Is Your Company Suffering from Initiative Overload?

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to HBR On Leadership. I’m HBR Executive Editor Alison Beard. On this show, we share case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. We carefully curate this feed from across the HBR portfolio, aiming to help you unlock your next level of leadership.

I hope you enjoy the episode.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.

Launching a new initiative is one way a manager can make their mark in a new job – or show their value at a company they’ve been at for years.

So it makes sense that more and more managers across industries might be piling on more and more new projects.

The downside, though, is that more and more work gets saddled on middle managers and frontline employees. Workers are getting overwhelmed.

ROSE HOLLISTER: When you have large organizations and lots of different people wanting to make things happen, the ripple effect all the way down is where it simply becomes almost impossible to keep up. And with all good intentions – people want to support these initiatives, they are great ideas – there are simply too many to be able to support to the right level.

That’s Rose Hollister. She and Michael Watkins looked at how companies – like a Fortune 500 retailer – ultimately suffer from overloading their employees like this.

They are the co-authors of the HBR article “Too Many Projects,” and both consultants at Genesis Advisers. Rose and Michael, thanks for joining us today.

MICHAEL WATKINS: Great to be here.

ROSE HOLLISTER: Thank you, happy to be here.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So has initiative overload always been a problem or are initiatives more popular now?

ROSE HOLLISTER: We think that initiative overload is becoming more of a problem. We think it’s been a problem, but we think it’s escalating, and we think it’s escalating for a few reasons. One, organizations over the last five to 10 years have gotten leaner and so they cut costs. Usually one of the main ways to do that is by cutting headcount. And then usually what doesn’t happen is that they don’t change the work or cut the work to fit the cut in people.

The other thing is that if you think about it, year after year, a department or a function wants to do something better; they want to launch something; so they start something new this year, something else next year and the following year and large departments might launch many initiatives and that happens over an entire organization. And then there are legacy initiatives that have been in place for a long time that maybe should be stopped but haven’t been.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is this just kind of like every executive has to have his initiatives that he’s running or she’s running?

MICHAEL WATKINS: This is a part of the problem and it’s not uncommon. A leader only has a couple of years in a role. They want to make a mark. One way to make a mark as to launch a signature initiative, right? And this is also a great example of what we call the “magnifier effect,” right, which is you may have executives, you know, individually launching a few initiatives, but then there’s some critical level at the organization – in this case, the store managers, where it all comes to a focal point and people literally get burned out by everything that’s kind of coming down towards them.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s interesting because there are like, you know, mathematical equations that support that too, right? It’s like, if you look at a road, traffic’s flowing smoothly and then all of a sudden you just get a couple more cars on that road and the road can bear you have a traffic jam.

MICHAEL WATKINS: Exactly.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Sounds like the same thing.

MICHAEL WATKINS: Very similar, but I think also just understand that those executives that you mentioned earlier that are launching those signature initiatives – that’s happening in all the departments. And they’re all trickling down, but where implementation needs to happen often is at focal points where, you know, it all kind of comes together. And so a couple of initiatives from each department can translate into a dozen right at the level of something like the store manager.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I just want to ask why simple sort of prioritizing techniques don’t seem to work here, because this is something where I know in my own career when I’ve felt overwhelmed, my boss said, “Well, I don’t expect you to keep every ball in the air, just the most important ones. And some things will drop and that’s fine. And these are your priorities. And just do them.” Why doesn’t that kind of conversation help?

ROSE HOLLISTER: I think the problem is, as Michael said, there are so many different functions or departments all with signature important initiatives. So if marketing has their initiatives for the year, if IT has theirs, if HR has theirs, if operations has theirs – and I could go on and on. In big organizations they might be doing multiple big initiatives. Well, they usually prioritize in silos and they say, “We’re going to do these five or these 10 or these 20.” Well, that happens in every single function and what usually does not happen, is a senior leadership team saying, “Let’s look at all of these. Let’s look across the enterprise.” What Michael and I would call a balcony view. Let’s get on the balcony. Let’s look. Let’s not just look at the dollars this will take. Let’s look at what the hours it will take for people to either learn this, support this, execute on this, sustain this.

That kind of inventory usually is not done. And somebody can juggle, but there are so many things coming at them that prioritizing isn’t enough at the team leader or employee level. That prioritizing has to happen, should be happening at the senior team level.

MICHAEL WATKINS: I love your example because you had a boss and you had a reasonable boss. And I want you to imagine you had three bosses, none of whom were reasonable, all shooting things at you – maybe with conflicting priorities. All asserting that it’s really important that you do this work today.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, that sounds like a nightmare!

MICHAEL WATKINS: Right, and that’s what really does it. It’s both the number of channels that things are coming out people through, combined with a really a lack of attentiveness to what people reasonably can accomplish.

ROSE HOLLISTER: Well, and just to build on what Michael said, that “reasonably accomplish” – depending on the culture, it might not be culturally okay to say we’re at our limits. And people fear saying I can’t do more or they’ve tried it and they haven’t gotten heard. And so I think there’s also a, “We can do this, let’s work harder, not more!” And well that only works when there’s a reasonable amount of things on the plate.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if senior executives are somewhat clueless to the havoc that they’re wreaking and people are either afraid to speak up or aren’t heard, then how do companies know if they’re creating this problem?

MICHAEL WATKINS: I think that’s a really big problem, which is often they don’t, right? This is something we call “impact blindness,” that basically senior management does not have sufficient visibility into the cumulative impact that the executive team is having on people at lower levels. Maybe they’re not paying attention, maybe they don’t want to pay attention, maybe they’ve got their own agendas they’re pursuing, but the net impact is they do not really have visibility into what they’re doing to the organization. And the organization will survive doing this for a while, and then the cracks will begin to start showing.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: When those cracks start to show, what do they look like? Is it decreased engagement? Is it turnover? What is it?

ROSE HOLLISTER: It’s decreased engagement. It’s turnover. It’s people leaving for other jobs. There was an SVP that we were in an interview with and he was a leader at a human resource consulting firm and he said, “I love this organization. I love the work. I love the team. The pace is unsustainable. If I stay here, I will have a heart attack.” And he left and he found another role.

I was just talking to one of my clients and they had gotten in their engagement survey, they had gotten scores about that work-life balance wasn’t where they wanted it to be. And as they unpacked that and said why – it wasn’t that managers weren’t flexible and weren’t saying, “Yes, take care of your home life, your children,” those things. It was that there were simply too many initiatives going on for people to be able to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

MICHAEL WATKINS: I would add that this sort of thing can work okay when unemployment is high, right? And people are worried about their jobs and they’re worried about saying things. But when you start to get to a full employment situation and people have lots of opportunities, the real risk is you’re going to lose your best talent.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And is that because the good people have more options or because the good people are the ones who tend to be the most overloaded with a million initiatives?

MICHAEL WATKINS: Yes, to both. Right? I think it’s both things. One is that they tend to bear the brunt, right – your high performer, you know, tends to get more loaded on them, right, which of course can generate some resentment because other players are not doing the job and they have options. And so they look for places that are going to appreciate them and modulate the workload better than where they are.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: How do companies usually try to solve this problem and does that work?

ROSE HOLLISTER: Well, typically, first of all, they say “By function, let’s go prioritize.” And so the marketing department says, “Okay, here’s what’s top for us, here’s what we’re doing, let us lead on our initiatives,” and that happens across every other function – whether that’s finance, whether that’s IT. That typically doesn’t work because there’s not an understanding of the impact.

Now there was someone that we know that looked at his organization and realized this was an issue and he asked every senior leader of this organization – the C-suite – to come to a three day meeting and as their homework, they had to bring every initiative that was happening under their oversight: What was the business case for it? What was it taking in people time? And then how did it meet two screens – one, to support the building of the business, the growth of the business, and second to support customer satisfaction?

Now that C-suite took three days, they looked at every single initiative, and as a group they said, “We won’t do this, we won’t do this, we won’t do this.” Then they reallocated resources from the things that they weren’t doing to the key initiatives. But at the end of the day, they significantly decreased the number of initiatives across the enterprise. When someone does that, the whole organization wins and the business results gave proof to this because looking down the road, customer service scores did go up, the business did grow and people looked back on that three day retreat as a turning point in the organization.

MICHAEL WATKINS: Yeah. I would add a couple things to that, too. That’s potentially a highly conflictual process. Right? That’s a really difficult process of making tradeoffs between people that really want to drive certain things in their organizations. Second thing is you’ve got to be very careful about interdependencies between things, right? You can stop this and it turns out it really impacts that – and so you’ve got to be willing to think through those interdependencies. And then, you know, once you’ve decided to kill something, you actually have to kill it. I mean we see these Zombie initiatives, right, that they sort of rise from the dead because they’ve got an agenda associated with them and people find little hidden pockets of resource or think they do to try and pursue them.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So usually when projects don’t die or stay dead, leaders get blamed by employees and employees who feel kind of disgruntled and kind of like, “Ugh, like, you know, management never kills any these projects,” but I know that from talking to leaders, leaders feel like employees won’t stop doing the work. I mean – it’s sort of each side kind of blames the other camp.

MICHAEL WATKINS: Yeah. I’ve been doing some work with a big pharma company – R&D. And I think I’ve seen this very much happened because people get very identified with projects, right? They begin to think their employment may depend on certain projects being pursued or they really strongly believe that this particular drug is going to change the world. And so there’s resistance to this notion that we’re actually going to kill something. Prioritization – really prioritizing and really making it stick – that’s really hard.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So as a leader, how can you deliver that message convincingly and compassionately?

ROSE HOLLISTER: I think part of this, and one of the things that we find is there needs to be better dialogue going both ways. There needs to be an understanding from the people who are being asked to execute on this initiative, what’s the true impact? Or if we’re stopping it, are there pieces of this that are related somewhere else? Because in big organizations, as Michael said, there are so many interdependencies that stopping something – maybe you can stop 85 percent, but maybe another department is depending on this 15 percent. And so part of this is more robust conversations about what will it mean to stop? What’s the impact on the organization? If we stop and what’s the plan to stop it?

MICHAEL WATKINS: You need to recognize that really doing this kind of privatization and winnowing across an organization is a kind of change management exercise. And change management exercises tend to work best when you start with the why: Why are we doing this? What are the benefits, right? Rather than just jumping straight to the “what” or the “how”?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So clearly it would be better to prevent this problem from occurring. What are some of the questions that leaders should be asking before launching initiatives to avoid this kind of thing?

ROSE HOLLISTER: I think the example for me would be if I just say “I’m going to buy a car” and I budgeted for my car. Well I go and buy that car, but if I can’t afford the gas, if I can’t afford the maintenance and the insurance, I can’t really afford the car. Well, I think for a lot of initiatives we get the initial funding, but we don’t understand all the peripheral things that are needed in order to support it for the long-term. So it’s understanding will this initiative truly solve the problem? Did we do enough homework to understand whether this isn’t just a Band-aid but it’s actually the right answer, and then if it is the right answer, have we truly looked at the costs, and does it make sense – with all the other things in the organization – is this truly one of the priorities? One of the quotes we really like is from Steve Jobs that says that we all need to get better at saying “no” to hundreds of really good ideas.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What about the sort of – I think of it as the closet cleaning approach, where for every new piece of clothing you buy you have to donate an old piece of clothing or give it away. I mean, can you take the same approach with initiatives or is that just too rigid?

ROSE HOLLISTER: It might be like, let’s say that I buy a wool coat, but I give away a pair of socks. So they’re not quite equal. So I think that where it’s a nice idea to add an initiative, take one away. I think it’s about how, what will it take for the organization to support this initiative?

I used to, when I was running the team at Mcdonald’s, I used to ask my team about once a quarter: “What are we doing that we could stop doing and no one would notice?” We also one year took the time to say for everything that we’re delivering, what does it take in time to deliver it? And we got a really amazing sense of if we were doing a high potential officer program, what did it take us in hours to support that. And we did that across every single program we ran.

And then when we sat down to plan for the following year, I had all these great ideas. I wanted to start this. I wanted to start this. I wanted to do this. And my team who had been working with me tracking it said “We have 15 percent free time. That’s all. So if you want to start these things, are we going to get other resources? Are we going to stop doing some other things?” We had done our homework to truly know what it took to deliver. Most times we’re all just working so hard, we don’t really know what it takes to make something happen.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If you’re talking to people at the C-suite level, what’s sort of the most important thing you’d want them to take away when they’re thinking about initiatives in their company, either starting new ones are finding ways to cut back?

ROSE HOLLISTER: I would really encourage the C-suite to get an inventory to truly understand across the enterprise what are the projects – the initiatives – that are currently in place, and then what I see pretty much every year with a budget process is new initiatives are added to that. So before any of those things are funded for the C-suite team to take enough time to say what are we already doing? What of those things do we keep, and then what do we add?

MICHAEL WATKINS: As you’re thinking about doing an inventory and looking at what your organization is doing as a senior executive team, don’t just look top down. Start at the base layer of your leadership and management, the people managing your frontline contributors, and take a very hard look at what’s happening there.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Once you’ve done the inventory, what does success with initiatives look like?

MICHAEL WATKINS: Yeah, I think it’s an important point, right? Which is that success in doing this doesn’t just mean that you’re sort of funding what you’re doing better. It also means you can do things that really are going to contribute, you know, powerfully to what is going to drive the business forward. So there’s a combination of benefits here. I mean sometimes you’ll see as a part of doing this exercise that there’s this little jewel of initiative that really isn’t getting the support it needs, right? And okay, we’re gonna put some resource into that. Sometimes it’s: This thing is a dog, right? We’re gonna kill it and we’re going to make sure it stays dead and sometimes it’s a, “Hey, this means we can do this. We can pursue something that’s really pretty exciting.”

ROSE HOLLISTER: I think what we find is that when companies do fewer initiatives, the most important ones finally get the support they need because people have the time, they have the focus, they have the energy to really move that initiative forward. The fewer they’re doing, they’re doing those fewer much better, and so instead of every initiative getting to move things to steps, one or two big initiatives can move things significantly farther forward.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: We’ve talked a lot about handling initiatives that are kind of pushed down onto you, but I’m also wondering about the way that sometimes managers reach out and grab initiatives that maybe they shouldn’t. It has happened where sometimes managers will say, “Oh gosh, my team needs a piece of that project, or my team needs a seat at that table” and suddenly you’re contributing to initiative overload even though you know it’s a problem, so how can you resist that urge to kind of horn in to a project where you feel like maybe you should have a seat at that table even if you don’t have time?

MICHAEL WATKINS: Yeah. There’s a question of managerial maturity here, and unfortunately not all managers are mature, right? They’re not able to distinguish between those things that they should be doing – or more importantly committing their people to be doing because that’s often where the cost rests – as opposed to what are all of the lovely little pies I’d love to have my fingers in.

ROSE HOLLISTER: In some ways I believe this is at the heart of it: We all want to be involved. We all want to be well-thought of. We all want to be showing that we’re making progress and improvements and making things happen and we have limits. And so I think that’s the challenge here is: “What’s the highest and best use of my time? Yes, I’d love to weigh in on that project. With everything else we’re being asked to deliver, can we?” Sometimes the organization is pushing us to do it, sometimes we are part of the problem because we want to be in there and we put ourselves forth for volunteering for this or being a part of this and we’re the ones that sometimes cause our individual initiative overload.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you’re just a middle manager or individual employee, is it realistic that there’s something you could do to fight initiative overload at your company?

ROSE HOLLISTER: I’d say start with your own area and look at: “What do we have on our plates? And then be realistic with what does it take, not to just support our own initiatives, but what are our interdependencies and then working to say, “What can we limit? Can we get additional resources? Are there things we can stop doing? Can we move the calendar out? So, when I think about this as a middle manager, what I really think about is that locus of control. What does that middle manager, what are they able to impact? What are they able to influence? Because they can start with their area.

Part of this is also making sure that they’ve had the conversations. I worked with somebody for years who was very well-thought of and people kept saying, “Give him this new responsibility, give him this new area.” And this came up year after year and his response was always, “I will take that on when I get the resources,” and as an employee I was like, “Can we say no? Is that okay? I felt bad. I thought, oh, we’ll figure it out.”

But what I realized is that his answer was the right answer, not just for our function but for the organization.

ALISON BEARD: HBR On Leadership will be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation from Harvard Business Review.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. On Leadership’s team includes Maureen Hoch, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, and Ian Fox.

If this episode helped you, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. While you’re there, consider leaving us a review.

When you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, find it all at HBR.org.