The Workplace Coach

Do you ever feel like you have just got too much on your plate?  Every time the phone rings, or you check your emails, or someone from your team walks into your office, you end up with more things to do.  You find yourself working back late or taking work home.  Your sleep starts to suffer and your stress starts impacting your health and your relationships.  While you are working a lot more hours now, you are now in fact far less productive.  Perhaps not in the volume of work you are getting through but most definitely in the quality of what you are producing. 

Its an easy trap to fall into.  You’re the boss and the buck stops with you – if these things don’t get done, or don’t get done to your standard, then whoever you answer to is going to book some time for an uncomfortable conversation with you. So you figure you have to do it all, right? Wrong.

You may have come across a book by Ken Blanchard, “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey”.  It’s a quick read and a great little book for any time strapped manager.  Its been around since 1990 but still super relevant.  Here is the short message – every time someone walks into your office and you end up with another task, they have left a monkey sitting on your shoulder.  Every time an email brings you something else to do, you’ve just gained another monkey. 

At the end of the day, you are walking around with everyone else’s monkeys on your shoulders. No wonder you are tired all the time, those monkeys aren’t light. Ken talks about making sure that people take ownership of their own monkeys. If they bring you one that they are looking to offload, instead of taking it on yourself, you should try to help them figure out how to deal with it themselves.  Make sure they don’t leave their monkey in your office when they leave.

Another great book that talks on a similar topic is Michael Bungay Stanier’s, “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever”. A key message of this book  is similar to the Monkey message. You want to develop a coaching habit with your people in order to reduce or avoid 1. creating an overly dependent team, 2. getting yourself into overwhelm, or 3. creating disconnection between what you are doing and what really matters.  This book is about changing the way you lead your team to make sure that you actually have the time and space to focus on what you need to be doing as the leader.

To sum up – if things aren’t where they need to be then you need to change something. Trying to do more or do it all yourself is a short road to serious health problems and relationship breakdowns. You are probably doing too much of what you currently pay other people to do.  The irony is that you pay them to deal with the monkeys but you end up carrying them all. It makes you wonder who is actually working for whom?

Get better at delegating and do it the right way. Practice coaching your people so they can do their own work rather than taking it on yourself. Importantly, if you feel like you are starting to drown, make sure you wave both arms so we can get you some help.

The Workplace Coach