In the current issue of The Harvard Business Review, authors Heike Bruch and Jochen Menges explore the root causes of “The Acceleration Trap” – never-ending, hard-charging activity and change inside an organization – and offer practical solutions to avoid it.

Although their change and growth strategies often succeed brilliantly for a while, CEOs often try to make frenetic change the new normal. Symptoms of over-accelerated companies, ironically, often yield poor performance: lack of employee motivation, scattershot focus, and deteriorating customer service.

Does your company have an acceleration culture?  Take this quick, 16 question quiz to find out.

Over-accelerated companies exhibit at least one of three distinct patterns of destructive activity:

• Activity Overload – Employees are overloaded with too many activities and don’t have the time or the resources required to do their jobs.
• Multiloading – Employees are asked to do too many different kinds of activities, leaving them and the company unfocused, and activities misaligned.
• Perpetual Loading – Management gets into the habit of creating constant change, depriving workers of any hope to recharge and refresh themselves on the heels of an intense period of work.

In a survey of employees from 600 firms, Bruch and Menges found significant distinctions between trapped and non-trapped businesses.  Here’s what the employees had to say:

• “I lack resources to get my work done” (60% trapped vs 2% non-trapped)
• “I work under constantly elevated time pressure” (80% trapped vs. 4% non-trapped)
• “My company’s priorities frequently change” (75% trapped vs 1% non-trapped)
• “I see a light at the end of the tunnel” (3% trapped vs. 83% non-trapped)
• “I regularly get a chance to regenerate” (6% trapped vs. 86% non-trapped)

Ever been there as a staffer?  No, it’s not much fun at all.

If your organization is caught in the acceleration trap, there are four ways to break free: clarify your strategy, stop less important work, create a system to select projects, and declare an end to the current mode of hyper energy operation.  The bottom line: don’t drive your company constantly to its limits.

Over-acceleration – often in the form of aggressive growth and change – leads to loss of focus, too many activities, organizational fatigue, and employee burnout.  To combat it, strive to be aware of the exertion that underlies progress toward your goals, and work on making sure the firm’s energy level is sustainable.  This means being vigilant, even when things are going smoothly, for signs that the company is slipping into the acceleration trap.

Are you wondering if your company has an acceleration culture?  Click here to take our brief, 16 question quiz!

This question is painfully simple, yet it plays a major role in the execution of your firm’s vision and priorities. Sadly, many leaders cannot accurately answer it. You may be surprised to find a sizable disconnect between your top priorities and how you actually spend your time.

People take their cues from the leader when it comes to time management. How time is allocated must match both your business priorities and your team’s actual day-to-day activities.  If they don’t match, have a look at your goals and priorities (you DO have goals and priorities, right?).  I’ve found that in most cases, time management issues are merely symptoms of underlying goal and priority issues.

Although time allocations may vary depending on time of year, staffing changes and external factors, time management must become a conscious decision that fits your vision and priorities. In fact, a periodic review of how you invest your time is a vital business habit.

Give yourself the gift of time for the new decade: track your time for 3-5 days.  Have your management team do it too, then review the results together.  Once you see the reality of how your spend your day, you can more realistically and honestly evaluate what needs to change to bring your time allocations back into alignment with your goals and priorities.  Like a fleet small boats bobbing in the ocean – they are bound to drift over time.

Back in the 1920’s, a PR man named Ivy Lee was hired by Charles Schwab – the President of Bethlehem Steel.  Lee gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He told Schwab “I can increase your efficiency. Pay me in 3 months whatever you think it’s worth.”

Lee met with Schwab and with each member of the executive team individually for exactly 10 minutes.  In the meeting he told them “Promise me that for the next 90 days, at the end of each day you’ll list the 6 most important priorities you need to accomplish the next day, and number them according to importance.  Then when you come to work the next day, work on them sequentially until they are all completed. Any leftover items get transferred to the next day’s list.”

They all said: “That’s it?”  And then they all agreed to Lee’s rules.

Schwab wrote Ivy Lee a $25,000 check 90 days later and said “This is the best investment I’ve ever made.”  Remember that this was in the 1920’s!

Whether you realize it or not, all your staff’s eyes are trained on you – looking for cues and norms to help them define how they should behave.  If you need THEM to make better choices around how they spend THEIR time, start by setting an example for them to model and follow.

Track your time, analyze the results, and make changes to your allocations. You might also consider taking Ivy Lee’s $25,000 advice to Charles Schwab – often it’s the simplest things that can make the biggest differences.

How much profit and productivity do you leave on the table in your organization due to misalignment and hazy focus? By implementing these 3 tools, you’ll be well on your way to more productivity and profit from your existing investments and resources.

3 Tools to Create Focus & Improve Performance

Now wouldn’t that be a handy reminder on the welcome screen of your PDA or in your date book? Time is not given to us; rather, it is only made available to us.  As a non-renewable resource, time is – quite literally – here today and gone tomorrow. How you choose to utilize it, however, is entirely up to you.   

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asked. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.  As the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland points out, a lack of clear direction can result in sub-optimal decisions and wasted time.  Did you know that the #1 factor contributing to time inefficiencies in an organization is the absence of clear goals and priorities? This makes decision-making a chore and generally causes confusion about what should be accomplished, why, and by when. Not exactly the stuff of precision time management! 

Think about a situation in your life where you exhibited exceptional time management.  Maybe it was the day or two before you departed on vacation when you had a number of things to accomplish in a tight timeframe.  If you’re like most people, you probably made yourself a list of things that you needed to get done before you left town.  And wasn’t it miraculous?  In that situation, you seemed to “find” the time to get everything accomplished so you could go on your merry way. 

What happened here is – gulp! – you set clear, time-bound goals for yourself.  More importantly, you got them done.  Yes, sometimes something as simple as a “to do” list can go a long way to improve time effectiveness in an organization.  Seeing the items on the list (your goals), knowing when they must get accomplished (the timeframe), and understanding what’s at stake for yourself (vacation!) work together to create an invisible motivational force that impels you to act and to become very time efficient. 

Just imagine if you could create that environment throughout your organization – clear goals, timeframes, and a gut awareness of the rewards for success – each and every day!  Well – you can, so why not give it a try?   

The clock is ticking…