Heavy Workloads

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

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4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2019

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you or your team have way too much to do? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Amy Jen Su, an executive coach and author. They talk through what to do when you’re struggling to get things done at a new job, a coworker is stressed about their work, or you and your team disagree about whether they're overworked.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:30.6	Today we're talking about heavy workloads with Amy Jen Sue.
0:35.6	She's an executive coach and the author of the leader you want to be.
0:38.8	Amy, thanks so much for coming in. Thanks for having me. So in your work as an executive coach,
0:43.7	how often do clients come in with their struggles of having way too much to do and not enough hours to do it in?
0:51.0	Alison, I feel like honestly that's the number one thing I'm hearing. That mantra of there's
0:56.2	never enough hours in the day and I have more on my plate than what I know what to do with. And what do
1:01.1	you do to help people cope with that? I think first just giving them space and permission to
1:06.3	acknowledge that they're feeling under the water and to bring some compassion to that. And then for each person,
1:12.2	it really becomes about how do we reset, redefine, and get them back into the driver's seat.
1:17.4	Because you can't ever really tell your boss, I have too much work. Please don't give me anymore.
1:24.7	I'm not sure that I would advise anyone to say that to their supervisor or their manager.
1:29.4	Right. And so instead, it really becomes about, again, how do I take back my life and prioritize,
1:35.0	set my teams up differently? How do I level up my focus, my resilience, to really be effective?
1:41.1	On the idea that you can't push back on your boss about having too much to do, does that ever come up?
1:46.5	When I said don't push back, I don't mean just say, hey, I can't do this. But instead, for this
	...

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