Flashcard: Heat Map

How to keep going when there is blood in your shoes

I’m writing this on the road, from an old carriage house in Yakima, Washington. It’s been over 100 degrees for the last few days in this part of Eastern Washington, and my Seattle-acclimatized body is feeling the impact.

We’re not acclimatized to the stress of leading through an ongoing pandemic, global supply chain issues, and an uncertain economic outlook, while working long hours, often remotely. How can we survive a leadership weather system that we’re not used to, or built to withstand for this long?

When people talk about burn out, they often recommend vacation, rest, self-care as spa treatments. Of course, all of those can be useful. For example, I’m finding my brief trip to visit my oldest friend and her family to be quite restorative.

But what if you can’t take a vacation? What if rest or time is in short supply? Is there anything you can do to mitigate the impact of your work as you work?

Possibly. Which brings me to today’s flashcard: heat maps, those scans or images that show areas of thermal activity. I’ve used this image as an exercise for clients to look at their work lives and understand where they should be focusing. Not for productivity, but for longevity.

Picture your week as a thermal scan. The hot zones that light up are the activities that are restorative to you. The darker zones are tasks or meetings that suck the life out of you. The light areas are somewhere in between. The exercise is simple.

1.     Write out the main tasks or areas of focus that you do every week or whatever block of time you want to consider. This might include management, finance, strategy, supervision, planning.

2.     Highlight which tasks/meetings/activities are restorative. You like them, you finish them feeling energized, productive, competent. Usually these are things that got you into this job or career in the first place.

3.     Use a different highlight for the ones that are soul-sucking. You end these activities tired, low energy. You wish you could do these less or not at all.  You might not be temperamentally suited to them, or as skilled and competent as you are in other arenas.

4.     Try to delegate as many of the soul-sucking activities as you can.  

5.     Try to do more of the ones that are restorative.

It’s simple, right? But when I talk about it with clients, they appreciate being reminded, and many of them find it to be a useful refresher about where to focus their energy.

Of course, there will be tasks you can’t get rid of, or a whole bunch of things that you don’t feel that strongly about. But there should be a happy gem or two or three in each week, if not each day.

Try to do this without judgement. Listen to yourself clearly without expectation. We change over time. You may be surprised at where you now find joy, or that a task that was once engaging is now enervating.

Don’t assume delegating tasks you hate to another is unkind. A leader that finds finance, spreadsheets and detail work mind numbing and thrives in management activities like coaching and developing a team may have a colleague who thrives on detail work and hates her regular 1:1s with her direct reports. In that case, a swap of some responsibilities could be a win for all involved.

I’ve had a few clients who started out in the making and building space and then moved into executive management. But it is restorative to them to return to the making and building space occasionally. Their heat map glowed bright red around anything creative. When they made time for creative projects it was restorative and reminded them why they got started in the businesses they now run.

What if you do a heat map, and the whole thing is black? If you find that your job has no areas of interest for you, that, too, is useful information. I’ll write more in a later post about what to do with that information, and how to decide when and if it’s time to move on.

Teams have heat maps. Once I was working with a team who had some disconnects over communication. I did this heat map exercise with them to find out more about their dynamics as a team. To my surprise, they all had the same thing on their list of what they most loved to do at work. I’ve never seen that before, and I told them it could be a gift – since they all liked the same kind of work, they should make sure that they were doing that kind of project regularly. If an entire team finds a task or project soul sucking, that is worth looking at. They may still have to do it, but naming it and trying to mitigate the impact might help.

Prioritizing things you like sounds really easy, doesn’t it? But as a leader, so many people clamor for your time and attention, you have so many meetings on your calendar every day that the permission to spend more time where you find delight may seem as well-meaning but impossible as other things you mean to do but don’t get around to, like exercise, listening to that business podcast or your garden project or a regular meditation practice.

Sustaining yourself by making space for restoration in your day-to-day work will help avoid burnout and keep you connected to your purpose or meaning or competence. That should be a key priority.

Try to discover where you find energy and get more time there. It will help you stay the course. Remember that any important endeavor, whether it’s building a business, a house, or a family; running a marathon, working for change in your community, writing a book or finishing a degree – they all have peaks and valleys. Everything important has that moment 5 miles from the finish line when your feet hurt and your limbs shake and it’s 100 degrees outside and there’s blood in your shoes. If you know what keeps you going in those moments, you have a better chance of making it through.