Question #1:
“One of my team members works 24/7 , this makes me look bad, I can’t and don’t want to be available the same way”
You are right to think that.
Research shows that employees taking more vacation days, actually get faster promotions and better salary !
Isn’t that great news?
The research explains that managers know to value your work, even more when they see you care for yourself, your leisure, your family – therefore want to keep you close.
Here are 2 things you can do right now:
- Read the highlights of this research, get confident about your instincts and how you manage your time.
- To those who haven’t been to my workshop, you can initiate a win-win conversation with your management, as described in my blog post “How to create a buffer and have a life”.
Question #2:
“My boss keeps delegating new things at me several times a day, it’s a chaotic work environment and hard to effectively manage tasks that way”
The first step in decreasing the chaos is to lift the burden off your shoulders.
Here’s what you can consider doing:
Prioritize your weekly tasks together with your boss at the beginning of each week.
Then, when they ask for more tasks to get done, have an “expense conversation”; what this task is going to be at the expense of.
“If you need me to do X now, it means I wont be able to do Y today”
So what you are actually doing is confirming their new prioritization.
You are responsible to reflect what you’re working on and how the new request will affect the work you’re currently doing and let them decide.
Then you go ahead and execute but without the stress that is normally affiliated with those common office issues.
Your responsibility is to communicate that ABC will come at the expense of XYZ – that’s the trade off, when that’s fine with them – its sure is fine with you.
