Repetition helps to create mastery but can also lead to boredom. Leaders and team members who are repetitively tasked with the same assignments, travel, and engagements often lose energy and enthusiasm for the work over time.
Mixing things up and creating task diversity can help to some degree, but doing the same set of duties month after month, year after year, can wear people down. As anyone who travels frequently for work can tell you, it sounds exciting, but after a few trips, travel often becomes dreaded and anything but exhilarating.
The challenge of keeping themselves and the team highly motivated and engaged despite the monotony of repetitive tasks and travel is never easy for leaders. The possibility of burnout and weariness weighs heavily on the minds of good leaders.
Legendary NBA Coach Pat Riley puts it this way, “Players have a tendency to go sideways on you, not for any other reason than fatigue, boredom, monotony. Eighty-two games, 30 cities, same place, same arenas, same locker rooms, same hotels, same food. It’s not a bad life, but it’s hard to keep a team sharp for 100 games a year.”
Ignoring this potential problem or presuming there is nothing a leader can do about it is tantamount to surrender. Great leaders don’t accept the idea that monotony and fatigue are inevitable and must simply be endured. Instead, they embrace the power of learning to address the problem and offset its negative influences.
Doing the same task or assignment is only monotonous if it is done with the same approach, with the same thinking, and with the same people. Asking people to expand their approach to include new facets, new people, and new learnings is the recipe for sustained invigoration.
When travel to the same city and same hotel creates a pattern of indifference, the key is to learn new things. Scheduling an activity during the stay, meeting new people by design, and dining at a new restaurant reorients a traveler and doesn’t allow boredom to set in.
This applies to repetitive projects and assignments. as well. Insisting that team members should include new colleagues, experiment with new processes, and then document learnings to be shared with others interrupts patterned thinking and creates a fresh outlook.
The cure for boredom is curiosity and great leaders encourage it, sometimes to the point of insisting on it.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
