You can’t work with what you can’t see

Put your hand up if you’re ever been a martyr.  

Walking around carrying an invisible load of resentment, wondering why every other unreasonable person can’t see how busy or troubled you are. 

Not sure? Here’s a few signs: 

• You only tell people about it that can’t do anything (your spouse or friends, rather than your boss or colleagues)

• If someone who you complain to offers a suggestion, you reject it

• You look super capable on the surface but you don’t feel it.

OK, we’d better stop before this becomes a therapy session. I know I’ve been that person before, and I know leaders who find themselves behaving like this sometimes too.  

It’s easy to end up here. When we work in complex teams, in complex workplaces, with lots of functional diversity, the risk of martyrdom is high. When we’re all overloaded, and we’re operating in silos, the risk is even higher. In those kind of environments, it’s easy for things to fly under the radar. 

That’s how we get stuck and problems become worse than they need to be – because we can’t see them. 

There is no way your leadership team can fully appreciate just how much is going on, if they can’t even see it. In the HBR article ‘Too Many Projects’ Hollister and Watkins talk about the damaging, cumulative impact of having too many initiatives on the go. Without visibility of the full load, staff at all levels end up under unreasonable pressure and start resenting each other. 

Here’s the thing: we can’t work with what we can’t see. 

In The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo starts every project in exactly the same way: by requiring her subject to make a big pile of all of their stuff.  

It’s not until you see all 28 of your black t-shirts in one big pile in front of you that you realise how ridiculous things have become. 

Whether it’s too many projects at the exec level, too many tasks at a personal level or too many black t-shirts, you can't work with what you can't see - and you gain nothing by being a martyr.

Put all your things in a pile, share your pile with others, and go from there.