Last week, I put out this ask on my Instagram:
The thing is: Yes, a lot of this should fall on managers to invite and manage these discussions. But we deal with reality here, and many people work for managers who don’t do that. So, let’s help people in that position have more guidance – and therefore, more confidence – going into those discussions to maximize their chances of getting the help and relief they need! Plus, if you’re a new manager, maybe this will give you some ideas of how to invite and manage these conversations, too!
The Crowdsourced Tips
The tips straight from the people managers are amazing, so I’m going to lay them all out here – somewhat organized by topic (emphasis on somewhat), and then wrap this up with some takeaways.
Tip 1: Bring it up as soon as possible
“I always encourage my team to share this information ASAP. I know people often feel like it’s a personal failure if they can’t handle everything on their plate, so I like to emphasize that it’s important data for me/leadership to use to help get more resources or grow the team.”
“I manage a team of 17 and I want to know ASAP, and I want them to come with a plan – what should get moved and why.”
“Tell me asap but also let’s have a weekly standing 20 min meeting!”
“1. tell me asap. don’t wait 6 months to tell me you’ve been working all these saturdays. 2. “i have these 3 priorities and just got this one added. which should i deprioritize?””
“I want them to come to me early, before they become too overwhelmed and start dropping balls! We schedule a 1:1 and talk about their to-do list, triage tasks and discuss what is higher vs lower priority, and I take things off their plate that I can handle or delegate to others. Sometimes they’ve overestimated the scope of a task or project and just talking through it makes them perceive a lighter, more manageable load.”
“How to highlight too much work.
1) raise it quickly.
2) don’t over promise on deadlines. I’ve had people highlight “too much work” when really they over promised on something and that’s the real issue.
3) help them prioritize with the employee.
4) take a hard look at your work habits too. Are you chatting with employees constantly instead of actually getting work done? Do you wait for perfection before submitting anything?
5) can they delegate or miss some meetings and that helps? We usually start there.
I work in public sector- our number of employees are capped by an elected body. If a manager needs more staff, they have to show that with metrics. And then we can discuss more people.”
“When: as soon as they realize. How: I like them to come with the big things on their plate and some rough sense of how long they think those things will take. From there, I will help problem solve. Maybe timelines can be malleable for some things, maybe I can reallocate some of their work across the team, and/or maybe through this convo we learn something is taking them way longer than it should and there is some skill gap at play we need to address.”
“I keep a google doc of team norms that I send to every new associate when they join my team. In that document there’s a list of things I always want escalated to me and a note that two instances of working past 6pm in a week is escalated immediately. My expectations for how things are escalated varies by level. I expect junior ICs to flag and ask for help in the moment whereas I expect managers to have a proposed solution with the trade offs before it happens unless it’s an emergency.”
“When/how: I’ve made it clear to my team that I value their feedback and want to hear what’s going on with them in real time – if they feel like they have too much on their plate, I want them to let me know immediately. In my world (software sales), I think about workload as Chronic and Acute: If someone has too much going on with general workload, that is a chronic issue that we address in their weekly 1-1 and determine how to prioritize their workload to get them back to a productive and stable spot. If someone has a sudden activity spike that puts them in a bind due to a hot deal or something pressing, I think of that as an acute issue and they text or slack me and we triage the items in real time together. And on the how- In general, I ask that when they bring me an issue, they also share at least one idea for how to solve. I’m not a “fix it”, I’m a “let’s figure it out together” and this relates directly to workload management as well.”
“I would like them to email or ask for a one on one right away so we can figure out what can be reduced to make them successful with what they are trying to achieve. If they are feeling overwhelmed with too much work then their product is not going to be the 100% they are wanting to produce. It will also affect their mental health and work-life balance.”
Tip 2: Bring it Up in 1:1s/Team Meetings:
“This is so important, great conversation! 👏 I do this formally and informally. Formally, meet with direct reports each quarter to review annual goals. Among other things, we specifically talk about workload & modify number or scope of goals as needed to better reflect their capacity. Informally, from week to week I encourage them during 1:1s (or really anytime) to pop in, review weekly priorities together, and discuss what is truly a priority, what can be dropped, or punted to another week.”
“I manage a team of two other people. We have a team meeting on Mondays and Thursday mornings where we review what we each have on our plates and what each of our priorities are over the next 48-72 hours. I try to ask questions during this meeting about how much of each of their capacity they have taken up, and when I introduce new projects during that meeting, I ask whether the respective team member actually has time to do it. I encourage them to be honest with me about what they can handle and to chime in if it’s too much. I trust both of them completely to handle their workloads and communicate that to me.”
“We do a resourcing meeting once a week plus it’s in a spreadsheet. If you’re working overtime, you need to let the project manager know to get approval to have it count as time in lieu (so you get back the extra hours as leave).”
“I have a weekly 1:1 update with each member of my team. I generally let them drive the agenda so that’s the perfect time to share especially for larger project work. And then we can prioritize together or rebalance if someone else has capacity. But if it’s a crazy day and they are swamped and need help, a Teams message works too. We can prioritize on the fly for competing urgent items.”
“I address it in weekly 1:1s, we’re a young team and we will grow once the current ICs get to capacity, but I’ve made it clear since the beginning to let me know when they see that time approaching for their plate overall. We work together to set deadlines to keep things manageable on a week to week basis. This is something I was bad at as an IC, I said yes to everything and it made me miserable. I’m attempting to prevent that :)”
“Share in 1:1 w top priorities, timelines and recommendations to delegate, change timing, etc. recommendations for how to handle is most helpful rather than “here’s my problem.” The other important piece here is there are companies that keep their employees “over subscribed” intentionally (Amazon). If I were coaching women, I’d also encourage them to keep their eyes open about their company and team culture, specific role. I changed roles a year ago even tho it was at one point my dream job bc it required constant travel and I have two kids who I want to see. My leadership was trying to keep me in the role, but I knew it wasn’t aligned with the kind of parent I want to be.”
Tip 3: Propose a Solution
“Always come with the issue AND a possible solution. “Proj X isn’t making headway due to other high priorities. I could transition this scope to coworker Y who would benefit in these key ways, I’d mentor them thru the transition, etc.””
“When I’m sharing goals or team plans, I give them the opportunity to provide their input. I also meet with my team members individually once or twice a week and give them an opportunity to bring anything up they want to discuss. We’ll also usually talk about project updates so I’ll get a sense of if a deadline needs to shift. I agree with some others that there isn’t really a wrong way to bring it up and would recommend positioning it as a priorities discussion by asking if X can shift because I’m spending a lot of time on Y / this is taking longer than expected, etc.”
Some more tips / insight:
“I feel like as the manager I’m usually pulling it out of them. I tend to spot the load issue or where I’m seeing signs of stress before my team members will raise the flag bc they’re highly skilled and motivated and will usually burn themselves out before they ask for help”
“I think this question should be turned on its head a bit – it’s the job of a manager to know that information, so you shouldn’t count on the direct report to tell you – you should be regularly asking this question, in weekly 1:1, quarterly check-ins, etc. Not only is it proactive, but it makes the employee feel safe bringing it up when it’s the case – too many people will just keep trying to push through if they don’t think there’s true support for helping to reprioritize and take work off someone’s plate if it’s too much.”
“I manage a team of 25 and in the past have had up to 10 direct reports. I don’t think there’s any wrong way to express a lack of bandwidth… any time someone brings this up, I want to help! And usually I bring it up proactively before they do. Something that helps me is when the person shares their perspective on which work they WANT to do, and is most interesting for them to keep. That way I can focus on offloading or pushing back on the stuff they are not as interested in. We work together to come up with a reasonable plan on how to move forward.”
“This might sound overly simplistic, but based on my experience as having been managed before and now being in management: when someone tells me they have too much work, I *believe* them!! (Can’t tell you how frustrating it’s been in the past to not be believed and to be just told “you can do it!”) Then, we look together at their current case load, see if they need a new case pause to catch up on things OR if we need to work on pushing out some deadlines further than they have been. Lastly, we look at what they are and aren’t delegating. The answer is usually somewhere in those three things.”
“As someone who went from an individual contributor to team lead of my former peers – I know all too well how leaders can underestimate and downplay how long work actually takes. I am constantly reinforcing that I understand the lift and to be open with me as soon as it tracks near overload territory. So when? Asap. Big projects, little projects, it’s a part of our daily culture to be talking about workload and how everything fits into the bigger picture. How? Im big on context. Help me to understand the context of the overwhelm and we can work through it. I encourage my team to lean on AI to frame the conversation since AI is great at applying a framework to a hard-to-articulate situation.”
“I am managed, not a manager currently, but what worked for me in doing the successfully post five day reset and refresh was explaining how there were longer term non-urgent projects that weren’t getting worked on because I had the data showing what my time was being spent on. Once we identified lower priority, but urgent tasks we were able to hire an additional admin team member who could handle those time sinks so I have more time to spend on strategic priorities! I also got a raise lol.”
“I don’t manage people, but in the past I have had good experiences going to my boss when I’m overwhelmed and letting them know that I need to discuss priorities because I currently can’t get everything done in a timely manner. They are usually happy to strategize with me. In my current role as a teacher, I have had supervisors who connect me with other people who taught the class in the past to see how they managed the class assignments/grading, and I have also had them put caps on my classes in subsequent semesters so I have less grading to do. I just said I don’t manage people, and I’m realizing that’s only *kinda* true. I manage chaotic 16 year olds, not adult professionals. 😅”
Wrapping it up
Here’s an overview of the biggest tips:
- Bring it up as soon as possible
- Bring a proposed solution to share with your manager
- When explaining the issues and your proposed solution, have specifics and data to back it up
I hope you feel encouraged by the above shares – many, many managers want to help. And if it doesn’t go well and you get, essentially, a “do it all anyway” message, well, that’s good data to know about your manager and employer, too. For more on that, listen to ep. 4 of the Bright Method podcast about prioritizing.
What I want you to note is this, too:
Almost every tip above has one thing in common: clarity.
Clarity on what your capacity is – and how your current workload outstrips it.
Clarity on when that happens.
Clarity on what to prioritize.
Clarity on what to do with the rest (e.g., eliminate? punt out? reassign?).
If you don’t have that clarity, (1) I get it – I have very much been there; we’re rarely taught how to gauge it, and (2) that clarity is exactly what the Bright Method gives you – and it’s what makes these conversations with your manager so much easier to have.
If you want to build that skill set and system so that you can have these conversations with specifics and clarity to back you up, that’s what my 10-week program is designed to do. Check it out here. I’d love to work with you, get you that clarity, and help you bring your workload in line with your capacity so you can have less stress and more calm.
Sometimes the solution offered is to offload the work to someone else, which sounds great in theory but in reality the bandwidth just shifts to training them (or even hiring AND training them). Any ideas to mitigate this?