4 Strategies to Thrive in a "More with Less" World
Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash
Reduction in force, organisational restructuring, and cost reduction are just some of the things that result in several people in the organisation needing to do 'more with less'. Even those in the industry a short while would have experienced one of these.
As with every change, there is a mental process that we will naturally go through. The most common one is, 'How can I succeed without all the necessary resources?'. We all want to be successful in our roles. It might even feel easy when the momentum is working in our favour with easy sales, a seemingly unlimited budget, free headcount, and acceptable standards. So, when the change occurs, and your momentum slows overnight with less access to resources, your hopes to succeed can quickly diminish.
At the risk of sounding clichè, we need to focus on 'controlling the controllable, ' in this article, I want to share four ways you can focus on yourself to ensure that you can get through this change and excel in your role.
One. Refocus your mindset. There are three things you can be sure of, change can sting and disrupt, and the work still needs to be done. Both leaders and ICs are impacted and still expected to perform. The critical difference between those who will succeed in their roles and those who will struggle is how quickly you can shift from focusing on the negatives of the situation to problem-solving a way forward. How negative are your thoughts? Your thoughts create your mindset, manifesting in your words and influencing those around you. How can you motivate the people around you and continue moving to the team's goals if you look and sound defeated?
Try focusing on accepting the outcome and the resources you have available to you. If the resources are used differently, you can still achieve the business goals and have more positive people around you when doing it.
Two. Initially, it will feel hard. If you consider the majority of corporations worldwide, they have all changed over and over. With change comes a new plan, which will seem daunting and make you doubtful. But, of course, it will take work. You have a precedent set in your mind that this could have been easier if I just had a bit more resources. When creating a new plan to reach your goals, factor in the learning curve, change management and behaviour change required in phase 1. Just like when you first started this role, you thought it was hard and uncomfortable, but you worked through it, and it got easier.
Three. Reprioritise Everything. Conduct a review of your goals and the tasks required to achieve them. Make the time to talk through them with your manager stack ranking what is most important and what can wait. We often load things into our workload that might feel required and impactful, but it is a productive exercise to identify the tasks that most significantly impact your team's goals.
It might be the extra context slides you add or deeper reporting that is optional for weekly updates. Speak to your stakeholders and cross-functional team members to determine the basic form of what is needed instead of assuming your current output is required to continue.
Four. What got us here won't get us there. Once everything is prioritised, review the tasks with the lens of what could be automated or built as a reusable asset. Many of us won't accept a compromise on quality. But many don't look for the easiest path to create quality. Take a minute to review the assets you build and determine if a small time investment can reduce the time cost every time you perform it.
Find ways to leverage formulae and macros and automatically synchronise data with your CRM. In the short term, it might be counterintuitive to invest time in automating a task that might be quicker to do this week manually. Consider the impact over 12 months when you multiply one time-saving item per week per person in your team.
In Summary, change is hard but is also a constant in our quickly evolving corporate environment. The better we can upskill in working through change, the quicker we can achieve things we never thought possible.
Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not represent the views or opinions of my employer.