Disclaimer: This post is not about “X ways to overcome procrastination” or “procrastination is actually good for you.” I choose to not to write about either topics because a) many people wrote about that already (there’s not much that I can add), and b) it’s usually about the individual, and I’d like to focus more on the impact it has on the organization. First, allow me to clarify what I mean by procrastination. Derek Thompson in “The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It” provided a great definition for procrastination so I will refer to that here: Productive people sometimes confuse the difference between reasonable delay and true procrastination. The former can be useful (“I’ll respond to this email when I have more time to write it”). The latter is, by definition, self-defeating (“I should respond to this email right now, and I have time, and my fingers are on the keys, and the Internet connection is perfectly strong, and nobody is asking me to do anything else, but I just … don’t … feel like it.”). Furthermore, in this context I will assume that the procrastinator is a high performer. For example: the person knows he/she is responsible for the work, knows how to prioritize and manage time well based on the priorities. If a high performer is chronically procrastinating despite the fact that he/she is very capable and perfectly aware of his/her responsibilities, I suspect that there is a much larger, ominous problem underlying the behavior. The lack of motivation. There are many ways a person can lack motivation, and it may not be that person’s fault. The person might not believe in why the work they’re responsible for is actually worthwhile doing. The person might not believe in why the task or role is delegated to him/her. The person could be suffering from clinical depression. Or burnout. It could be a combination (if not a myriad) of things. Some may think, “well… it doesn’t have to do with whether you’re motivated or not because what needs to get done needs to get done.” I find this view to be prevalent among both the people who tell procrastinating high performers to “just do it,” and the procrastinating high performers who drag their feet to get things done. But to me, it looks like sticking a band-aid on a swollen area that’s actually caused by a bone fracture. Let me tell you a story about a procrastinating high performer, and a handful of things that contributed to the procrastinating behavior (names have been changed due to privacy reasons). The story of a procrastinating high-performerMeet Judy. Judy is entirely self-driven. External motivation doesn’t mean much to her because her motivation is fully intrinsic. She finds joy in large-scale problem solving — looking at a complex problem from different facets and exploring the design space for building solutions. That’s one of the reasons why she co-founded a small data analytics/design consulting startup. Judy also happens to have some knowledge in managing finances and administration. Since she was involved in a startup (where one person typically needs to take on multiple roles because there’s not enough resources to hire people in each specialization), she ended up taking care of finance and administration in addition to domain-specific consulting work. Judy has ADD (attention deficit disorder). During a typical work day, she spends around 80% of her time and effort trying to focus, and so she doesn’t actually spend that much time actually executing. But since she is extremely efficient, she can produce high-caliber deliverables very quickly compared to the average performer. Keeping track of things is not her forte; she can do it but it requires tremendous effort and focus compared to an average person to get it done. For example, a seemingly simple task such as counting is a daunting task for Judy (imagine being constantly interrupted by everything around you while you try to count). Switching tasks is not good for her either, because she needs to spend a lot of time and cognitive energy to re-focus. Judy is also a perfectionist who battles anxiety and depression. She needs to put in a lot of conscious effort to not feel ashamed of herself. Keeping this in mind, let’s walk through what Judy experiences. Since Judy’s motivation is solely driven from solving analytical problems, she is extremely productive in her consulting work but not as much in the finances and administration. She has difficulty taking and keeping track of records, making precise calculations, figuring out why the numbers don’t match up, keeping track of deadlines, and even being motivated enough to complete things before the deadline. As a result, the financial and administrative tasks start to fall behind, and self-shame starts to rapidly accumulate (Judy is a perfectionist), and she is aware that it’s nearly impossible to do all the finances perfectly in addition to her consulting work. And the procrastination doom loop starts: Oftentimes, deadline setting strategies are mentioned in pieces that talk about procrastination, but in Judy’s case, deadlines — whether they are self-imposed (“I need to start on this by next week.”) or external (“I will get penalized if my submission is late!”) — do not influence her motivation. Judy does not have a good fit with her role. But you see... the problem does not stop there. It turns out that Judy was not in the right role, yet there was no one else who had a better fit for that role! Although Judy has problems keeping track of things, her teammates were even more disorganized than she was. There wasn’t the right mix of people running the organization: everyone in the organization was strong at one thing, and weak in the other. So the problem was actually systemic — it wasn’t only about Judy. Yet, Judy was the only one who was blamed for. Her inner flame was extinguished. She left the organization not too long after she got bombarded with a tirade by a "livid" (I'm using the word "livid" because that was the word used by the person delivering the tirade) colleague. When a problem sheds light on a larger-scale problemI can't stand to see one person's inner flame get extinguished as a result of a system's problem (they're getting all the blame for something that's not their fault)! It isn't fair.
This case study was an example of when a behavioral problem (like procrastination) could have shed light on a larger-scale organizational problem, but that never came to fruition because one individual was blamed for (and that person left). I believe that there is a way to actually address individual behavior problems so that the organization can gain insights about itself (and the systemic problems it may have). More on that in a later post. I need to take deep breaths for the next week or so to calm myself down.
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You might know of some “open-house” events hosted by universities to get kids interested in math and science. I volunteered as a guest presenter once because I thought the idea was really cool.
The event is run by a few professors, many student teachers, and several guests like me. There were 2 volunteer coordinators and nearly 100 volunteers. Some of these volunteers set up activity booths so families can do STEM (science / technology / engineering / mathematics) related activities. Other volunteers were not stationed at a particular booth; these teacher candidates’ roles were to go to booths that needed more people and to help out while learning how to teach kids. Now let me tell you how the event was actually managed: one volunteer coordinator had all the information and there was no task delegation. Nearly 100 volunteers and 300 families had to go through that one person to get any sort of information about the event (where a certain activity was held at, which booths had too many or too few people, where the coat/bag storage room is, etc.). There was no communication going on between the volunteers because nobody had any idea what was going on (they all had to ask that one person and it takes so long to get the answer that many people give up). My activity station was in a room that didn’t have any signage so I suspect that most families had no idea that there were activities going on in this room. Furthermore, the room started to get used as a coat/bag storage space and there was nobody designated to monitor the space. When the event was over and I had to leave, there was nobody I could hand over the task to. Meanwhile, there were volunteers who clearly looked bored and clueless wandering in other rooms and hallways. Apparently they didn’t know that the room I was in had activities going on, or that the room was also used as a storage space. Let’s think about the opportunity cost for a moment: the professors, student teachers, and guest volunteers are literally volunteering their time on a Saturday where they could be doing something else instead. Students have assignments and projects to work on. Professors typically have research projects and/or courses to run. I could’ve spent my time preparing for my workshops for the upcoming week. We’re all busy. How many people were overwhelmed that day? One, certainly. How many volunteers ended up wasting their time? Probably many. This isn’t new, and this isn’t even the thing I’m upset about. There are plenty of events that have really good intentions that end up not running so well due to the lack of proper event coordination. So the other day, I addressed the event coordination issue for this event to someone who knew about this event, and was involved in it in previous years. The response was: “At the end of the day, as long as we get more kids interested in pursuing math and science, the goal has been accomplished.” While I agree with the main goal… this statement suggests that as long as the main goal is accomplished, the means used for accomplishing that goal does not matter. In this school open-house case, it implies that having one colossal information bottleneck and a 400-person queue does not matter. …Really? My concern is that people who think using this structure might think the same way in other contexts too. Let’s say the school was a company, the volunteers are the employees, and the families are customers: At the end of the day, as long as we get more customers to buy our product, the goal has been accomplished. It doesn’t matter if one manager is clearly overworked and is consequentially really slow at getting things done, 100 employees have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing, and the 300 customers are getting frustrated because they can’t get the support they need. It is important to have an overarching goal, but it doesn’t make sense to fixate only on that because events, organizations, and pretty much everything that we do have people running it (let’s put aside the robots for now). And if the people who make up the event or organization aren’t doing well (overworked or bored out of their minds), I’m not convinced that the event is well-run or that the organization is doing well. (Note: Conversely, if the people in an organization or event are doing fine but if their efforts are not contributing to achieving the overarching goal at all, that is also definitely a problem.) Going back to the school open-house case, people may argue that chaos is to be expected because it’s not a business. But doing things like event logistics and team management isn’t about running a business. It’s about respect. It’s about respecting people and the time and effort they put into their work. For me, good management is the behavioral instantiation of the respect you have for yourself and others. So when I see an event that severely lacks good management (and therefore the apparent lack of consideration for the people involved), I cannot help but question the actual success of that event. This is not to say that the event was bad, period. I just separate the concept and execution when I think about it. So for that event I attended, the execution was sub-optimal but the concept is still a great one. In conclusion, I think it is worth doing more of – and additionally refining how it is managed so that the people involved in it can get the most out of it too. In my last post I wrote about where I came from. In this post I write about where I want to go, and what I aspire to do. My goal is to help organizations that are...
I started my management career in a place where people would probably not expect – a vision science research lab. (No, not the one in the picture... but I must say that my research supervisor does have a lot of plants. Plants rock.) I haven’t had ‘formal’ education in management, but learned entirely through practice. (So if someone tells you that you must go to school before becoming a manager, that's false by the way.) In university, one of the requirements of my undergraduate program was to do directed studies at a real research lab (to gain research experience) so I was looking for potential labs I could volunteer at in my 3rd year. I found two labs that were interesting to me, mainly because I was starstruck by the professors (I am still starstruck by those people). One was a neuroimaging lab and I did my directed studies there. The other one was the vision science lab that I didn’t end up doing directed studies in, but stayed for much longer because I fell in love with the lab’s culture there. The thing that I liked about the vision science lab was that it struck a neat balance between order and chaos. The way things were run was organized and orderly, yet there was a lot of autonomy and flexibility. Another thing I liked about the lab was that the people there were fun to work together and hang out together. As I was working on projects with these great, scary-intelligent people, I started thinking of little ways that I can help these people do even better. And I started doing little things (that consisted of mainly organizing) that would save people a little bit of time and labor here and there. Apparently that was one of the things my manager liked about me, and I was appointed as successor. So what does a lab manager do? I suspect there's high variance among different labs, but some of the things I did were: counting money and refilling the safe (so that we can pay people who participated in our experiments), organizing the lab space, organizing lab meetings and socials, and bringing the right talent in as volunteers and directed studies students. Lessons learnedThe most important thing I learned about management from this lab was management is not about telling people what to do; it’s supporting the great people that you’ve brought into your organization and creating an environment that enables them to do even better. It’s freaking magical. Here's what prominent figures have to say about this matter: "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." "I hire people brighter than me and get out of their way." The other important lesson I learned was that hiring is vitally important. You need to make sure that the people you bring into the organization are the ones that fit the way the organization runs (i.e. the ones that flourish when you get out of the way, because not everyone works like that).
...Of course, I learned it the hard way! (I should elaborate on this in a later post.) But those mistakes didn't happen for nothing. Based on the lessons learned, I created the lab’s hiring guidebook which is still used by the lab managers today. In the past, I've experienced quite a few times where I'm anxiety-stricken because someone else is getting punished. There's stress coming from all directions - frustrations and fear from both the punisher and the punished, and those emotions are very sticky. It's like having paint splattered everywhere, and once it gets onto me it takes a lot of time and effort to wash away.
Usually, when people notice that I'm anxious, they say the following: "You're doing well." Although I believe the people who say this mean well, it doesn't improve my anxiety at all. What am I being compared against? The person who just got yelled at? To me, even if I'm performing "well" if the rest of the organization is shaken - if employees are getting fired, if the employees who didn't are quivering thinking "am I next?" and if everyone is frustrated and fearful, I can't separate myself from that. I am part of the organization after all, and I care about the wellness of the organization as a whole compared to myself only. Are we doing well? "You need to compartmentalize" is also something people told me in the past. After giving this some thought for a few years though, I have decided to not follow this suggestion. Yes, it will be emotionally overwhelming. But the connection between the self and the organization is something that feels natural to me. It's like looking at a biological organism. Sure, you can look at each organ as its own separate entity - the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver... but they're all part of the same organism. And when one organ is unhappy that could very well affect all the other organs because they can talk to each other. Even if the system is not biological, like a machine or a program, I think the same thing still holds. If one part of the machine is damaged, or if one part of the program has a bug, that's probably going to affect the output. I'm not saying that the notion to separate the self from the organization is wrong. It's merely not my cup of tea. I do find the differences in the way we think interesting though, and I am curious to know how the differences emerge through the different experiences that shape us. (For me, I suspect that the COGS program played an instrumental role.) |
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