Page 99 - Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct 2018

Too Many Projects

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Sometimes leaders are unaware of all the initiatives under and adoption rates for new initiatives dropped, because the
way and their impact on the organization. In other cases organization just couldn’t process them all.
organizational politics conspires to let initiatives continue When company leaders received the report, they realized
long after they should have run their course. Either way, that they had to be more disciplined about setting limits
overload can result in costly productivity and quality prob- and priorities, rather than expect store managers to keep
lems and employee burnout. With record low unemployment, shouldering everything. The country president assigned a
companies that do not adjust the workload are also at risk of senior leader to act as the gatekeeper between functional
losing valuable talent. One leader who used to head up talent departments and store managers. Departments could
consulting at a human capital firm told us in an interview, no longer reach out directly to managers with new work
“While I enjoyed and respected my team and found the work expec tations—those were funneled through the leader,
motivating, the pace was unsustainable. I chose to leave before who assessed priorities and protected the managers from
I had a heart attack.” impossible work demands. This change allowed store man-
In many organizations, the alarm bells for initiative overload agers to focus; doing less yielded better results on the key
ring when engagement survey results drop or turnover levels initiatives and priorities.
rise—or both. At one Fortune 500 retail company, for example, In our consulting work with dozens of businesses, we’ve
internal studies showed that store managers had more duties seen the consequences of overload play out again and again
than they could accomplish in a standard workweek. Instead of across a range of industries. In conversations and interviews
moderating the demands of the job, their bosses expected them in a wide variety of organizations, capacity is a frequent topic:
to prioritize and juggle. Yet with business results faltering and Leaders feel pressured to do more with fewer resources. We’ve
customer service scores declining, the senior executive team identified several root causes, which we’ll discuss here so that
realized that a new approach was needed and recommended you can spot the risks in your company. Organizations tend to
that a task force of high-potential leaders assess the impact of rely on flawed fixes, so we’ll also explain why those typically
initiatives on frontline store managers. fail and what works better.
The task force found that many departments were simul-
taneously launching initiatives that required store managers’ The Roots of the Problem
attention, in areas such as product launches, training, cus-
tomer service, and IT. A comprehensive review revealed that Why does initiative overload happen? We have observed
more than 90 distinct initiatives had gotten under way in the seven causes:
previous six months. Store managers were expected to absorb Impact blindness. As the Fortune 500 retailer learned,
and act on them while dealing with high customer volume and executive teams can be oblivious to the number and cumu-
managing the staff. All these demands took their toll. Some lative impact of the initiatives they have in progress. Many
outlets failed to meet company expectations and forecasts, organizations lack mechanisms to identify, measure, and
manage the demands that initiatives place on the managers
and employees who are expected to do the work. In practice,
it can be challenging to measure the load across an organiza-
► Idea in Brief tion, because of initiative volume, company complexity and
size, and insufficient tracking tools. But as the example above
shows, it can be done if the business dedicates resources to
► THE PROBLEM ► THE ► THE SOLUTION making it happen.
Most organizations CONSEQUENCES By understanding the Multiplier effects. Most senior leaders have a line of sight
struggle to kill Failing to cut projects root causes of initiative
initiatives, even those that don’t pull their overload, leaders into their own groups’ initiatives and priorities but a limited
that no longer support weight and to establish can better diagnose view of other groups’ activities. Because functions and units
their strategy. Unaware clear priorities for the risks in their often set their priorities and launch initiatives in isolation,
of the cumulative those that remain organizations, make they may not understand the impact on neighboring functions
impact or unwilling to can lead to severe smarter decisions and units. Suppose, for example, that an organization consists
part with pet projects overload. Productivity, about what to keep of five units. If each one undertakes three initiatives, each of
or both, senior leaders engagement, and what to kill, and
pile on more and more, performance, and follow through by which requires some resources from two other units, then
expecting managers retention tend to suffer allocating talent and frontline managers in each unit are effectively juggling nine
and their teams to as a result. other resources with initiatives. And this assumes an even distribution of impact;
absorb it all. discipline.

66 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018