Ep216: Helping my people with their backpack (First Friday)

Jim Marshall shares thoughts on how to help your team when they are feeling overwhelmed. Using a framework of four levers... Prioritize, Delegate, Work smarter & harder, Delay/stop & renegotiate. 

Transcript

Jim Marshall (01:06)
Greetings, everybody. I’m so looking forward to the conversation today and to offering something of value when you're thinking about helping your people—or the people you work with—with their “backpacks,” or workload.

This is the last in a series of six exploring the backpack idea. Sometimes we talk about it as a bucket, sometimes as a backpack, sometimes just as workload. But it’s this pervasive idea that we’re all trying to do more with less these days. Honestly, I think we’ve been trying to do that for decades, and it just keeps increasing. We try to go faster, do more with fewer people, streamline and automate—and all of that creates pressure.

What I hear a lot is something like, “I have more to do than I have time to do it.” Burnout is one of those red-flag words. If somebody uses the word burnout, we know they’re already at a high level of stress.

It can sound and feel pretty severe—extreme, even emotional. Not always—sometimes people step into the conversation feeling pretty grounded and calibrated. But when we look at the dangers of under- and over-capacity, which I’ll mention is available as a freebie on the Humanergy website under the Resources section—I’m showing you about half the chart here—what we see is a continuum.

In the middle of that continuum, between under- and over-capacity, is the green zone—the peak performance zone. That’s where people feel energized and focused.

Then you go up toward over-capacity: first into the yellow zone, then the red zone, which is the unsustainable or failure zone. That’s where we see exhaustion and fatigue (yellow), and then burnout, breakdown, anxiety, and anger (red). What it sounds like in that space can be pretty dramatic.

One of the reasons I wanted to start with what it sounds like is because I want us, as leaders, to reflect on how we respond in that moment. Because we are going to respond—and so are our people.

I really appreciate what Terry shared: that someone didn’t say anything until it was probably too late, and then felt like they had to go to HR. Most of us as leaders don’t want our people to feel like they can’t come to us and talk about what’s going on.

There’s a dynamic at play here that I think is worth examining, and it connects to a quote from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:

“A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them. You trust or distrust strangers without knowing why.”

And I think he would also say, “You make a judgment or conclusion about what’s really going on in an overloaded or over-capacity situation without a whole lot of conscious thought.”

Think about the factors at play. You might have a gut feel about their performance—are they a top performer or a low performer? You have a gut feel about your relationship with them—maybe you’re friends and that opens you up to trust them more. Maybe they’re very different from you, and even if you work well together, it might lead to more skepticism.

What I’ve seen in my own work and my own experience with capacity is this: we often misread a capacity problem as a capability problem.

In other words, we think, “This person needs to grow, they need to develop,” when in reality, the issue is that they simply have too much on their plate—more than any average or reasonable person could handle. Capacity problems can masquerade as capability problems.

So, coming back to the “dangers of over- and under-capacity” chart—Quay linked that resource earlier—you can look at both leadership actions and individual actions on that chart, and we’re going to explore those further.

What I want to offer—and what I’ve done myself as a leader—is to start by asking:
 What do I really want to achieve here?
And what’s really going on?
What’s the root cause of this sense of burden, overload, or feeling like there’s more to do than there is time to do it?

With that Kahneman quote in the back of our minds, we should be questioning our conclusions. I had a leader once say, “I hold my conclusions loosely.” And I love that. That’s what I try to do—I look around, explore, and partner with the person to investigate what’s really going on and what might bring some relief.

I did a quick Google search: “What happens when people feel overloaded or burned out?” And what I found affirmed this: when someone’s overwhelmed, we see a decline in performance. That can even look like someone becoming more task-focused—they stop being proactive or creative. But as the situation worsens, it’s not just about lack of creativity. It becomes:

“I’m not productive. I’m not effective. I’m not making good decisions.”

Because emotion starts to cloud our work. If this continues, turnover becomes likely. Think about the person brushing up their resume, applying for jobs, interviewing, and eventually leaving.

It also affects teamwork. There’s more conflict, reduced collaboration, or even unhelpful coping behaviors. Yes, sometimes healthy ones—like asking for help—but also things like doom-scrolling, gaming, or distracting ourselves instead of doing the work.

So, this is what’s going on for your person while you, as the leader, are trying to figure out what to do.

One thing I’ll say is that how I manage my own backpack is the same as how I help someone else with theirs. What’s helped me over the years is to think in terms of four levers:

1. Prioritize what’s important
2. Delegate what can or should be done by others
3. Work smarter (and potentially harder)
4. Delay, stop, or renegotiate

Now, I’ll say this again later, but there’s no cookie-cutter solution here. Relief doesn’t come from one-size-fits-all advice—it comes through a conversation (or series of them) that explores these levers in context.

Let’s start with prioritizing. If we’re going to do more with less, we need to let some things spill over—that’s the bucket analogy again. Be wise about what spills over and what doesn’t.

This ties into something we shared in earlier sessions: we need ruthless prioritization. Every time you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else. And every “no” can be a “yes” to something better.

If you’re like me, you’ve had those days where you had no real plan, bounced between meetings and emails, and by the end of the day you feel completely unproductive. What I realized is that my calendar and inbox were in charge—not me.

So, when it comes to prioritization, our goal as leaders is to help people consciously and intentionally choose what to focus on—because something will get done. But if we just let things ride, it probably won’t be the most important thing.

Sometimes in those conversations, we ask people to write down everything they’re doing that they think is important. Look at their calendar, their inbox—what’s taking up time?

Then we categorize. One tool we often use is the Eisenhower Matrix—the four quadrants:

• Urgent and important
• Not urgent but important
• Urgent but not important
• Not urgent and not important

The first two quadrants are where the real value is, and the last two are where we often want to offload or stop doing things. The point of this categorization isn’t to add work—it’s to support the investigation of where their time and energy are going, and what matters most.

Once we’ve prioritized, we move to the next lever: delegation.

The person may have already asked you for help. Now the question is, who else can help? Can we ask someone from another function? A peer? A support person?

And here's a word of caution: if we just say, “Well, delegate that,” we may not be offering real relief. Delegation takes time. Coaching someone else takes time. So even if that’s the right long-term solution, there’s a lag time before it actually lightens the load.

And I think it's important to mention something we’ve been talking about with our clients lately—monkey management.

We use “monkeys” as a metaphor for tasks, goals, and projects. And as leaders, we need to ask: Whose back does this monkey belong on?
Is it mine? Is it my direct report’s? Is it someone else’s?

Often, individual contributors want to be team players. So when someone asks for help, their instinct is to say yes. But as leaders, we have to start the conversation:
 “Where does this monkey belong?”

That’s a capacity conversation.
Do we have the right number of people doing the right things? Are we organizing work in a way that makes sense? That’s our job.

Now, on to the third lever: working smarter and harder.

This is about increasing efficiency wherever possible. Can we:

• Do the task faster?
• Automate it?
• Ask IT to help create a shortcut or generate a report?
• Use AI? (We talked with John about that a couple of months ago.)

Or can we invest in training—inside or outside the organization—to help the person grow and become more effective? Maybe they need to learn from a peer who’s already good at it. Maybe we mentor them.

And yes, sometimes it does mean working longer hours temporarily. If that’s the case, we should also be thinking, what’s the light at the end of the tunnel? Is this just a rough season? Is relief coming?

That’s also when we, as leaders, need to increase check-ins. If we’re only doing monthly one-on-ones, maybe we need to meet weekly. We need to be asking questions like:

• What are you learning?
• How are you feeling about the work?
• Are you seeing relief?

This isn’t just about productivity. It’s about supporting the human doing the work.

And finally, the fourth lever: delaying, stopping, or renegotiating.

I'll just say this plainly—we don’t do this enough. We talk about it, we acknowledge it, but in practice, it’s rarely done well. And when we do attempt to stop or delay something, we often forget to renegotiate with stakeholders.

Let me be clear—this is not a decision you and your direct report make in a vacuum. If you shelve a project until next year and don’t tell the other people involved, it’s going to come back as drama, noise, or confusion—and it might look like poor performance. So if you're talking about delaying or stopping, think:
 Who else needs to know?
How do we renegotiate expectations clearly and professionally?

And then there’s this idea of an inverse relationship—the more we take on, the less we get done. It’s my way of saying: we have to get clear on what’s important, and then focus on that. Otherwise, we pile on more and more, and paradoxically, accomplish less.

So again, there’s no simple fix. But in all the coaching I’ve done—whether it’s with individuals or organizations—when we’re trying to move someone from overloaded to that green zone of peak performance, it almost always comes down to one of these four levers.

That’s where relief begins.