Do Nothing!

I'm working so hard, but can't seem to make a difference!  I'm running at top speed, but don't seem to be getting anywhere!  According to Keith Murnighan I might be trying to hard, doing too much.  In fact, if we are going to accomplish bigger things, we may need to actually Do Nothing.

The premise of this easy read is that the skills and instincts that got us moved into newer, bigger roles will ultimately kill our chances of succeeding in them.  I've seen this happen in my own career, and I've seen it in others' as well.  I was once promoted to lead the team I had previously been a part of.  How was I going to make this work?  How could I earn their respect and trust as their leader?  I chose to show them that I was still "one of them" - that no work was beneath me, that I would still work as hard as any of them.  Isn't that "servant leadership" after all?  But my team now needed something different.  If I would provide the leadership they needed they could more than handle all of the projects, tasks and deadlines that came their way.  I made a lot of mistakes as a new-minted leader, many of them rooted in my failure to change the way I thought and worked.

From the years of experience I have since had, I know Murnighan is right.  To succeed - to give my company and clients the greatest benefit - I need to do less and less.  This is still difficult for me - I still derive tremendous satisfaction from working in the trenches with a team to deliver a solution of some sort.  But Covenant needs lots of good Project Managers and Analysts, not just one, and they're not going to materialize if I am focusing only on my own stuff.

I still need to work on solution delivery, but I also need to help Covenant achieve "leverage" - ("a high ratio of juniors to seniors" - see Managing the Professional Services Firm, David Maister.)  Few organizations can afford to have only senior-level employees: instead they must focus on developing new talent that can do much of the work, and do it at much earlier stages of their career.

Contrary to his book's title Murnighan is not advocating laziness, rather that we work very hard on different things.  When we work on the right stuff we will make a difference, and we will get somewhere - bringing others along with us as we go.

The rest of the book seemed more like a potpourri of advice for leaders - some of it very good - and all of it connected in some way to the theme of doing nothing.