Structure and Habit

Written By Cynthia Gill

How are your current structures and habits supporting you as a leader and as a human? Some of your structures can accrue over time, leaving you with a schedule or prioritizing methodology that no longer serves you. Or your shiny new plan to keep on top of everything might be already fraying at the edges, or even breaking down–it’s not working for your needs for now, and certainly isn’t built for the future you want.

The leaders I work with rarely come to me because they need new structures. However, many have systems that contribute to their overwhelm and burn out. Many leaders rely on maxims or ideas they learned early in their career, or try to do things others recommend, without thinking through what they need. 

Your foundation for your leadership is your values, skills and strengths. Your structures and habits are the framing for your leadership. They help you build a practice that keeps the gremlins of overwork and burnout at bay.

I invite you to start thinking about what structures are working for you and what aren’t. If you’re an executive, typically, you can’t do everything that is needed. You can work longer and harder, and many do. But that won’t end the demands for your time, which will likely grow to meet and exceed your supply of time and energy. You will become burned out and overwhelmed, somewhere between immediately and eventually. With luck, you won’t experience acute or chronic health issues, but unfortunately, that is very common. And while others in your life may anticipate your looming health risks, leaders rarely see them coming for them.

What is the alternative? The only path forward is to develop clear systems and strategies to get things done.  Know what is and isn’t going to be done by you, and make decisions about what you are delegating or letting go. At the same time, your structures should build on your strengths, your own flows and your needs. You make compromises all the time, but do your best to work when and how you are most effective. 

Start by asking what’s not working for you right now. That might be what’s not getting done, or that you don’t know what’s most important for you to do each day. If you are already burned out, it may feel like nothing is working. In that case, jump ahead to some specific structures to review. 

The structures that will work for you are most effective when you can work with your energy, what works in your organizational culture and the constraints of your job, and what helps you minimize the decisions you make each day. I invite you to consider:

  • When is your focus highest, and what tasks need that focus? For example, morning people may want to do creative or strategic work in the morning. But if their habit is to dive into their inbox first thing, they get bogged down in their prime time and find themselves struggling with strategic tasks in small windows of time or at a less sharp time of day. A solution can be a 10 minute quick email check (perhaps with a timer) and a blocked morning time for the work that matters at the frequency you need.

  • How do you know what your priorities are each day? Whatever system works for you, analog, digital or AI, you should know what your top few priorities are each day, and should understand how those can reasonably get done (within the usual disruptions). If you consistently can’t get those done, you need a new strategy–delegation, staffing up, changing your goals or letting go of other tasks getting in the way of the most important tasks.

  • How do you know what you need to do in the bigger picture? You should plan time for yourself to step back and see what shifts you need to make with your strategies, time and energy. Some leaders do this weekly, monthly and quarterly, in addition to the larger organizational strategies and structures. Others are fine with more formal quarterly pause and reflecting, and can adjust on the fly without blocking explicit time for this. 

  • How do you manage your boundaries? There is always more to do, how do you decide what is important enough to keep you working off hours? Do you also invest in your personal life, so that you have meaningful commitments or engagements that incentivize you to stop working? A date with you and a puzzle is perfectly acceptable.

  • How do you handle what isn’t getting done? Most executives recognize it can’t all get done, but you need time and resources to figure out what happens then. That may be a weekly meeting with a deputy or small team to assess and rebalance priorities and workload. It may be that you have unrealistic expectations of yourself, so that date is with yourself to adjust your own expectations or block some time. 

  • Are there deeper organizational structures you need to adjust? Meeting hygiene, in person work policies, and information flow are all areas that can free up time and energy.

Each of these topics is rich and may be complicated. If you are trying to change your structures and habits, and are consistently not able to shift, there are underlying issues at play. That may be a barrier to change that you aren’t aware of. Often, the skills and qualities that bring us to leadership hold us back in a senior role. On the other hand, you may be in a difficult or toxic work situation–one where success is hard to find and you don’t have the support you need. You can still grow and support yourself, but the outcome may be more incremental.

It is worth taking the time to pick a question above, the one that resonates most with you and think about what experiments you can try to rebuild or refurbish your structures. Investing in your growth and bringing out the best in you is critical to your leadership and your own development, and I encourage you to explore what you can explore today.

Please reach out if you want to learn more about practices! And please:

Cynthia Gill
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