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Strong Leaders Serve with Teri Schmidt
The leadership podcast for people who are in leadership not for the status and power, but instead to use that status and power to turn potential into performance for positive change.
Hosted by Teri Schmidt, Executive Leadership Coach & CEO of Strong Leaders Serve.
Each episode we focus on supporting leaders who are dealing with the overwhelming realities of transitioning into and operating in roles where their success isn't just about their own performance anymore, but about leading through complexity, ambiguity, and stakes their old playbook never had to handle. We focus on naming what's actually happening underneath the overwhelm, and finding a way back to clarity without pretending there's a five-step fix.
Strong Leaders Serve with Teri Schmidt
182. Efficiency vs. Resilience with Tom Geraghty
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ever wonder if squeezing every ounce of efficiency from your team could actually leave you vulnerable when the unexpected strikes?
In this episode, Teri welcomes back Tom Geraghty for a candid look at the critical—and often overlooked—tension between efficiency and resilience.
Together, they unpack why hyper-optimization can lead to burnout and brittleness, and share practical strategies for leaders to build adaptability into their teams without sacrificing results.
Resources:
- Tom's website: https://psychsafety.co.uk
- Sign up for Tom's newsletter: https://psychsafety.co.uk/newsletter
- Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraghtytom
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-m-schmidt/
Get 1-on-1 leadership support from Teri here: https://www.strongleadersserve.com/coaching
Set up an intro call with Teri: https://calendly.com/terischmidt/discoverycall
Have you ever found yourself wondering if pushing your team for greater efficiency might actually be making it harder for them to handle unexpected challenges? I'm Terry Schmidt, your host and leadership coach at Strong Leaders Serve, where I partner with caring driven leaders like you who are under pressure to deliver results through others. Leaders who can't afford to lead on autopilot or figure it out as they go, because they need to bring the clarity and trust that deliver real impact fast. Today I am thrilled to welcome back Tom Garrity, Founder and CEO of Psych Safety. If you caught our earlier conversation in episode 1 48 about boosting team performance by reducing cognitive load through psychological safety, you know, Tom brings a rare combination of research depth and real world practicality. In this episode, we're diving into attention. Every leader is feeling right now, balancing efficiency and resilience. So let's get started. I. Welcome back to the Strong Leaders Serve Podcast. Tom, it's so nice to have you again.
Tom GeraghtyOh, it's so good to be back. Thank you so much.
Teri SchmidtYeah. And for those of you who haven't had an opportunity to listen to our last conversation, it was on episode 1 48, a fascinating conversation where we were talking about cognitive load and the relationship with psychological safety and how you can improve your team performance when you're thinking about both of those. so definitely it was a conversation that, was one of the highlights of. Of my time doing these guest interviews. So thank you for that. And thank you again for coming back on. I saw your newsletter talking about the tension between efficiency and resilient, and I thought that is a topic that the compassionate driven leaders that listen to this podcast are probably dealing with. 'cause I know there's a lot of pressure out there, so I'm happy to have you on to talk about it.
Tom GeraghtyI'm really excited to do so. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it's, yeah, it's a really, really interesting topic, so thank you. Yeah.
Teri SchmidtYeah, definitely. Well, I'm curious, you know, just to start off, what piqued your interest in this tension between efficiency and resilience? And I'd love to hear, you know, if you have a story that you are able to share about how you've witnessed that in the organizations that you work with.
Tom GeraghtyYeah, so I think, I think this is one of those tensions that exists in, in almost ev in, in, probably in every organization, and I. It's one of those things that once, once you see it, you can't unsee it. The, this constant drive, this constant pressure and incentivization to be more efficient, to be more lean, To, you know, to reduce waste and, optimize everything, is probably almost u ubiquitous across. From tiny one to, to massive multinationals and, and people are rewarded and incentivized, and praised when. Particularly managers and leaders when, when we make something more efficient, when we, you know, and it sounds like a great thing to do, right? And it often is, efficiency is often a good thing. And, you know, by, reducing waste and making things more cost effective and things like that, we, we get praise and we get rewarded for doing so, but we rarely get rewarded for making things more resilient because resilience is so much more difficult to measure. It's so much more high, so much more difficult to put a number.
Teri SchmidtYeah.
Tom GeraghtyYou know, we can measure efficiency in sort of things per other thing, like tasks per minute or, you know, widgets created per person or whatever it is. And that's easy to measure and we can easily, you know, plot it on a nice dashboard and a nice graph and point to some impact that we've had and, and something like that. But it's much harder to measure resilience. It's, it's much harder to. to demonstrate what resilience looks like in practice, because also resilience is often only seen in response to something changing or some threat or change happening. And so we often only realized that we were not resilient after the fact when it's a bit too late to add it in. And so I've seen this in, in all sorts of organizations. So I think the first time I saw it in my career, so early on in my career, I worked for a motor, a large motor retail group, and there was a great deal of pressure. It was very metric driven, very numbers driven, and there was a great deal of pressure on, I. On being efficient on, on sort of maximizing our output and productivity per minute of the day and things like that. And we were, we had lots of systems to record time sheets and, and tasks done and, and all of this sort of stuff. And it, and it all appeared like on face of it, it all appeared to hum along, but everyone was sort of maxed out and heavily utilized and, and it only took a minor shock. If you like, like a, to send everything sideways because there was no, there was no adapt adaptive capacity in the system, in the organization to respond. When, when a, when a, you know, when a, when a competitor launched a new product or did a, did a different thing, or suddenly the market changes or we have a bunch of people go off sick and whenever anything like that happened, everything went absolutely sideways, really quickly. And it was sort of at that. It was through that experience, and it was very early on in my career that I realized that there was a tension between those things. And it took, took me a long time to articulate what I was trying to, really trying to, understand.
Teri SchmidtYeah.
Tom GeraghtyBut, but yeah, that, that was the first time I saw it. And I, and I've seen it in all sorts of firms since, and consulting firms, which is what I, I've got, you know, more recent experience of working in large consulting firms. Large consulting firms are a nightmare for this because.
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtythe people in a consulting firm are the billable units. And so we actually, you know, you'll hear about percentage utilization and things like that and constantly trying to up that so that people are, people are utilized at 90 or a hundred percent. And of course, if someone's utilized a hundred percent There is no space left to even recover or, or adapt to anything. And, and, you know, you're, you're basically just planning it's burnout as a, as an organizational
Teri SchmidtRight. That is so well put. And so, Depressing, I guess you'd say burnout as an organizational strategy. Um, but it is, it's, it is just dressed up probably in nicer words than that. But, and nicer charts and, and graphs. Um, but definitely is, that you bring up such a good point of, you know, people being the units there and, and looking at their utilization.
Tom GeraghtyYeah. Yeah. And of course this is, you know, since, since you know Taylorism and, and things like that, we've, we've, known, although we haven't always behaved this way, but we've known that treating people as machines as units of productivity alone is a, is a route to failure. It's a, it's a route to burnout, it's a route to, it's a route to bad things happening. It's a sh it, it can be effective or at least, hmm. It can achieve some results in the short term, but it's not a sustainable approach.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Yeah. It can achieve the results when everything's going right and you don't have that minor shock to the system like you were talking about. And that can, I think, lull leaders into a false sense of security as, as they're seeing that 'cause the me measurements that, and metrics that they are aiming for are headed in the right direction and those. Silent metrics, the ones that are a little bit harder to get our handle on. You know, even I think about how resilience is measured beyond just after the fact. And the closest thing I can think to it is like, you know, an annual engagement survey where, where people are asking questions about wellbeing, and kind of assessing that, but. That has its own problems in itself and that it, you know, isn't measured frequently. It is self-reported. It's, you know, so there, there's a lot of, a lot of challenges there that don't allow that to have the credibility as the metric related to efficiency. I.
Tom Geraghtyyeah, yeah, definitely. It's, because these things are often, you know, they are self-reported. They have to be, they're only as accurate as the safety that people feel in being honest, I. And of course they're, they're only as accurate as, as the number of people that actually respond. And, and ironically, if if we're, if we're surveying an entire organization, we're we're getting answers from the people who a love to fill out surveys. You've got those people who just love filling out surveys and you've got the people who have the time to fill out the survey. So of course, the people who are maxed out, burning out, super utilized, they're not gonna sit and fill out a, an engagement survey. So we're not hearing from
Teri Schmidtright. Yeah. So true. So true. Oh, well, definitely. Definitely some, issues to work through and, and problems to be solved there. So I'm glad we're having this conversation. so, you know, one, one thing that comes up with efficiency is. Standardization. And I'm not, I I went down a rabbit hole in all of your newsletters as I was, you know, looking into this topic. So I'm not sure which one this came from, but you were talking about the invisible cost of standardization. and as you know, our audience is, is full of compassionate leaders and they care about wellbeing, but they also are driven and care about results. So. They are probably looking at standardization as a way to optimize things as well. And I'm curious from you, you know, how can they tell when they've optimized too far, when the efficiency is actually undermining the team's capacity to adapt or recover.
Tom GeraghtyI think this is really, this is a really good question, and it's, and it's probably one of those with a, with, an answer that is, or maybe not with an answer, but, but I, I don't know, I think I'm gonna disappoint everyone, but, the, I think there's, so, yeah. Just to come back to this idea of standardization, I think. The, the idea of standardization sort of comes back to manufacturing and, and related sort of sorts of industries where we recognize that there's a, there's a real power, a real strength in standardization and making sure that we're using sort of as few different parts and components and tools and things as possible. Right. And it kind of makes sense. But there's also a danger in that, you know, and if so, if we think about technology and organizations, for example, if we think about the tools people use. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, there was just one, one tool, one platform that everyone used and we didn't need to use any other platforms. And of course this is quite a seductive idea. And of course this is what Microsoft and Salesforce and very, in various other vendors try to capitalize on. I, I desire to just sort of neatly compartmentalize, and avoid the tool sprawl that that often occurs in organizations. But of course, people have different. Varying needs and use cases and contexts and accessibility needs as well. And so we often, you know, of course we end up introducing more and more different tools to get more and more various different types of job done because if we standardize too much, then we end up with a tool or device that doesn't really work for anyone, but is equally bad for everyone. And so that, you know, that's one danger of standardizing. Just in one context too, too far. The,
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtythe challenge is that it's very difficult to know it where if we're getting close to that boundary, because we'll know once we've gone past it, we'll get people complaining and kicking off that, justifiably the tools aren't fit for purpose and they can't do their job properly
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtyat, but at that point we've already passed that boundary. We're gonna have to rewind back. And some of these, some of these changes are hard to, hard to rewind. So I would say one, of the best, you know, there's, there are certain indicators, of heading towards a state where we've maybe over standardized, but a lot of that is qualitative feedback. You know, talking to the people who are, who are actually doing the job
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtythe sharp end. Having those conversations, what is it like to do your job on a day-to-day basis and how is it changing over time and trying to map or trying to get an idea of how utilized people are, And how heavily utilized people are and do they have any slack at the end of the week? Do they have any capacity for adapting to. This new, you know, a sudden competitor in the market or a, or shock like covid or recession. How do we have the capacity in the system to suddenly adapt and do something different?
Teri SchmidtYeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I, I don't think that's necessarily a disappointing answer. I think what I'm hearing you bring up there is that the main thing you can do, or perhaps the first important step as a leader is have an awareness that there is a point. Where optimization is no longer a good thing or where standardization is no longer a good thing, and be able to recognize some of the risks that come along with that so that you can ask those questions to your people and have a sense of, of what's going on.
Tom GeraghtyYeah, yeah, yeah. And of course what happens in, in practice in many organizations is that that pendulum constantly swings one way and the other. Constantly trying to find that, that sweet spot. And of course, that sweet spot always moves because the whole, the real world is, is ever changing. And part, part of really the reason that pendulum swings one way, the other is because. Will get a leader, a new, a new leader will come in who's very maybe efficiency driven and sort of optimization and all of this, and cost benefits and stuff. And, and we'll do loads of things to optimize and increase efficiency. Then, you know, at the end of a two or three year tenure, they'll be able to show their, or these are all the big changes I've made. This is all the money I've saved, and then they can walk away and a new leader comes in finding. Everything's grinding to a bit of a halt. It's very, it's very efficient, but it's, it's not agile. It's not, and, and there's a
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtyand it's very brittle.
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtyat that point we start to introduce new tools and people start to do more, you know, and there's when we might see more innovation and more adaptation and that's great. And they, and they, because the metrics that we, particularly at a leadership level, sometimes the metrics that we measure ourselves on, we sort of choosing ourselves almost. Is, this is what I'm doing and this is the impact that I'm having. And we sort of ignore the the other metrics that are maybe, not looking, or maybe not metrics, but outcomes that are not doing so well in the background.
Teri SchmidtRight, right. And you know, depending on how the organization is structured too, there can be a whole lot more motivation for short term results like you were talking about. You know, I, did, you know, these 10 things and I saved the company this much money and now I'm ready to move on because I know that my job is gonna change every three years or whatever is set up in that organization. You know, that motivation to achieve the short term results as opposed to having that longer term outcome view about how is this lever I'm pulling going to affect the longer
Tom GeraghtyYeah, yeah,
Teri Schmidtin thriving?
Tom Geraghtyyeah. And a cynical person, not necessarily me, but a cynical person might suggest that there are even leaders who, you know, come in, make a lot of changes. I. The in, in the full knowledge in the short term. They'll have some good bene, you know, they'll, they'll show some upticks in performance and metrics in the short term and everyone will clap 'em on the back and then they get to leave because they know in the long term there's gonna be some pain to pay. But they're not gonna be around for that one. So they don't need to worry about that.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just, I'm not, I'm not getting this, this is going to be an uplifting conversation at some point, but my, my mind is going to politics and government and everything, but we're, I'll, we'll, we'll keep it business focused. Definitely. 'Cause there, that might take much longer than we have for this conversation. So.
Tom GeraghtyI, I see exactly where you're going with that. Yeah.
Teri Schmidtyeah, definitely stay there. So, you know, I think staying on this topic, there was a, graph that I saw on one of your newsletters, focused on utilization. And it was, it was showing the kind of tipping point around 80% utilization, where wait times and stress kind of exploded. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that for people who haven't had the opportunity to see it, but also. Talk about it in the light of, you know, leaders who have no necessarily intuitive sense for when they're getting to that tipping point. You know, how can they design team rhythms or decision making that respect that limit even when they are getting demands, you know, coming in from all angles.
Tom GeraghtyYeah, so this is one of those, in fact, this is one of those charts. So this is a graph that represents, a, a simplified version of queuing theory and little's law and things like that. And it's really, it's a fascinating graph and it's probably, it's one of those things that I think should be taught in sort of management 1 0 1 classes, but never is. And, and it is because it's fascinating and very visual. Mathematically, demonstrable, case of, of how, how utilization. So it, it is a relationship between wait, utilization and wait time. And it comes from initial work in telephone exchanges in 1920s where there is a sweet spot for most teams and most functions. And you can see where it comes from. Telephone exchanges where. We have a certain tolerance for the amount of time we can wait on someone else. And this, this also depends on how, how, integrated, how linked together team members are and things like that. But essentially this graph shows that as you begin to get above sort of 80% utilization wait time begins to increase exponentially. And it's essentially because we're dividing. The, time utilized by the time free. And so as you get higher, that number goes exponentially high. And so, you know, at at 80% it's like the proxy is four minutes but at 99% it's 99 minutes. So if you've got a team that worked very closely together, let's say a tech team or an engineering team or product team, then. Things might be chugging along nicely at sort of 75% utilization, but then one more thing comes in, tips 'em into 85%, and suddenly everything seems to have come to a screeching halt because just to ask Bob or Jane how to, you know, access this API documentation slows the task down by an hour or two, whereas it used to only slow it down by five minutes.
Teri SchmidtYeah.
Tom Geraghtyhas a knock on effect on everyone else in the team. And everything comes from screeching halt. And we see the same effect going on in, emergency departments, call centers and all, and all sorts of, all sorts of contexts. And what's, what's really powerful about this, in fact, the visual for this is so powerful and easy to understand for anyone managing teams. Practice is somewhat more difficult of course, because how do we actually measure utilization? And that's very contextual. One, but this is actually where Google's 20% time. Do you know about Google's 20%
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm. I do.
Tom GeraghtyAnd so this is the idea, and this is the almost infamous idea that Google give their engineers or insist almost that, that their engineers spend 20% of their time on innovative, interesting side projects and stuff. And the, the outcome of of this is some in really interesting products and services, many of which never see the light of day, but some do. And that's really powerful. But the actual rationale for this 20% time was not. Innovation and let's make some extra cool things. The rationale for it was to make sure that engineers spent 20% of their time on interruptible tasks so that they were available to the rest of the team and they weren't committed to, to certain work. So you're always spending 20% of your time on stuff that, that someone can, come over to you and say, oh, hey, hey Bob. Hey Jane. How do I get, how can you help me with this thing?
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtywhere that idea comes from. And we can build, you know, we don't necessarily have to use that exact same model, but we can build that same concept into our own, patterns and ways of working in our teams.
Teri SchmidtYeah, I, actually never knew that, that that was the original reason for that. I, I heard you reference it in relation to that, but I didn't realize that was the rationale behind it. So it's introducing that, that slack, as you said, into the system so that it's interruptible time. If we aren't Google, I mean, arguably any team could say, we wanna use this time, you know, and say that we're using it for innovation. 'cause that's probably more likely to not be seen as lazy or wasteful. But what are, I'm just thinking about that leader out there that's like, okay, I kind of get this, you know, I've, I've read the newsletter letters, which obviously we'll link in the show notes, but. I just don't understand how I can go to my boss or you know, my peers that are wanting my team to do something and say, I'm sorry, we need some time. That's interruptible.
Tom GeraghtyYeah. Um, and, and so I do think sometimes, and I, so I've certainly managed teams and departments where we've had to be a bit sneaky about this because I. Because, because people look at metrics and people look at metrics of utilization and stuff like that. And that what they don't wanna see is, oh, well what are you doing with, you've got, you've got 20% of your time free. You could be working on this new project or just, just, just add this extra feature into your sprint, or something like that. So, so there are ways to, to draw in work that's valuable. You know, we sort of talk about this 20% time this, this slack time. And it might not be 20%, it might be 30% or. 10% whatever suits the team. But we need to build in some slack at least. Otherwise, we're very brittle as a, as a team, as a unit, as a system. But that, that slack doesn't mean just sort of sitting and staring into space or. Reading. I mean, I was gonna say reading books. Reading books. It might be, reading books because if your team is particularly knowledge driven, and maybe that's a valuable way to spend that 20% of your time reading research papers and articles and books and stuff, or listening to podcasts or whatever. So it might be that, but it might also be that you've got 20% of your time actually allocated for maybe paying down tech debt, maybe. Maybe you even pre allocate a certain amount of time for unplanned work. And I used to use this approach quite a lot because a really powerful way to measure one, one powerful measure of work is measuring planned versus unplanned work and the ratio thereof, right? So if, and almost more interesting than the ratio of it is the trend in what direction is it? Is the amount ofAnd work going up or is it going down?
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtyif it's going up, then we've got a system problem that we need to address. If it's going down, then that's great. We can keep that going. Um, and depending on what that ratio is, we might want to actually allocate some of our time because we know the unplanned work. We dunno what it's gonna be, but we know there will be unplanned work. And so we, we allocate time for that and then we can sort of. Label it afterwards.
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtywork always takes priority over planned work.
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm.
Tom GeraghtyThat's the nature of it. And so by sort of getting in front of it and saying, okay, well we're going to spend, we're going to allocate 20, let's say 25% of our time on unplanned work, then we sort of get in front of that problem and we actually over time, so we're building in that slack, we're building in a capacity to adapt and respond. To these challenges as well as hopefully, having the capacity to actually create systems and make the changes so that that volume of, of unplanned work gets less and less over time.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Yeah. And I think that that is a totally defensible way to do it because it, shows that, you know, you're being very data-driven. You're being very intentional about it. I. Imagine this looks different for different organizations, but I'm curious, you know, is that, say you had 20%, is that the same time of day, the same day of week for everyone? Or what's the
Tom GeraghtySo is it.
Teri Schmidtway, or,
Tom Geraghtyyeah, this is, and this, so this is a very key point as well. Actually, there's not a great deal of use. I don't know, there's some use, but it's not as useful to have everyone's 20% say on a Friday, because then everyone's available to each other all at the same time, but no one's available to each other on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. So what we want to do is somehow spread that out around. So the, it's more like a fabric within the work. And maybe, you know, maybe someone's, so it is a general, it increases the general availability in Slack throughout the team throughout the time because yeah, it is if everyone's free to each other on a Friday, then well, that's nice, but, what happens when something goes wrong on a Monday?
Teri SchmidtExactly in, in a sense you're just shortening the week. And, you, you're still brittle for those four days and,
Tom GeraghtyExactly.
Teri Schmidtand, you know, maybe, maybe a little bit more flexible the other day, but that doesn't matter because you haven't solved the problem of being brittle and, and reducing efficiency by that brittleness, if that's a word.
Tom GeraghtyYeah, yeah. No, absolutely. It is. Because, that brittleness can look like efficiency. It can look like a finely tuned, highly optimized machine, which is what it is. But, but, but the most finely tuned, highly optimized machines are also those that are most vulnerable to, to risks and changes and threats and bumps in the road.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Right, right. And I think it's fair to say that those bumps in the road and those threats and those risks are probably more likely than ever, in the current times that we are living in.
Tom GeraghtyYes, yes, I absolutely agree. You know, the more there's this term vuca, isn't it? Volatile. Uncertain, complex and ambiguous and, I'm not always a massive fan of the term vuca, but I, think because we've always been in complex, tricky, there was no period of history that has ever been, oh, that was smooth sailing for a while. You know, it's, it always, it always feels like a challenge and it's always gonna be complex. But yeah, there are certainly periods of time where we need to make sure that we, we intentionally. Have some capacity to adapt and change and respond to threats and quite quickly as well. And unfortunately, probably at the moment now. So, yeah, I would say now is the time to build into in that slack and that add adaptability because now is where we need it. Maybe more so than, than recently, unfortunately. Now is also the time where there's an awful lot of pressure. On leaders to be more efficient. And so these are there's a tension coming right back to what we talked about at the start. There's a tension between efficiency and resilience and they're pulling against each other.
Teri SchmidtYeah, yeah. What advice would you have for leaders that are dealing with this or you know, have you seen leaders who are effectively handling this tension?
Tom GeraghtyI think, yeah, so, and I think there are some really good examples of addressing this in practice. It's gonna look different for all sorts of different organizations, but I like one, one good example is actually at Netflix, the Chaos Monkey at Netflix, who sort of intentionally tried to build resilience into the system by intentionally breaking it and, Having a system that that is like, we know it's there, but it's unpredictable enough that we don't know what it's gonna break. And so it's sort of keeping teams on, and you wouldn't be able to do that if you didn't have the slack in the system. If the teams were operating at full capacity, the Chaos Monkey would just break stuff and it would just all over. So that's Chaos Monkeys or those sorts of mechanisms in organizations, are really, really powerful. We, in fact, I used to run a team where we, every now and then we would intentionally. Lock someone out of of work for the day and we, we, we would give them some petty cash. They get to spend the day out in the out, go out for coffee, read some books, go to the library, have a nice day. It's sort of a bonus holiday. And we'd get to work out what happened in the organization without them present. Unplanned. Like, because holiday's one thing, you plan to go on holiday. You don't plan to simply not turn up one day. So, that was a really powerful way to. Sort of examine what, what happens without those, people there. But then there's, you know, there's loads of other things we can do. We need to, we need to, we need to foster psychological safety in, in our team so that, people can actually say to us, I'm at capacity, or I'm over capacity. Even that's, you know, that's a very hard thing to say to a boss or manager. Especially when there are promotions on the on the line or there are jobs on the line. None of us want to be the person that's saying, I'm at capacity, or I'm over capacity and I need to do less. That's a really difficult conversation to have. But it's, but we need to be able to have it because ultimately it's putting the organization risk as well, not just them.
Teri SchmidtMm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that did. You know, it brings up a excellent point, and. You know, ties back to our last conversation and ties back to all the work that you do with, with teams and organizations around psychological safety. Yeah, it's so, it's so true because even getting back to those like engagement surveys we were talking about for measure, you know, as one of the sole measures of resilience, it would be so much more timely and effective if the person feels safe enough. To just give you that input, that data, that feedback right away, as opposed to waiting for an anonymous survey that they may or may not complete.
Tom Geraghtyyeah, yeah. Exactly right. And this is, this is part of the risk of those sorts of infrequent check-ins and surveys and retros and things like that. If we only run those retro, those surveys and things once every six months or once every year.
Teri SchmidtMm.
Tom Geraghtyif something starts to go wrong a few weeks after the last survey, you're not gonna find out about it for nearly a year. There's, there's a lot of, that's a, that's a lot of time for things to go sideways.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Yeah. And, and as leaders, we can't afford
Tom Geraghtyno, no, no, exactly. So we, need to create the conditions to where people can tell us if something is wrong, straight away, even if something isn't wrong yet, but they feel like. This, we are heading in a bad direction. There's something looming on the horizon and we're, you know, that that is a, that's a very strong signal and we, and, and even 'cause we, and, and it's easier to address because it's easier to address it before it goes wrong. Right. So, so those like tap into people's spidey sense of what's going on in the teams and organizations. But that, yeah, that requires us to create the conditions and make it safe for people to do so, and that they, they believe there, there won't be a risk in some way if they do that.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I know you, you, you know, teach multiple courses and workshops on creating these conditions, but I guess, you know, in the short time that we have remaining, if there is a leader that's out there like, oh yeah, you know, I haven't heard, I haven't thought about that. I really need to be, hopefully they've thought about it, but they, I haven't thought about the impact of. Not having this slack time of the tension between efficiency and resilience and because I'm worried about my job, I've just been focusing on efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. If you could give one or two. Ways they could get started on creating the safety they need on their team so that people feel comfortable even in that environment and coming to them and saying that they're at capacity. What would that be?
Tom GeraghtyI think so there's probably two. I think there's two things. Then I'm gonna try to make these sort of a bit complimentary. 'cause one addresses, utilization, one addresses psychological safety. So what the utilization one is, I'd consider how you could apply work in progress limits. To your team. So this is essentially a, a collective agreement amongst the team is this is how much work we can do in a given time, like a week. And we agree amongst each other to not take on more than that. And this, this applies at an individual level and a, and a and a team level, right? So you might have like a team of, you know, a, a team limit of 30 things and a, and an individual, individual limit of five things. And we agree collectively to not go above that. And, that's a powerful thing to do because there's always a pressure to, to, there's always a pressure to do more. There's always, we, even unintentionally reward people for doing more. So set those firm limits and they, they, those limits should be co-created and agreed by people on the team. And in terms of psychological safety, 'cause we, we require psychological safety to have that discussion about WIP work.
Teri SchmidtUh
Tom Geraghtyword gets tricky and psychological safety looks different to everyone, but probably the first thing to do is consider the power gradients in the team who's, and particularly for, for a leader, you've got a lot of formal power. So there's,
Teri Schmidtmm-hmm.
Tom Geraghtypower gradient there. Steep power gradient are probably the most, the thing that most. Damage. Most damaged psychological safety and most suppress voice. So how can we lower, how can we flatten those power gradients? And that might be informal power, like who's most popular or expert power, like who's the most expert or qualified or has most years experience on the team? And having some discussions about those power gradients and how to flatten them. This might be as simple as making sure that when people come together to have conversations, they, they simply introduce each other by. Their names and what they do. Like, hi, I'm Jane and I, and I'm doing anesthesia today, or I'm, you know, in a, in a different context. I'm Bob and I do ux, instead of saying like, hi, I'm Bob, I'm chief level seven consultant, surgeon General. And I'm Jane and I'm superintendent, chief Warlock, whatever it is. And and you know, these are, because it's a lot easier to simply speak up to Bob or Jane than it is to speak up. Chief superintendent, consultant person., So yeah, addressing those power gradients and and creating psychological safety and having conversations about how much work can we actually do, how much work is realistic.
Teri Schmidtyeah. And and what I'm hearing in both of those too is, is having the conversation, raising the awareness around this is a reality. So you know, the reality is. We want to be a resilient team and we wanna be an efficient team, but there is a place, there's a tipping point and we want to, as a team, make sure that we are keeping an eye on that. So in that first conversation, and you know, the second conversation, just having a conversation about power gradients and Acknowledging the different types of power gradients that may be present and having a conversation with people about. You know, what would it take for us as a team? What norms do we need to put in place so that that is minimized as much as possible?
Tom GeraghtyYeah. Amazing. Yeah, exactly, exactly that. So powerful.
Teri SchmidtYeah. Well, excellent. Well, I always enjoy talking with you, Tom. You're, you're welcome on the podcast anytime. For listeners, if you haven't subscribed to Tom's newsletter, it will definitely be linked in the show notes, and I highly recommend it, every Friday. I enjoy going into my inbox and, and seeing. What thought provoking content you're putting out there. So thank you for that. Thank you for all the work that you do in organizations, and thank you again for this conversation.
Tom GeraghtyOh, thank you so much. Well, thank you. So yeah, thank you so much for having me on. And, yeah, anytime I. Love having these conversations. It's such a pleasure to, to dive deep into some of these, into some of these concepts. So, yeah. Yeah. Thank you again.
As always, thank you for listening. If today's conversation got you thinking differently about how you manage efficiency and resilience on your team, I encourage you to pick one small action you can take this week to build in just a little more slack and see what changes. Have a great week, and I'll talk to you again next week.