It can go around in circles like this for a long time. The leader gets more and more confused. What's real? Every time they leave the door open for more focus, no one wants to walk through it. Meanwhile, other channels (like engagement surveys, informal discussions, etc.) tell a different story.
Something I've done successfully with a "managing up" approach is that when my superiors tell me that everything is all equally Urgent, Important, and Top Priority, I take a look at all of it myself, and report to them, in a document, the priorities that I will be working.
If they will not set the priorities, I will.
Usually, at that point, they do actually talk with me about their actual priorities.
I've heard from others who do this and *deliberately* say they'll pursue an *obviously bad* priority order. I wouldn't, as (1) I don't want to appear incompetent, and (2) they might just (either blindly or maliciously) approve the bad priorities, and then I'd have to live (and die) with them!
Also, when they crash in with emergencies, I update the priorities to put that on top, showing how everything else has moved down. They object, of course. But unless they have something more to say than, "You can't do that! We have to have it all, now, equally!!!" then I'm not listening.
The operational load isn't just tasks, it's the emotional tax of pretending everything’s fine when it clearly isn’t. Focus is not just a strategy conversation; it’s a cultural permission that needs to be reinforced all the way down.
Most of the time, when I got a "the team is overwhelmed", it ends up being a confusion between outcomes and outputs. More exactly, even if the outcome is well understood, there is a shared belief that such outcome can only be obtained by achieving a specific set of outputs, making the output the main focus on the direction.
The share belief was usually created and cemented during the initial planning phase:
- the outcome is subdivided immediately into the final components to build (upfront over design)
- there is no viable intermediate milestone (no MVP) with a clear goal of providing a stepping stone to reevaluate the plan/goal. Instead, they are just partial results of the some of the final components identified in the first part.
Such set up creates the vicious circle identified by John: everything is a priority because everything is seen as necessary to achieve the goal, and there is no measurable progress until everything is finished.
This isn’t misalignment. It’s a networking flywheel of dysfunction:
- Teams scream overload
- Middle says “we’re good”
- Execs ask what to cut
- Everyone panics, says nothing
- New dashboard launched to track the silence
It’s alignment theater. With jazz hands.
Something I've done successfully with a "managing up" approach is that when my superiors tell me that everything is all equally Urgent, Important, and Top Priority, I take a look at all of it myself, and report to them, in a document, the priorities that I will be working.
If they will not set the priorities, I will.
Usually, at that point, they do actually talk with me about their actual priorities.
I've heard from others who do this and *deliberately* say they'll pursue an *obviously bad* priority order. I wouldn't, as (1) I don't want to appear incompetent, and (2) they might just (either blindly or maliciously) approve the bad priorities, and then I'd have to live (and die) with them!
Also, when they crash in with emergencies, I update the priorities to put that on top, showing how everything else has moved down. They object, of course. But unless they have something more to say than, "You can't do that! We have to have it all, now, equally!!!" then I'm not listening.
The operational load isn't just tasks, it's the emotional tax of pretending everything’s fine when it clearly isn’t. Focus is not just a strategy conversation; it’s a cultural permission that needs to be reinforced all the way down.
Most of the time, when I got a "the team is overwhelmed", it ends up being a confusion between outcomes and outputs. More exactly, even if the outcome is well understood, there is a shared belief that such outcome can only be obtained by achieving a specific set of outputs, making the output the main focus on the direction.
The share belief was usually created and cemented during the initial planning phase:
- the outcome is subdivided immediately into the final components to build (upfront over design)
- there is no viable intermediate milestone (no MVP) with a clear goal of providing a stepping stone to reevaluate the plan/goal. Instead, they are just partial results of the some of the final components identified in the first part.
Such set up creates the vicious circle identified by John: everything is a priority because everything is seen as necessary to achieve the goal, and there is no measurable progress until everything is finished.