Let’s face it, we all feel overcommitted these days and we do so love to blame our work for this overcommitment. We are overcommitted because we are collaborating too much - this is the conclusion of a 20-year study by Robert Cross in his book “Beyond Collaboration Overload”. So, who is to blame? Our work environment is partially to blame but not solely. The nature of modern work, especially in a remote working environment, demands collaboration and digital tools makes collaboration easy, perhaps too easy. According to the author 50% of what he calls collaboration overload is driven by our own wants, needs and fears. He has identified nine “triggers” that leads to collaborating too much. The better we understand them the better we can manage our feelings of being overcommitted.
So, if you are struggling it is worthwhile to honestly assess our own response to the triggers. The trick is to recognise them and figure out how to manage them:
The desire to help others is generally seen as a good attribute, but there is a line where helping others can detrimentally affect your own ability to deliver. The trick to manage this trigger is to identify if there are people who have become overdependent on your help. If this is the case, you need to figure out what they need help with and then transition how you help to a coaching/mentoring relationship designed to help them become self-reliant.
The sense of fulfillment from accomplishment is the positive neurological feedback we get from getting things done, especially if we are helping others. This can lead us to actively search for opportunities to get a quick “fix” from seeking out small tasks that give us positive feedback. To counter this we need to identify if we are engaging in such behaviour and pull back from over commitment on small tasks.
The desire to be influential or recognised as an expert is a strong trigger and stimulates us to seek collaboration opportunities where we can demonstrate our expertise. To counter this trigger, decide to use your expertise to develop other rather than just accumulating more responsibility. If you lead a team, invest in developing their capacity, share rather than hoard your expertise.
Concern around being labeled a poor performer. We tend to believe that if we say yes to all requests, it builds our profile as a high value performer, and that saying no to a request has the opposite effect. Unfortunately if you overcommit and under deliver instead of enhancing your performance, it will achieve the opposite. To allay these fears create transparency around your existing workload and commitments. Instead of saying yes or no – you can ask the person generating the request to help you prioritise their request by discussing your to do list. Being able to say No is rapidly becoming a key survival skill. Any component manager appreciates subordinates or peers who would rather say no upfront than say yes and then are unable to deliver on time.
The need to be right drives unproductive activities designed to create the illusion that you know all the answers - e.g. engaging collaboration to bolster your understanding and insight. If you are honest about your limitations when joining a new team and admit you do not have all the answers, other team members will guide you to where to find them and will trust you more.
Fear of losing control of a project, Over collaborators often believe they need to do everything themselves to retain control or spend excessive time on trying to collect more data, design better strategies to maintain the illusion of control. A more sensible approach if you are prone to this trigger is to differentiate between high and low risk tasks.
Keep control of high-risk activities and delegate the lower risk activities. The need for closure is where you become obsessive about completing a daily to do list or cleaning up our e-mails before end of work. Especially at the end of the day, when your mental energy is low, this can translate into poor quality work that has to be redone. It is important to understand that your inbox will always fill up again so letting things stand over is also OK. This also applies to feeling obliged to accept all invitations to meetings. It is also OK to decide what meetings are important and declining the unimportant ones.
Discomfort with ambiguity often aligned with risk aversion and drives people to try to manage uncertainty by engaging with unnecessary activities in the hope of decreasing uncertainty. Holding too many check-in meetings and requesting unnecessary progress reports will inflict collaboration overload not only on you but also on your team members. We must learn to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity by being adaptable.
Fear of missing out drives over collaboration and often lead to involvement with projects where you can add little value and derive little value from. Analyse your reasons for wanting to join a committee, project, or a working group. If you are purely motivated by a fear of missing out step back and say no. If you are struggling with your commitment load you cannot afford to engage on collaborative activities with little return in investment.
Being aware of how these triggers drive our need to collaborate and the danger of this leading to collaboration overload is where you can start with taking control of managing your levels of commitment.
Staff Writer