156. Your Boss Derailed Your Plans. Now What?

Episode Transcript

Nick Jaworski:
I saw the topic for today’s episode and it felt like it was very timely. Today, we’re talking about when your boss changes everything about your day or your week. You’ve made a plan. Suddenly, your boss says, “I need this ASAP” or “Drop everything you’re doing”. And now, you’ve got to adjust. I want to stretch that idea out a little bit. I came back from walking my kid to school today and I was in the kitchen with my wife, and suddenly, I heard a weird sound in the other room. Nobody else is in the house. I was like, what is that sound? It turns out that my beloved cat, Todd, has knocked over our television.

Courtney Baker:
I thought you were going to say died.

Nick Jaworski:
No.

Courtney Baker:
Okay.

Nick Jaworski:
He knocked over our 65 inch television onto the ground today.

Courtney Baker:
Okay. That’s worse than dying. Okay, I’m sorry.

Nick Jaworski:
Suddenly now, we go, “Great. Now, we don’t have a television” and “Can I fix this television?” and the emotional hit to that of going, “Great, I just bought this a year ago”, all the other things. I feel… That rearranged my morning. I’m trying to figure out, can I fix it? Is there a warranty? What does that look like? I am in the space where I feel like Todd is sort of my boss. He’s my cat. He does dictate a lot of what happens, so I am in that space of going, “My plans have suddenly changed and I have to regroup.”

Courtney Baker:
I do think today will be really valuable. I mean, I think we’re specifically talking about your boss, because I think that is a pain point a lot of us feel from time to time, but I think it’s true when your cat does something they shouldn’t be doing…

Nick Jaworski:
He’s in charge, apparently.

Courtney Baker:
But so many people work from home or work for themselves. Essentially, you still have a boss. It could be your very best client or… I don’t know, your business partner. I think there are lots of people that could fill this role of boss in this episode. Let’s see if it works. Let’s see, Nick, if… What’s your cat’s name?

Nick Jaworski:
It’s Todd.

Verbs Boyer:
Todd the cat.

Courtney Baker:
Okay. Todd. Let’s see how to help you deal with Todd today. This works so well. I’m so glad your cat has a person’s name.

Nick Jaworski:
We have Todd and we have Greg.

Courtney Baker:
Todd and Greg. It’s hard.

Verbs Boyer:
My question is, do either of them resemble sweater cat?

Nick Jaworski:
No, they don’t.

Verbs Boyer:
Okay.

Nick Jaworski:
I don’t tell them that either of them are that cool. I can say that today, because I’m mad at my cat.

Verbs Boyer:
Today, we’re going to help answer those questions by walking you through four steps to get you where you need to go.
Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Monday. I’m Verbs, here with Courtney Baker and Blake Stratton. Happy Monday to you.

Blake Stratton:
Happy Monday to you, Verbs. It’s good to be here with both of you. Virtually speaking, that is.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. Happy Monday. Obviously, we’re in this scenario. We’ve got hypothetical bosses, Todd, and this happens to all of us at some point. You’ve had your… You’ve done your weekly preview. You’ve even got your daily big three, and your boss comes in and throws a giant wrench into your day. We’ve got four steps to walk you through how to deal with that. The first one is to lead with, “Yes.” I know that maybe not what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling in that moment, but if your boss comes in with a time-sensitive request, it actually is an opportunity.
Again, I know that it doesn’t always seem like that, but if you think about it now, ahead of time, before it starts, maybe in the moment, you’ll be able to see it for what it is, so you have the opportunity to really shine in that moment and it gives you the opportunity to maybe even make your boss look good because it’s time-sensitive for them as well. That’s why they’re asking you for it. And so, lead with “Yes” and have the opportunity to earn the reputation for reliably solving problems. Okay, so that’s the first step, is just to come in it with a “Yes” attitude.

Verbs Boyer:
I feel like I’m having a bit of a problem with this first step.

Courtney Baker:
Are you? How about you start with “Lead with Yes”?

Verbs Boyer:
Therein lies my problem. If I start with yes, as we go into this second step, which is take a step back, when we’re taking a step back, we’re saying, hey, this seems like it’s an urgent situation as our boss is bringing it up, and it’s tempting to just react to what they’re asking us to do in which we would say yes, but what if yes is not the answer that we could legitimately go with at that time? Does that make sense?

Courtney Baker:
Again, with this first step, you’re leading with “Yes”, more in you’re being in your mindset. You are coming to this as a person that is willing to engage in solving problems.

Verbs Boyer:
I like that.

Courtney Baker:
Now, we’re going to walk you through the next couple of steps that are going to help you assess how to deal with this. But from the beginning, what your boss really wants, before anything else, is to see you as a collaborator in meeting the objective of getting the work done. And so, if you come at it with that attitude, you’re going to be much more successful at the next three steps.

Verbs Boyer:
I like that. Thank you for that addition, Courtney. Now, we can proceed with the rest of the podcast.

Blake Stratton:
The second step is to take a step back. What this means is sometimes when you get a request, it is urgent or very much seems urgent, and you abandon whatever you’re doing and you just start reacting as if something’s literally on fire. We use the analogy, “There’re fires I got to put out.” The reality is, most of the time… Unless you’re a firefighter, then please just don’t take a step back. In this case, slide down that [inaudible 00:06:57] from the second floor and put on and react, please. But if you’re not a literal firefighter, it pays to even take five minutes or 10 minutes to resist the temptation to just start engaging in the work and to go, “Okay, great. Now, things have changed. The landscape of my day is changing.” Rather than simply react and jump in and start fixing, take a breath and step back and move to step three, which is…

Verbs Boyer:
Step three would be assess implications. This is probably my favorite step of today, assessing the implications. As Courtney mentioned, yes, we want to be in the posture of being ready to help creatively solve problems that come up to us or solve tasks, or maybe it’s a project that’s pivoting. We want to be in that posture to say, “Yes, let’s figure it out.” But when we get to this point of assessing the actual situation and looking at what are the implications of the request that our boss is making, because with that, there’s going to be some other things that do need to shift to the side for that moment until that thing is taken care of.
This is the moment where we have to look through all those solutions. What can be deferred? What are some new priorities, and how will we need to allocate our time to do what our boss is asking us in this change? And so, I think when we get to this step, then we can actually… We’re armed with the information that we need to go back and really define to our boss, “Hey, we can do this. We’re ready to do it. This is what it’s going to take. This is how long it’s going to take, and this is what may need to be paused while we work on this current situation that you want us to take care of.”

Courtney Baker:
Once you’ve finished those three steps, you’re coming into it, step one, you’re having an attitude of “Yes”, you’re taking a step back and then assessing the implications. Then in step four, your recalibrating expectations. You’ve already recalibrated your expectations during the last step. Now, it’s time to recalibrate others’ expectations. This might be the time where you’ve got to go back to your boss and give them a timeline on when they can expect whatever they’ve requested, or it might be a time where you’re updating them on some other projects that you were working on to let them know, “Hey, I’m going to have to reprioritize these things and make sure that’s cool”, basically get their feedback on that. And then, you’ve got to recalibrate expectations of other collaborators. It could be other projects that people were waiting for things from you on, or it may just be, “Hey, I’ve got to pull in some other people to actually get what my boss has urgently requested done today.”

Verbs Boyer:
Courtney, question for you. As a boss, do you have an example of maybe a heavy duty pivot that you showed up Monday and just let your team know, “Hey, guys. I know we’ve been going this way, but we now need to go this way”?

Courtney Baker:
Yes, I certainly have. Actually recently… No, it wasn’t like a Monday morning, but there was a project, a big project, that really everybody in our company had been working on, but we had to change pass, and some work had already been started on that project. I had to say, “Hey, we need to pause on that. I need you to work on this new direction that I’m laying out.” I think that the reason I really like this content and even that very first step of, hey, start with an attitude of “Yes” is because in that moment, it is really easy to do the exact opposite of that. It is so… Everything in us wants to actually put our heels on the ground and just like, “No, this is not what we had going on here. This is not what I’ve been working for.”

Verbs Boyer:
This is not on my daily big three today.

Courtney Baker:
I mean, there are so many times… I think so many people that rise up in leadership have the ability to look at changes or things that are coming from their boss and say, “Okay. Yeah, This is different than what I was expecting, but how do I come at this with an attitude of ‘Yes’? How can I actually be a great team player here?” So many times, I see those people are the ones that rise up in leadership roles in the future. It’s a really great skill, no matter where you are in an organization.

Verbs Boyer:
Sure.

Courtney Baker:
I do want to say, on behalf of people that lead people, one… In general, I don’t think bosses are just looking for how to blow up your day. I don’t think that’s the [inaudible 00:12:26], even though I know sometimes it can feel like that. That’s the first thing. The second thing to other people, if you lead people, I think one thing that I learned early on was to make sure that I’m communicating the context for what I’m asking and the real goal, rather than just like, “Hey, go do this thing.” Because a lot of times, the people on my team can solve the problem better than I can if I will give them the context and what I’m trying to achieve. And so, so many times when I trust them with that information, they will exceed my expectations versus just like, “Hey, go do this, the thing that I think should be the way that you do it.” And so, not only are my expectations exceeded, but also gives them the opportunity to really showcase their talent. It’s really a win-win for everybody.

Verbs Boyer:
It’s that time once again to where we get to hear about your questions that you’ve posed in the community. Our producer, Nick, will now pose that said question. Nick, what do you have for us?

Nick Jaworski:
Thank you, Verbs. I like that. That was such a formal setup. I appreciate it. All right. This question is from Amy. I’m actually sharing this because our dear Blake participated in this conversation, so I thought it might be nice to have him talk a little bit about it. Amy writes, “How do you treat goals that will take all year to complete? This year, one of my goals is to get published by the end of the year. I knew when I set the goal that it would take a full 12 months to complete the necessary steps, and it would be delusional to think that I could compress this goal into a single quarter. But when I set my quarterly goals, does that annual goal effectively become four goals, one per quarter? It seems that the Full Focus recommendation to only focus on two to three goals per quarter that a year long project effectively becomes four annual goals. How do you handle this?” Blake, I leave it to you.

Blake Stratton:
She had also added some context where it became clear that her actual struggle wasn’t understanding that as a concept, but of the implications of that concept. Meaning, in the planner, there’s all these life domains and you go, “Man, I want to… When I get in goal-setting mode, I want to improve every area of my life and I want to have balance.” That’s a word people bring up a lot. “I want to have balance.” Meaning, I want all areas of my life to be improving. The way, I think, I’ve got to do that is to have a goal in each of those domains. But in Amy’s case, all of a sudden, she has a goal that she realizes is going to crowd out her ability to do that. What I shared in the group that I’ll paraphrase for you listening is, essentially, that balance comes through strategic imbalance. Balance comes through strategic imbalance.
There’s never balance. Everything’s always out of balance, but it’s strategic because you are balancing. In other words, if you think about, “How do I achieve balance in my life?”, you don’t look at how can I set a big goal in every life domain, because if you did that, you probably wouldn’t be able to achieve very much in any life domain. But what Amy has done is set a really big, exciting goal that, this year, that’s going to improve one life domain, and she may focus on another later or next year. That’s one piece, is that there is going to be some imbalance. But the other good news is that if you set your goals correctly, you’re looking at it, the analogy, the word picture I think of as a domino, you’re thinking of, if I set this goal, how does that benefit my other life domains?
I posed two questions for her to help her think through this. One question was, which life domains will not be indirectly and positively affected by my pursuit of getting published? Because the truth is, some life domains will. Let’s say, for instance, if you have an income goal, that’s going to affect your domains of your avocational, your hobbies or your relationships. If you have a marital goal, that’s going to help you… That’ll improve your parental domain or your health or your emotional domain.
Everything affects other things, right? By asking the question, which life domains will not be indirectly or positively affected by my pursuit of that goal, now you’ve realized, okay, what life domains should I use? This leads to the second question. What is one goal I could pursue that would create the biggest domino effect on those remaining life domains? That was the thought. Hopefully, you listening, if you’ve felt that way as well like, “I’m not going to have balance if I just focus on one goal”, no, no, you will have balance because you focused on one goal, and you can use those questions to help you figure out what else you may want to address.

Verbs Boyer:
Thanks for joining us on Focus on This.

Courtney Baker:
This is the most productive podcast on the entire worldwide web. Share it with your friends and don’t forget to join us in our Full Focus Planner community on Facebook and get some more questions answered by Blake. In the meantime, we’ll be back next Monday with another great episode. Until then, stay focused.

Verbs Boyer:
Stay focused.

Blake Stratton:
Stay focused.
Because when you are focused in your plan, and then you’re planning and you’re focused, you got your weekly big three.

Verbs Boyer:
Dude, that’s true. Here’s a little story about a man named