Why Compartmentalization Is the Key to Effective Leadership, According to Adam Bryant
By Adam Bryant
As much as it’s your role to set the pace for the team, that can be harder to do for yourself. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed in leadership roles because of the demanding deadlines, the people problems that fill up your day, the second-guessing and criticism, the pressures to do more with less, and dealing with the crisis of the moment. Work can become a three-shift day the morning emails, taking care of problems at work all day, and then the night shift to catch up on reading and writing and responding to more emails. Time to think? That’s rarely in the mix.
On top of all the challenges that leaders face running their part of the organization, there are all the broader societal challenges that have rolled up to the front door of companies to solve. Since the start of the pandemic, we are hearing from many leaders in our consulting work that the jobs have gotten so difficult that they are opting out. And it’s not just C-suite executives many other senior leaders are saying that they are not up for the demands of the roles today.
How to avoid feeling overwhelmed? For some, it’s not a problem. They are wired to compartmentalize, and they seem to be able to let everything roll off their back. There is a part of me that admires people like that, because I was never particularly good at compartmentalizing. If something difficult was going on at work, I often took it home with me and I would toss and turn when I should have been sleeping. On the other hand, being too good at compartmentalizing can have its own cost you can be blinded to some of the repercussions and consequences of your decisions. It reminds me of that scene in HBO’s Succession, in which the patriarch of the family, Logan Roy, explains to his son, Kendall, what it takes to be a leader: “You’ve got to be a killer. You’re not a killer.” Fortunately, this kind of macho leadership is (mostly) going out of style, and leaders are now expected to be more human and compassionate. It’s just one of the many reasons why you will be well served to learn the art of compartmentalization. Here are some effective approaches.
STAY FOCUSED ON WHAT MATTERS MOST
There is a common trap that leaders can fall into where, as problems pile up, they convince themselves they are creating some order out of the chaos by ranking rather than prioritizing. Ranking simply lists all the incoming challenges in order. A better use of a leader’s time is to commit to prioritizing what is most important. “I often tell people to stop patting yourself on the back for ranking things,” said Dave Goebel, the former CEO of the Applebee’s restaurant chain. “There is a difference between prioritizing and ranking. It’s not helpful to just rank twelve things in terms of what’s most critical. You’ve got to prioritize and have the discipline to keep the list to fewer than five critical priorities. This is tough to do, oftentimes not popular, but critical to delivering on the most important elements of the strategy. It’s about focus.”
The key to prioritization is to have a useful strategy document. Done right, it will serve as a constant reminder of what matters most. Given the importance of an effective strategy document to help quiet the noise and focus your energies, I’m going to briefly share the one-page strategy framework that I mentioned in my last book, The CEO Test. I learned this approach from Dinesh Paliwal, the former CEO of Harman International, the electronics company. I have found it to be incredibly effective in our work with leadership teams to ground the discussion in a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve. Using Paliwal’s framework, every business strategy is described in one page, with four short sections:
What is the goal, the core message, in one line?
What are the three key actions that are needed to achieve that goal?
What are the three key challenges you will have to overcome to achieve that goal?
And how do you measure success in twelve months (or whatever time period you choose)?
The beauty of Paliwal’s framework is that it follows a natural logic flow and sharpens the focus on driving toward a specific outcome rather than listing evergreen and lofty priorities, which can quickly pile up and weigh down strategy documents like pack mules. Creating a shared scoreboard for success also helps create a sense of “we” for a culture, which helps overcome the natural tribal instincts that lead people to identify more with coworkers in their immediate circle and to see colleagues in other departments as “them.” Like the personal leadership brand exercise, I have found that people can dash off superficial answers to this strategy exercise they often write a kind of job description for themselves rather than a plan for trying to achieve an outcome without really digging into the challenge of simplifying complexity. “Simplifying the message is not just an art,” Paliwal said. “It is a practice, and it doesn’t happen in one day. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It’s work and you have to spend time on it.”
Once you have that clarity, take control of your calendar (rather than feeling like it controls you), and start from scratch. What do you need to do to execute your strategy? What initiatives do you need to set into motion? Who are the key stakeholders you need on your side to help you accomplish those goals? What is the quality of your relationship with each of them? How much time do you need to invest in building those relationships? The world can feel like a tsunami rolling over your calendar. The best counterforce is gaining clarity on what you need to accomplish a constant reminder to keep you on track and help you focus on what matters. Part of the art form of compartmentalizing is being able to recognize the relative importance of everything that comes across your desk. Clarity about your strategy is your best tool for doing that. “It’s a simple but difficult question,” said Susan Story, the former CEO of American Water Works, a utility. “If you can only get two or three major things done this year, what should they be? And then every week, you ask yourself, have I done something to move those two or three things forward?”
To help ensure progress against those big goals, make sure you are clear on your “Picasso” for the day a smart approach developed by Laurie Schultz, the former CEO of Galvanize, to help her focus on the highest and best use of her time. “When I was working for KPMG as a consultant, I used to have this long list of projects,” she said. “And I often felt like it was overwhelming, so I adopted this system of ‘one Picasso a day.’ When you wake up in the morning and I do this every day the first thing you do is to decide what will be your one Picasso that day. It’s about focus. What do you uniquely do that matters the most? After all, you can only do one thing really well at a time. It’s a useful metaphor for prioritization. And it helps you go to bed at night and be able to reflect and say, that was my Picasso today. It’s a great way to get up in the morning, and it’s a great way to go to bed at night.”
DON’T GET PULLED DOWN INTO PEOPLE’S PROBLEMS
There are a lot of forces that will conspire to pull you down from the altitude you need to maintain so that you can think clearly and see the big picture. People may try to monkey-park problems on your shoulders. Or they will ask for meetings simply to get face time with you. Another trap to avoid is when people tell you they have an urgent problem, when in fact what they are doing is simply trying to elevate their self-importance by insisting that their problem is a five-alarm fire for the organization. Don’t be shy about pushing back and saying that you, not them, will determine the urgency of the problem. The same happens with scheduling. People may say that they need an hour to discuss their problem, when in fact it may only need fifteen minutes. Schedule shorter meetings so that you can give yourself breaks. “People want you to understand their problem and bring you into it,” said Joanne Berger-Sweeney, the president of Trinity College. “But as the leader you often have to stand outside of someone’s individual problem to be able to see holistically what’s going on, so you can make the best decisions for the organization as a whole.”
DELEGATE AND ASK FOR HELP
It can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to shoulder every problem yourself. It goes with the territory of being in a leadership position you likely got promoted because of your deep sense of ownership and accountability, and your willingness to take on problems and find a way to solve them. But personal resilience can be a double-edged sword. You can fall into the trap of thinking that you have to take on every new crisis that comes up. That’s not leadership. People want to pitch in. If you are feeling overwhelmed, pull your team together and ask for their advice on how you can tackle the problem together. Yes, some decisions can and should be made only by you. But often you can enlist others to help share the burden. “One of the most important demonstrations of leadership is to reach out and ask for help,” said Pam Fields. “It is not about putting on your Superman cape and thinking that you can fly around and protect everything yourself.”
GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK
If you are driven and ambitious, it’s a good bet that you set a high standard for yourself and want to get everything right. But you have to recognize that there are limits to what you can accomplish, and you can’t execute everything perfectly. “I share this advice with first-time CEOs, particularly when I hear them being hard on themselves,” said Bob Brennan, a veteran CEO and board director. “I say to them, ‘If you talked to your friends the way you talk to yourself, you’d have no friends. So stop talking to yourself like that.’ You shouldn’t give yourself a harder time than the people around you. Part of the learning curve for leaders is that the job shouldn’t be like self-flagellation.” And while your job is to help make people successful, you can’t feel fully responsible for their success. You owe them your best advice, but you can’t feel responsible if they don’t take it that is up to them. They control their destiny, not you. If you have to let people go, so be it. Your team will respect you more if you push out the people who are not carrying their weight. The point bears repeating leadership is not a popularity contest.
“You have to let go of perfection,” said Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, a veteran CEO. “At some point early in my career, I let go of wanting to be liked. I decided that I want to be respected. I accept that some people will like me and some people won’t. But I do want to make sure that I have a handle on all the problems and a handle on myself and how I’m doing. Then I can live with the idea that great might be getting seven out of ten things right. Getting it right all the time and being perfect and being loved is an impossible standard. Also, make time for whatever grounds you and gives you perspective on your life. Otherwise, it is a tough job, and we could all beat ourselves up every day for all the things we get wrong.”
DO WHAT IS BEST FOR THE COMPANY
It can be easy, particularly with people problems, to start studying decisions from many different angles. You can worry too much about potential fallout and consequences, potentially paralyzing you from making hard decisions. But one simple question What is best for the company?—will help keep you at the necessary altitude to clarify whether you are doing the right thing. “These big decisions are never easy, and you need courage to be an effective leader,” said Christian Klein, the CEO of software company SAP. “For me, what’s important is that I’m able, when I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, to answer the question, is what we are doing absolutely the right thing to do in the midterm and the long term? And as long as I can answer that question by saying yes, I know that I’m doing the right thing for all stakeholders.”