Laws of Leadership: Parkinson's Law

Tasks expand to fill the available time, turning quick jobs into drawn-out ordeals.

Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

This one is essential for the time manager in leadership and every leader manages time.

When leading change and doing new tasks that have unknown time requirements, the temptation is to set loose deadlines, assuming teams will finish efficiently on their own.

Parkinson's Law reminds us that to combat this, we need to focus on time compliance in processes. Time how long a thing should take, add a little to account for reality, and make that the standard.

If you don't know how long it should take, go do the task yourself and time it.

Manage to that time rigorously.

A McKinsey study found that teams are "40% more likely to meet goals on

time with better results when deadlines aren't overly generous."

That's not just to say the jobs were completed faster, but they were more likely to meet the deadline itself with better results when it was a constrained timeline.

You can create a lot of burnout trying to let work self-regulate, it just bloats into inefficiency. And inefficiency like that produces lots of other problems all by itself.

It may feel easier, but your team doesn't like it either. They expect you to set those standards.

It's also important to realize that in an industrial facility, faster isn't necessarily better; beating time goals on well-designed processes often indicates skipping steps, which can compromise safety and quality. Process duration is a standard, substantial deviation from any standard should cause leaders to get interested.

Make sure the task can be done reasonably in the time you set. You do not want people skipping parts of the process or making errors. Time standards that are too tight will generate errors that will cost a lot more than you hope to save.

Leading change is hard. Understanding Parkinson's Law helps us build efficient processes.

Change leadership is a marathon. You can't let work expand unchecked, or you simply won't succeed.