Bandwidth (#37)

Several executives that I have talked to are struggling with their teams during the crisis. Standards that the team accomplished and exceeded in February are no longer routinely met. Teams labor to understand the new priorities and expectations. Everyone is frustrated.

Bandwidth is defined as “the energy or mental capacity required to deal with a situation.” Every employee, every leader, and every organization has a limited bandwidth. With only 48 work weeks in the average work year, there is limited time to accomplish everything that the company needs to be successful.

The US Army is notorious for adding requirements without removing any of the old ones. A 2002 US Army study determined that company commanders, who lead an organization of about 120 soldiers, have 256 days available for training annually. However, the Army bureaucracy dictated 297 days of mandatory training requirements. This forced junior leaders to violate Army policy and make hard decisions about what 41 days of training to discard. There wasn’t enough time or bandwidth to accomplish what the US Army wanted its soldiers to do.

The essence of a corporate strategy is often deciding “what not to do.” With the addition of new tasks and requirements surrounding the coronavirus, sometimes the hardest things for leaders to do is to determine what no longer needs to happen.

So review your mission+leader’s intent and pay particular attention to your purpose (or why) and end state (what does success look like on December 31, 2020?) If you haven’t changed it, recognize that it is a new environment (see Stages of the Crisis — https://www.thefivecoatconsultinggroup.com/the-coronavirus-crisis/the-stages-of-the-coronavirus-crisis ) and February 2020 is in the rear-view mirror.

Once you are comfortable that the mission+leader’s intent is correct for your current environment, take the time, as a leader, to make the hard decisions on what does not need to happen. Discuss it to the team and get their feedback. Then publish the new standards of what needs to be done. Once your team is able to focus in on the truly important stuff, your team will amaze you with what they can accomplish. And they will appreciate being relieved of the non-essential requirements.

Make the most of your team’s bandwidth during the remaining work weeks in 2020.