The everything manager
Our recent ops peer support session came as folk were getting back into the swing of things following summer breaks so we focused on prioritisation and workload. It was one of the topics that came up for us to cover, along with ‘saying no’, that was wanted by everyone in the group and the timing felt right as we were all trying to get back at it and get set up for a busy few months.
We chatted through the urgent/important matrix. It’s a simple tool that can make a big difference. Everything on your To-do list goes in a box and then you follow through. The box people struggle with is important, not urgent. That’s usually where the real work lives, the stuff that moves things forward instead of just keeping the lights on.
A good place to start is ‘who decided this was urgent?’ Half the time the answer is that it isn’t really. It’s not a real deadline but you are so used to being asked to be fast or being busy, or someone thinks it’s urgent but it isn’t really. We chatted about how a lot of the things that land on our desks because we are the everything managers. The things that don’t have a home end up with us and we find it really hard to say no, either because it takes less energy to just do it, or you know that there is no one else set up to do it.
But what do you do when there is no one to delegate the task to? It’s the reality of small teams in our sector just now. Here are the options we discussed:
- Outsource it, if there’s a budget
- Reprioritise it, but make sure it doesn’t just fall between the cracks
- Say no to it, somehow
- Or agree with your boss or the team what gets dropped to make space for it
None of these options are easy, and so often I personally default to just doing the extra thing myself rather than feeling like I am letting someone down. Creating a new system or training someone else to help make capacity to limit reactiveness takes space and time itself.
We talk about this a lot at Iriss, it’s why we have our learning week, but we all know doing it is hard. The operations peer support meetings are like mini versions of these for individuals – maybe learning a bit, maybe getting some support or reassurance, maybe just a place to rant and realise that there are other people who feel the same way.
So if you are in operations (or adjacent), feel like an everything manager, and like stuff is constantly on fire, come join us.
Sam