May 2005

Are You too Busy to Innovate?

Research findings by Ghoshal Sumantra and Heike Bruch reveal the truth about all that busyness in the workplace.

The inability to innovate causes a lot of frustration in organizations these days. Managers blame everything from the lack of time, money and motivation, to corporate bureaucracy and the overwhelming amount of work they face.

In a 10 year study of busy managers [1] conducted by Ghoshal Sumantra and Heike Bruch asked, “Why do most managers work so hard but accomplish so little?” They discovered that a lot of the frenzied activity out there, is busyness for the sake of being busy.

“Only 10 per cent of managers act purposefully to get truly important work done.” The rest are often just spinning their wheels. ”Managers often confuse action with accomplishment and motivation with leading.”

How do the 10 per cent of effective managers do it? Energy and focus. “Great managers produce results not by motivating others, but by engaging their own willpower through a powerful combination of energy and focus.”

They have laser-sharp concentration on a goal until it is completed, and the discipline to resist distraction. Energy “is the emotional tenacity that releases immense inner resources, allowing the hardest job to be done.”

Managers who operate in a purposeless busyness zone are deficient either in one of these traits, or in both of them. Managers with low energy and low focus are eternal procrastinators. Highly focused managers with low energy approach their work with little passion.

40 per cent of the managers in the study fall into the frenzied category. They exhibit high energy but have low focus. “They generally engage in grasshopper-like behaviour, flitting from project to project, and demonstrate no clear sense of priority. They eagerly embrace every project but quickly lose interest, frequently abandoning the very projects they adopted in their original euphoria.”

Can organizations increase the number of managers with high focus and high energy?

1) Chief executive officer (CEO) behaviour is important. Frantic behaviour at the top tends to generate frenzied managers unfocused managers.

2) Leaders in organizations need to create meaning in work, and provide employees with autonomy and a sense of purpose:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to go to the forest to gather wood, saw it, and nail the planks together. Instead, teach them the desire for the sea.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Meaningful work, aligned with vision and purpose provide the motivation for innovation.

References:
“The Business of Busyness,” by Prem Benimadhu
InsideEdge Volume 9 Number 1 Winter 2005
<www.conferenceboard.ca/insidedge/pdf/ie_q1_05.pdf>

[1]Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, “A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time” (Boston: The Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

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