Is your mind burning?

Once upon a time, a young woman named Emma lived a hectic professional life. She was always running around, making decisions, and trying to stay ahead in the competitive world of entrepreneurship. However, she felt overwhelmed and stressed on the battlefield, and she couldn't seem to make the right choices no matter how hard she tried.

One day, Emma decided to take a step back and go on a much-needed vacation. During her time away, she discovered the beauty of nature, and she could reflect on her life, work, and choices. She slowly realized that she had been so focused on the day-to-day and short-term goals that she had forgotten about what she wanted to attain.

IT Operations can be exactly the same. The day begins at 6 am, and before you know it, incidents, interruptions, endless operational meetings and myriad other topics await your attention. At the end of the day, you have done 1/10th of what you wanted to do.

Imagine Emma in IT Ops. Her day would be exactly like this. IT Ops can throw many things at us simultaneously. But we're only meant to keep a small number of items in our working memory. And the same goes for the people we work with. So delegating, aka "push schtuff down," is not going to work.

What you need to do is to help others to work in their way and provide space for them to think. That allows the power of collaboration to bloom.

How do you do that? Through clear leadership, establishing a supportive and positive culture and clear values. Lofty idea, yet it is easier than you may think.

By taking this step back, Emma started to see that success wasn't just about realizing the project and climbing the corporate ladder at the expense of everything else but also about finding balance and happiness in her working life. She realized she had been neglecting her relationships, health, and the team's well-being in pursuit of success. She also made a conscious effort to see the bigger picture and make decisions that were aligned with her values and what was truly important to her.

The "bigger picture" is understanding in what context you need to make decisions and how to explain this to your teams, And organizational size does not matter. By asking a few questions, you can obtain all the information you need to translate goals, visions, and strategies to the scale of your team. This works in small companies as well as large international organizations.

This larger view allows you to translate the immediate needs to what your team member needs to hear in a way this person can accept. The larger view will enable you to filter things away from the person who needs focus and give broad insights to the person who wants context.

When you use this, your explanations work with staff open to new ideas and people who want things to stay the same. When you have the larger view, you can give people either a perspective on the future or a view on short-term targets.

I learned long ago that my stress translates badly to leading people. Take a step back, recognize the whole picture, and then divide it into bite-sized actions to reach your desired goal.