Overcommitted: 3 Lessons for Managing a Busy Season
School has started again, and once you get past the initial exhaustion caused by the hustle and bustle of getting ready in the morning and the real after-school activity schedule locks in, the family starts adjusting to the tempo of life. If you have met me, you know that I have a deep love of teaching and coaching. And with my kids, it’s no exception. I’ve been able to get involved with their teams and volunteer my time where I can help. This fall is going to be a little different though… I may (ahem… definitively) have over done it.
It all started innocently enough. We signed our daughter up for Rec League Soccer and the team needed coaches… badly. Four of us were standing together at a swim meet and it became clear that if a group of girls from my daughters grade wanted to play together, we needed to create a staff. Frankly, none of us had time to really be the lead coach, and fortunately one of us stepped up and the three of us are going to help him stitch it together. Then there was the pre-existing volunteer coaching with my son’s travel baseball team. And… the clincher occurred when I was officially asked to co-head coach his club volleyball team.
I have met hundreds of moms and dads in our industry who coach and support their kids sports and after-school activities. Like many others, I love it and consider it an important opportunity to spend time with my kids and in the community. And let’s face it— if you can get a group of six-year-olds to hold spacing and not play bunch ball, you can organize grown-ups who actually want to be at work. But this fall, on top of a recent surge of work, I’ve become overcommitted. Here are the three lessons I have learned (often the hard way) to help me prioritize as a business owner and as a coach dad.
- Say “Yes… if”
- Build a System (aka find great help)
- Prioritize (80/20 Rule)
1. Say “Yes…if”
When I was at graduate school, I had a Mediation Professor and author of Improvisational Negotiation, Jeffrey Krivis, frame mediation practice as an improvisational game. He used the teachings from Chicago’s Famous Second City Improvisational Comedy group and taught us to keep conversational balls in the air by using the improv technique “Yes…and”. In Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton’s Book Yes… and: How Improvisation Reverses No, But Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration—Lessons From the Second City, they describe the one rule of improvisation – to say “yes” to the idea brought by your peers on stage, which means the game (and conversation) can always continue.
As a leader in construction, I’ve learned an important nuance to this rule. “Yes…and” involves total buy in to the premise. In construction, it is common for end-users and maintainers of systems to have requests for the construction team while the project is still going. During the design phase, it is possible for teams to say “yes… and” and figure out how to incorporate and prioritize all of the requests that are coming in.
Once the team is in construction, however, we need the project team to switch to “yes…if”. As the project progresses, the later we say yes to a change, the more costly it becomes. It is important for teams to be open to recommendations and requests and accommodate things that don’t impact the schedule or budget. That being said, “yes… if” is a positive way to approach a request and also gives the team an offramp to say yes… we can accommodate that change if we can add time, get flexibility around substantial completion criteria, or we can make “Day 2” changes after the end-user has moved into the facility.
For me… I have gotten better about saying “Yes…if” by confirming with my other coaches that they are okay with me taking a limited role. My commitment is that I will be active and present when I am available and more importantly will be clear about my availability. I provide the “yes…if” from the outset, so it is not a surprise. That helps the team accommodate my lower attendance rate in a supporting role. When I get to practice, I’m there as a humble helper. I am not the leader or head coach… my job as a supporting coach is to observe the team at the practice in real time and go where I am most needed.
2. Build a System (aka Find Great Help)
Busy people need systems. Period.
I am confident in my facilitation practice. That being said, I’m pretty terrible at building systems and implementing them. I’ve been fortunate to work with and for people who are outstanding at developing and implementing systems for organization.
- For our soccer team, our head coach has developed AI generated practice plans with visuals of the drills and we use an organizational tool called TeamSnap to build the schedule, communicate with the team, and organize uniforms, headbands, get-togethers, etc.
- For volleyball we agreed on our vision for the team, are crafting our standard start of practice plan (first 30 minutes), and are developing a curriculum for our learning objectives for the team in the first three months of our season. Again, we use TeamSnap to prepare for attendance at practices and tournaments and then set up a WhatsApp group for day-of-play messages that are more time-sensitive.
- For baseball we use an app called Gamechanger that has similar tools for tracking the ball club, but this one also incorporates video and statistics and helps you plan your strategy.
- In the office, our team made up of Jen Burum, Louisa Garrett, Tess Van Buskirk, and Tonya Clenney work together to organize our schedules, our session prep, our calendar invitations, our business practices, our invoicing, our insurance, our newsletter, our CRM, etc., etc. They do hundreds of back-of-house tasks each week to help ensure that I and the other OrgMetrics facilitators can focus on what we do best—facilitating and delivering for our clients.
- For my calendar, I had to give it to someone else. My default setting is to overcommit (shocking I know) in the attempt to be helpful. For all you people pleasers out there, having someone with emotional distance who can help you prioritize your time is a gift you can give yourself to remain productive and avoid burning out. Due to the nature of our business, I need someone in the office to run point. There are many ways to build the support you need, both personally and professionally, without adding significant overhead.
In construction, I’ve seen teams set up similar systems for project communication. For airfield and tunnel outages, teams have used WhatsApp as a way to check-in and check-out daily and marshal the team quickly if an incident occurs. Last Planner SystemTM incorporates years of lessons learned into construction practices to help breathe predictability into what can be a set of complex and chaotic coordination with the trades in the field. Great systems enable great leaders to build effective teams and achieve extraordinary project outcomes.
3. Prioritize (80/20 Rule)
If you’ve been reading our newsletter for a long time, you may recognize the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. This is the economic principle that originated from Italian farming and land ownership where they noted ~20% of the population had accumulated ~80% of the land. In business, we use the 80/20 rule as a way to focus on key activities that will provide the most return on investment.
This fall, I need to invoke the 80/20 rule and focus on the key activities that will provide the most return on investment for both me personally and for the teams I’m supporting. This starts with family and work. For coaching, I had to reshuffle because the volleyball team has become the priority that I need to build around. I’m co-head coaching that team and signed an agreement stating I will be there. For the soccer and baseball teams, I need to prioritize certain practices and games to support, so I can deliver on the commitment, while balancing the team’s needs (and my occasional need for a night off).
As mentioned above, the key is to communicate effectively with the lead coaches about attendance and also to be okay when I’m told “no… we don’t need your help anymore” or “we need your role to switch to focus on this”. Just as I need to say “yes… if” they need to be able to do the same thing.
People often ask if you had one superpower what it would be – for me it would probably be the ability to freeze time like Evie from “Out of this World.”
(image: Reddit/Xennials)
If I’m honest though, that would just enable me to keep overcommitting to things. So instead, I would focus on the skill of prioritization through “Yes… if”, building and implementing a system with a great team, and remembering to use the 80/20 Rule when prioritizing activities. As I said from the top, this is a busy season of life while the kids are still young enough that I can have a positive influence on them and with their peers. This is my roadmap to survive it.
Good luck and please share your best ideas for dealing with a busy season!
– Rob
Rob Reaugh is President of OrgMetrics LLC. He facilitates the City and County of San Francisco Collaborative Partnering Steering Committee and currently works with San Francisco International Airport, San Jose International Airport, BART, Caltrans, and others. He holds a Masters’ Degree in Alternative Dispute Resolution.
For more information please contact Rob Reaugh, RobReaugh@Orgmet.com / (925) 487-2404 (cell), or OrgMetrics, (925) 449-8300.