Recent performance discussions with my team prompted me to muse a little bit about reflections and the power of reflective thinking. In my mind, the biggest single value of formal performance discussions is that it prompts us to pause, reflect, and decide what we want to take away and change from those insights. Forget the forms and processes – instead, focus on the insights you can take away.
So here it goes, my reflection on the power and value of (more than annual) reflections.
Reflect to celebrate and be proud
The most immediate benefit we get from reflecting on what happened in the past is usually a feeling of accomplishment and happiness. All too often, we are solely focused on what lies ahead, and we miss recognizing and being proud of what we have already achieved. Especially in today’s busy life, it is easy to look back at a day, week, month, or year and wonder what we had actually done and accomplished during that time.
Continuously and frequently reflecting allows us to balance the scale and not only see what still lies ahead but also be proud of what has already been accomplished. Write those accomplishments down to make them real for your brain; otherwise, they will be forgotten in an instant.
Reflect to celebrate. Reflect to be proud. Reflect to feel accomplished and happy.
Reflect to acknowledge and share appreciation
Similarly, we often forget to appreciate contribution and achievement from the ones who help us move along – family, friends, co-workers. Reflection is an opportunity to pause, think about all the help we received along the way, and express a quick but heartfelt “Thank you”.
We can only succeed together, and the true leader is not defined by what they accomplish but how they engage those around them to boldly go beyond their perceived limitations.
Reflect to say thank you. Reflect to appreciate. Reflect to encourage.
Reflect to learn
Last not least, we all make mistakes all the time. And that’s ok. It’s how we learn and grow.
Reflection helps us to analyze situations in hindsight and with the 20:20 vision that hindsight provides. If we don’t reflect, we are bound to make the same mistakes over and over again. If we reflect, learn, and adjust future actions accordingly, we will embrace those slips and use them as inspiration to grow.
The only thing we can really change is the “Man in the mirror” as the famous philosopher Michael Jackson told us back in 1988 (yep, I know, I just dated myself).
Hindsight is 20:20. However, you can only benefit from this clarity if you look back with the intent to learn.
As you dive into your reflections, find ways to share them. Keep everyone on the same page and take the people in your life along your learning journey. Do this, and you will get double the benefit for the same amount of time and work.
Reflections are a powerful tool, and they are a lot of fun once you get into the habit. You can do them daily (e.g., journals, work logs), weekly (e.g., status updates, learnings, plans for the coming week, this email), annually (e.g., annual discussions, progress on strategic goals, and necessary course corrections, post-mortems), or anywhere in between. The more often you reflect on past experiences and outcomes and let those reflections inform future priorities and corrective actions, the more you will benefit. Personally, I do all three of them.
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Thriving in High-Pressure Environments Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk ISBN 9798718017663
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I was going to write about asking “Why not” instead of “Why” – which is advice I’m hearing often – but then I decided differently. While well-intentioned, I think that advice might drive the wrong behavior if it’s heard and understood the wrong way.
In many meetings, we tend to focus our time on why things won’t work, why they are hard, and why we cannot do them right now. We are guessing what might (!) hold us back or make things complicated.
Well, anything that is worth doing and any problem worth being solved tends to be hard and complicated. The easy stuff had already been done a long time ago.
Instead of looking at the challenges, we need to look at the opportunities: what do we gain, what can we enable if we solve this problem? Is it a worthwhile endeavor? How does this rank against the other things we could be doing with our time and energy?
Once decided, we need to stop thinking about why it’s hard and instead start focusing on how we CAN do it. For every problem, there is a solution. It might not be easy, it might not be quick, but there is a way to get it done. Dwelling in the challenges will only discourage us and waste both time and energy.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for ignoring challenges and problems to be solved. I’m instead saying that those problems need to be identified, acknowledged, written down, and then tracked to resolution. That is the productive approach to deal with challenges. Reiterating, discussing, and dwelling on them without concrete action is the unproductive approach. Once you identified a problem, you write it down, find a time and owner and move on.
Once we decided that something is important, we must only be concerned about how we can get it done and finding a realistic approach, plan, and timeframe. We must not waste our time discussing why it’s hard, and we cannot waste our resources looking for easier projects that we can tackle instead. The important stuff tends to be hard.
Back to the “Why not” advice that I poo-pooed earlier – It’s actually well-intended as it challenges us to instead of asking “why do we need to do this” rather get in the mindset of thinking, “yes, why in the hell would we not do this”. Always starting with the “Why” and assuming that there is value in a new project, initiative, or change is a good thing. Dwelling in reasons not to do something that is useful is wasted energy.
Just for the fun of it, here’s a list of a few things that were impossibly hard at some time: personal computers for everyone, finding stuff on the internet, a smartphone for everyone, streaming the movies you like to watch, getting an online order delivered the next day, electric cars, GPS for everyone, online banking,… – well you get the idea. All of those were solved by people who chose to focus on how to overcome hard problems instead of discussing why they are hard to solve.
Since we’re talking about starting with the “Why”, here’s a recommendation for one of my favorite business books:
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action Simon Sinek ISBN-10: 9781591846444
Everything always starts with the “Why”. If you know your “Why”, you know your purpose and motivation. If you know the “Why”, it will be easy for you to enlist others for your cause.
Did you like this post? Want to read more?Check out our newest book!
Thriving in High-Pressure Environments Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk ISBN 9798718017663
If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.
If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.
I was recently asked: “How do you optimize your productivity hours?”
My answer was clearly not what the person had expected: “You don’t. You optimize your impact!”
When we think about productivity, we often look at the wrong metric: the hours spent and the effort taken, not the output and impact of what we did. However, how busy we felt or how hard it was, doesn’t matter with regards to our productivity. We can be very busy, work extremely hard, and still not achieve anything.
Therefore, “hours” is the wrong metric. It’s not about the hours we spend and the effort we put in – it’s about the output, deliverables, and impact we achieve through our work. So the real question is: “How do we maximize the output and impact we have?”
The answer is to put our energy to its best use, invest our time where it matters most, and keep ourselves healthy and balanced so that we can operate at peak performance for those deliberately selected areas.
Three simple shifts in your mindset will get you there:
Focus on the things that matter most
Invest your time where you get the most bang for the buck. Don’t spend all your time in “busy work” – it’s easy to fall into that trap as we feel so accomplished if we were busy with lots of stuff all day.
Instead, we need to develop the discipline to look hard at the impact of our actions and have the courage to say “No” if some work and priorities don’t make sense.
Of course, we also need to communicate early, proactively, and clearly to our stakeholders if we decided to deprioritize a given task. No surprises!
Remove distractions
Multitasking doesn’t work – period. As endless studies have shown, multitasking doesn’t work for anything that requires our conscious focus on two things at a time. You can brush your teeth and reminisce about your day – however, you cannot solve a logical problem and check your email simultaneously. The switching cost to get back on task after an interruption (multitasking) is surprisingly high – often up to 20 mins.
Knowing that every distraction can cost you up to 20 mins of your focused time, you need to eliminate all distractions. Switch off notifications, don’t have email counters on your phone, kill all notification sounds or pop-ups – better even, close all apps aside from the one you need for your current task and put your phone on mute. Don’t even listen to music; our brain immediately zeros in on the lyrics – if we like it or not (white noise is ok).
Allow your brain to get into “the zone”, find your “flow” and be sharp, focused, and effective. When you’re done, you can leave “the zone” and follow distractions for a little while.
Protect your recovery times
The third piece of advice actually does go towards optimizing your productivity hours (although that’s not my primary purpose): ensure that you can be at your A-game when you’re on task.
You cannot be the best version of yourself if you worked through the night or weekend and come into the office already exhausted in the morning. Take your breaks, take time to recharge, don’t push beyond the point where you are focused and effective. You need to recharge, you need to balance, you need to come back the next day with your A-game.
Observe yourself and your focus and notice the point where you aren’t productive anymore. I learned that it is better to call it a day then, rather than trying to push through a little more – most times, your work will get sloppy and faulty when you get tired, and you will spend more time cleaning up the mess you created than if you had just waited for the next day. Trust me, I’ve been there many times.
Did you like this post? Want to read more?Check out our newest book!
Thriving in High-Pressure Environments Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk ISBN 9798718017663
If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.
My first real job was 24/7 onsite support for mission-critical data center servers that ran national credit card processing.
As part of the job, I got a brand new Nokia cell phone, which was a big deal then – none of my friends had anything fancy like that. We were at a party at a nearby lake, and I proudly showed this gadget around – then it rang, and I had to jump in the car, leave my friends and drive 100 miles to the customer site. From there on, whenever I was on call, I didn’t sleep well, couldn’t fully enjoy what I was doing, and felt miserable.
What I learned from that is that I don’t do well in jobs where I get phone calls at home. I am telling this story because, for me, being called for work-stuff during my off-times is a deal-breaker. I walked away from jobs that I otherwise loved because I didn’t want this boundary to be crossed. On the other hand, I am totally ok to work into the night if it’s required – as long as the endpoint is in my control. Others don’t mind being on call and enjoy the extra money that goes with it.
Values and boundaries are personal and unique – there is no one size fits all!
Close encounter with burnout – too close
Since that eye-opening moment, for one reason or another, I ended up working in high-stress burnout roles for the coming 25+ years, and for the most part, had a lot of fun doing so.
I started my career with HP/Tandem in that 24/7 onsite support role that I talked about in the intro. I then went to Microsoft, where I had different roles, such as being the national spokesperson for crisis-PR – right in the midst of the Open Source and Linux wars and the DOJ monopoly investigation. After 17 years, I looked for new challenges and found them with Amazon, where I had several leadership positions, amongst others, leading product strategy for a 250+ people engineering team. It was always “more” and “faster” at Amazon, and after five years, I decided to prioritize my family and move to Bozeman – where I arrived right with the start of the global COVID pandemic.
Life has not been boring, and I actually like it that way.
While you’re young, you can do a lot of things that are not sustainable but are fueled by pure energy and naiveté. There was always a lot to do – more than one could humanly achieve – and I had to learn to prioritize and be more effective. That got me quite far and is a key component of achieving anything. You need to learn to make the most out of your time and have the most impact with the resources you have. Cut out the slack, ignore the distractions, simplify what you do, and focus on what matters most.
However, things get harder when you add responsibilities for others. Eventually, being effective wasn’t enough as there was always so much more to do. I also felt the increasing tension between spending time at work (up to 60 hours a week) and wanting to be there for my family and kids. I started to feel tired, lacked drive, and felt bad for not connecting enough with the areas of my life that I really cared about. I didn’t realize it right away, but I slipped deep into burnout. Luckily, I noticed the slippery slope before it was too late, and I decided to take action. I needed to rebuild how I work and learn how to set boundaries while still performing at the highest levels. I had to fix the engine while flying the plane, and I had to do it quickly before serious damage was done.
All along this journey, I’ve been a manager and people leader. I tried to create those spaces of flexibility for my team and appreciated it if team members took full ownership of their areas. It’s easy to grant autonomy when you see true ownership. However, what I learned is that you cannot do that job for other people. You cannot make others happy – only YOU can make yourself happy. You cannot define values or boundaries for other people – they are personal and unique. Everyone is different, and you can not “carry” someone to happiness – everyone has to define their own path and take charge and full responsibility for it.
There is a Zen proverb that captures this well: “The teacher can only show the door. The student has to walk through it.”
What you will find below are some essential principles and rules that helped me protect my boundaries while still performing at high levels at work. It helped me balance work and life by taking full ownership and responsibility for both. It’s showing the door – you need to decide if you want to walk through it, and if you do, you need to make every single step yourself.
Taking charge, taking ownership
Three main principles are key for work-stress management and happiness (in my experience):
Your values are personal. What works for the person next to you doesn’t necessarily work for you. You are the only one who knows them, and you are the only one who can implement them. No one can carry you to happiness.
You only gain autonomy if you prove ownership and accountability first. Good leaders love to delegate – but only if they are confident the job gets done.
Achieving 1 and 2 is hard work and requires constant engagement. If you drop your focus, they will slip.
Understanding and protecting what matters to you
It all starts with YOUR values | What matters to you?
It all starts with understanding YOUR values! A solution that works for the person next to you might not work for you or make you happy. For example, I am perfectly happy dropping lunch to get things done or working late (occasionally) when it’s crunch time. However, try to make me work on a weekend for no good reason, and you’re up for a hard time. Others appreciate the opportunity to catch up on things during the weekend.
You have to understand your values and what is really important to you. It’s personal. It’s not what the other person has. A good way of doing that is to write down all the things you care about (your values) on little cards. You will end up with some 20-30 values. Now give the ones away that you care less about. Repeat that until you’re down to three – those are the ones that really matter to you. Align your life and decisions such that those values are not violated by what you’re doing.
Those values are the guiding stars for you, not to show around. They can be grand, like changing the world, but they can also be as down to earth as having fun or achieving financial stability. There is no right or wrong – there’s just what matters to you. Those values are personal, and there is no need to share them, although it can be helpful if others understand them.
My values are family, integrity, and autonomy. In that order. That is why it’s important to me that I don’t get unplanned interruptions in my off time – it feels to me like breaking a promise I made to my family. On the other hand, I’m ok to plan for extra time to get the job done, as it supports my integrity value and is done within the boundaries of autonomy.
Set YOUR boundaries | What are your non-negotiables?
Like our values, our boundaries are different for each of us. My big boundary is that when I’m home with my family, I want to be home. Period. I don’t check emails in the evenings, weekends, or on vacation. Others do appreciate the flexibility of today’s merged work/life arrangements. For some, it’s a big deal to be able to go out for a walk during lunch. You might need to come in a little later to drop your kids at school or leave a little earlier for your Yoga class.
Whatever it is that is an important line in the sand for you – it’s not one size fits all!
As you think about your boundaries, you can do a similar exercise as the one for values. Write down the boundaries that you care about. Then give up the ones that are less important to you. Work-life balance is always a tradeoff, and you need to know what you’re willing to trade and what you’re not. Know your negotiables and your non-negotiables. Don’t ‘die on the hill’ or get yourself all worked up for the former.
Compartmentalize | When you’re on, you’re on. When you’re off, you’re off.
Don’t spend energy on things you cannot fix at the moment. Once you’re off work, don’t ruminate about things that concerned you at work. Focus on the environment you’re in at the moment, enjoying the activity you’re doing, fully tuning in to your kids or friends, or just taking brain time off. You don’t win anything if you keep thinking about that work task you need to do the next day – it just ruins your time and attention for other things.
Make a clear distinction between working and being off work. Use the time off work to follow your other interests, passions and recharge. Be off. Then when you’re on again, you need to be fully on. Care deeply about work when you’re at work. Be as effective as you possibly can. Forget about work when you’re at home. Focus on the things that matter personally to you.
Give both aspects of your life your fullest instead of dabbling in inattentive mediocracy for each of them. Multitasking doesn’t work, and it burns a lot of switching energy.
Think about doctors: they need to give the best possible care to patients when they are on shift. However, if they keep worrying about them once they’re home, they will not be able to bring on their A-game the next day.
Earning autonomy and flexibility
Autonomy only comes with accountability | The work still needs to get done. You need to own it. Fully!
Everything we talked about above – living your values, setting boundaries, and compartmentalizing – boils down to work flexibility and autonomy in one way or another. However, autonomy is something that is not and cannot be granted lightly – after all, the job needs to get done, and we all have a critical function for the organizations we work in.
Instead, we have to earn autonomy. We do that by consistently demonstrating that we are on top of things, that we think forward, act responsibly, don’t drop commitments, and are accountable and reliable. We demonstrate ownership.
Ownership and accountability mean being clear about the priorities in your work, communicating those clearly, and focusing your time at work on those. It means tracking your timelines and deliverables and not getting surprised by looming deadlines. It means getting started early and not waiting until the last minute. It means proactively planning how you get the work accomplished by the deadline. Work is NOT the place for procrastination!
Ownership also means looking for better ways of doing things or proactively engaging other people who can help relieve pressure. Ownership means making good suggestions to improve your work area.
No surprises! | Communicate clearly, proactively, and early.
One of the first and biggest lessons I learned was: “No surprises!”
There is almost no problem that cannot be fixed if people are made aware of it early enough. There is absolutely no fix to a problem if you learn about it after ‘the ship has sailed’.
If you cannot accomplish what you had promised, you need to give early proactive heads-up. It’s ok that things change, it’s ok that you get other priorities, it’s ok to have unforeseen complications. It’s NOT ok to not tell anyone about those changes or risks immediately. Be proactive and give people an early heads-up if things stray from the agreed-upon plan.
If you cannot do something that you had promised, don’t just throw your hands in the air and hope that no one will notice – rather, look for solutions.
Pace yourself | Life and career are marathons, not sprints.
Sometimes we need to sprint to get things done and achieve the desired goal. Sometimes it’s crunch time, and we need to let go of our boundaries for a little while for the greater good – the challenges the global COVID pandemic brought upon us are a great example of such a time in which we need to go above and beyond for prolonged periods of time.
However, we need to also deliberately slow down afterward. Humans have a way of getting used to pressure and not noticing it until something pops. Like a sprint, you keep running until you’re out of breath, and then you drop to the floor and pant.
Instead, life is a marathon, and so is your career. Notice when you have times where you can recharge and regain your energy. Use those times! Push hard during crunch time and then focus a little more on yourself, your values, and your passions during the times in-between.
Life is a marathon, and muscles grow while we rest them! However, when it’s go-time, you need to be on your A-game.
If I can leave you with three things
1. You need to take care of yourself first!
This includes your health, the things you care about, and time for your purpose and passion.
2. You need to know what matters to you.
It’s different for everyone, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for the other. Don’t look at what flexibilities the other person has – be clear about which ones matter to you.
3. Autonomy, accountability, and ownership go together. Always!
You can only set boundaries if you own the expected outcomes and if you hold yourself accountable for the promises you made. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help – it means YOU need to be the one who proactively brings up issues early and helps identify solutions.
If you master the tension between boundaries and ownership, you master your stress. Trust your team and help your team! In the long run, you win as a team – you can only lose as the lone warrior.
Did you like this post? Want to read more?Check out our newest book!
Thriving in High-Pressure Environments Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk ISBN 9798718017663
If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.
We all love data, and we all make data-driven decisions. – Or at least that’s what we say when someone asks us because “data-driven” is the thing you need to be these days if you want to be cool.
You can spend a LOT of time getting, tracking, analyzing, and reviewing data – but do you actually get value out of that time investment? Maybe, maybe not. In order to get a good ROI on your data investments, you need to be smart and deliberate about what data you look at.
When deciding what metrics you want to track and report on, it’s helpful to think about four key principles:
Data that’s not actionable is just noise – If you measure something, but you cannot act on it, or you have no intention to make an effort to act on it, you’re only wasting your and everyone’s time. It was one of the first lessons I learned at Microsoft: don’t collect and present data unless it helps your case to drive action. Everything else is just noise. Always ask yourself what possible actions might be informed by measuring a specific data set. If you cannot come up with at least a high-level answer, you shouldn’t spend time collecting the data.
Data that doesn’t track against a goal is useless – Assuming you have actionable data, you also need to understand what the ideal state should look like. If you have a metric but no goal to it, you miss the reference point. If that data changes, you have no way of knowing or telling whether that change is good or concerning. Likewise, you will not know whether you are in trouble or you have reached everything you aspired for. You must have a goal or desired end state to contextualize what you’re measuring.
Show what matters, not how much you have – Tell a story when you show data. Don’t show all you have; show what matters and explain why it does. I have seen and learned that at Amazon: some folks took pride in showing pages and pages of data – a sea of numbers – but they failed to convey a message and drive action with the audience. While the story behind the data might be clear to you, it won’t be for your recipients. Analyze the data, understand what’s going on, then tell a story and have everyone focused on the relevant data to that story. Don’t show a sea of numbers, don’t try to show off by how much data you have.
Proxy data is better than no data – Often enough, we care about a certain metric, but we cannot directly or efficiently measure it. Instead of throwing your hand in the air and giving up, think about proxy data. If you cannot measure the specific metric you really care about, what is a proxy metric that correlates with it? What can you measure that gives you a good indication as to whether the metric you really care about might be tracking in the right direction? If you don’t have precise numbers, how can you create approximations that give you at least directional insight? Amazon is big about proxy metrics, as many things they do are too new to have lots of data available. Looking at proxy data is just as good for making business decisions and necessary course corrections.
Do use data and do make data-driven decisions. However, make them based on a sound understanding of what good data means in the given context.
Did you like this post? Want to read more?Check out our newest book!
Thriving in High-Pressure Environments Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk ISBN 9798718017663
If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.
Tai Chi, Wellness & Life Coaching | Keru Uma Budo 