The Five Engines Keeping You Stuck

Why rational leaders keep overworking

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:30Bill Gallagher: Well, if the data is so clear about why overwork, why busyness is a problem, why do we keep doing it? Why do rational leaders keep flooring it? Why do we keep leaning in, hustling, grinding? That is the thing we hear we should do, and yet on some level, we know it. We may have read where it's a bad idea, yet we keep doing it. We're going to get into all that and more in just a second.

00:59Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and author of busyisbroken.com. Our show comes to you every week. This Scaling Up Business Podcast with stories about our work, our clients, guests who are authors, gurus, CEOs telling of all the things, the lessons they learned in scaling, hopefully, to help you scale and grow your business. You'll find the book, Busy Is Broken at busyisbroken.com. You can pre-order it now. Lots of cool special extra things for people who pre-order the book. You can get a diagnostic. You can get some extra content, that kind of thing, by pre-ordering the book at busyisbroken.com. All right. And our monthly workshops and coaching programs, that kind of thing at scalingcoach.com. Find all that more. Like, subscribe, all that kind of thing right here, wherever you're getting the show. Comes to you every week. About 700 episodes now.

01:58Bill Gallagher: All right. The data is pretty clear. The research, the studies on overwork. Our productivity drops off after about 55 hours of work. The additional work we do isn't that helpful. We know that it causes more heart attacks, strokes, things like that. We know it impacts relationships, family, and personal friends, romantic relationships, that kind of thing. Overwork. We know that busyness is killing us. We say it with both pride, but also some exhaustion. Oh, I'm so busy. And there is a tension there. There is something going on there. There's a reason behind it. They're actually operating systems. I'm going to share them with you. I think you'll see most of us are operating on two or three of them at the same time.

Five engines that keep leaders stuck

02:46Bill Gallagher: So chapter 14 names the pattern, the powers and the patterns that we've been talking about. The histories in the book, Lee is a micromanager. Thomas has delayed his succession. Rocky's bringing chaos by trying to be Superman. Eddie is an obsessive over-involver who doesn't sleep much. My own years of missing out on midweek dinners. They all run on some of the same engines. Here are the five big engines. First one is identity. Your sense of self welded to the role as the founder and the CEO of the business. Michele Corvallis, one of the stories in the book, shares his stories, named person. Some of you may know him in our audience. Michele worked 360 days a year, 360 days a year, not because the business required it every single day, but because his identity was wound up in the business. I am the business was his operating identity. I had another friend who went to a deep, deep depression, a huge personal crisis because he was welded to his identity after a career of his work. He and his role, his title, were one and the same, and it was a profound mental health crisis when it changed. So when your worth as a person is inseparable from your output, from your role as the CEO, everything else feels kind of like death, like worthlessness. So identity is number one. Where are you and your job and your role one and the same and inseparable?

Identity welded to role makes rest feel like death

04:25Bill Gallagher: Second engine is fear. Right? I'm afraid this thing's going to come apart. I'm afraid they're going to let down. I'm afraid I'm going to fail. Fear sounds like I'm being prudent. I'm being cautious. Sounds like diligence. A lot of the times you tell yourself, I'm not micromanaging. I'm just double-checking things. I'm making sure. Right? But making sure underneath it is if this goes wrong, I will fail. I'll be a failure. People won't think I'm good enough. Like there's a deep thing, like a little kid talking fear running the show. I can't count on people. They'll let me down. I'll fail. Like that's engine number two. Like I said, you may have more than one of these going on. Most of us have a couple of them.

05:11Bill Gallagher: Engine number three is habit. We develop habits. It's just the way we operate. We started as a little kid doing things a particular way in school, and it builds on itself over time. Thomas, one of the stories in the book, couldn't see the cage. It was made of the same thing. They'd done it for as long as he could remember, Thomas turning 70 and he couldn't change any of it. Like, it just was the way he did things, and the company then was the way. So both Thomas and the team and the company as a whole were involved in codependent habits. They had habits that were deeply ingrained. So that's engine number three.

Habit running yesterday's reflexes on tomorrow's decisions

05:48Bill Gallagher: The fourth one is culture. It's the whole background, the environment that we operate in. Visible effort signals our worth. People get higher status by appearing busier. I'm a very busy man. I'm a very busy woman. I'm a busy person. Busyness feels indispensable. It feels like winning. It feels like worth. It's like, I'm important. I'm cool. Right? So our culture says busy people are worth more, are better, be taken seriously. Like, there's just a value we place on busyness as a culture. Right? So it's the water you swim in.

06:30Bill Gallagher: Number five, engine number five is adrenaline or the hero complex. We save the day. We're running on things. If you're like me, you'll run things right to the edge of a crisis so that you can save things unconsciously. I love being the person still. I love being the person who gets the call. If there's a, there was an accident, I don't know, like a year ago now out on the street, I love being the one who will run right into the middle of it and go bring calm, bring order, take charge. Like I'm not a paramedic. I know enough to deal with it. And I know that not everybody can step into a crisis and calmly, effectively take charge. I love being that person. I love being someone that people can count on. I love being heroic. You might love it too.

Adrenaline from being the one who saves the day

07:19Bill Gallagher: Now here's the thing. These things compound. Remember I said you might have more than one of them going at the same time. So fear drives micromanagement. Micromanagement feeds the identity of being needed. The adrenaline of firefighting, the strategic neglect underneath. So if you're fighting fires, if you're in the operations all the time, you're also not looking out in the world at what's going on. You're so busy focused on the fire, the crisis of the moment. You're not noticing the bigger picture, that kind of thing. These five engines produce at least four major sins, bad behaviors, and they are poor delegation. So you just hang on to things. You have a lot of helpers, but really the owner of everything is you. The second one is you've delegated, but you're still messing with it. Right? That's micromanagement. So you don't delegate or you delegate, but then you still get involved in things. It's micromanagement. The third one is perfectionism. You're afraid. You don't trust. You keep noodling on things. You're afraid of looking stupid or failure or making a mistake. And so you hang on to things, you delay. You slow down everything. And the last one is you're so busy running in the business, you don't notice the competition, the market, the customer, that kind of thing. We call that strategic

08:43Bill Gallagher: Myopia, right? I can only see the things closest in front of me. I don't have the big picture, right? I think I do. I'm supposed to be the big picture person, but mostly I'm internally involved in the company. All of these things can feed each other in a kind of a doom loop. So which one is it that you do? I noticed there's a few of them that I do for sure. Culture, being busy, being the hero, right? Fear coming and going at different times, having my identity, I and my business. Like, I am a scaling coach. I am a former CEO, right? Those are the kinds of things that are tied up. I can't just be a person who loves people, who cares about something, who's working on something, who's committed to, who's willing to be accountable. It's like an identity thing. No, I am this role. I am this kind of thing. And then I get afraid of something, and then I have certain habits, and then I operate in this culture and I see myself more that way. And I love to be that person who gets a hit by weighing in on and doing all of that. So your job is to start to look at which of these is running you, which of the five is running you, and then which of the sins is it producing?

Name your engine and go public with it

09:57Bill Gallagher: I wouldn't pick the one that seems the best or least bad. Just notice you could be running all of them at different points. I think many of us do, but you'll probably tend to a couple of them. Notice the couple that are loud. Then when you notice it, start to talk about them, share them with somebody that you trust. Start with a peer, but really helpful to start to tell people on your team, maybe not everyone, but a couple of people. I noticed I think that adrenaline runs me, and I think I like to do this. And they may correct you. They may give you some additional insight. They're not right or wrong. It's simply an additional perspective. So whatever they have to say, thank them for it. Say, thanks, I'll think about and I'll start to notice what that is. So notice the engines running you. And then what are the behaviors that you do? Are you failing to delegate? Are you a micromanager?

10:49Bill Gallagher: So what is running your engine? And then what does it produce? What are the sins? Failure to delegate, micromanagement, perfectionism, or too much inward perspective, strategic myopia. So what is it? So we want to start to notice that, and then we want to go public with it. Like, get it out there. Look, I noticed this is running me, and I do this behavior. Naming it is the first step to moving beyond, to choosing something else.

11:18Bill Gallagher: That is really our focus for the next couple of weeks. If you'll just start to notice which of the engines and what are the behaviors you go to more. Like I said, you'll do more than one, but you'll have a few that are more common for you than for others. Each of the leaders that I talk about in the book, stories, real people, some named publicly, some shared, some anonymised, and then my own story as well, the things that I did and noticed in my own life as a CEO and then coaching others, start to notice what it is for you. Go public with it. Share it with the people around you, close to you, the people you work with, the people that care about you. And then in two weeks, we're going to come back. I'll talk to you about the shift, what I did for myself that made the biggest shift, the most lasting one. It's not that I never do these things again. It's that I did one big thing and I worked on it for almost a year and it transformed everything. I'll talk to you about going to Italy.

12:18Bill Gallagher: In 2009, my wife and I made good on a promise. In 2010, we went to Italy in the summer in a time that was very difficult for the business, wasn't ideal to do this, but it transformed me and the company and the people, made a difference forever for me. I'll talk to you about that and you'll have some inspiration on what it is that you might do. So this week, just focus on which of the things is running you and which of the sins it's producing, which of the five things and which of the four sins. It'd be a couple of each of them that is running you. Notice that. Go public with that. I'll talk to you about how to move on that when I talk to you again in a couple of weeks.

13:01Bill Gallagher: All right. Thanks to Wanda, who helps us get our show, my assistant, and to Verne Harnish who created the whole Scaling Up framework that is at the core of our work. If you want to know more about Scaling Up and our work with that, scalingcoach.com. If you want to know more about the book, if you want to pre-order it now and get some of the extras, start your diagnostic, go to busyisbroken.com. Busyisbroken.com. You can pre-order the book, get special deals, things like that for ordering it now. Thanks for listening, for watching. Until next time, keep scaling.

13:34Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.