Strategic Recovery

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode. In this episode of the Leaders Kit.

Bag, I'm continuing with the theme of looking at how we, as individuals, as leaders, can manage our own energy levels and stay motivated. And in this particular episode, we're going to be exploring the topic of strategic recovery. First of all, I'm going to encourage you to pause and think about how you currently go about booking in holidays and deciding when to take a break. Because the reality is, for many of us, that process is largely driven by either the religious calendar that we follow ourselves or is most prevalent in our part of the world, or the academic calendar. So, for example, for myself living in the uk, many people I work with their year and their approach to planning in rest breaks looks something like this. They get to Christmas and they take the mandated break when their office closes down for Christmas and New year. Then come January 2nd or 3rd, they hit the ground, an absolute sprint, full of energy, things fired up by New Year's resolutions, and go hard at it all the way through until Easter, which is actually quite a long burst. Then they might take a break, they come back off of that holiday, they sprint again through to the summer, at which point, especially if they've got kids, they'll likely take off two weeks to have a holiday with their family and then go back to work and, and sprint right the way through until Christmas, maybe taking the odd little break here and there. That's the norm for many people. But it's potentially, and I would challenge you that it's rarely that effective. Instead, I think a much better approach is to take a very strategic approach to your rest and recovery. So back in 2001, Jim Lure and Tony Schwartz wrote a Harvard Business Review article called the Making of the Corporate Athlete. And in that article, they compared an elite athlete to a senior business executive. Now think just for a minute about how an athlete trains or maybe how you've trained, if you've ever taken part in a half marathon, marathon or some sort of big sporting event. What we tend to do is increase the training load. Next week we'll increase it again, next week we'll increase it again. Then we pause and rest. After a rest, we come back increase training load, build, build, build, rest, build, build, build, rest. But that's not what we do in the business world. And an athlete is training for a particular event, whereas the corporate athlete, as Lure and Schwartz pointed out, is expected to perform like 365 days a year, 52 weeks a year. And we don't take that very deliberate approach to planning in rest and recovery. So I encourage you to take a strategic approach to planning in your rest breaks. And here's how to do it. Step one Just get yourself some sort of basic annual calendar or planner. Even create one yourself on Excel if you need to. Once you've done that, step two is to look at your business or work calendar. Most organisations are cyclical, so based on previous years you can easily identify when the particularly busy periods are going to be month end, quarter end. Is there a particular conference season, a particular quarter in the year where you get received the most orders and you're the busiest in terms of operations or when the most sales pressure comes on. So mark all of those particularly busy periods in the work calendar onto your 12 month planner. Once you've done that, step three, mark on all of the important activities in your personal and family life. If you are training for any sporting events, get them on there. If you've got kids at school at exam age, then mark those on the calendar so you can see when there might be some busyness, pressure or stress on the home front that you can plan around. And then once you've done that, step four is to sort of start zooming in and look at blocks of two and three weeks to think, okay, well over this two or three weeks, where are the particular busy periods and pinch points? And based on all of that, you can then start to strategically look at when do I need to book in some time off to take a break so I can consistently manage my energy and motivation and perform to the standard I'm expected to perform at and the standard I want to perform at. And of course you don't just need to do this on a yearly basis, you can do it quarter by quarter as well. So you can zoom in on a specific 90 day period and do the same sort of process. That's the framework I use feel free to adapt it, play around with it. But whatever you do, I encourage you to be much more intentional and deliberate and strategic about when, where, and how you take breaks. Because when you do that, you'll be much better at managing your energy and motivation. That's it for this episode. As always, look after yourself. Look after those who've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.