Some employees have a gift for creating work for themselves. They
can take a 3-hour task and expand it so that it takes 3 days. Hidden mes- sages lurk behind all the layers of tasks they invent for themselves and others to do:
• “No one works as hard as I do on this job.”
• “I am the only one smart enough to see that these extra steps are
needed.”

Those messages are wrong on so many levels.

Interventions
• If the forming of unnecessary task forces or focus groups becomes
a habit, make the employee more accountable for this use of human capital. For 6 months, the employee should be required to get management approval before forming these groups. Until he develops better judgment about how to use groups appropriately, someone should monitor his use of them. In lieu of management approval, two coworkers could serve as accountability partners.

• The manager should ask several employees with projects similar to the employee’s to develop a timeline depicting their project milestones from start to finish. The employee should create one, too. The manager should meet with the employee privately to compare the progress of each project and the total time consumed.
A serious talk should follow about allocation of resources, particularly
that most valuable resource—time.

• Be concrete in telling employees what you don’t want them to do.
For example, “I don’t want a 10-page, bound report analyzing every safety incident. A 1-page summary on the standard form will serve my purposes satisfactorily.”

• If focus groups and other collaborative bodies are important to an
employee, satisfy that need by sending the employee to serve on
these when someone must. Many employees don’t want this duty.
Give it to the employees who enjoy it.

Many of these problems may stem from analysis paralysis. Review that section and others for more interventions.

Taken From: 201 Ways to Turn Any Employee Into a STAR Performer