TEN

How Managers Can Help Their Staff Manage Up

In some ways the ultimate focus of this book is finding strategies and techniques to help staff and managers better understand one another, coexist more harmoniously, and ultimately collaborate and thrive. Clearly, this happens most effectively and efficiently if both parties (managers and staff) are each doing their part. Not only can managers help, their willingness to create an environment that makes it easier or more palatable to manage up can make a huge difference. So let’s identify a few specific steps managers can take to encourage managing up within their organization.

PROACTIVELY SHARE SPECIFIC FEEDBACK ON YOUR PREFERENCES

Often it can take months or years to “learn a new boss”—figure out their quirks, idiosyncrasies, preferences, and work style. Typically, employees are forced to figure this out the hard way through a sometimes brutal (and risky) version of trial and error. While it’s normal to just let people feel each other out over time organically, it’s not necessarily the best recipe for success. Why make it such a guessing game? Accelerate this critical process by proactively sharing this information with staff early on (whether they ask you or not). Better yet, encourage the entire team to share it with one another. True collaboration is about everyone on the team knowing each other better so they can operate more effectively. Well, if that sounds logical, the next obvious question becomes how do you do it?

There are many effective methods for sharing your preferences proactively. I generally recommend that managers conduct some sort of team retreat to facilitate this information sharing. It’s a highly efficient method and if done correctly also highly impactful. With a face-to-face team retreat, the manager can not only share their preferences with the team all at once, they can also facilitate that same sharing among all team members and do so in an interactive environment where team members can ask questions, discuss examples, and ultimately learn much more.

Having facilitated scores of team retreats over the years, I have several specific recommended activities to help a team shed light on individual preferences.

The Four Walls Communication Mode Activity

I developed this activity after working with many teams who were clearly struggling with dysfunctional communications. Particularly today with so many different communication modes available, selecting the best mode for each situation can be key. One important factor in that selection process is considering the receiver’s preferred communication mode. Most people simply default to their preferred communication mode (when practical)—if they’re an email person, they heavily lean on email; if they’re a phone person, they tend to call a lot, etc. While that may seem perfectly logical, my experience has been that it’s not the most effective approach. Instead, it’s ideal to customize communications to match the receiver’s preferred mode (not yours). We all know people that you can email all day long—you’re not going to get a response until you pick up the phone and call them. Or there might be people who won’t respond to a voicemail for days, but if you text them, they’ll respond within seconds. The key is figuring out each individual’s preferences so you can customize your communications for maximum success. This quick activity reveals this information for everyone, and then encourages a really healthy discussion about team communications.

Here’s how you would facilitate the activity during a team meeting/retreat:

1. Label each wall with a different communication mode: Face to Face, Phone, Email, Text/IM.

2. Ask each team member to walk to the wall that represents their preferred communication mode. Point out that although their preference might change depending on the situation, we’re not talking about extreme situations (project crisis, the building is on fire, etc.)—just normal everyday communications.

3. Ask everyone to look around the room and observe who is standing in which group.

4. Ask each group to take a few minutes to share with the team why they prefer that mode, what the others should know about how to communicate best with them, and what additional communication preferences they might have that relate to that mode (avoid bcc, don’t email if it’s urgent and you need a response within four hours, etc.).

I should clarify that while receiver preference is an important factor to consider when selecting the best communication mode for a message, it’s not the only factor to consider. Obviously, practicality plays a role. If you need to provide information to 100 people in the next hour, your mode options are limited. Likewise, I often teach groups to avoid using email if a communication is sensitive or emotional in nature, complicated, or urgent. For those three situations, richer communication modes (face to face or phone) are typically more desirable and effective. Like our mom always said, “It’s not what you say but how you say it!” Many of us have heard of the unfortunate situation where a friend experiences break up by text message, social media, post it, or some other inappropriate communication mode. In those cases it’s not uncommon for the person broken up with to be more upset with how it was done than with the break up itself! Indeed, selecting the wrong communication mode can cause problems where there were none or make a bad situation much worse. Avoid it at all costs!

Quiz Me Activity

The goal of this simple activity is to encourage team members to get to know each other a bit better quickly—think speed dating for the workplace. Here’s how it works:

1. Each person is given a pad and pen.

2. When the bell rings, they find another person and interview them, asking them the question announced by the facilitator. They write down the answer, then they give their partner their own answer to that same question. Once they exchange this information and chat briefly about their responses, they find someone else and repeat the same Q&A exchange until the bell rings again and the facilitator announces a new question.

Sample Questions—I generally strive for a combination of personal and professional type questions to encourage general relationship building and work styles clarification.

• What was your first paid job?

• What is your workplace pet peeve?

• What is your secret superpower (something that you do well that may not relate to your current work or professional life)?

• Growing up, what was your favorite TV show or superhero character?

• If you won the lottery tomorrow, what would be your first major purchase?

• What is a fact that no one else in the room knows about you?

• What was your best trip and why?

• What should others know about your work style?

3. Once the new question is announced, participants repeat step 2 until the facilitator announces that the Q&A portion is over.

4. To debrief, ask the full group to respond to these questions:

• Please share something that you found you had in common with someone else in the room.

• Please share something that you learned that surprised you.

• Please share something that might change how you work with someone else on the team.

Work Styles Assessment

There are many different assessment tools out there that can provide valuable feedback on your natural style, preferences, and inclinations. Not only can it be helpful to take an assessment and discuss individual style differences as a group, the benefits can spill over into everyday interactions if you choose to post your personality or work style type outside your cubicle/office or print them on your name tents for meetings. The initial discussion certainly accelerates the organic process of trying to understand different personalities on the team, and the posted types serve as a casual reminder for team members to customize their approaches, communications, and interactions on a daily basis.

Create an Environment that Rewards Questioning/Challenging Authority

If a manager truly wants staff to feel free to push back on their ideas, ask thoughtful questions, point out something that hasn’t been previously mentioned, they must actively cultivate a questioning culture. Unfortunately, most corporate cultures are exactly the opposite for a number of reasons. Possibly the most dominant reason is that most of us are programmed early on to have some level of fear of asking questions in a group or public setting. Whether it’s because we don’t want to seem stupid, we don’t want to seem confrontational, or we are just generally nervous about making public comments, there’s a definite inertia that many employees have to push beyond to raise their hand in a group setting and ask a pointed question or make a controversial comment. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to this basic psychological barrier, virtually no one wants to be the one to challenge the boss (e.g., tell them they have an “ugly baby”), so it’s not terribly surprising that most organizations don’t have cultures that encourage questioning or challenging.

Of course, the real question becomes how do you create that culture? It’s definitely easier said than done and the few organizations that I’ve seen do it well, definitely didn’t develop that culture by accident—instead, they were very deliberate and intentional about creating it. A participant in one of my project management training classes told me that he had a boss once who had a “challenge jar” in his office and he would put $5 in the jar every time someone on his team effectively challenged one of his ideas or posed a question that caused the team to think about an idea or concept differently. At the end of each month he used the funds for a team lunch. The practice became something tangible or demonstrative that showed the team that the boss truly did want and value constructive feedback. Another project management technique that I’ve often recommended to teams to extract more candid feedback (and create a culture reinforcing that) is called the Final Index Card. At the close of a meeting for a new project or task, I usually say something like this:

“I so appreciate your participating in today’s session, and I want to fully acknowledge that there are many things I don’t know at this point. There also may be concerns or issues that some of you may not want to raise publicly, but it’s critical that I identify those potential risks sooner rather than later. As such, I’d like to ask each of you to complete the sentence on the provided index card using your black marker, and drop your card into the bag in the hallway on your way out. The sentence is this: The biggest concern I have about our team’s (project’s) success is …”

After the meeting I would review the cards, then discuss them during my next team meeting. I wouldn’t “out” anyone by asking, “Who wrote this one?” Instead, I’d focus on the general themes covered in the cards and begin an authentic risk management discussion. In my experience, this Final Index Card technique has been a powerful method for identifying potential risks that may not have otherwise been exposed until much later (if at all) and starting to build a culture of discussing undiscussables.

Let Them Know that You Embrace the Managing Up Concept

Hopefully, this is stating the obvious, but one way to encourage managing up is to first let staff know that you’re open to it. This doesn’t need to be a major proclamation or a mandate. The goal is to make it clear to them that you embrace the concept. The issue is this: many subordinates might have the natural inclination to manage up but chicken out for fear of retribution or some sort of negative outcome. It’s important that managers let staff know up front that they shouldn’t fear that. One of the survey respondents (in a leadership capacity) shared how she did it with this comment: “I tell all my new hires that there are two ways we can approach things: you can fill me in on what’s ahead for the day or week in the morning in a five-minute chat, or I can chase you down and ask you for it. Which option would you rather use? I asked them. They chose the first option—smart!”

Now, the other side of that coin is that if managers tell staff that they should feel free to manage up as needed to enhance effectiveness and efficiency, they can’t react defensively or punitively to questions, proactive suggestions, and so on. Again, managing up doesn’t shift authority from manager to subordinate, and that should be made clear, but it’s also important that managers react and respond positively to managing up type behaviors if they want to encourage them. Indeed, in the short term subordinates will ignore what managers say and instead watch what they do, so managers should ensure that their actions match their words in this regard.

Develop Team Ground Rules

I’ve worked with teams for years helping them develop team ground rules. Project teams often develop and utilize ground rules as a tool for proactively discussing and gaining team consensus on how they’ll work together, paying particular attention to specific areas that often cause team difficulties. I often refer to these as a workplace version of the type of “house rules” you would develop with your college roommate when you first moved off campus. Invariably, once you start to cohabitate, after the honeymoon period has worn off, it becomes necessary to discuss potential problem areas and reach agreement on those to save the harmony of the relationship. As a project manager, I would typically introduce the concept of ground rules like this:

“We’ve all worked on teams that are dysfunctional, in part because they don’t talk about how they want to work together, and I don’t want us to be one of those teams. As such, I’d like us to take some time to develop a list of ground rules, if you will, that we can all buy into to help us collaborate and team more effectively. Each person will propose at least one potential ground rule, then we will review them all and only adopt the ones that we all can agree to.”

Team ground rules provide huge benefits. First, the ground rule development process helps prevent the team from waiting until they’re having major problems (or worse yet, have become irrevocably broken) to begin to discuss certain issues that tend to plague teams. While the focus may be on the final list, the discussion itself is a very valuable part of the process. Another benefit is that it reinforces the concept of bottom-up consensus building (instead of a top-down autocratic processes). Since the ground rules aren’t determined by the manager and instead are developed organically from staff input (and only adopted with unanimous agreement), the process encourages and reaffirms a culture of bottom-up feedback. Finally, this is one more avenue that managers can use to share their preferences with the larger team. It provides a great vehicle for them to proactively share key information about themselves and their expectations, whether their specific feedback becomes a ground rule or not. For example, I worked with one team where the manager shared that she felt inundated with emails and hated long, rambling emails. After some discussion the team chose to adopt the ground rule “Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)—include Action Required in the subject line for any emails requiring action.” It’s important to reiterate that the ground rules should be driven primarily by staff and should not become a laundry list of management requests, but managers should participate in and contribute to the process. To the extent that they participate as a team member, they have an opportunity to provide the team insight into their personality and their preferences. Ground rules can cover a wide range of topics, including meeting etiquette, out of office practices, general office protocol, and so forth. Here’s a sampling of some ground rules I’ve seen various teams use over the years. Note though that each ground rules list should be highly customized to that particular organization.

Sample Team Ground Rules:

• Start and end meetings on time.

• Anyone late to the meeting must sing a stanza of the national anthem.

• Ownership means ownership.

• Rotate facilitator and scribe for all team meetings

• Meetings longer than two hours must have food (longer than three hours must have beer/wine).

• No meetings or interruptions during quiet hours (before 9:30 and after 4:30).

• Team members are responsible for documenting the status of their action items in the appropriate application.

• Attend the full duration of all team meetings, barring emergencies.

• Phones/electronics are not allowed in the meeting room (drop them in the basket on the way in).

• Seek input from those on the conference bridge first.

• Attack the issue, not the person.

• Anytime you voice a complaint, you must suggest two possible solutions.

• Avoid passive decision making (“whatever you all think”).

• No sacred cows allowed.

• Include kudos in every meeting and be positive.

• Provide backups and at least forty-eight hours notice if you’ll be out of the office.

• Telecommuting is a privilege. Telecommuting staff will happily come into the office on their telecommute day if needed for critical meetings.

Again, it’s a mistake for a team to just adopt someone else’s ground rules—the real benefit is having the team do the work themselves so that they get a much deeper understanding of their own team DNA in the process.