“I don’t want to distract the team. They don’t need to worry about this.” That’s what my boss – the head of engineering at a rapidly growing startup – told me when I asked him how he would share information from top management about our revised expansion plans. His job, he said, was to protect the engineers from things like this and to let them focus on building the product.
That conversation was almost ten years ago. It has never sat well with me. I understood my manager’s desire not to make people anxious about what was coming. He really did mean well. Intent is not impact, however. When the corporate changes came to light – in a company-wide, all-hands meeting – they took the teams by surprise. They had no context to understand what they heard from the CEO. Many of them were hurt, confused, and angry. They started to doubt whether or not they could trust the head of engineering. In the long run, withholding information did more harm than good.
I’ve often heard managers say their job is to “protect the team,” especially from “the business.” I disagree with this, and I’m not the only one. As a manager, one of your jobs is to provide a high-quality information conduit between the larger organization and your people and teams. You need to connect people to the organization in a way that creates clarity, not anxiety. Here are three skills I’ve seen effective managers use to do precisely that.
Create Clarity By Adding Context
Great managers help people focus and gain clarity, even when there seems to be none. As Liz Foslien points out, “Great managers create stability for their teams, even when things within the larger organization feel up in the air.” They don’t do this by shielding their people from what’s happening. They certainly don’t keep them in the dark. Instead, they share information about what’s happening in the larger organization and add context and meaning to that information. They take something vague and conceptual and turn it into something specific and tangible their people can interact with. They translate “We’re pursuing a new product strategy” into “As a part of the new product strategy, we will need to redesign our components for sale in Brazil by the end of the third quarter”.
As a manager, you can add context and create clarity for your people by thinking about:
- What does the information that I plan to share mean for them?
- What will they need to do differently?
- What other information do I have that will help them make sense of this?
- How do I communicate that clearly and calmly?
Doing this regularly improves your people’s ability to make decisions by giving them more exposure to the types of problems you encounter and how you want them to handle them. For example, imagine that a team you manage gets an unreasonable request. You could decide not to do it, let the requester know, and not tell your people about it. After all, you don’t want to distract the team, nor do you want them to worry because there’s an increasing number of requests. Shielding the team from information like this is what I see managers who work in the “protector mode” do.
Instead, you could decide not to take on the request, let the requester know, and tell the team what you decided and why. That could sound like, “We got another request for X. We’re not going to do that because it would compromise our ability to deliver on Y, which is our top priority. That’s the third request like that we’ve gotten already this month. Right now, I can handle them. If we get three more before the end of the month, I may need to come back to you to brainstorm what we might do.”
Sharing information like this gives the team context (“We’re getting more and more of these unreasonable requests”) and communicates the strategy for dealing with the situation (“I’m on this; you stay on our top priority and be ready to do some troubleshooting if things get worse”). This takes something abstract and changes it into something concrete that the team can interact with. The sense of agency that brings decreases people’s anxiety rather than amplifying it.
Another benefit of these conversations is that they demonstrate the kinds of decision-making and problem-solving you find helpful as a manager. Modeling this behavior helps your people understand what’s expected of managers – and how they should act when you are unavailable.
Decide What To Tell People And When
Managers can feel caught in the false dichotomy between telling their teams nothing or absolutely everything. There’s a third option: Be strategic about what you share with people and when. Effective managers tell their people about things that will affect them, are relevant to their situation, or may influence their work. There are, of course, things they can’t tell their people about. But unless something is confidential for legal, regulatory, or other compliance reasons, relevant information should be routed to the team – even when it’s something they might not want to hear.
Default to sharing information, but do filter for relevance. Some managers share every bit of information that comes their way in gory detail – particularly details that make the manager nervous or angry. You shouldn’t disguise relevant facts that bother you but don’t need to dwell on or overemphasize them. You don’t need to share every thought that pops into your head. Work to deliver your message clearly and calmly. Your worries and concerns are important but don’t share them in a way that increases the team’s apprehension.
When you choose to share is often a point of contention. Suppose you have some information germane to your people’s work that you believe will upset them. Do you share it immediately? Right before someone goes on vacation? Just as the team is preparing their quarterly release? In your Tuesday staff meeting? Late Friday afternoon? I’ve worked with managers before whose desire to wait for “a good time” to share bad news led to them never sharing it. (In most cases, the team found out about it from other channels.) In truth, there is no best time. Pick an acceptably bad one. If you think this news will upset people, you may be right. Trust that your people can handle it. The more often you do that, the more true it becomes.
Talk About Uncertainty In a Way That Dampens Anxiety
Communicating clearly and calmly is easier when all details of a plan or situation are known. What about when they aren’t? I’ve noticed some managers act as though everything about a situation is either entirely clear or completely unknowable. That’s rarely true. Yet when anything is unclear, they want to wait until everything gets figured out before talking to their people about it.
Like the choice between sharing everything or nothing, this is another false dilemma. Even when there are many unknowns, you use what I have called (with apologies to Douglas Adams[1]) “clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.” When you share information about an ambiguous or uncertain situation, you can reduce people’s anxieties by saying, “These are things I do know, and these are things I don’t.” Enumerating what is known gives people something to work with. This technique is another example of taking something vague and making it clearer and more approachable.
As counterintuitive as it seems, telling people what you don’t know can be very productive. Use what you don’t know as a way to ask about what they know. You might understand the strategic direction the executive team wants, but you might not know how to accomplish it. You might be clear about the range of acceptable solutions, but you might not be familiar with the team’s technology. Clarifying what you know and what you don’t allows you to ask the team to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. This process may not drive out all of the uncertainty, but it gives you a chance to devise a plan for answering your remaining questions.
Telling people what you do and don’t know frequently builds people’s capacity for working in uncertainty. Is your team used to being given a fully fleshed-out plan for them to implement? If so, it’s likely they’ll panic at the first signs of a less-than-perfect approach. By regularly exposing them to the ambiguities and unknowns in your organization – in a way that acknowledges and channels their concerns in a productive direction – you increase their ability to work in less-than-perfect situations.
Improve the Quality of Information You Pass Along
There is some truth to the idea that a manager needs to protect their people. The best managers don’t do that by keeping information from their team. They don’t just share information that reaches them. These managers improve the quality of the information that reaches their people. They help their teams make sense of the often chaotic and confusing messages they receive. And they do it by increasing clarity instead of anxiety.
[1] In Adams’ humorous science-fiction novel The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, the activation of Deep Thought – a computer designed to calculate “the answer to life, the universe, and everything” – is interrupted by representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons. They claim that Deep Thought will render them unemployed and unemployable. To protect their jobs, they demand “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.”
