It's about time

Normaly I wouldnt blog such a big article but I Think its a good read

So which one are you? A pre-emptive or a procrastinator? Either way, you’re abusing time

Managers categorise their employees in many ways. Some like to distinguish between extroverts and introverts. Others prefer to look at how willing or unwilling their employees are to take risks. Only rarely do top managers group their people according to their use or abuse of time.

Time abuse is very different from the common and well-covered problem of time management. While the vast majority of us can benefit from practical insights on how to organise our lives better, lessons in time management will have little impact on time abusers. That’s because real time abuse results from psychological conflict that neither a workshop nor a manager’s cajoling can easily cure. Indeed, the time abuser’s quarrel isn’t even with time, but rather with a brittle self-esteem and an unconscious fear of being evaluated and found wanting.

As a clinical psychologist and executive coach, I have observed hundreds of time abusers and have worked one-on-one with more than a dozen in their battle with the clock. Over the years, I’ve come across four main kinds of time abusers.

Financial Review BOSS | Magazine > It's about time

Contd...
The pre-emptive
The rarest of time abusers are people who compulsively beat the clock. They finish assignments weeks ahead of schedule and always seem to be in control. So what’s the problem?

Often there is none. In fact, pre-emptives can thrive for long periods in organisations without ever drawing negative attention, precisely because managers delight in having what appear to be low-maintenance workers. Over time, however, pre-emptives can cause morale problems because they ignore the way their behaviour affects others. They are seldom team players. While their work is often first-rate, they are typically asocial individuals who, while not actively hostile, fail to take their group’s needs into account. For instance, their obsession with beating deadlines makes them move on to other assignments just when they should be accessible to colleagues on the previous one. If their attempts to stay in control are viewed by colleagues as manoeuvres to curry favour or to overshadow the efforts of others, serious dissension can erupt.

Why do people become obsessed with beating the clock? Although a small percentage become pre-emptives as a result of traumatic experiences in adulthood – say, severe illness or the sudden loss of a job – it is largely a response to being raised in a highly disruptive environment.

Far from demanding punctuality – which would provide a sense of predictability and orderliness that, while usually resented, does not produce fear – parents of future pre-emptives are always changing the rules. A future pre-emptive may be cleaning their room (as ordered) then find themselves chastised for not doing their homework. As a result of this arbitrariness, pre-emptives believe that if they don’t comply immediately with a directive the request may be changed at a moment’s notice and they will be open to criticism. By minimising the extent to which anything but their own behaviour determines their fate, these early birds seek to make a pre-emptive strike against that feeling.

So how do you manage the pre-emptives? In my experience the only way to get them to confront their fear of disorder is to put them in a position where they think they are getting more control when in fact they are being forced to interact with their peers. One way to do this is to promote your pre-emptive to a position such as unit head or director of a sub-department. Through socialising and accepting responsibility for others, the pre-emptive will gradually learn to accept unpredictable demands while becoming more flexible. Another approach is to get this person to mentor others. Mentoring is a way for them to get the kudos they crave. Ultimately, this role will lead them to develop greater social awareness and interpersonal skills.




The people pleaser
While the vast majority of us want to be helpful, saying yes all the time is highly dysfunctional. When a person chronically takes on more and more responsibilities out of a fear of confronting authority, he will inevitably commit too much of his time to unproductive projects – he will sit on a project that he should have passed on to someone else much earlier.

Like pre-emptives, people pleasers develop problems with time because of difficult interactions with authority figures. In their early environment their feelings were not sufficiently valued. People pleasers are taught to subordinate their desires for the good of others, notably their parents. The covert message that they should subordinate their needs not only breeds resentment of being controlled but can also evoke feelings of rage.

In the workplace, people pleasers often resort to time abuse to vent their anger. For example, they agree to take on a task they don’t want and then devote obsessive attention to its minutest details. Although this form of over-compliance can win approval, unchecked it can lead to conflicts with the very authority figures they are endeavouring to please.

People pleasers often nurse deep anger, so if you have a direct report who is an inveterate people pleaser, you should consider getting them some form of assertiveness training. Your people pleaser needs to learn better how to set limits and, ultimately, how to handle their anger.

Managing lateness, however, is more complicated. The clear message you have to send is: “If you don’t hear it as a direct request from me, don’t do it.” You can institute regular meetings to monitor what your people pleaser is doing for whom. So if you hear that they are preparing materials for another department, calmly assign some of their assignments to another employee. A simple “I need you here with me” also addresses the people pleaser’s chronic need for appreciation.




The perfectionist
Perfectionists are time abusers who can hold people hostage for indefinite periods of time. But they do it out of anguish rather than rage. They take more time than allotted to satisfy extremely unrealistic but deeply internalised standards of excellence. And they get away with it because they do first-rate work.

For a perfectionist, performance is all or nothing; good enough will never suffice. To achieve such high ideals, the perfectionist posts psychological Do Not Disturb signs all around him as he works. Emotionally isolated, they frequently appear arrogant and dismissive. They require absolute control over the quality of their product.

People often assume perfectionists suffer from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Both perfectionists and those with OCD worry incessantly, are over-scrupulous and extremely preoccupied with exerting control over people, places and things. But a hallmark of OCD is an obsession with rituals and rules, which helps allay anxiety. Perfectionists don’t let rules get in the way: in their pursuit of excellence, they ignore all the regulations.

So what makes perfectionists tick? While there is no single theory, if a child is shamed for failing to meet impossible standards while his self-image is forming, he will later develop a keen sense of humiliation. Harsh demands made on a child can be traumatic. According to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, in early childhood a person either learns to feel autonomous or starts to distrust himself. If parents do not help the child build inner confidence at this stage, he will be haunted by a chronic sense of inferiority for which he will constantly overcompensate. A perfectionist is too vulnerable to feeling ashamed of his productions ever to give anyone less than the best.

A cardinal law of psychiatry is that parents must respond to a child with respect and empathy if he is to acquire a healthy sense of self-worth. Otherwise, the child will develop so-called narcissistic vulnerabilities that drive the person to seek escape through grandiose fantasies and a sense of entitlement. In this view, perfectionism is an inevitable by-product of a narcissistic disorder. The perfectionist copes with their vulnerability by doing all they can to prevent criticism: “If my work is beyond reproach, then no one can find me wanting.”

Perfectionists feel they must demonstrate extraordinary proficiency to succeed or be accepted in organisations. Unfortunately, their perfectionism also makes them very uncompromising colleagues. And a perfectionist’s strategy for winning acceptance is precisely what makes it hard for them to gain acceptance.

In my experience, the technique that behavioural psychologists call flooding offers the only possibility of succeeding with perfectionists. Flooding is typically used to treat people who suffer from a morbid fear of contracting contagious diseases from normal daily interactions. They are forced to deal with potentially contaminated substances – like shaking hands and then eating a sandwich – and learn they can survive. Similarly, you can encourage your perfectionist to get as many colleagues as possible to evaluate his work prior to his submitting the perfect version for your final approval. This inoculates the perfectionist against a dread of evaluations by exposing them to low doses of what they most fear – criticism.

The procrastinator The most common type of time abuser, procrastinators leave assignments until the 11th hour and then throw themselves (and others) into a panic, working around the clock in a vain attempt to meet a deadline. While a perfectionist is sweating to achieve an A+ because that’s the only grade that’s acceptable, a procrastinator postpones doing any work out of fear that they cannot produce an A+.

Parents who praise the child too early and too often in the mistaken belief this is good for self-esteem is known to give rise to such chronic self-doubt. Typically, parents of future procrastinators do not respond to average performance with corrective feedback or disappointment. Instead they say: “You must not have been yourself when you did that, because the real you is perfect.” When a child is raised this way they develop an exalted self-opinion that they fear losing. Unless a child knows the praise is real, they become doubly disillusioned. On one hand, they resent being trapped by unrealistic expectations. On the other, because they come to suspect their parents’ admiration as false, they unconsciously distrust praise from others.

Common to both perfectionists and procrastinators is that their symptoms often grow worse after public acclaim. The situation is particularly acute for the procrastinator, who essentially fears that a promotion will increase the likelihood of failure; even well-earned praise serves only to exacerbate their need to finesse another deadline.

The only way to rescue a procrastinator is to strike at the heart of what they most fear: failure. One helpful technique involves helping them feel more comfortable imagining all the bad things that might happen if they were to turn in work on time but not up to par. Helping a procrastinator air their anxieties can help them understand that they can do remarkable work even if they are not always the superhero.

You can also help a procrastinator lower absurdly high expectations by telling them a project is like a pre-season game – that they should be looking for flaws that can be removed over time. By saying you expect glitches to occur, you give them licence to report problems and lower their anxiety about less-than-ideal performance.

Time abuse is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. It is impossible to cure a person of time abuse by managing their time. Instead, you must understand their need for control and fear of evaluation. Helping the time abuser change their ways will be a slow process – many will be in a state of deep denial that only long-term therapy will ever completely cure.

Yet the rewards of that kind of investment in your people can be great. The motivations that cause time abuse are often the same ones that drive people to perform well, so it is very likely that your company’s worst time abusers will also be its top performers.

Steven Berglas spent 25 years in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is now a researcher at UCLA’s school of management. © Harvard Business Review/New York Times Special Features..