Staying In Your Lane

I work in a culture where we all have titles that mean very little, especially when it comes to those duties where no one has any clear responsibility for particular projects. We are supposed to work as a team, but everyone has so much on their plate that when these tasks come along I quite often hear, “I can’t do it because I need to stay in my lane.”

This is a term which was started by our HR Director who chewed out one of our buyers for bringing in a birthday card and cake for the Warehouse Manager who is also the buyer’s good friend. The HR Director told the buyer that she needed to stay in her lane because birthday acknowledgements were an HR function. (In reality the HR Director was miffed because she looked like she wasn’t doing her job.)

This rift set the tone where people began using, “I’m staying in my lane,” as an excuse not to volunteer for any additional projects or to get out of those that were assigned to them. Now, a lot of very important stuff is falling through the cracks as the office team concept falls by the wayside because people are staying in their lanes.

What I found out is that as stuff fell through the cracks the boss dumped the projects on my plate because even though I was busier than everyone else the boss could rely on me more than anyone else to get the job done.

This was killing me. Whoever said, “Crack kills,” knew what they were talking about because my picking up the slack for the stuff falling through the cracks was killing me. I had to figure out what to do about it. I had to figure out how to get my overworked coworkers out of their lanes long enough to help keep things from falling through the cracks which in turn would help grow the company and eventually benefit them in the process.

Each time the lot for additional work fell on me I began looking at it as an opportunity to bring some cohesiveness to our team. Through research, feedback, and trial and error I discovered six strategies that helped me get the most from my overworked coworkers who were trying to stay in their lanes.

Ask for input

I discovered that people don’t mind giving advice—to them that feels less like working to train someone as much as it is just sharing or telling someone what to do. I moved away of saying, “Can you show me how to do this?” and more towards, “What do I need to do to get that report?” When I asked for someone’s advice or comment or input for a particular task, I often times was able to get them to do the task as they walked me through it. So ask for their input and you just might get more than advice.

Look for tradeoffs

This is a quid pro quo, I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine, kind of approach. What I’ve done here is to identify a task they were doing that they might not like and offer to do that task if they would do one of mine, or two. The benefit of this is that if you are better at doing one thing than a coworker then you could switch and do something you prefer rather than something you dislike.

For instance, Lindsay wasn’t a people person and didn’t like talking to people on the phone. I like talking to people but hate getting bogged down in paperwork minutiae, so I gave her the 4-year employee list project while I called several of her vendors to find out the status of our application—something that I could do and didn’t mind. And, the added benefit to the company was that people were then being cross trained.

Promote efficiency

Every time I am working on a project with a coworker I say something like, “There’s got to be a way we can do this faster and easier so that so we can finish sooner and take the rest of the day off.” I say that somewhat jokingly but at the same time I am serious about promoting efficiency.. It doesn’t always work as some people are set in their ways or don’t want t learn something new or they are just plain lazy, but when I put it in the perspective as getting more time to do other things that they may like, I usually get positive response.

Ask the boss to reprioritize tasks

There have been a number of instances where my coworkers and I have had way too much on our plates, and when we would get stuck on a project because our conflicting schedules wouldn’t allow us to move to the next level on the job, I would ask our boss to help us reprioritize our tasks so that we could finish our project. What this also accomplishes is that it allows the boss to get a sense of how busy you are although he may not care.

Push for power meetings

It’s no secret that most people hate meetings. Power meetings, however, are those short meetings where everyone agrees to the agenda and duration ahead of time, and where the purpose of the meeting is to figure out who is best to accomplish a particular task. The benefit of this is that not only is the right person assigned to the job, but also shorter meetings allows for time to go and finish the task.

Get temporary or volunteer help

Getting help to finish projects can reinvigorate people so that they feel a sense of accomplishment and are ready to take on the next task. In our company we now have a task pool where everyone is allowed to drop in a task that they really want help with. We are allowed to do this with only certain tasks, but every quarter a task is randomly selected and our temporary or volunteer help is assigned to that task. The task pool has allowed me to have a bargaining chip with coworkers as I can now offer to use my temporary and volunteer assistance to help them with their projects if they could help me with mine.

Employing these strategies has helped me to have a better working relationship with my overworked coworkers who had been trying to stay in their lanes. Sometimes people still get burned out and cannot help me at all, but for the most part we find ways to work together to keep things from falling through the cracks.