Why Your Best Employees Eventually Stop Being Proactive

Why it happens and a simple exercise to fix it in your business

You wouldn't think Tetris has a lot to do with chocolate. Yet watching my friend run his growing chocolate business - another location, more staff, happy customers - all I think is Tetris.

He's in a constant reaction mode: looking for fires, juggling small tasks as they pile up faster and faster. Each decision is like placing a Tetris block— figure out where it fits before the next one drops.

In your business, the game changes as you level up. I felt this in my own career hearing "what got you here, won't get you there" when turned down for a leadership promotion. Or realising that being hands-on with my teams actually wasn't helping them grow.

When I moved from leading just one team to leading many, I needed to approach the work differently. The same is true in business - each level of 'success' brings different challenges.

With one location, this busy work is manageable. But the larger you grow, the more the shapes change and the faster you're playing. You can miss a few blocks, but mistakes stack up until you lose control and hit game over.💥

As the business owner, you know exactly what you want - and how it should be done. But as you hire more people, you might start to feel like they’re missing the point or don't follow through the way you'd like. Then you find yourself still doing the small tasks that shoulda been handled by the people you hired.

For me, I found this means you haven't set the boundaries for them to bring their best self to work yet. My friend has expectations for his team, but without having the expectation and limits in writing, they will eventually stop being proactive.

Each proactive measure becomes a risky overstep where they can be told off (I’ve been told off a lot, then stopped trying to help and waited). When I asked my friend if he could share any checklists or written processes the team has as reference. He didn't have them.

Your team needs written expectations to measure themselves against, and to know the world they operate in. Then when things go wrong, which they will at some point. You're critiquing the process, not the person. It’s easier to find fixes, or for them to propose improvements.

I don’t believe anyone shows up to work wanting to be incompetent, thinking that “today I’m going to do terribly!”, people want to contribute and do their best at work. But "good" is relative unless you actually define it for them.

As your business scales and the Tetris blocks start to fall faster you need your people playing for themselves instead of constantly checking with you.

Written expectations set the manual that lets your team self-manage. They know what boxes to check, when they're meeting minimums, and when to call you for help. You no longer need to watch every move because you can trust the process will support your customers.

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So how do you work out what needs to be turned into a system? Start with what's taking all of your time!

Here are four exercises you can do to workout what's actually consuming your time: Do at least three of them:

1. The list
   Set a timer for 25 minutes. Write a bullet point list of everything you can think of, all the tasks that come to mind. No filter, just writing. Let it flow.
   
   Pro tip: Put a piece of paper beside you. When something comes to mind that you have to go do, write it on the piece of paper. It's out of your mind, you can put your focus back on the task of writing your list. When the 25-minute timer goes off. Go look at that piece of paper and see if you actually need to do that stuff, no do it.

2. The calendar audit.
   Look through your calendar and write a list of all of the recurring meetings and what you are actually scheduling.

3. The extreme.
   Look at what your week looks like during your busiest time of the year. For my friend being in chocolate sales, that's Christmas time. What does your week look like when you're the busiest? Write all this out.

4. The log
   This is the most time-consuming, so I don't recommend this one for everybody. If you've already done 1, 2, and 3, you can choose to skip this one. But if you're up for an interesting exercise, give it a go.
   
   We often put things in our calendars, but what we actually do during the day is a bit different. Sure, you are in a meeting for an hour, but what were all the things you actually did during that call? Write an log of day for two weeks. Then look — where are you actually putting your time?

   

   I did this log exercise for a number of weeks

By the time you've done this, you'll have created a large overview of all of your different tasks. Now you can start grouping and sorting your tasks into common tasks. Ask yourself:

• What are the tasks that have to be done? And could they be grouped together?

• Can you define specific days for certain types of tasks?

• Could there be a checklist of bare minimums that need to be done each day?

Continue on this path until you start to have larger groups that reveal themselves. These are the processes you need to define.

As much as games are great, you don't want to play when it comes to payroll or your business. Creating these predictable systems and processes lets you create the fence posts, the boundaries for your team to play-in.

They're adults. Give them the freedom to do their best work and let them surprise you.

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