Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your Modern mentor.

I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders design work so that results, wellness and engagement all thrive together.

And if you're a leader of a team wishing you could get more from and also do more for your team, then head over to lead above noise.com/connect.

Submit a form, book us a call, and let's chat about how we can help activate some big results in your organization.

Okay, onto today's episode.

So last week a client of mine, she's the head of HR for her company, was venting to me about this wellness program that her team had launched just the week before.

So much time and money went into this program.

She told me we were expecting a few hundred people, but only three showed up, literally three, and I don't get it.

Employees keep telling us in our engagement survey that they're desperate for wellness and then no one shows up when we launch something.

And I told her, listen, I'm guessing they don't have the time.

And yeah, she knew this was probably true, but she asked around a bit to validate and it was pretty clear.

This is what we keep doing.

We keep trying to solve problems by bolting things on top of the work.

We try to repair the overwhelm and exhaustion and disconnection we're creating.

But I read this quote recently by a guy named Eric j McNulty in an article that said, elegant solutions mitigate stress in the systems while fostering flow, the feeling that individual and collective effort are optimized for achieving desired outcomes.

It's a little wonky, but really this for me is the crux of so much.

We need to be designing more elegant solutions at work that are meeting all of our needs rather than forcing them to compete with each other.

Let's talk today about some opportunities that I think are kind of right there for the grabbing.

The first is prioritization.

As both a breather and an impact driver, most teams today are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

17 different priorities are all number one, which leaves everyone running around like headless chickens.

It's exhausting for people, but it's also terrible for performance because who is delivering their best anything in this kind of chaos?

Now, granted, we live in the real world and simply cutting a list of 17 down to three priorities would be nice, but that is not usually realistic.

But what can we do instead?

How do we redesign the way that we carry that load so it doesn't destroy us?

And so it actually makes us sharper at the essentials.

What I've seen work isn't refusing the work but reshaping how it's handled.

Like one team I worked with started mapping every new request against their core goals in a shared doc, visible to everyone.

They didn't reject projects, but they labeled them clearly as core supporting or nice to have, and it gave the team just some language to start to push back, even postpone when energy was being drained by the nice to haves and it gave executives visibility into those trade-offs.

People still worked hard, but they weren't spinning equally on everything.

They started to bring the most important things to the top little bit of breathing room, stronger results.

The next one is breaks as fuel for focus, not just downtime.

So burnout, you've heard me say it a million times, we're all feeling it, but it's not just coming from volume.

It's too much running around without reflecting or processing, doing something with all.

We're drinking from the fire hose, we're running from meeting to meeting task to task without pausing or breathing or dare I say peeing.

And the cost here isn't just the human toll, though.

There is that, but there are also costs like things slipping through cracks, things that we are not thinking through or handing off effectively because you don't have the space in which to do it.

One thing I'm seeing these days, and it's so simple, is just companies cutting their meeting times by five or 10 minutes.

So instead of a meeting ending on the hour, it ends on the 50 or 55.

It's a tiny break, and it's about recovery and peeing, but also it's not because really it serves to give people just a minute to think, to reflect, to process what just happened in that conversation, to capture their key takeaways, their next steps, literally giving people a hot second to jot those down, to flag their questions or get organized for coming next.

It is a small change and the impact can be huge.

Next, we have connection as performance accelerator.

We all know that feelings of connection and belonging are down, and connection isn't just about physical proximity or more meetings.

It's about people feeling tethered to each other and to the work.

Honestly, it sucks to work in a silo or wonder if your efforts are mattering to anyone else, but it's not just a culture problem.

Disconnection also slows the work down.

Handoffs get messy.

We don't trust each other.

We duplicate effort and deadlines slip because we're not fully aligned.

Aligned connection matters to the spirit and the results.

One approach I've seen work lately is what a client is calling connective tissue meetings.

Instead of adding more check-ins, teams are just redesigning their existing touch points to create actual connection points.

One team started every project kickoff with a simple question, what does success look like on this project?

For each of us personally, not just the team outcome, but what do each of us need in order to feel proud of our contributions?

Another team added two minutes to the end of their weekly standup where someone different each week shared one thing they learned from another team member that week.

It's a tiny time investment, but people started paying attention to each other's work differently, to each other's comments and contributions.

They started seeing opportunities to support each other to catch potential issues earlier and leverage each other's strengths.

The magic isn't in the format.

It's in creating moments where people see how they're connected to the bigger picture and to each other's success.

When that happens, the work flows better because people are actually working together, not just near each other.

And finally, we've got learning as energy and edge.

We know that people crave learning.

We want it.

It's a driver of employee engagement, but also finding the time, oh, come on.

But without it, we get bored and stale.

And here's the thing.

We don't need elaborate programs to solve this.

We need to stop treating, learning like it competes with getting stuff done and start seeing it as fuel for better work.

One team I know started doing what they call edge shares.

They spend the first three minutes of their weekly planning meeting with each person sharing one thing they learned recently that they think could help the team.

It could be from a client conversation, something they read or listened to, even a mistake they made.

It didn't matter.

What happened was fascinating.

People started paying more attention throughout their week because they knew they would have to share something.

I said, the team got smarter faster because they were pulling their insights in real time, and suddenly those planning meetings had more energy because people were bringing fresh thinking and not just status updates.

The learning wasn't separate from the work.

It was making the work better.

People felt more engaged because they were growing and the teams output improved because they were continuously sharpening their edge together.

Wellbeing isn't about add-ons, perks, or extras.

It's about the way the work itself is designed.

When you frame prioritization as alignment, recovery is focus, connection is acceleration, and learning is fuel.

You're not just making people feel better though you are, you're also making the work stronger, and that's when experience and results stop competing and start reinforcing each other.

This is what I do, and if your organization could use a dose of this, send me an email, rachel@leadabovenoise.com and let me know how I can help.

You can follow Modern Mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week.

Modern Mentor is a quick and Dirty Tips podcast.

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