Sweating the small stuff

Before we get into a discussion of more metaphorical sweating - in a few weeks’ time, I’m going to be working up an actual sweat in support of my brilliant organisation, Streetwise Opera. I’m going to be walking a half marathon - starting in the evening and finishing in the small hours of the morning - along with many other brilliant folk from the homelessness sector. If you fancy supporting me, you can do it on my Just Giving page right here. Thanks so much in advance for anything you’re able to give!

Last weekend, I took my kids to a magical place called the Sand Cafe - a cafe which has a fairly small area at the back that’s filled with (guess what) sand, including a slide and various beach and vehicle based toys that can act as receptacles. I honestly don’t know why they’re so obsessed with this fairly basic setup, but whenever we go there, we end up staying for hours.

At one point, when we were all sitting at one of the tables having a sand break, my daughter lay down on her chair and started climbing her feet up the wall. “Don’t do that,” I said, and she, of course, ignored me and kept on doing it.

I was then confronted with the choice that parents have to make many times every day - is it worth it? Kids live in a world where so much of what they want to do is curtailed - no, you can’t stay up late with us; no, you can’t stay home from school; no, you can’t touch the grown up plates after what happened last time. There are many legitimate battles that need to be fought and so, when confronted with something like this, I find myself wondering how much I should insist. It would have been better if she kept her sandy feet to herself, preferably under the table where the rest of our feet were, but on the other hand, it wasn’t causing anyone too much harm and I’m sure the cafe walls had seen worse.

As leaders, we often find ourselves up against similar questions but for very different reasons. We are frequently working in under-resourced environments with overly stretched teams - sometimes, we need to cut everyone (including ourselves) a little slack. However, there is a delicate and ever-shifting line between being understanding and inadvertently lowering standards, which in the long-term, is good for no one. So how do we know which details to sweat and which to let be?

There’s no clear answer to this question, but there are a few things I consider when faced with it. One is whether something which is a non-issue on a small scale would become problematic if scaled up. Let’s say you work in a job where you need everyone to be in by 9am and one person is consistently arriving at 9.15. This may seem like a minor point - but if you’ve got a team of ten people and everyone arrived at 9.15 then that’s a total of 2.5 hours of lost time, which is a very different consideration to 15 minutes. Another example of this might be someone who misses a team meeting without sending apologies - not the end of the world in itself, but if half the staff did this on a regular basis, the entire team meeting would quickly become infeasible. For me, this makes these things worth tackling.

Linked to this is the principle of fairness. There is little more infuriating than the sense that someone is being allowed to behave in a particular way and go unchallenged, and, if allowed to persist, this can ultimately lead to an erosion of morale within a team. If one member is consistently not getting things done on time, or taking hour and half lunch breaks without challenge, then eventually others will either do the same, feel perpetually disgruntled and/or leave. This point is especially true if the person taking liberties is in a senior or leadership role. Having a separate rule for those at the top is one of the classic things you see within negative working cultures; the sense that a leader is operating a ‘do as I say, not as I do approach’ allows resentment and frustration to build and fester if not addressed.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

So in terms of standards of behaviour, it feels worth it to me to be particular - a high functioning, motivated team is essential to making good work and achieving good outcomes and generally creates a more pleasant environment for everyone to spend their days in. Where I think there’s more room for flex is in the things that we choose to prioritise within our organisations.

I’m a strong believer that we can all only hold a relatively small number of priorities in our mind at a given time - my number is usually around three. One of the traits I often see in new senior managers is a desire to tackle everything at once, which can lead to a sense of overwhelm and a perpetual feeling of nothing being quite the way they want it to be. This instinct comes from a good place - a drive to aim high and do well - and our job as leaders is to encourage them to direct this energy into two or three areas of focus and park all the other things they want to change until the first batch is done. This is not dropping standards - this is making a deliberate and strategic choice about what to work on.

As leaders, this absolutely applies to us as well, and setting the example of this kind of strategic thinking will help support the rest of the organisation to know what’s important to focus on at any given time. This means developing a tolerance for living with the non-ideal until you have the capacity to address it; if for example, your organisation’s website is a bit shonky and unintuitive but you’ve decided you’re not going to make it a top priority until next year, then you’ll need accept any criticism or feedback about it with good grace, and know that, even though you can’t action it right away, you know you’re going to fix it in the future. The important thing is that you have a plan to do something about it - which is different to knowing it’s not very good and just accepting it.

The thing about sweating the small stuff, as a leader, is that it’s easy to let this drift into a work pattern where you don’t ever really sweat the big stuff. I’ve seen leaders get obsessed with small details - the flowers in the front of house space haven’t been replaced, the offices are a mess, the production photo that’s been shared on social media isn’t the one you would have chosen. These are not the things that should be occupying our brains - if they indicate a bigger problem (the flowers not being replaced speaks to a lack of care and pride in the venue’s appearance, for example), then make a plan and address it; if you want to share your opinion (on the state of the office, or the choice of production photo) then do so quickly and then move on. Details are important, but they are also a great place to hide; your job is to create a culture, a vision and an environment where the details will be dealt with in the right order, rather than spending valuable time fixing all of them yourself.