
Folsom Dam, on the American River near Sacramento, California. The dam and the Folsom Reservoir are the primary protectors of the city of Sacramento against floods resulting from rainfall and snowfall that cover higher elevations nearby.
Being flooded with work is a metaphor more apt than might first appear. Flooding inland, like overwork, can have multiple causes. Whether any particular rainfall or snowfall event or series of events leads to flooding depends on numerous factors, among them: available soil water storage capacity, the ability of the topography to shed water, the ability of the topography to contain flows within established river channels, the region's vulnerability to flows from higher elevations in the watershed, snow melt rates, and the region's ability to store standing water in contained areas. All of these mechanisms have analogs in overload management in the workplace. Photo courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Having too much work is a common condition in the modern workplace. Having way, way, way too much work — so much that 70-hour weeks still are not enough to keep from falling behind — is less common, but still too common. Combine way-way-way-too-much-work with ongoing supervisor expectations that the work will get done, and done well, and you have the ingredients for stress, sleep disturbance, declining work quality, toxic conflict, and disruption of home life. It's a toxic stew that can cause permanent harm.
We must be honest with ourselves. This degree of overwork is abuse. It threatens our health, and it must end.
What follows, this week and the two following, is a sketch of a program for ending this kind of abuse.
Let's begin by examining where the work comes from.
- The work is included in or implied by my job description
- Work of this kind truly is yours. The question is: "Does the organization need another one of you?" Or maybe, "Should my job be divided?"
- Affirmative answers to these questions usually occur only when the situation is obvious to all concerned, whether or not anyone acknowledges it openly.
- My boss explicitly directed me to do the work
- Typically, you were already overloaded when your boss gave you yet one more responsibility. And you accepted it because you felt you had little choice.
- Some supervisors are unaware of the true scale of the excessive workloads of their subordinates. Some are fully aware, but choose to do nothing about it. Some are willfully unaware. Understanding your own supervisor's state of awareness is a first step to devising a strategy for ending the overwork.
- I picked up this work because "it has to get done"
- Sometimes, important responsibilities or tasks remain unassigned or even unrecognized. When they remain open, they sometimes block progress on work that has been assigned. The people who are blocked can then find it difficult to resist the temptation to take on responsibility for this "fallow work."
- If you've succumbed to this temptation, then you have, in effect, assigned yourself some work voluntarily. Complaining about it later then becomes problematic.
- I picked up this work to prevent someone else from getting it
- Political Some supervisors are unaware
of the true scale of the
excessive workloads of their
subordinates. Others are
willfully unaware.rivals sometimes contend with each other for responsibilities not because they seek those responsibilities, but because they seek to deny their rivals control of those responsibilities. - Outcomes in these situations are rarely beneficial to anyone involved, or to the organization. Yet supervisors often let this happen, because they feel they're getting productivity for free. Or they're more comfortable permitting people to overload themselves voluntarily than they are comfortable with overloading people directly.
These various mechanisms by which overloading comes about call for different approaches to prevention and resolution. That's the topic for next time. Next in this series Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
Conflicts of Interest in Reporting
- Reporting is the process that informs us about how things are going in the organization and its efforts.
Unfortunately, the people who do the reporting often have a conflict of interest that leads to misleading
and unreliable reports.
When You're the Least of the Best: II
- Many professions have entry-level roles that combine education with practice. Although these "newbies"
have unique opportunities to learn from veterans, the role's relatively low status sometimes conflicts
with the self-image of the new practitioner. Comfort in the role makes learning its lessons easier.
Rope-A-Dope in Organizational Politics
- Mohammed Ali's strategy of "rope-a-dope" has wide application. Here's an example of applying
it to workplace politics at the organizational scale.
Narcissistic Behavior at Work: III
- People who behave narcissistically tend to regard themselves as special. They systematically place their
own interests and welfare ahead of anyone or anything else. In this part of the series we consider how
this claimed specialness affects the organization and its people.
Appearance Antipatterns: I
- Appearances can be deceiving. Just as we can misinterpret the actions and motivations of others, others
can misinterpret our own actions and motivations. But we can take steps to limit these effects.
See also Workplace Politics and Managing Your Boss for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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And on March 17: Facts, Opinions, Estimates, and Desires
- One reason why resource allocation debates can become so difficult is confusion about the differences among facts, opinions, estimates, and desires. Clarifying their differences can reduce the length and intensity of resource allocation debates. Available here and by RSS on March 17.
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Decis
ion-makers in modern organizations commonly demand briefings in the form of bullet points or a series of series of bullet points. But this form of presentation has limited value for complex decisions. We need something more. We actually need to think. Briefers who combine the bullet-point format with a variety of persuasion techniques can mislead decision-makers, guiding them into making poor decisions. Read more about this program.
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- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group