The Hidden Cost of Creeping Frustration

Episode #361 The Hidden Cost of Creeping Frustration

CREEPING FRUSTRATION AFFECTS YOUR PERFORMANCE

Have you ever been in a situation where you just get worn down…  where all of the little things just seem to add up? This is what I call creeping frustration – things that, by themselves, are hardly worth mentioning; but they add up over time to create a drag on your capacity, your mood, and your effectiveness.

It’s the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

In this newsletter, I show you how to become more aware of the creeping frustrations that can affect you as a leader, and I give you four practical techniques for dealing with them before they become a problem.

I begin by asking the question, “Where do these frustrations typically come from?”; I’ll help you to recognise how and when these frustrations might be affecting you; and I’ll give you four ideas for how to stop your frustrations from building up over time and become a drag on your performance.

WHERE DOES CREEPING FRUSTRATION COME FROM?

Since Emma and I set up Your CEO Mentor, my frustrations have been few and far between… which is not to say we haven’t faced a number of significant challenges – but I had to cast my mind back to my days as a corporate executive to remember the things that typically caused deep frustration.

In larger businesses, day-to-day frustrations are ever-present, and if they’re not treated properly, they can wear you down. Ultimately, they affect your performance and dilute your leadership effectiveness.

You may not have thought much about this, but it’s important to nip any frustrations in the bud, before they completely sap your energy.

Where do frustrations typically come from? For the purpose of this newsletter, I’ve narrowed it down to six obvious sources: 

1. Lack of control.

When you feel as though you don’t have any autonomy; when your decisions are second-guessed or overridden by your boss; when you’re being micromanaged; when your boss is constantly pushing you to operate below your level – all of these things can make you feel incredibly frustrated.

It stymies you and it holds you back from performing at your best. And you may even start to think, “What’s the point?” Once that happens, it’s hard to come back from. The frustration that’s born from lack of control rarely improves by itself.

2. Change for change’s sake.

This is incredibly frustrating. Some leaders make changes for no other reason than to mark their territory, especially when they’re new to a role. Without having a deep understanding of how the business operates, or how to maximise its performance, they just decide to make sweeping changes.

Other leaders like to think they’re highly innovative, so they constantly implement changes to keep up with the latest trends. They’ll read an article in Harvard Business Review, or they’ll take a principle from a book completely out of context, and decide that it’s a good idea.

They often become what I call sandy beach bosses: the last person who walked there leaves the biggest impression!

When people talk about being change-fatigued, they aren’t railing against the amount of change, but rather the lack of rationality in the change. I dealt with this in Ep.319: Leading a Change Fatigued Team.

Things that don’t make sense, or don’t have an obvious outcome in terms of business improvement and value, drive deep cynicism into the team.

3. Borderline employees.

This is probably the biggest source of frustration for any leader. It’s that employee whose performance or behaviour is low, but not that low – it’s not really bad enough to have that performance heart-to-heart, but it’s not quite meeting the standard you’re trying to set either.

These people constantly miss the mark on a range of little things. You don’t think they’re important enough to address directly, but they just sh!t you… and over time, these little frustrations wear you down. You end up forming a very negative opinion of the individual involved

But, even worse, there are some people who are absolutely fine on some days, and then, for some weird reason, they simply choose not to perform on other days. They can be awesome, sometimes, and then they can be terrible, but still, you don’t address it head-on. So the frustration mounts.

4. Poor or Irrational decisions made above you.

The main reason I set a goal to become CEO of a major business was that I wanted to rise above the noise. I became increasingly frustrated having to deal with the impact of poor decisions that were made above me, and I wanted to be able to make those higher-impact decisions myself – for better or for worse.

The decisions that really drove me nuts were the ones where a leader would take the easy path: the path of least resistance. Or, even worse, when they made decisions that were clearly self-serving, but had significant downstream impacts on the team. These frustrations are tough because they’re largely outside of your control.

5. Moving the goal posts.

Quite often, leaders above just change plans and move the goal posts. Why? Because they are indecisive and reactive. Instead of having a clear strategy and adjusting that strategy as more information comes to hand, they flip-flop about wildly.

From below, it just looks like knee-jerk reactions to whatever’s going on at the time. The team can never settle because it’s constantly being pulled from pillar to post. They don’t see the fruits of their labour because they’re given new targets before they’ve had a chance to deliver the old targets.

Either that, or work just keeps getting heaped on, and the leaders above you aren’t strong enough to push back, so that the chances of delivering the high-value work effectively are almost nonexistent.

A lot of leaders justify this by saying things like, “We have to be agile,” or “We have a culture of failing fast,” or (my personal favourite, “We have to pivot.” That’s a word that implies a sense of strategic intent that rarely exists.

6. Passive-aggressive culture.

Occasionally, you’ll find yourself in a company that’s fallen into an us-and-them dynamic. The workforce has a deep distrust for management (which is probably well-deserved after years of poor leadership).

Third parties, like labour unions, take advantage of this leadership vacuum, driving a deep wedge between management and workers. I’ve always wondered at what point you cease to be a worker and become management. Is it when you become a frontline leader, or a superintendent, or maybe a general manager? I don’t know.

I once worked for a company where even some of the executive team members were still card-carrying union members. Your inability to shift the culture in these situations can be an immense source of frustration.

RECOGNISING THE SIGNS

How do you recognise the signs of creeping frustration? I must admit, I’ve felt the frustration rising in me just by going through that list. I’ve clearly buried some of my experiences deep in my subconscious.

The danger is that, because these frustrations are so prevalent in your working environment, they just become normalised.

There are a few telltale signs to watch out for, though. In order to recognise these signs, you have to begin with at least a basic level of self-awareness. The good news is you can’t listen to too many episodes of No Bullsh!t Leadership unless you have a level of self-awareness.

Here are five signs that you should look out for:

1. When little things begin to set you off.

You may just start to feel that you have a shorter fuse than normal. This is when it’s useful to have a trusted advisor who’s prepared to give you feedback, without fear or favor – someone who can observe your declining level of tolerance and alert you to the fact.

Without a trusted advisor, it’s sometimes hard to recognise that your fuse is getting too short. Using a daily reflection point can be incredibly valuable.

2. When you start to question everything.

I always knew I was succumbing to creeping frustration when I caught myself saying, “FFS, how hard can it be?” It was okay once a week, but not twice a day. Your glass just starts to look half empty.

3. When you have to employ your coping mechanisms more frequently.

The techniques that you use to build resilience are incredibly helpful, and this is front of mind for me at the moment because we’ve just come through Module 3 of the Leadership Beyond the Theory with our current cohort.

This is where we deal with resilience in some detail, showing how to deploy practical tools, like learning how to control your physiological responses and asking the questions that bring greater perspective.

These techniques are designed to help you through a crisis or emergency, but if you’re having to use them multiple times a day, it could be a sign that there’s something wrong.

4. When people start to become quiet around you.

It’s often difficult to see your own reactions changing as the frustrations build. Sometimes, it’s easier to read the reactions of the people around you.

Your direct reports are often going to pick up on your mood. If they know you well, they’ll know when’s a good time to have a conversation with you. If they start to lose their ‘lightness’ when they’re around you, or if they seem overly hesitant or cautious, then it may be because they just have problems they don’t want to fess up to you about…

Or it could well be that they’re walking on eggshells, because they can’t predict how you’re going to react.

5. When you dread certain daily tasks.

A small percentage of every job involves some unenviable tasks. In my days as a software developer, that was producing documentation for the software I wrote.

No job is perfect – we all have to do things we’d prefer not to do – but that should be 10% of the job. When it starts to feel like 80% of the job, that’s a problem.

It could be that your job is genuinely shitty, but it’s more likely just another sign of creeping frustration.

FOUR TECHNIQUES TO KILL CREEPING FRUSTRATION

I’m going to finish with four suggestions for how to deal with creeping frustration:

1. Don’t silently accept poor decisions from above.

A lot of frustration comes from the decisions that are made above you. Remember when I listed the main contributors to creeping frustration, more than half of them relate to what happens above you:

• Change for change’s sake;
• Irrational decisions;
• Moving the goalposts; and
• A general lack of control.

When these things happen, it’s important that you push back. Of course you need to pick your battles, but you’ll overcome a lot of your frustration just by having the courage to push back on the things that seem stupid.

For example, I once had an executive role where the CEO decided to announce a cost-cutting and redundancy program. This was all well and good, except that he decided the redundancies should be offered on a voluntary basis. This was the path of least resistance: no opposition from the unions and no internal noise, because virtually every individual would get exactly what they wanted.

I argued that the redundancies should be forced. That is, that the company should retain control over who stayed and who went.

If you ask for volunteers, the best people put their hands up and take a big payout. They’re the ones who know they can get a job anywhere else, any day.

The ones who can’t get a job anywhere else, well, guess what? They stay… and what you end up with is:

• A huge one-off cost to execute the redundancy program;
• The quality of your gene pool is weakened, not strengthened; and
• Over time, you have to hire new people to rebuild your capability.

In some cases, the company has to re-engage the very people that it’s just paid a fortune to leave, to return in a consulting capacity.

I didn’t win that one, but I felt a lot better just by putting my case forward as strongly as I did. It didn’t make the decision above me any better, but I took comfort in knowing I’d done everything I could to get the best outcome for the company.

In general, the choices you make about whether or not you voice your opinion can be the difference between increasing frustration, and philosophical acceptance of the things you can’t control.

2. Make sure your team’s value proposition is crystal clear.

When work’s being pushed down from above and the Nike boss says to you, “Just do it,” your ability to push back depends almost entirely on how strong a handle you have on the inherent value in your team’s work program.

With a program that articulates the value of every piece of work you have resources allocated to, you can have a conversation about priorities.

But too often I see leaders having conversations like this:

Boss: “We need to deliver this. It’s priority one.”

You: “But we haven’t got the resources to do it.”

Boss: “I don’t care. It’s critical.”

You: “But we already have four priority ones.”

Boss: “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Just do it.”

This dynamic is completely different if you have a well-constructed work program that identifies the value of each initiative, and ranks the work items accordingly. The conversation between a boss and their leader looks more like this:

Boss: “We need to deliver this. It’s priority one.”

You: “Excellent. Well, as you know, we have a really good handle on the value that each initiative delivers, so let’s work out what we can shift to accommodate this new deliverable.”

Boss: “We can’t drop anything, we’ve just got to get this done.”

You: “Well, okay, I get that, but if we had to delay something slightly or put the delivery of something at risk, what would be the most sensible choice?“

Boss: “Well, show me what you’ve got.”

You: “I tell you what, Boss, why don’t I come back to you next week with a plan for where this fits in our program and then we can go from there?“

You’ll get better results, less need to change plans every 10 minutes, and a whole lot less frustration to deal with.

3. 
   

   Give your people consistent, clear, regular one-on-one feedback.

The creeping frustration of a direct report who runs hot and cold can really wear you down. It’s important to realise this is your problem, not theirs.

It usually stems from your lack of willingness to address the little things and, after a while, the little things become the big things. Like I said, death by a thousand cuts.

When you notice things that aren’t a major deal, but you know they aren’t quite right, you’ve got to jump on them. Don’t let them fester. You don’t have to make a big thing of it, but don’t let it slide completely either. Just a little corridor conversation like, “Hey, that report you sent me out this morning was a little bit loose. It’d be great if you could tidy it up next time to improve the quality. Do you know what I mean by that?“

It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but it does have to be dealt with.

4. Recognise the constraints of your job.

You have to accept the fact that every job has its constraints. These can vary greatly, but typically they extend to things like a lack of resources; or a micromanaging boss; onerous or bureaucratic processes; or a lack of decision-making autonomy.

Whatever the constraint is that’s causing the frustration, it’s important to recognise that, more often than not, the constraint can’t be broken.

The only way to alleviate the frustration is to make a choice. You can choose to live with the constraint or you can choose not to live with the constraint.

If you decide you can live with it, then you’ve got to just put it aside – don’t dwell on it – and just do everything you can to drive maximum performance within the constraints you are operating in.

If you decide you can’t live with the constraint, you only have one way of avoiding it: vote with your feet, and try to find a less restrictive environment somewhere else.

Let me reiterate though, every single job has its constraints, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Making a conscious choice about whether to stay or go is certainly going to make a big difference, though, to your frustration levels.

DON’T IGNORE CREEPING FRUSTRATION

I think that’s a pretty decent coverage of creeping frustration. If it’s left unchecked for a little while, it can affect your own leadership performance, and it’s often at the heart of overwork or burnout.

But if it’s left unchecked for a long time, it can lead to much bigger problems – a team that becomes demotivated and rudderless – and coming back from there is way harder!