This article is written by Rell DeShaw, Government of Canada.

  • The problem: You are drowning in work and don’t have enough team members to get it all done.
  • Why it matters: Your strong work ethic isn’t enough to help when you just have too much to do. You need some deliberate strategies for a re-set.
  • The solution: To begin tackling the problem, start by examining the ‘why’ of your position, then figure out your ‘must do’ tasks.

The first question: What is your best guess at how you’ve found yourself in this difficult situation?

  • Are you a victim of success? Specifically, high-performing teams who deliver tend to attract more work. “I gave it to your team because I knew you’d find a way to deliver.” You may also realise that the ground has shifted and that a star performer who was actually punching above their weight (to the tune of working as much as two people), has left the building.
  • Is scope creep happening? Did a core mandate creep up over time to something less manageable?
  • Did some pot of money start and stop? This can happen too - you got money for a special project that ended but the work didn’t end.
  • Could your work habits do with a tweak?

This diagnosis may lead you to some answers for the path out.

Unfortunately, most strategies out of your predicament involve more work as a means to an end. I remember trying to give a family member a pep talk on a big clear-out of their house. My main message was, “This may get harder before it gets easier.” And the response was: “Was that the pep talk?” Touché.

The other bit that may be hard to stomach is that, in general, in my career, during the years that I have had to build/rebuild a team while delivering on file-related work, I got some of my lowest performance ratings. It led me to the unfortunate conclusion that building a strong team may not carry the weight of going over and above on core work deliverables. Is it frustrating? You bet. Is it better to keep your eyes on the prize of building the foundation for a well-resourced team that can hit it out of the ballpark in future years? Yes, I think it is.

Identify the ‘must dos’

If you are a victim of success or scope creep, see if you can find a place where the core mandate of the section is written down. Then, conduct your own audit of what you must do/should do/could do (Called the MoSCoW method) against the mandate of your group and the list of commitments that are already baked in, such as written in your Minister’s Mandate letter. I have also worked with teams on ‘value propositions’, which though more common in the world of marketing, can also be interesting to consider in government. Essentially, what is your team best placed to do?

The trick may be to really challenge what stays in the ‘must do’ category. In my world that is fairly clear:

  • The minister needs their speaking points for a meeting on Friday and we are the experts for that stakeholder group.
  • We have to prepare our senior executives for an appearance at a parliamentary committee.
  • We are launching a programme for which we have already made a public commitment to do so by a certain date.

That said, a lot of material gets thrown into the ‘must do’ category that might be gently challenged. Sometimes the reasons for pushing ahead are more like, “We said we’d do this so we must”, or “It’s on the division priority list”. As we’ll touch on later, it might be time to show your own humility and ask if this commitment could be altered or pushed out after some deliberate consideration.

A lot of material gets thrown into the ‘must do’ category that might be gently challenged.

So, the first order of business is whether you can get agreement on the ‘must do’ list given the mandate of your group.

Hold up - was that actually a tasking?

This work audit is also a good time to clarify what I will refer to as ‘musings’ vs. ‘taskings’. Sometimes senior executives unwittingly unleash major projects by simply saying “It would be nice if we knew…”, “It would be great if we had…”, etc. But, when clarification is sought, the intention was never to displace core work or push the team into buckets of overtime in the short term - merely to make a suggestion for longer-term work. If you have any doubts about where things fit on the priority roster, it won’t hurt to ask for clarification of what and when things are needed.

Read the second part of this series here.

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