Tackling Team Overwhelm Together: Conversation Guide and Reader Tips

We wrap our series on overcoming overwhelm with personal tips from subscribers and a team conversation guide.

AuthorAuthor

Elise Keith & David Mastronardi
December 13, 2023

Hi friend!

BLUF:

  • Unstable working conditions and competing priorities have many teams feeling overwhelmed and nearing burnout.

  • Building on previous articles and interviews, we created a conversation guide (including one new technique) and templates you can use to tackle team overwhelm together. Check out the PDF guide and template below.

  • While the number of people talking about feeling overwhelmed may seem to be on the rise, the experience is individual. After the team guide, you'll find tips and strategies shared by you, our dear readers, for keeping overwhelm at bay in your personal life.

We started this series on combatting overwhelm because this was the most frequent concern we heard from clients.

Overwhelmed teams struggle to learn, adapt, and embrace new ways of working. They're too busy treading water, trying not to drown, to swim ahead! Ultimately, overwhelmed teams get left behind.

We shared two methods for addressing this challenge in previous articles:

Today, we’re introducing a third technique that draws from our interview with Bob Sutton and Rebecca Hinds, and modifies an old standby: the Start, Stop, Continue technique. In our experience with the original, teams often list more 'starts' than 'stops', which isn't helpful for overwhelmed teams. Our revised approach emphasizes fixing friction by deciding what to Stop, Speed Up, or Slow Down.

Here's how it works.

Friction Fix: Stop, Speed Up, Slow Down

Goal: Embrace a subtraction mindset and reduce the number of things overwhelming your team.

  1. Identify the things overwhelming you that you want to address.

  2. Discuss each item and place it in the appropriate category.

    • STOP: for things that can either be dropped entirely or deferred until another time.


      Want to stop something but worry about how others will react? Stop it for now and see what happens. Unless something breaks or someone with authority says otherwise, you don't need to do these things any longer.

    • Speed Up: for things you can make easier by reducing the friction involved.


      What's more difficult than it should be? If we must do it, could we make it easier? Think streamlined processes, shorter meetings, reduced requirements, and automation that strike a balance between effort, risk, and productivity

    • Slow Down: for things that interrupt or consume too much energy, you can use good friction to eliminate bad friction.


      Where do you need to step back and inject more checkpoints, gatekeepers, recovery time, or maintenance cycles to prevent future problems? How might you make it more difficult for outside forces to overwhelm your team? Look for those ounces of prevention and rigor that will keep work from spiraling out of control.

  3. Assign individuals who can take responsibility for putting each strategy into action.

Put all three techniques together to take your team from ARRGGH !! 🤯 too Ahh.... 😮‍💨 😌 sweet, sweet relief.

Example: Too Many Meetings for the Project Team

Imagine a project team that felt they wasted too much time in meetings. Using this guide, they would first list out all the meetings they attend. Then, they’d use Circles and Soup to clarify the degree of ownership they have over these meetings. Finally, they’d identify meetings they can Stop, some that they may try to Speed Up, and consider how Slowing Down might relieve pressure on the team.

This short video goes into more detail about each step.

Example: tackling overwhelming meetings for a project team. Click to see larger.

Here's a PDF guide that walks you through the entire process. While you don't need any special materials, you're welcome to make a copy of this Miro board too.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

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Strategies for Individuals

In this series, we focused on the kind of overwhelm that impacts an entire team or department.

That said, everyone experiences their to-do list in their own way, which creates challenges when some team members feel underwater and others yearn to pump up the jam.

Replies to a LinkedIn request for tips on overwhelm

This means we can't always rely on the people around us to recognize when we’re overwhelmed. We must instead take responsibility for how we relate to our workload and adopt personalized management strategies.

With that in mind, we asked you to help us close out this series with your go-to strategies.

The thing is to give people hope that they can do something about it. Just get a little more rest, a little more clarity, a little more permission to set limits.

Carrie Goucher, founder of Fewer Faster Bolder, expands on this advice with three mindset shifts backed by practical strategies.

  1. Prioritize rest and recovery - even if it inconveniences someone else. 

    The mind can process most life stressors on its own given enough rest and recovery. Schedule your work in time-blocked pulses, and become your own best executive assistant who would never book a meeting over your child’s recital (even though you might!)

  2. Stand in your power - and get out of other people’s scripts

    Every time you feel frustrated or upset that something is unclear, unfair, not right - ask yourself: What’s in their script and what’s in mine?

    There is a huge freedom in only reading from our own script. One script is plenty! Let others read theirs.


    Make sure your script details your way of saying YES to the person but NO to the work. Practice your "Yes, but No" so you can use it in the moment

  3. Accept the impossibility of ‘finishing’ (anything!)

    There is no limit to the effort you can put in. So, stop looking at your to-do list like it's a bucket to empty each day. Instead, think of it as a river to draw from, and make sure you stick to your daily limit.

Mark Kilby says:

The best way to "say no with grace" is to create a visual representation of your work. Then it's easier for you and others to tell if you are at capacity, overloaded, or perhaps you actually have space to say yes (but you still have choice).

He uses the Personal Kanban strategy, which nicely aligns with Carrie's advice to see your workstream as a river, with to-dos flowing in one end and ta-dones flowing out the other. This approach is quite a bit simpler (and easier to share) than most of the personal planning and productivity tools out there.

Plucking to-do’s from the river of options, courtesy DALL•E

Finally, several people noted that you don't need a big to-do list to feel overwhelmed.

Simply keeping up with the latest news and wonderful newsletters like this one can be enough. To manage this info flood, folks are adopting a personal knowledge management system (PKM) in addition to their productivity tools. These systems consist of two main elements: a methodology for organizing information and software that makes it easy to capture and find this information later.

If the PKM idea is new to you, we recommend starting with a methodology before selecting software. See the list at the very top of this Reddit thread for options.

Looking to the Future

As we wrap up our series on overcoming team overwhelm, remember that the journey to a more manageable and productive work environment is ongoing and collaborative. Whether it's adopting the techniques we've shared here, prioritizing personal well-being, or embracing personal ownership through tools like a Personal Kanban, the key lies in taking these insights and turning them into action. We encourage you and your teams to experiment with these strategies, share your experiences, and continue to evolve your approach. Together, you can transform overwhelm into opportunity, paving the way for more resilient, effective, and joyful collaboration.

Now, it's time for us to turn our attention to the future - literally. Over the next month, watch for interviews with career experts, top business thinkers, and researchers all focused on how we can set ourselves up to thrive in the world that awaits us.

Until next time,
Dave and Elise

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