How Much Baggage Are You Carrying?
Over the last week myself and my family moved house. The project was well planned (as you’d expect), the team were primed and ready to go (some more than others it has to be said) and we were looking forward to a relatively pain-free, short-distance move.
Four days later, on my 15th trip to the new place with a car full of stuff, my wife and I realised that the minimalist lifestyle that we thought we had was actually a story we’d been (very convincingly) telling ourselves. Old shelving units, picture frames, books, kids school text books and suitcases of clothes were just some of the things sent for recycling in what seemed like a never ending cull. It became clear to me that rather than being efficient and minimalist we’d actually been carrying some baggage around with us for years.*
It’s a useful metaphor for our working lives too, and something that we should be personally and collaboratively conscious of, to ensure that we’re getting the most from our working life.
On a personal level, emotional baggage is something that can hold you back almost every single day. Anger, greed, jealousy, suspicion, envy and so on, are all things that everyone feels from time to time, however, if you don’t deal with them, they can have a detrimental effect on your attitude. Which in turn affects your overall mindset and before you know it, you’re moaning, procrastinating and doing everything possible to disempower yourself. It can be a vicious cycle and you may ultimately end up dragging your emotional baggage round everywhere you go (and everyone else down with you at the same time!).
The same is also true of the things within cultures that hold teams back. The frustration you feel with ‘the way we do things around here’ can often be a legacy of the process baggage that has held productivity and efficiency back for years. The procurement process that takes six months, IT equipment purchase and set up that drags on for three months, induction processes that don’t happen at all, days filled with back-to-back meetings… those things that leave you shaking your head in disbelief.
By not creating a mechanism to continually challenge these things, they become more and more embedded into the culture until we can see no way of doing without them. Projects are delayed, targets are missed and morale drops, which leads to more emotional baggage and before you know it, you have a stagnant culture that requires some serious work.
I wrote about the fresh start effect at the beginning of the year and now is a good time for a reminder, because all of the ‘this year will be different!’ self-talk has probably worn off by now!
On a personal level, regularly checking-in with how you’re feeling and taking action — or talking to someone who can help — is something that can help to stave off burnout, anxiety or stress. As humans we are very good at focusing on our negatives, so make an effort to focus on your strengths too — remind yourself of the good that you do.
As a team, you should plan in regular monthly sessions to look at the way that you work and to challenge those things that don’t help you to deliver value more quickly to yourselves or your customers. Give it a name, don’t let anything get in the way of it and look to make one thing better every month. Get into the habit of regularly asking yourself, ‘how much baggage am I carrying today and what can I do to lighten my load?’.
*Note to my wife: the 30 years worth of Everton shirts will add a certain aesthetic to one of our rooms, I just haven’t figured out where to hang them in yet #notbaggage
