In the first installment of our essay, Saying Yes To All Work, I mentioned that the class exploring the topic identified that “when the CEO tells you to do something, you do it” as a reason for accepting unplanned work. This is a classic and while it is rare, it does happen. Over the years when I have seen (or participated) in the event almost no one pushed back. A few hours after the podcast was posted, a long-time friend of the podcast sent me a stream of texts adding an exclamation point to the “CEO told me to do it” excuse.  The texts formed the following story:

Hi Tom,

Regarding why shouldn’t we start all work on the latest podcast, the exact thing that you mentioned about the CEO asking for a task happened here. An executive asked for a report, jumping the normal prioritization queue. It took several people several days to do it. While the data existed it was not broken down the way he asked for it. a team was spun up, reported with twenty people.

When he heard the story, he said during an all-employee meeting,  “If I had known that it was going to take more than 15 minutes to get the answer, I would have expected someone to come back to me.  Because maybe I don’t need that. Or maybe come back to me with “hey, we don’t have that, but here’s something similar that we already have.”

Note this is slightly abridged to remove extraneous quips. 

Jumping the line in the work intake process meant no triage occurred, other work got neglected, and in the end, the organization got a bit of a black eye. 

As step two in our exploration of the topic, I challenged teams in the class to consider the consequences at individual, team, and organizational levels. 

A synthesis of the top five groups of answers are:

• Work Overload: At a team level, saying yes to everything can overwhelm team members, leading to stress, burnout, missed deadlines, and decreased productivity. Impacts of overload at the organizational level included losing customers due to higher costs, missed deadlines, and/or poor quality. Almost everyone agreed in the long run overload would increase turnover.
• Priority Confusion: Lack of control over work intake can result in unclear priorities. Lack of control of work intake creates a scenario where teams struggle to determine which tasks or projects are most important. Less critical tasks get done at the expense of crucial ones. At an organizational level, this leads to frustration and reduced trust in teams and the process causing the problem to get worse.
• Effort and Resource Misallocation: Ineffective intake processes lead to the misallocation of people and resources. Effort gets applied to the wrong work at the wrong time. This generates cost overruns and causes opportunity costs at the organizational level. This also causes trust failures. 
• Inconsistent Quality: When work intake isn’t controlled, the combination of work overload, frustration, and people asking about their work will cause quality to suffer. Rushing through tasks due to overload or lack of prioritization can result in subpar outcomes.
• Customer Dissatisfaction: The inability to manage work intake means someone is always getting the short end of the stick. If your customers don’t trust you or your quality they will go somewhere else. 

Why do you take on every piece of work that comes your way? I think the class concluded that the right answer was not to do it. BUT when I asked them if the problems they described would override behavior the room became uncomfortable. Pushing back on the rationalizations for why they have to participate in destructive behavior has to start with being able to feel that behaviors can be safely changed. Those that have that safety avoid most of the problems and those that don’t have a tough road to travel. 

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