There’s an old saying that “if you want something done, give it to a busy person”. Like many old sayings, it’s bonkers. If you give a busy person more work to do, all that happens is they take on the extra workload, but do everything less effectively. It is an illusion that a “busy person” gets the work done. They do, but often it has to be repeated because they didn’t do it as well as they could have because they had other things to attend to. This is due to the psychology of task switching.
Yesterday, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullaly, was appointed. She’s a former nurse, used to being busy on the wards, juggling various patient needs. That might be good training for her new role, as she will be overwhelmed with tasks to do. Within moments of starting her new job, she was questioned about the dreadful attack in Manchester, as well as her urgent need to deal with issues surrounding child abuse and being a female role model. Being asked to deal with almost everything is the price you pay for being a leader.
You can see this in action at any annual meeting of a company’s shareholders. The CEO is expected to be able to comment on every aspect of the firm, even if it is a specialist area. Becoming a CEO, or the leader of any team, inevitably means you are expected to understand everything and be able to handle a wide range of issues. It’s a busy and demanding job.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you were in a leadership position and you could hand over much of that work to other “busy people”? After all, they would get things done, according to that old saying.
This might not sound as daft as it seems. When bosses share their leadership, teams can become 60% more productive. This is the concept of “distributed leadership”, which was first considered about 25 years ago. The idea is that everyone in the team takes on aspects of those all-encompassing tasks and responsibilities of the person at the top.
Increasing numbers of businesses are adopting this approach to reduce burnout in senior leaders. GE Appliances has done it. So has Fidelity Investments, the Columbia (Missouri) Fire Department and the New Diorama Theatre in north London.
It works like this. Team members are given more responsibility and are empowered to make leadership decisions. They get extra accountability to match. Rather than being told what to do, employees get to make the decisions about what to do. Indeed, at GE, they get to run micro-enterprises within the business, having their own P&L accounts and being able to decide what’s best for their tiny area of the company.
This results in increased autonomy, which is one of the primary reasons people report enjoying their job. Several studies confirm that engagement and enjoyment of work are directly linked to independence in the workplace. The more people have the opportunity to decide what to do and how to do it, the more likely they are to stick with the firm, thereby reducing employment churn.
So what does all this have to do with giving work to busy people? The workplace these days is full of people working flat out. Their bosses, though, keep piling on the work, leading to stress and burnout. At the same time, the demands on those bosses are increasing.
However, when those overwhelmed bosses share their leadership tasks, those busy people end up doing less work. That’s because they are involved in high-level decision-making and get to choose what work needs to be done. Sharing the leadership responsibility appears to make things more efficient as people are now only working on what is required, rather than being given more and more tasks that are non-productive. For example, I have often been asked to write reports because someone in leadership demands them. Yet, if I were involved in that leadership decision-making, I would not work on such reports, as they are unnecessary. I doubt anyone reads them anyway.
Of course, you can’t just transfer everything from the leaders. The workers may need to be trained in specific skills. Additionally, there needs to be transparency from the top; otherwise, the leadership cannot be shared. However, when this happens, it becomes apparent that organisations with distributed leadership are more productive and happier places to work.
So yes, you can give busy people more to do, but make it the work that removes work: decisions. When you distribute leadership, you don’t squeeze more hours out of exhausted people. You delete the nonsense, accelerate the necessary, and make room for real performance increases.
