Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!
The little things become dangerous when leaders give minor inconveniences more attention than the business problems that actually matter.
There is something funny about leadership. The things that really threaten your business usually don’t cause you to lose your cool. You deal with them because you have to. A major client leaves. Sales fall short. A key employee resigns. Your cashflow forecast predicts a negative balance in two weeks. You gather the facts, make a plan, and get to work.
But instead, it is the tiny, insignificant annoyances that make you question your sanity.
I had one of those incidents yesterday. I changed the password on my Zweig Group email account while sitting at my computer. Everything worked perfectly there, so I congratulated myself on another successful technology project. Then I picked up my phone and discovered I couldn’t get or send email. I checked every setting I could think of. I deleted the account and added it back. I muttered a few words I won’t repeat here. After re-adding my email account to my phone everything seemed to work. Emails were coming in again. I could relax for the evening. Then I got up early this morning and found out that while I could receive emails on my phone, I could not send them. After another 30 minutes of cursing to myself and deleting and re-adding my email account it all worked again like it is supposed to.
It wasn’t a crisis. It wasn’t costing the company money. The world wasn’t going to stop because I couldn’t send an email from my phone. I could always go to my laptop to do it. Yet, for those 30 minutes, it occupied far more space in my brain than it deserved.
Then there was the draft payroll report I reviewed last week for one of the companies I work with. One employee had charged 0.06 hours of overtime. That is 3 minutes and 36 seconds. Think about that for a minute. Someone worked three-and-a-half minutes beyond 40 hours. Someone else approved it. The payroll system dutifully calculated it. Then it showed up on a report that managers would review. I found myself wondering how many people had already spent more than three minutes discussing three minutes of overtime.
That is business in a nutshell. We spend thousands of dollars paying smart people to debate problems worth pennies while genuine opportunities that could generate hundreds of thousands (or more) dollars wait patiently for our attention.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that leadership is largely about maintaining perspective. You have to know what deserves your emotional energy and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the little things are relentless.
The software update starts five minutes before your crucial Zoom call. Someone schedules a meeting to prepare for another meeting. Someone wants to have a meeting for a decision that is so obvious it will take 15 seconds to make. The printer jams only when you are using it. You lose your reading glasses that are sitting on top of your head. Someone interrupts you by texting to see if you have “just a minute for a call,” which everyone knows is management code for “the next half hour.”
None of these things matter. Yet they all have an amazing ability to pile up until you feel like you are carrying around a backpack full of pebbles. One pebble weighs nothing. Five-hundred of them become exhausting.
The danger for leaders is that everyone around us is watching. If we react to every little irritation as if it were a five-alarm fire, eventually the entire organization begins operating that way. People start confusing inconvenience with catastrophe.
There is a difference. The payroll report showing 0.06 hours of overtime is not a catastrophe. If it signals a broken policy or an employee who doesn’t understand expectations, fix the policy. If it is simply an employee working an extra three-and-a-half minutes, maybe you should pay them and move on. The amount of management attention devoted to an issue should bear some relationship to its importance.
The same goes for technology. Your phone refusing to send email is annoying. It is not a moral failing on the part of Apple, Microsoft, Google, or whoever else you decide to blame that day. Fix it if you can. Get someone to help if you can’t. Then get back to work.
One of the hardest lessons I have learned is that emotional energy is a finite resource. Every ounce you spend getting aggravated by trivial matters is an ounce you won’t have available when a real problem lands on your desk. And if you stay in business long enough, it will.
The companies that succeed over the long haul are not run by people who never get frustrated. They are run by people who recognize the difference between a nuisance and a genuine threat. That distinction sounds obvious, but it isn’t. It takes discipline to laugh at the little stuff, solve what needs solving, and refuse to let a three-minute payroll entry or a stubborn smartphone steal half your day.
The irony, of course, is that I am writing this after eventually getting my phone to work. Had I simply waited another 15 minutes before becoming irritated, I probably would have saved myself a lot of aggravation. Patience has never been one of my stronger qualities, but perhaps that is exactly why I keep getting opportunities to practice it.
This article originally appeared in The Zweig Letter. Reprinted with permission.
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
