Do you remember your first love 💕?
Don’t we all?
For me, hands down, it was Shel Silverstein.
He was the first to break my heart. Totally, irreparably with The Giving Tree.
But also the first to draw me in — on a joke. In the poem Smart.
In it, a boy is gifted a dollar by his dad. And he enterprisingly trades that dollar for 2 quarters. The 2 quarters for 3 dimes, and so on until he victoriously shows his dad 5 — FIVE — shiny pennies.
Delighted because 5 is more than 1!
He’s confused by his dad’s rage. But we’re not. We’re all in on the joke.
Even in kindergarten, I understood that one dollar holds more value than 5 pennies. Value wins over quantity.
We’re all laughing at the kid with 5 pennies.
And. At work? We’re all the kid holding 5 pennies.
In nearly every Pulse Check I’m running — still in 2024 I keep seeing teams struggling with the problem of quantity over value.
The questions we’re attempting to answer in these pulse checks may be…
- Why haven’t we solved the burnout problem once and for all?
- Why are our teams continuing to work in silos rather than collaborate?
- Why are we missing opportunities to truly innovate, to reinvent, to leave our competitors behind?
And I continue to hear the same answers from their teams.
We’re still packing our calendars with meetings. It used to be 8 one-hour meetings. And now, for many, it’s 16 30-minute meetings.
We’re holding the pennies!
We’re preaching prioritization to teams who can’t list fewer than 10 “top” shared priorities for the quarter. Which leaves everyone scrambling and competing for resources. It’s too much. It’s pennies.
When do we do the value? The thinking? The crafting learning and building and implementing?
Drowning in quantity, we have no time to deliver value. We are perpetuating the problem.
We have to be better. We have to put our collective foot down. To stop being and doing everything. We need to choose. To sequence and focus.
What 2–3 initiatives will truly deliver impact in the next few months? And once we’ve done those, what’s next?
We have to create change. And it must begin at the top.
We need our leaders to be in on the joke. To have the courage to:
- Articulate and cascade a clear message of narrowed focus
- Hold the leaders beneath them accountable to truly aligning, preparing their teams to collaborate
- Grant people permission to block off meaningful time on their calendars; to opt out of meetings whose value they won’t directly drive
- To make bold choices and tradeoffs
I’ll bet you a dollar this begins change.
- Recognize layoffs will happen. As will reorgs and resource reductions and a million other changes. But treat your teams with dignity. Be transparent. Create regular, open forums of communication — email, Slack, in person. If you have nothing to say, then say you have nothing to say. But saying nothing at all is dangerous. Surprises are for birthdays.
- Take a hard look at top-level priorities. Not by function or region, but as a whole. Where are there gaps or misses? Conflicts or contradictions? Understand that the tiniest crack at the top becomes a chasm of chaos on the frontlines. Ask questions, shuffle resources, and affirm the messaging and resource management is consistent across teams.
- Celebrate, truly, not just big wins, but brave choices. Not carelessness, but bold, thoughtful actions. Recognize the person asking the “dumb” question that unlocked an insight; the one who laid out a thoughtful experiment designed to either win or teach; extract and share insights. Fuel your future plans with them.
Those are just a few for now. But I’ve got sleeves-full.
What else have you been wishing for? And how can you transform that wish into will?