Preventing Initiative Fatigue
Ambitious leaders often push their teams to get a lot done. They introduce an ongoing number of initiatives and projects to sustain and grow the organization.
As the team accomplishes a never-ending list of new tasks and initiatives, productivity soars. Other leaders want to know how the team gets so much done so quickly. The organization prospers as the team repeatedly delivers better results.
Sounds like a leadership dream come true.
But if leaders never take their foot off the gas, the team can begin to suffer. They can experience what is known as initiative fatigue, a weariness that robs them of their desire to perform. If asked to accomplish team goals without the support, resources, and reasonable time to deliver, team morale can sour and undermine the desire to perform.
When burdened by too many balls in the air, the pride and sense of accomplishment team members feel when highly productive soon are replaced by an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. Under the continual pressure to perform, team members lose interest in the work and soon become less effective.
But the reality is that the number of initiatives is not the real problem. Leaders who inadvertently burn out their teams generally do not have too many initiatives. They have too many priorities.
For some leaders, every initiative takes on an importance that requires the full attention of the entire team. When leaders make every initiative a high priority, fatigue is soon to follow.
All effective teams have a lot to get done. The challenge leaders face is not to overwhelm team members with the continual pressure of never-ending projects all with the same importance. This pressure is more about priority setting than the number of initiatives on the docket. Not every project can be of the highest priority.
Leaders who believe that a sense of urgency and priority for all initiatives is how to get more done will soon find a team fatigued and exhausted. Instead, giving a team a healthy list of initiatives to move the organization forward but declaring which project has the highest priority is what good leaders do.
Fatigue and burnout are the result of too many priorities, not too many initiatives.
Does everyone on your team know which initiatives are of the highest priority? If you can’t count the most important initiatives on one hand, you’re setting the team up for fatigue and eventual failure. One more example proving that less is more.
100% agree with this! May I add that also if we don’t take enough time to pause, celebrate accomplishments and reflect to bring actionable insights for the next round, it’s like being on a never ending treadmill on high speed, and really if there’s no way to slow down that’s why it feels like falling off it and letting it run without one is almost inevitable. The main point is that some team members may feel like a failure for not being able to sustain this constant cadence and forget just how much they actually got through until this point. We’re cyclical beings, like there’s a winter every year for nature to pause, there’s also a time when we sleep every day, there’s a time when the moon goes dark and there’s a space between the last exhale and the next inhale. So let’s honour the PAUSE as an essential part of the process.