Energizing the Team That Faces Repetitive Tasks and Travel
Repetition helps to create mastery but can also lead to boredom. Leaders and team members who are repetitively tasked with the same assignments, travel, and engagements often lose energy and enthusiasm for the work over time.
Mixing things up and creating task diversity can help to some degree, but doing the same set of duties month after month, year after year, can wear people down. As anyone who travels frequently for work can tell you, it sounds exciting, but after a few trips, travel often becomes dreaded and anything but exhilarating.
The challenge of keeping themselves and the team highly motivated and engaged despite the monotony of repetitive tasks and travel is never easy for leaders. The possibility of burnout and weariness weighs heavily on the minds of good leaders.
Legendary NBA Coach Pat Riley puts it this way, “ Players have a tendency to go sideways on you, not for any other reason than fatigue, boredom, monotony. Eighty-two games, 30 cities, same place, same arenas, same locker rooms, same hotels, same food. It’s not a bad life, but it’s hard to keep a team sharp for 100 games a year.”
Ignoring this potential problem or presuming there is nothing a leader can do about it is tantamount to surrender. Great leaders don’t accept the idea that monotony and fatigue are inevitable and must simply be endured. Instead, they embrace the power of learning to address the problem and offset its negative influences.
Doing the same task or assignment is only monotonous if it is done with the same approach, with the same thinking, and with the same people. Asking people to expand their approach to include new facets, new people, and new learnings is the recipe for sustained invigoration.
When travel to the same city and same hotel creates a pattern of indifference, the key is to learn new things. Scheduling an activity during the stay, meeting new people by design, and dining at a new restaurant reorients a traveler and doesn’t allow boredom to set in.
This applies to repetitive projects and assignments. as well. Insisting that team members should include new colleagues, experiment with new processes, and then document learnings to be shared with others interrupts patterned thinking and creates a fresh outlook.
The cure for boredom is curiosity and great leaders encourage it, sometimes to the point of insisting on it.
I read somewhere that novel experiences slow down the perception of passing time. This is why most of us perceive our childhood and educational experience as lasting much longer (the first 18-22 years) than the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th, etc. Because back then, everything was new. I love your idea of disrupting highly repetitive work by including other people. My team and I sort of do this now. We call them working sessions. But we only do them when on of us are stuck and need help/support. Why not do this with repetitive work? Two benefits immediately come to mind: 1) Because the task is repetitive, it's like going on a fast walk/slow jog with a friend - you're getting a good workout, but you can still talk to each other; and 2) Whenever I watch others at work, I always learn something new and usually the other person does too - or at least re-sees something they now take for granted. My team and I have been thinking of ways to bring us closer together, I think this might be the ticket. Thanks for today's post.
Good post. CURIOSITY is a main thing that ignites me. Actually it was just yesterday I had a conversation with our warehouse manager. He was doing a check in. I had used an inappropriate adjective to describe frustration with miscommunication on our team. The manager who reported me was concerned with my well-being and brought this to his attention.
I am someone primarily focused on execution and communication.
Either way, he felt it was the tip of an iceberg. He challenged me to do two things:
-Ask myself where does this come from?
-Once I know, apply that energy to making a difference.
What got a hold of me was the curiosity portion. It showed me he was concerned/cared. He also gave me simple and applicable feedback. In a world of having to learn high priced lingo (university), sometimes it is nice to have someone just be blunt and keep it simple.
I know this post is longer than my standard posts.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this.