Welcome back to Part 2 of this Sunday Story series, where we talk about how our adventures in our vehicle to some of the most remote parts of the planet can teach us all incredible valuable lessons for our leadership.
If you’ve missed part 1, you can check it out here, but to get you up to speed, we are avid “Overland Travellers”. This means we like loading up our tiny little GMC Canyon and travelling to some of the most remote parts of the world - from the Arctic Ocean, Baja and beyond. Every year we typically spend a month or more stopping only for gas, groceries, or incredible experiences as we meander our way through the highways and byways of our beautiful planet. We’re actively planning a multi-year road trip around the world - yes, we’re that serious about it - and through nearly two decades of adventuring this way, we’ve learned a thing or two about how to do it well. And, it just so happens that this is a perfect metaphor for leading through disruption. Why?
Well, when you’re on an adventure like this you truly never know what’s going to happen, and you need to be ready for anything. The goal is reasonably well defined, as is the context, but the specific path is usually not totally clear. No doubt every reader who has leadership experience has been in a similar boat - a rough idea of what you’re there to do, and an understanding of who and why you are doing it (the context), but perhaps the exact method of getting there hasn’t crystallized; the lessons learned from our adventures apply directly to this situation as a leader, and last week we talked about the importance of choosing the right team for your adventure.
This week though, we’re going to talk about something that at face value might seem a bit dull or boring, but it’s one of the most impactful things in the day-to-day experience of a leader (or an adventurer!) - its the processes you have to use every single day, and the power you unlock by organizing them and taking an attitude of continuous improvement.
I’ve described how we’ve outfitted our truck before -the back of it has been replaced with equipment like a fridge, drawers for our stuff, a hot shower system, and more. Every day when we are on an adventure, we’re typically finding ourselves in a new place, but at each stop we have to do the exact same things that we do at home every day - breakfast and coffee in the morning. Laundry once a week. Make the bed and get cleaned up for the day. Make sure our kid’s toys are tidied - we mustn’t forget his favourite monster truck at the campsite, after all! Walk the dog, pay the bills that accrue while we’re away, do some work for Authentik - you get the idea (and yes, we do all this - including laundry - from the truck!). Life on the road is in some ways very different than life at home, but in the core ways it’s the same - we still need to achieve more or less the same daily goals whether we are in a tent or at home. But, in addition to that mix, we also usually have to put on some heavy miles (some of our trips have required a 1,000 km/day average travel distance), make sure we’re building in time to stop at the museums or hiking trails that tell the stories of the places we’re visiting, and plan for the usual curveballs that an adventure throws at us. Not to mention that most daily activities in strange places take longer - every time we stop for groceries, we’re learning a new store layout, and the further we are from home the more likely we are to be dealing with all new brands and nomenclature for food too! In other words, these aren’t vacations - there’s a lot going on, a lot to organize, and a lot of tasks to achieve in a tricky context.
Let’s pick the most basic - making the morning coffee. At home, that’s an easy process that just takes a few moments - boil the water, grind the beans, mix ‘em together and wait a few minutes, add some cream and sugar if that’s your flavour, and you’ve got coffee. But remember at home, everything is already set up - the water comes from turning on the tap. The stove is a button-push and never gets “put away”. The coffee grinder and beans have a designated cupboard space that’s easy to grab, and the mugs hang from their hook under the cabinets. We have that luxury in our homes because we have an abundance of space, utilities, and creature comforts to make it possible, and thus our morning coffee ritual is a short, few minute process.
But imagine trying to make coffee while on the road in a very tiny space that is the back of a truck. You’d have to dig out the stove, hook up the fuel, figure out your water situation - which might mean finding a nearby creek or stream and filtering. You’ll have to find a place to boil the water out of the wind, figure a way to grind the beans, and so much more. And if you do not have a good system - like you do at home - this process is going to take you way, way longer than it should. For most people when they go camping, that’s part of the experience, but for us, it’s an opportunity cost. An extra 30 minutes on morning coffee is 30 minutes we won’t have at the natural hot springs we found at the end of the mountain trail, or at the local farmers market that we stumble upon down a country road.
That’s why we’ve modified the truck the way we have - for us, our morning coffee on the road isn’t that different from the morning coffee at home, and it takes about the same amount of time. The entire process is well organized - we have a particular spot for the pot and stove, and we make the coffee right in the pot with a French Press-style pot lid. Since we only have one cup each, we know they need to be washed in between last night’s supper drink and the next day’s coffee, and so as part of our evening tidy up process that gets done every time. And, since space is at a premium, we don’t worry about grinding fresh beans on the road - we either pre-grind them at home, or grind them at the store when we resupply. Our shower doubles as a convenient source of running water, so we don’t typically need to go finding random creeks at 6 AM to filter our coffee water, and our truck fridge keeps our cream cold and fresh. Our systems, processes, and equipment all work together to make it a seamless, smooth experience that is just as fast as it is at home (except for it being on a tailgate instead of a countertop).
If you take a close look at our vehicle, the amount of work and energy that has gone into designing our systems is obvious, and folks might wonder “Why’d you put so much work into it?”. And the answer is it saves us time, headaches, and frustration every single day when we’re on the road, which makes the purpose of these trips - experiencing the world around us - way more accessible and fun.
In your leadership practice, it’s the exact same thing. There are countless leaders out there that have the knack for inspiring others, making them exceed what they themselves thought they were capable of, and seeing themselves in these wonderful organizational strategies that change lives and improve organizations every day. But your people are going to have a much harder time doing that if they have to fill out a redundant form 3 times to achieve a work result, or if they have to spend 80% of their time in meetings that do not serve a purpose for their work.
In other words, your systems, processes, and workflows make a massive difference to the success of your leadership, just like they do when on our adventures. And yet we so rarely talk about this in the realm of leadership development! These systems - essential in their own way - are what I like to call “Administrivia”, and they are massive capacity drains. You are no doubt surrounded by them! Timesheets, vacation request processes, ordering supplies, booking meetings, taking meeting notes - all of these things are essential to the effective management of your context, and while management and leadership are not the same things, they are directly complimentary and often are functions performed by the same individual human.
As a leader, by carving out time to focus on the systems and processes that your context relies on to function, and making sure these systems and processes are as efficient and effective as they should be, you are achieving a few incredibly valuable things:
1) You are saving your people’s time, and thus you are freeing up their capacity. If you can take a 1-hour process that occurs every day, and cut it down to 30 minutes, you’ve freed up 2.5 hours a week of capacity for whoever was spending the hour before. The trick as a leader is remember that nature - and bureaucracy - abhors a vacuum, and so that time you just found is incredibly likely to be filled up fast by some other type of administrivia; as a leader it’s your job to protect your team’s capacity and make sure they fill this time with something that’s useful and productive.
2) Related to the above, this gives you the chance to treat “Found Capacity” as “Capital”. In other words, if you are able to free up the time and capacity of your people, rather than allowing it to get filled with more administrivia, take that opportunity to figure out how that capacity can be leveraged to further enhance your team’s capacity. Be intentional and proactive and encourage your people to spend their new found time on professional development - learning new skills and tools that will help them in their role - or on looking at other systems and structures in their context that they can, with the investment of a little bit of this found time, make more efficient and improve. Treating “capacity” like “capital” means you can invest that capital in places that are going to drive a return.
3) You are showing your people that they matter. The reality is that we’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day except for two days - the day we’re born, and the day we die. All the days in between, every living human being ages at the same temporal rate. It’s easy for leaders to fall into the trap of thinking that their time is more valuable than the time of others - that your hour is somehow more valuable than the hour of one of your followers. That’s a specifically capitalistic way of framing your time, and of course our market does say that some people’s time is more valuable than others - that’s why CEOs get paid more than the factory workers making the products - but as a leader of humans, that’s a toxic way to look at your time. Not all leadership is in a profit-driven or capitalist context, after all!
And the reality is, those you lead don’t like wasting time on an inefficient process anymore than you do. People generally like to feel like they are accomplishing something, and administrivia can be a barrier to achieving that feeling. By investing your time as a leader on improving your context’s systems and structures, you are showing your people that their time matters to you. And, by encouraging them to spend that found time in something beneficial to them, rather than on more administrivia, you are reinforcing this attitude and giving your people a chance to grow and develop, which is also typically something people like.
This can be applied to the simple processes and the complex ones, but too often leaders skip over the “brass tacks of the business” and instead focus on the inspirational, high-level strategic, or big picture stuff. The reality is that a leader needs to pay attention to all of the above to be truly successful.
It seems hard, but the best part is you don’t have to do this by yourself - nor should you. Often, there’s a huge gap between the leader’s competencies and the competencies required to actually execute the processes and systems we’re talking about; if you are a VP of Finance, that doesn’t mean you know all the steps involved in a front-line worker doing a travel expense reimbursement, and learning all those steps just so you can throw suggestions at the person who does that work every day is probably not a good use of your time. Odds are good that the person who does it every day has already got some ideas on how to make things better, and this is where the culture of continuous improvement comes in.
To link this back to the truck analogy, in our case we did everything ourselves - measured, cut, welded, bolted, painted, wired, and fabricated pretty much every part of our systems. But it took a long time, required a lot of learning, and there are still some things that I want to change. The alternative was to pull out a credit card and start ordering things online - everything I built can be purchased commercially - which would mean I would have achieved a potentially better, more polished result by trusting the skills and approach of the people who build this equipment every single day.
In your leadership context, you don’t have to take the DIY approach that we did with our truck, you can take the credit card approach instead. What I mean is this: you don’t need to be the expert on all the systems and processes that suck the capacity from your team and need improving - trying to become that will take a ton of time, and if you don’t include the people working in those systems every day you may create more problems than you solve by missing key details or information.
But, as a leader you can create a culture where your people are empowered to advocate for continuously improving the systems and structures they work in. They are the SMEs on their context, and empowering them to make that context easier can go a long way to improving your situation. Empower and support your people to make things better, and they’ll often surprise you with what they come up with.
Someday we’ll write more on tackling administrivia - with some specific technology examples that can help you out - but for today, that’s the end of this Sunday Story! Next week is Part 3, where we talk about how getting stuck - be it in sand, mud, or leadership - is part of the fun, and can provide you with some of the most significant growth moments in your leadership career.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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