How managers prioritise when every task feels urgent

Jimmy: That mastering the art of prioritisation means that not everything is actually urgent. In fact, very few things probably are urgent, but when you're playing whack-a-mole and you're the one just waiting for everything to come and not thinking proactively, not thinking ahead, everything will seem urgent. But if you've got really clear purpose, this is what my job is, really clear impact that you want to have, these are the big things we're working on, the priorities we've got, then it makes it much easier to prioritise on a day-to-day basis. Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments, to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out, and to help you build a high performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes, and if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device. Hello and welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. You know, this episode is one I've been looking forward to making because it's one of the most common challenges that seems to come up for busy, overworked, over overstressed managers, leaders, and executives, which is everything seems to be really urgent. What do I do now? How do I make some progress? And, you know, if you're listening and your inbox is full of emails, you've got to-do lists in all sorts of places, you're trying to manage your day and manage your time, but no matter what you do, you seem to just have constant problems at your front door. Maybe you've got people in the team constantly asking you for the answers, "How do I do this? How do I solve this?" and you're the one that is required to save the day, then this episode of The High Performance Leader is for you. You know, one of the things I remember from when I was a GM was it's so easy to be the save the day leader. And these save the day leaders have many different guises or nicknames. They could be the firefighter, the superhero, the uh the rainy day solver, or the rainmaker in many teams. But essentially, what they are are the leader who is constantly putting out fires. And that, in the very short term, is a good thing, because it it allows them to solve problems and get stuff done quickly. But over the long term, it can hinder not only their own impact, but also the impact that their team can have. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to get into how do we identify if we're in that trap and share some new tools and skills that are going to allow you to reclaim your effectiveness and your impact. Uh we'll talk about things like prioritisation, delegating, and setting boundaries, of course. But we're also going to try and shed a little bit of light on maybe why you're doing this, and and that's interesting to unpack. So, you know, let's go back to that reason of why you might be solving all the problems. Often the reason you've got to where you are is because you could solve all the problems. You could solve problems better than anybody around you, and you became famous for solving those problems. Maybe you get a little hit, the excitement of solving those problems. And it's really alluring, right? It's really interesting to find something really crunchy, get stuck in, solve it, and get all the praise for it. And when you move further through your leadership career, it can be uncomfortable when suddenly you're not the one solving all the problems and you're not the one who's getting all the praise. It's those around you. So there can be a temptation to slip back and get involved. Equally, it can be very tempting, and I remember this one from from my own previous life, where you really do feel like you don't have the capability in your team or you can't trust the people who work alongside you to have the knowledge and skills to solve the problem as well as you would. So when the chips are down and the pressure is on, we rush back in to try and roll our sleeves up and fix everything. And, you know, let And we do it from from a sense of care. Let me help. Let me solve it using my skills. Let me try and sort this out for us, and once we're back to normal, then I'll hand the reins back over. And we've all done it. But the challenge is that that creates a not only a dependency culture in your team, but sometimes it can often create a culture of, "Well, there's no point in trying to even fix it because Jimmy's going to come back in and fix it anyway." So we need to be careful of going there. Often the reason as well that we're called into these urgent situations is because we've just got too many things going on in the team in our daily workload. And so everything feels urgent because there's too many things. We don't have enough time to really clearly identify, "What are our priorities?" and work on the important stuff. So we're the hamster on the wheel trying to work on everything. And so that lack of clear prioritisation, that being overcommitted in terms of your energetic horsepower and not having the clarity and foresight of where should I work, then we tend to just try to work on everything. Everything feels crucial. Everything leads to fire fighting because we're not seeing things coming ahead of time. We're just reacting to what's coming, and that behaviour can be quite contagious. Now, there's some dangers in this. If we have a lack of clear priorities, it also means that we're not necessarily going to be working on the most important stuff alongside our team, and certainly not the most strategically important stuff. What we tend to do is we go into a game of whack-a-mole, and we're urgently solving very tactical-level problems, problems that should probably be solved by people one or two layers down in your team, but for some reason, you're taking ownership of. And that's hindering you working on the bigger stuff. And as I say, often I hear this, "Oh, I'm just too busy to get to the strategic stuff." Well, there's a reason for that, and it's down to some of the choices that you're making. Equally, when you are the one that steps in to save the day, the firefighter, the superhero, the, "I'll just get this back on track and then hand the reins back over," can be really demotivating for your team. As we spoke about at the start, when you had the opportunity in your career to show what you could do and solve some problems and you got recognition for it, then that was amazing, right? You got all of the recognition, and you the sense of achievement and a sense of satisfaction, but also you gained the experience. But now you're stealing those opportunities from those people around you. And that can be not only damaging for their productivity and their growth and capability, but that then makes you feel like, "There's nobody around me who I can trust or has the capability to solve these problems." So you are stuck in that rut of having to be the superhero because you choose to be the superhero. Now, this is, inevitably, over a period of time, going to start to have an impact on you. You're going to become more and more committed. You're going to become overstretched, and what I see often is people involved in meetings, and making decisions, and getting involved in the stationery order, or being involved in decisions around what should the uniform be, or you know, really small things that aren't relevant for somebody at their level of the business. But because they want to be involved and help, then they certainly take part in that. Hey there, Jimmy here. And I just wanted to drop into this episode and let you know we're extremely grateful for all of the incredible reviews and feedback that we're getting about the Ways of Working podcast. We've managed to get ourselves, amazingly, into the top 10% globally of all management podcasts, which is an absolute dream for me to be able to share the Ways of Working message across a wider community. I wanted to share a quick review from one of our listeners because it's absolutely incredible and inspiring to those people that were trying to reach and communicate with. From Pinnacle Coach: "Jimmy is a great, natural interviewer and his background helps him to ask some really good questions. I've enjoyed a couple of the episodes from here, and always come away feeling inspired for my own work." Pinnacle Coach, thank you so much for that incredible review. We really appreciate it. And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe or follow on your favourite podcast platform of choice to the Ways of Working podcast, and we'll see you soon. Take care. Equally, when we are in this firefighter mode, it can be really tough to see the purpose in what we're doing. "Why am I doing this? What's the purpose of all this whack-a-mole? I don't feel like I'm making these great strategic leaps and bounds that are going to make a real difference to the team, and to my business, and to me in my career. I'm just firefighting all day." And that can make it very hard to distinguish not only the things that you find satisfying in the job, but also for your leader and the people who judge your performance to see whether you're doing a great job or not, because there's nothing really stand out. They don't see the purpose of what you're doing, they just see you running round and looking really busy. And again, I remember this back in my own time as a manager when I just kind of felt like I had to be involved in everything to make sure everything was running smoothly. And it was just minimising my impact when I did pop up because I was only there for a short time or not really present in the moment or not adding my best knowledge because I was overstretched and uh overcommitted. There's some conventional uh myths that uh often come up when things that you're probably trying that are also not helping. You know, one of them is the always available myth. So, "If I'm always available, that will make me a better leader. You know, I can always respond to everything, I'm always available to step in and help, I'm always solving everything." And that can be not only that challenge for your team, as I mentioned earlier, but then that starts to wear you down. Often, we see leaders who are always available, the ones who burn out first, because they never have any downtime, they never have any recharging time, and they never spend time and energy investing in building the team because they're always available to fix it. They can solve all the problems, so why spend time training anybody else? Or they're too busy trying to train anybody else. Equally, starting to think about judging your own success based on your own wins. As you become a leader in an organisation, you move from being responsible for the work to being responsible for the people who do the work. And so your success as a leader is judged on the success of your people, not on the little wins that you step into. So those tactical superhero moments where you step in and save the day, yes, they may be good short-term, but your team needs to be doing those, and you need to have a team that is perceived as running efficiently, effectively, and autonomously with a great leader in front of them, not, "Oh, well, when the chips are down, Jimmy will come in and save the day, and that's okay." And so we really want to start transitioning from being the expert, the firefighter, the problem solver, the superhero, to being more of a visionary leader, to being the impactful leader. And that really does start with being very clear on the purpose of your role and the impact you want to have. In chapter one of my book, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance, which is now available on Amazon, actually, we talk all about the purpose of the role. And often, what we see with leaders who are overworked is because they are doing all these things that they shouldn't be involved in, because they're not clear on the purpose of their role. I have a a managing director I work with at the moment, and for the last couple of years, he's been getting even more crystal clear on the purpose of the role. And it's awesome to now hear him say, "That's not my job. I shouldn't be involved in that. I need to make sure so-and-so in my team is enabled and supported to be able to take care of that. And then, once he's up to speed, I can step away." And he's really transitioned from what was the previous mindset, which was, "Oh, my gosh, I need to get involved. I need to solve this. They haven't done it. I have to fix this," and always being overworked, overstretched, and overtired. Now, "That's not my job. That's not my role purpose. The impact I want to have is growing the business, is starting a new product line, is offering new services, is optimising and making us more efficient, not, 'Have we ordered the stationery? Have we signed off the basic stationery order? Have we ordered some supplies for the week?' Whatever it might be that your business does, find the person in your team who is responsible. It's in their role purpose, and stay in your lane, step back into your purpose and have more impact." Equally, we've talked about the art of prioritisation previously. How do you prioritise? Well, what's the purpose of what you're doing? We've just talked about that. What's the value that of the thing that you could do or the other things that you could do? Choose the one with the highest value to the business and to you and to your team. And is it inside your capacity? Do you have enough headroom or capacity to take that thing on? And if you don't, what are you going to stop doing or slow down so you can create some capacity, or is this the thing that's going to be stopped or slowed down? So that mastering the art of prioritisation means that not everything is actually urgent. In fact, very few things probably are urgent, but when you're playing whack-a-mole and you're the you're the one just waiting for everything to come and not thinking proactively, not thinking ahead, everything will seem urgent. But if you've got really clear purpose, this is what my job is, really clear impact that you want to have, these are the big things we're working on, the priorities we've got, then it makes it much easier to prioritise on a day-to-day basis. That's not important. That's not important. That is important, and it's urgent. Equally, start to think about how you delegate. We run a whole mastermind programme on delegation using the four-letter mnemonic, explain, demonstrate, imitate, practice, EDIP. And you'd be surprised by how powerful just having a delegation methodology which is followed and followed and followed across a business can make such a huge difference to offloading something that you've been previously responsible for to somebody else in a way that they feel supported to take it on, and you can trust them to deliver it to the correct standard. If you don't know how to delegate, we'd love to show you how to do that and share with you some of the information. And then the final one is really learning to protect your boundaries. Chapter five of our book talks all about downtime. And the single most important thing we talk about in that chapter is preparing to perform. This is not switching off and being lazy. This is giving your brain some recharge time to connect the dots, to join things up, to solve those problems that you've been wrangling with. But because you're running at a thousand miles an hour all the time, you don't have the chance to do that. So making sure you take some time to set some boundaries that I go home at this time, I switch my let my emails and my phone off at this time, I have this personal time where I do hobbies, family, rest, relax, cuz that allows me to perform better when I'm in the workplace. It's this great myth, the always available myth, where I'm online at 3:00 in the morning doing things that steals those boundaries away from you gradually, piece by piece, but actually reduces your impact, and reduces your performance as a result. So today, we've talked about why you might be spending all of your time being the urgent, solving all the problems, save the day, superhero, firefighter leader; why everything might feel urgent to you all the time; and some of the things that you can do to start solving that. You know, if you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of my book. But also, just please do drop a comment on whichever podcast platform you're listening on to let us know how you are managing urgency in your day-to-day life. Life does seem to be more urgent than it used to be. It seems to be higher tempo than it used to be, and we're always looking and researching new ideas, concepts, frameworks, and tools and techniques that our listeners, our clients, and the people we work with are trying and learning from. So please do share them with us. That's all we have for this week. The "Everything is urgent, so how do I make progress?" I hope you enjoyed it. Look forward to sharing some amazing future episodes with you. Please do hit that subscribe button if you haven't already, or follow on whichever platform you're listening on before you leave this uh episode. It would be great to make sure you don't miss any further episodes of The High Performance Leader. Speak soon. That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest best seller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture, and is packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.