This is a reviewed and extended version of a series of posts already published on my friend Luca Cipriani newsletter.
The one thing I noticed when I was promoted in a management role, was that suddenly people started listening to me (ok, stop laughing now). I was never a charismatic person, my opinions were not always taken into consideration. Sometimes for good reasons. And now I was exhilarated by this new superpower!
I soon realized that it was a trap, it is a superpower that needs to be used sparingly. Otherwise, it does more harm than good.
But let me pick up on a few examples where I messed up (or I have seen other people messing up), and what you should be doing instead.
Managing down
A team member asked for help. He didn’t know how to approach a problem. I was a bit busy, so I could not sit together with him, but I suggested that we try doing things in a certain way.
After 3 days he came back to me, very frustrated: the way I suggested could not be done, as I didn’t consider the problem very well (my fault). My first reaction was asking: “Why haven’t you tried a different way” (but actually inside my head I was wondering: “Why have you listened to me?”).
And then it dawned on me. Of course! I am his boss, what I say has a completely different weight!
So, the first lesson I learned was to be very careful to express my opinions with the team.
You can use your authority to establish what is right and wrong, the ways of working, and the rules for interacting together. But this needs to be the perimeter where the team can work safely and take their own decisions.
Managing up
I had a great relationship with the VP of engineering of my previous company. We would often spend our “one-to-ones” chatting about a bit of everything. One day I was venting about my frustration with one of the designers.
A few days later I was confronted by this designer. He was angry and disappointed that I complained with the VP of engineering instead of simply discussing together.
What I didn’t realize is that your boss’ role is to act on your issues.
The lesson for me was: do not disclose information to your boss if you don’t want them to be acted upon. Or if you do it, make it very clear that you don’t want them to intervene.
Tell the story
One of the important skill that a manager should develop is "to tell the story". Telling the story is a way to frame progress, events, decisions in an unifying way that makes sense to the people.
You can tell the story to your manager (managing up), catching up on your status updates. For example:
About the service migration to shut down the cluster that costs us a lot of money: the analysis was completed 2 weeks ago and we found out that we had to replace nginx as its module is not longer supported (this was unexpected). The team is now testing an alternative. When this is completed we will proceed with finish the migration of the database first, and then the application. Then we should be able to go live and complete.
You can also explain organisation changes to your teams, in a similar way.
As you know we had issues with the workload and the quality in our project. We spent last month reorganising the teams and reducing the scope, removing project X from the roadmap and postponing project Y. Now it is time we start with the next phase of listing and prioritising the tech debt, and in the next 2 months we will address the most severe of the issues.
The story format is very simple. You lay down some context, sum up a quick roadmap, mention what was done and what needs to be done to finish. Often it may be useful to give the reason why.
Don't be afraid to repeat briefly the story every time you give a status update. The benefit of it is that makes it is easier to follow and understand what is going on. It is equivalent of the recap they put in place at the beginning of some tv show.
Driving decisions
Faced with a problem my first instinct is to propose a solution and to get the team consensus.
This is a reasonable course of action if you are NOT the leader.
There is an acronym for this. HIPPO: decisions are often made deferring to the opinion of the most senior person in the room. (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).
The reason for this is the “peer group syndrome”: people like to side with one opinion, rather than express their own. In cases where the psychological safety is low, this opinion ends up being the one from the person with the highest authority.
In a decision-making process, you want everyone to be heard and to consider all the different points of view.
The first easy improvement is for the leader to speak at the very last. This helps in minimizing his/her influence on the team. But the team dynamic is still vulnerable to converge to the opinion of the most senior or charismatic member of the group.
A more effective way would be applying a strategy for divergent communication.
There are a few good strategies in the book “Leadership is language” (David Marquet).
For example: asking everyone to write down their own idea, and then discussing all of them. While you as a leader try to be neutral until the very last.
When it is necessary to reach a consensus, avoid asking binary (yes/no) questions like “Is this ok?” but rather a confidence interval “how much are you sure?”. And always investigate if there are outliers: what have they seen that the others could not see?
Avoid projecting uncertainty
Some people define the role of a manager to be a “shit umbrella”. I don’t like the expression, but there is some truth in the metaphor.
Your role as a manager is to create a safe environment by filtering and consolidating information between the team and the organization.
One thing that you should not do is to project uncertainty on the team. Do not communicate things that are not definitive, unless after carefully assessing the consequences. Uncertainty leads to fear and can be very stressful and affect the team morale.
Imagine your boss is setting an emergency meeting with you, without specifying the reason. How would you feel? My first thought would be “what did I mess up?”
Representing the organization
I had a manager that expressed very clearly when he disagreed with the organisation's decisions.
I think it was a big mistake. After a while, engineers didn’t trust him to be able to exercise any influence on his managers and those decisions. Leaving the team vulnerable, and creating an atmosphere of fear and distrust.
While communicating decisions taken by the organization, you have to bear the responsibility of the decision, even if you disagree. At Amazon, they call it “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit”. Your authority comes from the organization that appointed you as a leader. If you show dissent, you are only undermining your own authority and the trust the team has in you, in being able to protect them.
Closing
Your role in an organization has a massive effect on the perception of what you say. You have to take this into consideration while communicating with your team and managers. Like any superpower, it comes with great responsibilities!