00:00:00: Introduction
00:02:29: Some common complaints
00:07:09: The perfect/imperfect solutions…
00:08:56: … 1: complaints around meetings
00:15:47: … 2: volume of work
00:21:33: … 3: lack of time to think
00:26:34: … 4: other people
00:35:25: Final thoughts
Helen Tupper: Hi, I’m Helen.
Sarah Ellis: And I’m Sarah.
Helen Tupper: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we talk about the ins, outs, ups and downs of work to give you some tools, some advice and some tips to help you stay confident and in control. It’s a weekly show, we’re nearly at episode 500, which means there’s lots to catch up on if it’s the first time you’ve listened, and there’s also lots of support in addition to the episode. Easiest way to access all of our toolkits, all of our one-page summaries, everything that we’ve got for you to help you learn is to sign up for Squiggly Careers in Action, which is our weekly newsletter. That will be in the show notes, or you can just go to our website amazingif.com and you will find it there.
Sarah Ellis: So, this week we’re talking about realistic responses to common work complaints. And I’m not sure how motivating that is as a title. Both Helen and I were like, “Oh, usually we’re quite upbeat and we’re naturally both very optimistic people”. Helen’s super-optimistic. If any of you have ever done those profiles where you come out as colours, Helen’s as yellow as you can get.
Helen Tupper: But do you know what? I’m not very yellow today.
Sarah Ellis: No, I know you’re not.
Helen Tupper: I feel like I like I’m like, what’s a mucky yellow colour? Ochre. I’m like, ochre.
Sarah Ellis: Mustard?
Helen Tupper: Yeah, today I’m a bit mustard. It’s going to be interesting.
Sarah Ellis: Well, maybe it’s a good day to talk about complaints then. And the reason that we picked this one is we all complain about work. I think in some ways, there’s quite a lot of joy in complaining some of the time, because it makes you feel a bit better and you get them off your chest. I think getting complaints off your chest can be helpful. But what we were trying to talk about is if you look at the really common things that we like all complain about to do with work, often when we try to then solve those things you aim for a perfect solution, and you’re like, “Oh, if only”. I often feel like you kind of go from this very day-to-day complaint, and certainly if you’re me, I then imagine a whole different world. I’m like, “Well, I’m going to completely clear my week”, or something radical is going to change.
Helen Tupper: Or, I think probably you and I probably respond to complaints slightly differently. I think sometimes, you’ll be like, “Oh, we’ll just stop it then, we’ll just stop it”. And you’re like, “Well, that’s not a realistic response because you’ve got blah, blah, blah”, or whatever. And what do you think my default would be to just end it all?
Sarah Ellis: Just keep going.
Helen Tupper: “It’ll get better. Let’s keep at it”.
Sarah Ellis: You’re relentless in your, “Well, I’m going to just keep going”. But then, I think you’re hopeful it’s just going to disappear, but without actually doing anything. Like, nothing’s going to change, but the complaint is going to go away.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, “It’ll be fine, it’ll get better, it’s fine”.
Sarah Ellis: That whole, “It will be fine”, when it never is fine. And so, we tried to pick some common complaints that we thought might feel relevant for everyone. You might have some different ones, but see if any of these feel familiar. “I’ve got too many meetings and they’re not a good use of time”. Every time I test that in a workshop, I just get massive reactions. Doesn’t matter what role people are in, what kind of company people are in, nobody sees meetings as the best moment in their day ‘yet’, let’s say ‘yet’. So, there’s always a meeting complaint. One just about, I think, volume. It’s like, “I’ve just got too much on”. I would say that’s probably how Helen and I are feeling like this morning. We’ve both had like quite a full-on morning and you know, you’re just like, “Oh, too much time”, and you just complain about, “I haven’t got enough time to do all the things that I need to make happen”.
The next one is slightly different to volume of work, it’s what you’re doing with your time at work, which is the whole, “I’ve got no time to think, or I’ve got no time to zoom out, or no time to be strategic”. And so, that can feel frustrating. Perhaps you feel very sucked into the immediate day-to-day needs of getting stuff done. And then the last one, senior people, so, “Senior people are slowing me down, creating a bottleneck”. I am sure our team, who sometimes, I’m sure, listen to the podcast, I’m sure they would definitely say this about us sometimes. I can think of at least two examples right now where I know Helen and I are holding things up, where we have said, “Oh, what’s stopping this from happening?” and essentially they’ve kind of gone, “Well, you. You are stopping this from happening”. And so, yeah, they wouldn’t say it to us because they’re probably too productive and constructive, but maybe to their partner when they’re grabbing a cup of tea like, “Sometimes so annoying, because they say they’re going to do something and they don’t, or I’ve messaged them about that three times and they’ve just not sorted it”. You’re complaining, right? You’re complaining about other people.
Which one of those for you, Helen? What do you reckon is your most common complaint?
Helen Tupper: I was actually just thinking, there’s probably one we’ve missed. I reckon there’s, like, too many meetings. I mean, it’s the same sentiment, I think, which is the ‘too many’ thing, but probably like communications. I think some people would say, “I’ve got too many emails, I’m getting too many messages”. I think that would probably fit in there. Probably the ‘too much to do’ one, which is obviously a bit recency-biased, because we’re recording this and obviously feeling like it at the moment. But I think that probably is the headline one, because then you kind of go, “Oh, why have I got too much to do? There’s too many meetings or there’s too many comms”, but actually, it’s just the too much to do probably feels like the biggest complaint that I would probably carry with me and bring into conversations in an unproductive kind of way. What about you?
Sarah Ellis: The same now, but I think probably previously, when we were both in big companies, it would have felt different. Big companies, definitely sometimes the senior people one, or I get annoyed that like, “I’ve got to wait for a meeting to happen to get something signed off”, like lots of sign-offs. I suppose the complaint there is essentially bureaucracy. I was actually reading a book about that on Friday. It’s, “Too much bureaucracy, it’s slowing me down, it’s a waste of time, why am I having to get 4 million people to sign this off before I can make this happen?” So, I definitely would have felt that one. And probably, the meeting one more in corporate life than now. We still spend a lot of time delivering, learning and with other people. But I don’t have as many meetings now as perhaps I did. And certainly, when I talk to people in those companies about meetings, they’re often in so many back-to-back meetings, and I work quite hard for that not to be my reality. I think because you’ve been there, I try hard, I don’t want to complain about that one.
I get very frustrated if I don’t have time to think. That’s probably the complaint out of those ones, where if I’m complaining about that, that’s where I’m most likely to be really dramatic and go, “Well, that’s it, I’m stopping work”!
Helen Tupper: It’s interesting, isn’t it, what the complaint sounds like, because I think my too much to do, I don’t think I go, “Oh, I’ve got too much to do”. I’m not sure that it sounds like that. I think it’s a control thing, like I hate feeling like I haven’t got choice over what I do. I’m like, “Well, that has been determined for me”. Probably my rant or complaint would come out more like that. But the origins of it is like the too much to do thing, definitely.
Sarah Ellis: So, probably worth you thinking for yourself, if you’re listening to this or watching this, almost in your own words and in your own way, what are your most common complaints? What do you say? That’s why we actually had a go at writing them in first person, because then I think you can kind of go, you’re probably saying these already to a friend, to another work colleague, to your partner, or whatever. So, what do they sound like for you? And then, what we’re going to talk through is, for those ones, just to give you some examples, what’s the trap that we can fall into when we try to design this perfect solution? And then, what would an imperfect solution look like that we hope would be way more realistic, but would help you to make progress, really on the kind of basis that better to do something than to do nothing, or to just keep complaining? Because I think we can all give ourselves permission to complain some of the time. But if you keep complaining, it becomes quite demotivating, and it’s not good for energy. You definitely get more pessimistic than optimistic.
So, it’s one of the things actually I look out for is if Helen and I are complaining about the same things to each other, it definitely sort of triggers something in my mind to think, “Okay, well what would an imperfect solution be, because I think I’ve tried the perfect ones and they never stick?”
Helen Tupper: And also, I think the way that we’ve framed the imperfect responses to common complaints at work today is from a very individual perspective, what can you do? But I do think there is a lot of value in talking about this together as a team. Now you don’t want to turn it into like a big moan-zone thing, because to Sarah’s point, not that fun. But I think you could say which of these complaints feels most real to us. And then, you could take the imperfect responses we’re going to talk about now and say, “Well, which of these could we try out together?” I feel like that would be a really useful team chat, which is just acknowledging that of course it doesn’t work brilliantly well all of the time, that’s real life, but we do have a choice about how we respond to it, and we can do that in a sort of pragmatic way. So, it’s framed for individually today, but I do think turning this into something a team could talk about together would be, I think, a really useful conversation.
So, we’re going to take these in turns. I will take the first one. So, the first complaint we’re going to work with is the too many meetings, and also, these meetings that I’m in don’t feel like a good use of time. So, the complaints around meetings. The perfect response to this kind of thing, I think, is to completely redesign the way that meetings get done. So, I’ve worked in a company that had like a “No-meeting Wednesday”. And it was like, “We’re going to have no meet no meetings on Wednesday”. I think they also, at the same time said, “No emails on Wednesday”. So, basically the idea was you’d have, I think they called it like a detox day, or something, from memory. But the idea was, Wednesday would just be the day when work got done.
But the reason that that perfect solution just does not reflect the reality is because you’re very, very rarely working on your own. And so, actually, I probably do need to get in touch with Sarah at some point. And you then maybe say to someone, “Oh, should we have a bit of a call? It’s not a meeting, it’s just a quick call, because we’re not allowed meetings on Wednesdays”. And also, people that maybe work outside of your little bubble where you’re trying to put this perfect solution in place, whether it’s your team or your company, they still want to call you on a Wednesday, they still want to put a meeting on on a Wednesday. And so, it’s just it’s quite an unrealistic way to respond to the problem of too many meetings, “We’ll just halve our meetings, we’ll take a day out each week where we have no meetings”.
So, we think an imperfect solution, a sort of much more realistic response to this particular complaint, is to redesign the meetings that you are responsible for. And it’s interesting how much percentage of those meetings in your week are the ones you’re responsible for, but these are the ones that you have a high degree of control over. And things that you can do are, you could make every meeting 15 minutes shorter. So, we often put 30-minute or 60-minute meetings in; change your 60 minutes to 45 minutes or just put the 15 minutes — I actually want to experiment with this a little bit more in my one-to-ones, is I’m going to make the meeting slightly shorter. But then, the last 10 minutes is for the actions. Otherwise, actions often accumulate towards the end of the day, and I’d rather get it done within the meeting in the diary.
Or co-working meetings, we’ve actually experimented with one of these this morning, with the recognition that we didn’t want another meeting to go into people’s diaries or another thing to go on the to-do list for this particular thing that we were doing together as a team. So, it just got added into the meeting. The meeting was already in the diary. We took 20 minutes to do the work individually, and then the rest of the time was talking about it together. But it meant that it wasn’t another action to take away, it wasn’t another meeting that had to go in the diary. And these are often things you can experiment with. So, the 15 minutes after a meeting or the kind of co-working meetings, you can experiment with those without actually introducing too much change or risk into your business. And you can definitely do it with the ones that you are responsible for. You might want to explain to people why you’re doing it and what you’re hoping to learn, and potentially get a bit of feedback. But it is something that you could try out this week.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think it was really interesting seeing our team’s response to, we essentially repurposed a meeting we already have to do something different. And actually, when I first suggested it, I actually got a lot of relief from people. And I think people were feeling relieved because of not this complaint, but the ‘too much to do’ complaint. So, we were using it to get work done, but kind of co-working at the same time. And the reason people haven’t done it before is not that we don’t have a motivated team who don’t really care, because we do, it’s just because it never ends up rising to the top of the list of priorities, because it always feels like it’s a classic ‘important, but not urgent’ activity. And I think rather than I noticed, I was like, I’m just chasing everybody to do this. And I thought, “This is not fun for me”. And I’m thinking, “Why are we not getting this done?”
Actually, just by thinking about it differently, by just going, “Well, I can’t completely change everything, but I can change how we use that meeting once a quarter”. That’s really easy to do. We did make it slightly longer to give everyone a bit of time for working and then talking, so they got both of those things. Then we did a quick, “What worked well; even better if”, at the end, which actually was really valuable to hear what everybody’s experience of that was, what would really appeal to people, people definitely want to do it again. And to Helen’s point, people hadn’t got actions. You don’t go away with a big, long list. You go away going, “Well, I’ve done it. I’ve done the thing I need to do.
Helen Tupper: I do think, ‘what worked well’ with that kind of co-working meeting, it was cameras on. So because, I think cameras on has a little bit of accountability, weirdly, like we’re all here, the purpose of this is all getting something done together at the same time, but not necessarily directly with each other. And so, cameras on, I think, has much more of a, “We’re in it together, we’re experimenting together”. Whereas cameras off, I think would have felt like, I don’t know, maybe people are less committed to the co-working element of this.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and there was a moment today actually where I could see people were like, “Oh, should I just go away and work on this?” And I was like, “No, let’s all stay, we’re all going to stay here”. And I was like, “Oh, it’s not something we’ve done. So, it did feel a bit strange initially, but then the accountability definitely just went up and everybody has done the action. So, I think it’s just that thing of like, if you are complaining about meetings, and who isn’t, it’s those small, and they are often imperfect and some bits of it might work, some bits of it might not work, but at least you’re trying something, at least you are trying to see whether you can make it better.
Helen Tupper: Can I just add in one other thing, which is slightly random, but just because I experimented with it last week? Now, it didn’t actually work for me, but it might work for other people that have got too many meetings, is that reclaim.ai tool. It helps you with different habits, actually, in your diary. And one of them being like, if your complaint is, “I’ve got too many meetings”, what it helps you to do is to manage that better. And so, you put it like, “Well, how much focus time do you want in your week? How much time do you want in between meetings?” And it automatically, based on how much focus time you want in a week and how much time you want to reflect after meetings, it automatically puts that in your diary, along with a slightly passive-aggressive comment that you might be able to change that just says like, “Helen is no longer available. She has no more focus time left in the diary”.
Sarah Ellis: I saw it in your diary and it really threw me. I think I was looking for something for like, you and I were going to spend some time, and I was like, “What’s happened to Helen over the weekend?”
Helen Tupper: “She’s become a bit aggressive”! But no, actually it wasn’t quite right for me, partly because of just the way that mine and Sarah’s diaries work. But I did think, you could probably soften the tone and I could probably start with a bit less focus time so it was a bit less dominant in my diary. But I think that is an interesting experiment. If you’ve got too many meetings, actually having something that blocks time out that stops people proactively putting a meeting in that, I don’t think people would vote over it in that time. I think they would have come to me and said, “Oh, I looks like you’re blocked out. Can I have that?” They would have at least asked, rather than just stuck it in, which might be helpful depending on the direction of the meetings.
Sarah Ellis: So, the next complaint, which I think we all have, is like, “We’ve got too much to do”, it always feels like there’s too much to do”. And I think the perfect solution, which is not hard to find, because people sell millions of books based on this, and you can follow people on LinkedIn talking about it and you can read about this all the time, is, “Right, I am going to become a productivity guru. I am going to follow all of those techniques and things which are going to just make me so efficient”, I think a real focus on efficiency. So, it’s those inbox-zero people. Or you go, “Right, I’m going to use the Pomodoro technique. I’m going to start getting up at 5.00, because I’ll go for my big, long run and be so fit from 5.00 until 6.00. Then, I’ll probably get in some sort of ice bath and then I’ll do, I don’t know, read some book or whatever I’m going to do. Then, I’m going to be so present. I’m going to remove every distraction and just do deep work. So, you just kind of have this image.
Also, comparison here. I feel like comparison can really get in your way of like, “How do they manage to get so much done?” And so, the imperfect solution, I think here, I think there are two things that you could potentially try. So, the first one is being able to sort of zoom in and zoom out, but quite quickly, on what matters most. So, rather than just being like, “I’m going to create these perfect days”, actually just asking yourself, “What matters most today, what matters most this week?” I think gives you a useful short-term focus. And we always really clear on what matters most this week, because in our team meeting on a Monday, we do ‘what one thing’. So, everybody has to say what one thing matters most this week. So, we have created that clarity, because we always talk about it, and then I just ask myself what matters most today. And that was actually useful advice that I just got from a boss, from somebody who was a founder who runs and still runs his own company. And he was like, “There will always be loads of demands on your day, Sarah”. But his point was, “Yeah, but you need to be really clear about what matters most today, because that’s where you’ve got to be at your incredibly brilliant best. You’ve got to make sure you’re channelling your energy and effort into there.
Sometimes that feels hard, because I’m like, “Oh, but that also matters, and that also matters”. But there usually is one thing that matters most. So, I’m not short term at all, I’m not as good at zooming in. So, just asking myself that, the today and this week, really helps. And then for the zooming out, we use, and we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, and again, we actually did ours this morning, we do a ‘win-watch’ for what matters most this quarter. So, again, these are not perfect solutions, they’re not particularly sophisticated solutions. But actually, having a win-watch helps Helen and I to figure out where’s our focus. And if we don’t focus on these areas, we’re probably going to fall behind, or we’re not going to make the progress that matters to us. I think there’s a bit of acceptance of it will always feel like there’s a lot to do, so that’s never going to change. I don’t expect that to change. I also don’t want that to change, because that means I’m excited about all the things that we’re working on. But by asking ourselves those questions and having a few sort of, they’re basically mini, small mechanisms, I suppose, for having those conversations, it does always really help me.
Helen Tupper: But if you do do a win watch every quarter, it also, at the end of the year, when you have that moment that you’re sort of reflecting, and you think, “Oh, what have I done this year?” you can clearly look at your quarterly win watch and see all the wins you’ve accumulated. Because I think if you’ve got too much to do, sometimes I don’t think you appreciate what you’ve done. It just feels like more and more stuff, more and more stuff, busy work, busy work. And actually, there will have been a lot that you’ve done, but it hasn’t sort of risen to the surface. It still hasn’t kind of popped out, but it does pop out on the win watch. So, I think it does become a very motivating thing, I think, to look back on. And also, if you’re in a company that does an annual review, I think it makes that process a lot more efficient as well, because you’ve got all that in one place.
Sarah Ellis: And then, the one other thing I’d recommend just listening back to, if this is your really big complaint, is we did do an episode on the podcast where we talked about when good enough is great. This I do always find harder, but I think through practice, I have got a lot better at. And because I care, I have quite a high care and quality bar for myself, but also for everybody, I find it really hard sometimes to just let stuff go. And we’ve all got too much to do; if your bar is consistently the same, again, that’s really unrealistic. That’s like saying the perfect solution is, “Every single bit of work that I do is going to be the same 10 out of 10 quality and it’s going to get the same 10 out of 10 attention and care”. And again, that just can’t happen.
So, there was a good example of something actually we were working on last week, where a company wanted to write about Squiggly Careers. So, they’re doing sort of a case study in a press release, and I said to someone on our team, “Right, how can we review this and get it to something we feel good about really quickly, because essentially this can’t take more than ten minutes of our time”. And we worked out actually, again, working together live was the best way to do that, because initially we tried to edit what was already there and I was like, “Oh, this is just not working, it’s taking ages, and it’s not the right thing for it. We don’t want this to be taking up loads of time”. And that was a really good example. I think I start to spot now, “Oh, this is a ‘good enough is great’ moment, this is a ‘good enough it’s great’ piece of work”, and then I definitely have other things in mind where I’m like, “No, I’ll stick it with my ‘great’ bar and I’m going to stick with that”, and I want to put lots of time and attention because it’s on the win watch, for example. So, I think that distinction also really helps me.
Helen Tupper: So, our third complaint is the one around, I don’t have enough time to think. And sometimes people might say that. I think sometimes it sounds like, “Oh, I get no time to be strategic”. I think people kind of put those two things together. I take it as that I’m not able to put my brain in a thoughtful space, in a reflective, or way of projecting into the future. And so, the perfect solution to this that I will often hear people do is like, “Well, I have a strategy day”.
Sarah Ellis: Team away day.
Helen Tupper: Yeah, we’ll do it on a team away day. We have this period of time every year in August where we change the mix of our work a little bit, so that we do genuinely have a little bit more space in our diary. But it’s very easy to start going, “Well, that’ll happen in August. Well, don’t worry, that’ll happen in August”, and that August becomes our perfect solution. And the problem is, it is very, very, very hard to protect that time. You can maybe do it as a one-off, but other people have agendas, you’re not operating in isolation, there’s other stuff going on in your life and family outside of work. And if you have put all the emphasis on it happening on that day, like it has to happen on that day, on 1 September, or whatever’s going on, and then you don’t have any awareness of other things that might get in the way, then you can often feel even more frustrated than when you started, which is not what we want for people.
So, our imperfect solution here is to write a to-think list. It’s almost like this is in two stages. So, stage one is write, just get out of your head — this is quite a fast process, I think, this first part — but get out of your head the main things that you want to think about at the moment. So, if I was to put pen to paper now, I might be thinking, “Oh, I want to think about how Sarah and I are actually going to spend our time in August, like what do we want to achieve?” I might think about, “How am I supposed to manage the juggle of childcare over the next couple of months, that I’m currently dealing with?” So, things are currently on my mind. So, you get them down on paper, which I actually think is helpful in itself, because sometimes when your thoughts are going around your head, they can be magnified, but putting them down on paper adds a bit of practicality to them.
But then, the next thing is you want to do a first-thoughts five minutes. So, you pick something off your list. So, maybe I put, “Sarah and I, we’re spending some time together in August, what do we want to get out of it?” and I’m not going to solve that in five minutes. But what I am going to do is just jot some first thoughts down. I actually think setting a timer for this is quite useful. And I might just quickly get some thoughts. And I think you can get quite far in five minutes. And it’s up to you whether you want to do it as a mind map or a list, it doesn’t really matter. It just matters that quite quickly, you have created some time to think about something that isn’t going to derail your day or require you to schedule next month. We can all find five minutes in a day, and I think then you could even share your first thoughts with somebody, like, you could do it as a voice note. There are a lot of ways that you could do it, so it then goes from you towards somebody else. But it means that it doesn’t just exist as this growing mass in your head. It just becomes something a little bit smaller that you can move forward more easily.
Sarah Ellis: One of the other things that we know, there’s some interesting research around self-explaining. So, when you do talk to yourself about your own thoughts out loud, it actually does help you to figure out what you think, what you know, what you don’t know. So, again, you move forward fast. So, what you could do is self-explain for three minutes, set a timer and just go, “I’m just going to say out loud what I think about that”. Even when you get stuck, because I do this exercise a lot with people in workshops, where I get people to do three-minute mind maps; when you get stuck, my top tip is always, just stay focused on the question, because it is amazing how, when you get stuck, what comes next is often really insightful, because it’s forcing your brain. You’ve gone past the obvious and it’s forcing your brain to come up with new ideas or new answers. So, all you’ve got to do is just stay focused for that time.
Helen Tupper: I’ve been using the voice thing on ChatGPT quite a lot. I just find it quicker if I’m just thinking about something. I was thinking about a random book this weekend. I was like, “I might write this book”. Obviously, I’ve got no time to write this book, but I think I might write this book. Anyway, I was just sort of chatting along to ChatGPT. But I think you could record like a minute or two of your thoughts and then ask it to summarise that into five points, because I think you thinking about it is one thing, and then I think you being able to share that with somebody else, but in a much more succinct way, or you’re just dumping, aren’t you? You’re just dumping loads of stuff. So, if you talk to ChatGPT, or whatever platform you want to use, and then said, “Summarise this into five points”, then that is a much more constructive thing for me to share with Sarah than potentially just complaining to her for five minutes, or just writing a long essay about what’s on my mind.
Sarah Ellis: Maybe I should start doing that, because I think you get the unfiltered version.
Helen Tupper: I’m allowed to, I’m allowed to get your unfiltered versions.
Sarah Ellis: That’s one of my work-ons. So, the last complaint is about basically other people. They don’t always have to be more senior but I think often they are, because they’re the bottleneck around if you do have sign offs, or if you do need someone’s approval, or someone does need to read something before you can send it. I always think the perfect solution, when you’re thinking about this, and I did a lot of thinking about this when I was in big companies, because I did work with lots of senior stakeholders, you were always thinking, “If I could just spend more time with them. I’m going to try and put in more meetings with them. I’m going to make the meetings with them longer. I’m going to have more regular meetings”.
Helen Tupper: Imagine if their complaint, senior person’s complaint is, “I’m in too many meetings”. Junior person’s like, “Have a meeting”!
Sarah Ellis: Well, and it’s interesting because I see that a little bit with our team sometimes. They will, less so to me, which is probably feedback for me, but they will often be like, “Oh, Helen, we’d like more time with you”, because Helen does the one-to-ones with our team. And people’s default is sometimes more one-to-ones with Helen, longer one-to-ones with Helen. And you sort of go, “Sure, in a perfect world”, because that feels very perfect world because nothing’s changed for Helen. So, where has that extra time come from for Helen to do that? So, either you’ve got to trade something off, or you’ve got to make a choice, or something has to change, right?
Whereas actually, I think the imperfect solution here is thinking about how does that person you’re trying to influence, or who you need something from, how did they like to spend their time? And then, what could you do? So, what could you try out that might work better for them? One of the things that we found, we’ve been working with Amber, brilliant Amber, on our podcast over the past few months. Amber started using Notion to write down all of her thoughts and do her reports for us. Then, she does these really good videos, which are summaries of what’s in that report. Now, what is so good about that is it meant that Helen and I can watch those whenever it works for us. So, it mirrors the fact that Helen and I don’t ever have two days or two weeks the same, ever. So, she’s then created something that just works whenever. It’s very flexible. Also, and I only realised this when Helen told me recently, she knows whether we’ve watched it or not.
Helen Tupper: I love that!
Sarah Ellis: I hadn’t realised that. And I was like, “Oh, so she knows you’ve seen this much of it, or you’ve watched this much”. And I was like, okay, that’s probably quite useful to know. But what I think she has done is probably caught onto the fact that neither of us wanted more meetings, we do care about the work she’s doing, but we wanted her to communicate in a different way. And so, that was just, I think, a really smart way of like, we could easily be a bottleneck for Amber. But the reason we are not is because of how she has chosen to collaborate and communicate with us, but I think almost based on asking us some questions and not defaulting to the obvious. The obvious thing would have been, “Oh, well, once a week we’ll all catch up and we’ll talk about it”. And she’s gone, “Well, we could, or what we could do is something slightly different”. And it’s just worked so much better. And I don’t think there’s been too many bottlenecks for her. And also, we’ve quite enjoyed the process.
Helen Tupper: It’s funny because Sarah and I, because we don’t have a manager, we mainly manage each other, and we probably are a bottleneck occasionally to each other’s work. So, if I was mirroring how Sarah works in order to get something done, I would probably say, “Why don’t we spend an hour doing it together and then have a bit of a break?” Whereas my thing would be, “Let’s work 9.00 to 12.00 and not stop until it’s done”. It’s just more effective for the other person when you mirror them, it’s also just more appealing to them. Like if I said, “Let’s have a long meeting, Sarah”, she’s probably thinking, “Ugh”. Whereas if I said, “Oh, look, can we just have a bit of a walk and talk to think it through?” Like even that, that is Sarah’s language, like think it through, whereas my language is, get it done.
Sarah Ellis: Because you have that ‘get it done’ mindset, if you were my boss, I would never turn up to a one-to-one without like a, “This is what I need from this meeting”. And I would use decision discussion agendas with you, because also I’m a big fan of those, to be honest, I think they’re really helpful. So, I’d be like, “Right, Helen, I want us to discuss these two areas and I want to make two decisions. Let’s do that in 20 minutes”. And if I could, I’d try and give you some time back. I’d be like, I think we might have half an hour, but I think we can –”
Helen Tupper: Can you imagine how that is for someone like me?! Yeah, if you have a manager, if anyone has a manager like me, who likes getting it done and pacey stuff, if I always knew that I met with someone and I got ten minutes time, I’d be like, “I love meetings with them”. I wouldn’t even care what we were doing. I’d be like, “I love meetings with them”, I always get ten minutes back. It’d be so motivating.
Sarah Ellis: Imagine if you were my manager. I think I would show you something visual, and then I would green as we went through and be like, “Well, that’s green, because we’ve sorted that”. Then, I’d do the next one. I’d be like, “Well, let’s get them all to green by the time we finish our task”.
Helen Tupper: It’s so funny, this is just like feedback for Vivi. So, Vivi, who works on our team that I was with last week, who had used the Notion thing, had this checklist. And we were going through, and I absolutely, because it was like, “Tick and done, tick and done, tick and done”, and it felt like at the end, we were like, “Oh!” But then, she’s quite like me as well, so I think we both got that little buzz at the end of it. Whereas, I think treating a meeting like a to-do list is not very you at all. You’d be like, “Well, if it’s a to-do list, we could have done it in a different way anyway”. It does mean you have to be, I think, quite perceptive to understand how different people like to work, but I think that’s an important skill anyway. And I do think it means you need to be quite adaptable, so you can take that approach with different people. But it is effective and there aren’t that many senior people that you’re really trying to make this work for. So, I think it’s quite a selective skill, but it’s a very valuable one.
Sarah Ellis: I always think about it for our partners. So, we might not have managers anymore, but we have loads of big brands that we work with all across the world, and we have those learning partners. And all of those lead people in those companies are all a bit different. They definitely don’t all like to work in the same way. And they could definitely create a bottleneck for us if we need to get some stuff done around, like, a leadership programme we’re doing or something. As we were preparing this podcast, I find it really helpful to just create those opposites. Because I think what we’ve described today with all those different complaints is like, start with the perfect thing, because that’s quite fun. I found it really fun to imagine, and I actually found Helen was like, “Oh, you’re finding this really easy”. I did. I was like, “Oh, I can just do this”. I can imagine, oh, yeah, for senior people, I just want loads more time; or I’m just going to get rid of all meetings.
So, just imagine this perfect world, and I found that quite playful to do, and then you go, “Well, clearly that’s not going to happen”. But it makes it easier, I think, because you’re creating a contrast. I could do the opposite much easier, because I’d started with this perfect reality to then do the imperfect one. Maybe for some of you, you’ll find it’s the other way around, or your brain works in a different way. ut I certainly found that once I got started, you were like, “Crikey, you’re off”.
Helen Tupper: There were loads of ideas. It was quite unlocking. So, we will summarise all of these in the PodSheets. So, you will be able to see all of the complaints and you’ll also be able to see the sort of perfect/imperfect solutions. And I think back to what we said at the start, if you want to talk about this together in a team, I think the prompt is probably, “Which complaint feels most familiar to us?” and then, “Which imperfect solution could we experiment with?” And you might want to do a bit of a ‘how else’, because we’ve started you off with some ideas, but, “How else, what else could we experiment with?” could be a good conversation to have together.
Sarah Ellis: But that’s everything for this week. As always, thank you so much for listening. We know loads of you share the podcast with other people, which we really appreciate. And we always love hearing from you. We’re helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com. Bye for now.
Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.