by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

“Seeking do-or-die deadlines and then routinely missing them is like crying wolf: People lose their interest and the deadlines lose their bite…study after study has shown that too much time pressure…makes us less creative and more sloppy.” Opinion article by Carl Honore, Sunday NY Times, July 2015.”

    Honore, the author, went on to point out that the word deadline was coined at prison camps during the American Civil War, where boundaries were set that inmates couldn’t cross without deadly consequences. Apparently, the term then caught on during the early 20th-century within the newspaper world: to push people toward make-or-break publishing time limits. Now the word is commonplace and not so much to show for it.

Question is: Is the word a help or hindrance in everyday organizational life? The article’s author makes a strong case that it’s likely to be more of a hindrance. His conclusion: ‘Maybe the time has come to reconsider deadlines altogether. To stop falling into a mind-narrowing panic when they approach.’

He aptly put forward that: ‘No one bullied Albert Einstein to crack the theory of relativity by a fixed date.’ In more recent times: ‘Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web without anyone really breathing down his neck with a stopwatch.’

Talking about stopwatches; it is more than likely that Frederick Taylor – the early 20th-century guru on manufacturing efficiency – enhanced deadline thinking in a major way. He had such success in his heyday that his outdated thinking still exists today…unfortunately.

Deadlines, as we know, create enormous stress. Stress dramatically shrinks people’s ability to think, either rationally or creatively. Many of us enjoy applying stress to people in the hope of getting what we want, without realizing that it’s often counterproductive. But our ruthless side lingers on.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced the think-shrinking phenomenon when you  panic. Your mind goes almost blank. If you haven’t experienced it, one would contend that you’re not human but superhuman. Unlikely.

So what’s the point in shrinking someone’s ability to think, other than a power trip? Creativity goes out of the window. Experience goes over the wall and so does a quality view. On pain of death something gets produced, but it’s probably sub-par and makes the producers feel bad. So much for employee relations.

A better alternative is to discuss the human outcomes of accomplishing something by a certain date. But that requires a different mindset. Instead of calendar or clock watching, a habit we’re all guilty of, perhaps we should be discussing with  project implementers a picture or view of all the human beneficial outcomes by completing something at a certain time. This is not to ignore a timeline, but make it secondary to all those, both externally and internally, who will benefit from the outcome.

Just think about a publisher’s book deadline? Is it more important to obsess about a looming date or is it more motivating to think about a happy editorial team when they have a class manuscript in their hands. Or is it more important to think about all the potential readers who are awaiting a fascinating story. Which do you think will be more inspiring to the writer, the timeline or those human thoughts?

Just think about producing a complex software package by a specific deadline? Is it better for the programmer to sweat over producing a flawed program on time; or having an honest, educational discussion with the customer upfront to explain unforeseen delay issues?

Is it better for a company trying to meeting a contract deadline to ram everything through to meet the ascribed date, or to have thought enough about a happy customer, as well as others, who may benefit from a quality conclusion?

Not that this author is advocating deliberately letting people down on promised delivery dates. Often missed deadlines are due to poor calculation of the necessary timelines and  not taking Murphy’s law into account, and so on. However, the long term satisfaction of the recipient should be more sacrosanct than meeting a deadline.

Even better than stop-gap solutions to meet deadlines, when  assigning key tasks, is to focus executors on all the people who will be thrilled by on time completion. As things progress, it is better to keep that executor mindful of all the people looking to be satisfied, since human relations are far more motivational than deadlines. And, done in the right spirit, far less stressful.

The simple solution seems to have become ‘focus on deadlines;’ whereas the right solution is to focus on the outcomes, especially the people related ones. Not only will the staff-leader relationship be much more positive, but the relationship with recipients will be much more conducive, too. Since most customers are not buffoons, they will always sense a genuine desire to meet their wishes, rather than experience a poor job done to meet a lame deadline.

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To learn more about alternatives to deadlines, talk with: