One Bite at a Time

There is an old saying, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, “One bite at a time.” The premise is that any task, no matter how big, can be tackled if you break it down into small steps. That is exactly what our team at HUG did a few years ago with one of our shared key performance indicators (or KPIs).

Three years ago, at our end of year staff retreat, I talked to the team about concerns over my travel. I had been on the road 116 days that year just for work activities. That didn’t include family trips like Spring Break or summer vacations. Just HUG travel, 116 days. Think about that. Nearly 32% of the year I was in a hotel room away from my family.

One could say that we were blessed to have enough work that I needed to be gone that much so I could provide for my family. However, in this case, that trend needed to be reversed, and soon. 100-plus days on the road wasn’t sustainable.

As we chatted through potential solutions, the team came up with some great thoughts. However, scaling back to say 75 days we all agreed wasn’t possible overnight. So we had to put a plan in place to conquer this “elephant” one bite at a time. We needed to institute smaller goals that would get us where we wanted to be over time.

Our “bite” goal was 10% less travel each year going forward. So in 2023 our goal was to knock that 116 down to 104. We did even better and landed on 100 that year. In 2024 our goal was 90 days (10 percent less than 2023), and we landed on 88. This year’s goal of 80 days away from home is on track as well. The plan is working, but you might say, “Well how did that happen almost overnight?” Good question…..

We were intentional.

There were really three things that led to this success. One was that we tied my travel to the team’s KPIs. Everyone at HUG shares this travel goal target each year. So they have become quite open about how to keep me home and they track my travel days throughout the year. Hey, money is a great motivator, let’s be honest.

Two, we cut out all non-essential trips. Do I need to be at six trade shows a year? Maybe, but do I really HAVE to be at all of them? No. So I only go to the ones the team feels are mission critical. Just this one alone cut out 3-4 trips a year of three days each on average.

Third, I’ve cut back on a lot of “free” trips. That includes some volunteer boards I’ve rolled off of that require attendance at non-project essential meetings. We also started saying “no” to invitations to attend some meetings where there wasn’t a project tied to them. The team made it clear to me that I had to value my time more and that it was okay to say no to people, even long-time partners of ours. This one has had a net positive effect that we didn’t anticipate. People value my time a lot more now when I do say “no” than they did before. Fundamentally, there is a price that needs to be paid for me to get on a plane and trade that time away from my family. People respect that.

One larger positive from all of this is that our team has grown professionally a great deal these past few years. They have stepped in and led projects without me, they have volunteered for industry boards and committees, and they have really taken ownership of when to say yes or no on behalf of HUG as a whole. It’s been quite satisfying to see their growth as an unanticipated outcome of this one KPI.

The moral to this week’s story is that any goal can be accomplished. And you don’t have to try and knock the ball out of the park in one fell swoop.

There is an old baseball saying, “You can’t hit a grand slam with the bases empty.”

String together a bunch of singles and the grand slam will come over time.