Want More Time? Be More Courageous.
A small industry addresses the problems of overwork, work-life balance, email overload, meeting overload, and all the rest. Lots of good ideas, but one critical element doesn’t get enough attention: COURAGE.
A deficit of courage leads to many kinds of pain in life; sucking up vast amounts of time is one.
Let’s look at three areas of our work where having courage will give you back time and energy, perhaps more than any time-management systems or tips.
1. Interpersonal. Imagine a team member who is consistently late: late to meetings, late on project deadlines, late to reply to requests. This lateness wastes the time of everyone around that person.
Do you brush it off, saying, “Oh that’s just how Jim is”? Or do you have the courage to confront Jim? Do you let him know that his tardiness is impacting the other employees, important projects and customer service?
Most of us cringe at the thought of hurting someone’s feelings or getting embroiled in a messy conversation. So we take the easy way out and avoid conflict. That avoidance has so many performance implications - but the pain it imposes on you, day in and day out, is that it wastes your time.
2. Trust. In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey addresses how efficient trust is. It’s a powerful, intuitive point that we can all see in our work and personal lives. But trusting others takes courage. Giving others a chance to succeed (or fail) takes courage. When you hold too tightly to work, no one else has the opportunity to contribute great ideas and carry the load. And your time crunch gets no better.
Sometimes it’s the courage to give trust. Sometimes it’s the courage to repair trust. Either way, that courage can give you back time.
3. Strategy. As Richard Rumelt says in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, “Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.” But, honestly, in a group setting it’s comfortable to say “yes.” It’s courageous to say “no” … to people’s ideas, dreams, and inspiration. But when you don’t say no - ruthlessly, consistently - the result is overwork (and bad results).
Professor, author, and speaker Brené Brown, has written extensively on the topic of courage and in particular how it relates to work and leadership. Brown has a great example of the courage to say no on her blog. Sometimes we need to echo the words of Bart Simpson: “We won’t be doing that.” Or more high-minded from the Athenian Thucydides: “The secret to happiness is freedom. And the secret to freedom is courage.”