Some wise saying suggests that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” I have heard this applied in many different ways, but hardly ever including margin. For most of us, planning centers around stuff to do. And our calendars are more packed than ever. “I’m busy” is a statement of honor in our society. But that paradigm has to die; it’s unproductive and unhealthy. You need leadership margin.
A few years ago, I worked with a client at a global organization that was known to be fast-paced. He had a demanding workload and responsibilities and expressed that he felt every day as if he had hardly accomplished anything. “There’s so much to do, and so little time!” he said to me. “The truth is, no matter how busy I am with high-priority items, there is always something else that needs my attention. This is just how it has been since I started working in my new role.”
I asked him if he was able to delegate some of his duties. He replied, “That’s the problem! The time I would spend delegating to get the job done right would be the amount of time to get it done already.” And so he continued to feel overwhelmed and frustrated with a life of ‘busy.” He realized that he couldn’t possibly continue like this, but felt too overwhelmed by the size of the load to imagine any way out of his dilemma.
When a personal emergency collided with an incident at work that created a sudden influx of demand on his time, he exclaimed: “I have no margin left!” A painful, yet powerful realization.
The Benefit of Margin
We are talking about more than space on a page. Margin in a book allows easier reading. If you’re like me, you use that space for notes (sorry, but nearly all my books get ‘defiled’ that way). Without it, reading is becoming tedious and unpleasant.
Margin applied to our calendars allows us to respond to the unforeseen while remaining calm, without getting nervous. When applied to our expectations it allows us to keep our agility and we can navigate missed expectations with adventure, experiment, and exploration.
Lack of margin on the other hand leaves no room for anything.
- No room for error.
- No room for learning.
- No room for new opportunities to unfold.
- No room for fresh ideas and contemplation.
Yet you need time to contemplate to make strategic decisions. You need space if you want to be able to venture to new, challenging destinations. If you want to innovate at all or come up with solutions to the problems you’ll face, you need the space to enable it.
Space allows for it. A packed life doesn’t.
A lack of margin will force you to fit everything in. It’s narrowing your freedom. It is limiting your foresight and your responses. It impacts your relationships at work and at home. It drags an entire collection of negative consequences behind you.
Signs Of A Lack Of Margin
How do you detect a severe lack of margin? Employees who lack margin are typically marked by:
Stress: They are stressed about their jobs. They are stressed about their lives. They are stressed about being stressed. Their stress level rises when they don’t have enough margin. Stress drains energy; it drains time. Stress also makes us less effective at work.
Frustration: Leaders who lack margin are often frustrated. If everything is important, nothing is. This lack of focus leads to unsatisfying results. This frustration often causes them to become more critical – with themselves and others – creating an atmosphere that leaves no room for error and causes fear of failure. Extended spins of this cycle, cause a “blame culture” where mistakes get hidden or covered for fear of consequences. Their frustration comes from not having enough margin to deal with unexpected situations or changes in plans.
Impatience: Employees who lack margin often show impatience with those who don’t understand how much work goes into doing something well. Impatience often plays out in leaders placing false urgencies – on themselves and others – which leads to resentment and burnout and ultimately to draining great talent.
Lack of margin drags an entire collection of negative consequences behind you. Share on XInability To Take Risks: Leaders who lack margin usually cannot take risks. They are afraid to try something new. They are afraid of making mistakes. Because of their fear of failure and risk-taking, they hinder growth.
Lack of vision: Leaders who lack buffers often sacrifice strategic foresight because they get stuck in the shuffle. So overwhelmed by the load they carry, they have no room for contemplation, which is key to identifying challenges and strategic problem-solving.
Disengagement: Disengaged employees lack excitement, which means they lack motivation. They may seem apathetic. They lack energy. They often complain. But they rarely take action. They become disengaged because they have little room available to invest in new projects, tasks, and activities. Lack of margin turns into more lack thereof.
Defensiveness: The previously mentioned frustration as a result of a lack of margin often shows itself in defensiveness in the employee or in entire teams. Defensiveness does not create solutions – it dampens performance as it creates isolation and mistrust. And trust is vital to any team. A lack of trust in leadership can destroy productivity, morale, and motivation.
These are just some of the most visible signs that can point to a lack of margin. Identify them early if you want to keep your team engaged and productive.
6 Ways You Can Create Margin
Margin doesn’t just happen. It takes effort. There are some things you can do to increase yours. These include:
Learn to Prioritize. If you’re always running late, then you’ll never make time to learn how to prioritize effectively. In fact, prioritizing is one of the most important skills you can develop. Learn how to prioritize effectively so that you can set aside the right amount of time for each task.
Set Boundaries. Prioritization includes learning to understand what is important and what we have to say ‘No’ to so we can say ‘Yes’ to the right things: our priorities. Those who excel in prioritizing have learned to put guardrails around those priorities. Until you learn to prioritize and pair it with boundaries by saying ‘No’, you won’t be able to build space into your schedule. Otherwise, those non-priorities take up the extra time you had planned room for.
Accept Limitations. It’s astounding how many of us pay lip service to the statement “I can’t do everything.” More often than not, we treat our time and energy as limitless. Before you can build margin into your life, you have to accept that you and those on your team have limitations.
Until you learn to prioritize and pair it with boundaries you won’t be able to build margin into your schedule. Share on XSet Expectations. Lack of clarity is the number one reason expectations are missed. Ambiguity in our communication and acting on assumptions are often causing misunderstandings, and as a result, missed expectations. You can read more in this edition of Leading Choices: Why Your Communication Style Kills Your Productivity And Your Talent Pool.
Budget for Error. Setting expectations with margin in mind also means that you account for problems to happen and for the possibility of errors in your planning, or a change in requirements. Setting expectations with margin in mind helps us avoid being blindsided when we run into issues along the way.
Time Your Involvement. If you are one of those people with multiple interests and the tendency to jump into new projects while you’re still crawling to the top of the heap of work you’re currently under, learn to time your involvement. Take a step back and consider where you are headed, what matters, and what matters now. Consider which items on your schedule could be planned further out to free up space for things that need attention now.
Related Resources & Try This
If your schedule is filled to the brim and little changes cause the entire house to come down, try the “Tetris Approach” to time management to have more flexibility.
You may also enjoy this book by Nir Eyal, called “Indistractable“.
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