I’ll jump on Thursday…

What do you think? Pop on over to my Facebook group and let me know how this resonates with you and even better, how things turned out when you applied it.

TRANSCRIPT:
When it comes to applying the ‘I’ll jump on Thursday’ strategy to your working life, there is one keyword I want you to remember – prioritisation.

At work, when your boss says ‘jump’ they would love nothing more than for you to say ‘how high’ but while that might be impressive in the short term it’s simply not sustainable.

While dropping everything to work on your manager’s immediate priority is fine in an emergency, if you make this approach your default mode, you’ll be the one having an emergency… a burnout emergency!

As you may already know, I believe it’s so important in life to teach people how we want to be treated and this is especially true at work.

Imagine this…

You carefully organise your day, prioritising your task list based on your KPIs, things you’ve been told are important and deadlines that you know are coming up.  Your manager drops another piece of work on you at the last minute… and you drop everything to work on it.

 Now, if that last-minute piece of work was a genuine emergency your efforts may be well appreciated.  But more often than not while your efforts may be given a cursory acknowledgment, you are now scrambling to catch up, worried you’re going to drop the ball or worse being criticised for not finishing something else.

We’ve all been there… it’s happened to me and I’m going to guess it’s happened to you.

So back to that one keyword – prioritisation.

Next time your boss or manager drops something on you and tells you directly or implies that they need it yesterday, I want you to use one of these positive prioritisation phrases:

‘I’d be happy to work on that, would you like me to start it straight away or as soon as I’ve finished x, y or z.’

‘I’m in the middle of x, can it wait until I’m finished or would you like me to put x to the side and get started straight away.’

“Sounds great. Before I get started can I get your input on how to re-prioritise x, y, z.”

“I’d love to work on this but I’m concerned about still being about to deliver x on time.  Is there any flexibility in the timeline/deadline?”

“Got it!   To be able to complete it on time, I am going to need some additional support with x or y. I’m working at full capacity as we speak, and I’d hate to see anything else slip while I focus on this for you.”

Do you get the idea?

It’s a classic YES + AND.  Yes, I’d like to do the work and to make it possible/successful this is what we are going to need to do.

In each of these examples you are being positive and while articulating in an empowered way that something will need to shift to make it possible.

What do you think?  Pop on over to my Facebook group and let me know how this resonates with you and even better, how things turned out when you applied it.

Domonique
x