Invisible issues

Any of us could have told you it wasn’t going to work. (Popular Science Monthly, 1872)

Back when I was director of Eclectic Music, I worked into the evenings.

The busy hours at the music school also ran into the evenings. Lessons generally began around 3:00 PM and continued until 8:00 PM or later for our older students.

That meant that whenever I finally left the office, there were people around. People I knew, because these were my clients. It was often a bit of an obstacle course to find my way to the front door and out. As an extrovert, I would be genuinely happy to see people and spend time talking to them. Before I knew it, I would have spent forty-five minutes or an hour in a series of casual conversations on the way out the door.

As a matter of fact, this could happen even when I was just leaving my office to go grab a drink of water downstairs. Such an errand could end up taking me ten or fifteen minutes or more because I would get wrapped up in conversations with the parents of students who took that moment to ask a question related to their music lessons or just chose to be friendly.

I’m pretty grateful for all of the people I met as director of the school. Some of these conversations led to lifelong friendships. I even met a couple of celebrities. After two years of pandemic, I think wistfully of the social encounters that added so much color to my day back then.

However, the serendipity of impromptu conversations also had a downside. I suffered from significant lost productivity because I didn't know how to stick to my schedule. I didn't know how to say, "It's been great chatting! I've really got to get back to work," or "I'm going to be late for dinner."

These days, I’m a lot better at following through on my commitment to myself when it’s time to get some work done. I’ve improved at navigating awkward social situations and small talk. I understand that the other person is probably happy to say goodbye and get back to their phone. I'm grateful to now have the skills to be more intentional about the way I spend my time.

Yet if you had asked me about my time management back then, I probably wouldn't have identified those casual conversations as a problem. I know that they tended to happen when I was feeling a little tired and aimless anyway. I would have brushed off the issue and resolved to simply try harder. I wouldn't have looked very hard at the pattern.

I would have really benefited from some support regarding this issue. It was costing me hours of productivity in a given week. What's more, it was a sign of a gap in my leadership. It was a symptom of my tendency to follow instead of lead — to drift instead of direct. There were plenty of strategies for improvement, but instead of seeking them out, I meandered.

It never occurred to me that there was a way around the little annoyances that characterized my day-to-day work life. And I didn't realize that some of the little things were actually a big deal.

I'll offer another example that's useful as a metaphor, but can also be taken literally: Not everyone knows that they don’t have to go to the file menu to select "copy" and then "paste" — they can use the keyboard shortcuts instead.

Once you know that keyboard shortcuts exist, you start looking for more of them and use them all the time. They can save you many hours of the course of a career! But if you don't know about them, you won't even know that you don't know.

In my current work, I help other leaders to identify these blind spots faster. So much of what we think we have to put up with is optional, but it's often hard to see clearly a dynamic that we're part of and contributing to. It's helpful to have someone else to guide you toward a new vision for what's possible.

I still have invisible issues — we all do. I'm unwittingly doing things that undermine my efforts, and not doing things that could benefit me. The solution is to seek counsel and feedback to make the invisible, visible. Then, we can turn around and help someone else.