Have you ever heard the expression, “I am a person who wears multiple hats in business?” This expression is implying that this person has many roles that they oversee or must get done throughout the day. For example, say you are a business owner who is married with children and CEO of your company. Your hats may include, mother/father, husband/wife, leader, boss, accountant, business owner, and more. Does that make sense? Throughout the day you might be wearing more than one hat at a time! If you are dealing with your kids but also working at the same time, you would have the parent hat on, on top of the business owner hat.
Make sense? Good.
You may be wondering, why am I bringing this up. This is being brought up because currently, it is seen as a popular thought process to be always busy or to tackle many things at once. While this is a very good skill to have, it can bring up some negative side effects.
Let us talk about that.
Overdone
This is the first negative that comes to mind. Letting yourself become overworked and overdone happens very easily when you are wearing more than one hat. Obviously, some hats cannot be taken off, like the partner and parent hat. But let us pretend that those hats are not counted for (they are just known to be there). Let us start counting our hats in categories that do not fit parents and partners.
What I am getting at is that sometimes when we are working, we take on too many hats at a time and this will lead to us getting worn out and overwhelmed. If you are a marketing coordinator but you take on some of the programming, quality check, accountant, business development and other roles that are in your company, you might get overwhelmed and your work might suffer.
That leads us to our next negative.
Too many hats lead to a lack of proficiency in the areas that needs the most
Have you ever played more than one sport at a time? Or maybe a sport and a different activity that happened during the same time? What usually happens to one of those events? One ends up getting put on the back burner and then eventually suffers from lack of effort and attention. This is the outcome of having too many hats at once.
Will discuss with the two situations that can play out.
Situation #1:
Wearing all the hats.
This state is the one that will drain you the fastest. Basically, what happens is that you have four different hats on your head. And let us put your fuel tank up at 100%. You start by giving one hat 100% of your time and effort. Then, another hat comes into play. Now you are giving 75% to the first hat and 25% to the second. But wait… Here comes another hat. 50% goes to the first hat, 25% goes to the second hat and another 25%, and so on. Notice anything? Not one hat is getting 100% of our best. Not one.
Situation #2:
All to one and none for the rest.
This circumstance is very simple. You are giving your best to one hat and all the other hats suffer because you simply are not giving any effort towards them.
As you can see, neither of the cases are ideal for anything or anyone.
We have gone through some negatives of wearing too many hats at once. Again, there are some positive skills that you can gain from wearing multiple hats, other than possibly becoming a trendsetter. But in all seriousness, be careful with how many hats you allow to put on. Sometimes the best thing you can do is give the hat to someone else.
Do share us how many hats are you wearing?