#174 - Action Brings Clarity
Plus: Praise-to-criticism ratio (should be high!); Emotional signposting; How to announce team departures; The goal of a strategy is to change a team's behaviour; Getting and maintaining buy-in
Manager, Ph.D. is a newsletter and community which helps people from the world of research reach their full potential managing teams and enacting changes. We’ve already developed the advanced skills to be exceptional managers; we just need help with the basics.
If you’re new to the community, drop me a note! Some past issues from the archive which you might be interested in include:
#168, “Managers with PhDs have the advanced skills, we just need help with the basics, Part 1”
#169, “Managers with PhDs have the advanced skills, we just need help with the basics, Part 2”
#170, “Imposter Syndrome, Switching Fields, and Becoming a Manager”
#171, “Yes, Managing Up (and Sideways, and Diagonally) is Part Of Your Job”
Plus of course the one-on-one and feedback guides.
And whether you’re new to the community or not, feel free to email me, or even have a quick chat with me about problems you have, or things you’d like to see!
Being a manager in a new role is a little scary. People with a lot of training, like us, tend to be exquisitely aware of the influence of our role, and so we’re worried about doing the wrong thing. As an individual contributor, if we did something wrong, it mostly just affected us, whereas here could it could affect the whole team.
(There might be a little bit of impostor syndrome, #170, in there, too).
So we tend to retreat a little bit into our comfort zone. How about we start with a little Let’s Think About It for a while! We can even do some things that feel like action, even though they aren’t: we can do some planning, some research, some comparisons on what other teams in similar situations are doing… let’s make some diagrams! Look how many pages I printed out and read! Boy, I sure am evaluating the heck out of these options here!
Even better if this doesn’t directly involve our team members, so they don’t know that we’re feeling a little bit lost, so long as they sure can see we’re Wrestling With The Problem.
Look, I’m not telling you to develop a habit of just going off and doing the first thing that comes to mind. But, directionally? For us? That’s the right idea. Making under-considered decisions is NOT a problem I see managers with STEM PhDs consistently having. What I do see us struggling with is getting out of our comfort zones of analysis and into some action.
Because the thing is, action brings clarity.
We’re good at thinking and analysis. That means we think, and analyze, clearly, deeply, and effectively. And that, in turn, means we very quickly get to the point of diminishing returns of further thinking and analysis.
Are you at the point of considering options where the last several new things you’ve learned about the topic, the last several new thoughts you’ve had on the topic, haven’t meaningfully affected the rankings at the top of the list of options? Then yeah, you’re seriously past that point of diminishing returns.
“But this next article/book/video/customer-conversation/data-collection-process/diagraming-exercise might have the key insight I need!” Ok, listen, I ask these next questions with care and respect: Did the last one? How about the one before that?
Once you get to the point of diminishing returns — once you get near that point — it’s time to start taking action. Time to start actually interacting with the problem, taking first steps, stumbling occasionally, and repeating.
The process is really simple:
Pick one of the areas of the problem with the highest uncertainty
Try something simple
Learn from how it goes
Now you’ve reduced the uncertainty
Repeat
And here’s the other thing. Managing that process? Watching this doing/learning/doing cycle play out, nudging it occasionally, making sure the lessons being taught are being learned and documented, and skills being built along the way? That’s your job. It was never your job to have known what the right answer was. It’s your job to help the team pick a direction and get started.
I promise you I know how this all feels. Early in my management career I spent the better part of two weeks researching different project management software options RATHER THAN KICK OFF PLANNING FOR THE PROJECT THE SOFTWARE WAS NOTIONALLY FOR, because research and analysis was so much less nerve-wracking than getting started on the actual stuff.
What held back truly brilliant ancient philosophers from more deeply understanding the universe around them was a penchant for theorizing, and a distrust of direct experience of that universe. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later that scientists from the Muslim world, and then eventually European scientists and others, started consistently confronting theories with reality, with experimentation. This gave them the ability to rule out possibilities and discover exciting new phenomena worth further study, leading to science as we now know it.
Action brings clarity. Doing things that might fail produces far more insight than thinking about the things. Get unstuck. Do something. Take some action.
And now, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
PCR — The Praise-to-Criticism Ratio -
,There’s still, even in this the year two thousand twenty four of the common era, people (not Okrona, to be clear) giving advice to use the old, disproven, widely mocked “feedback sandwich” approach, where you sandwich some negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback. (People who receive feedback this way uniformly hate it, and see it — correctly — as disingenuous and more about the feedback givers’ feelings than the receivers’.)
The advice, however, comes from the recognition of a truth — that people will take your negative feedback more seriously if you also are giving them positive feedback. Because you recognize their good work when they do it, and enable them to do more of it by telling them specifically and actionably what to keep doing, you build trust and credibility for when you tell them something isn’t good.
But you do that not by encasing negative feedback betwixt insincere layers of positive feedback; you do that just by also giving lots of positive feedback!
Okrona talks about good praise-to-criticism ratios of 5-6 to 1, and about why it is so important to give positive feedback. Definitely worth a read.
And the amazing thing, as Okrona points out? This makes it easier for us to give more feedback, and a very effective way to get started giving feedback more often if you’re not doing it currently! It means we can start giving out lots and lots of positive, easy-to-hear, easy-to-give feedback today, right now.
(As you know, I’ve written a bunch about feedback for managers like us; feel free to leave a comment or email me at jonathan@managerphd.com if you want to talk more about feedback.)
Managing Teams
Emotional signposting: Why you should tell people how to feel -
,One common problem we experts tend to have when communicating is the curse of knowledge - not sharing context or background that is just obvious to us, because we’re experts in that and it doesn’t even occur to us that our audience may lack that information.
This bad habit can kind of stick with us even when we’re talking about other things, things we weren’t trained in. Things we think about a lot as managers or leaders that our team members aren’t.
Kao talks about this in the context of information which, to someone new to it, might be ambitious. By sharing some context and emotional valence — this isn’t great news, but we think we can handle it, because X; this is a terrific cause for celebration, because Y — we help people know how to react to something they might not think a lot about.
This isn’t about being manipulative or “spin” (although it can certainly be used that way); it’s about providing context for stuff we think a lot about and know a lot about and they might not. It’s about making good news sound like good news, and bad news be recognized as bad news.
And you would not believe how often this comes up! Kao gives some absolutely classic examples of items which were either neutral or positive but sounded out positively foreboding. By all means, read the article.
A more severe case - I read a message from someone who, just last week, their manager asked them for an uncharacteristic “quick sync meeting” on Friday afternoon, in an industry that’s having lots of layoffs. When the meeting time finally came around, it turns out it was to give them some good news about a project they had proposed. For pity’s sakes, folks, don’t do stuff like that! If something is going to be good news, communicate that clearly.
How To Announce Employee Departures To Your Team - Jason Evanish, Get Lighthouse
Maybe relatedly, team departures are a normal and healthy part of every team. Yes, it can feel like a gut punch to have a key team member leave, but it’s good for them, and in the long run its good for your team and you as a manager to have team members to on to greater success elsewhere.
Evanish goes through a playbook of what to do when an employee leaves - share the news fast, share the transition plan as soon as possible. In the less common case of someone being fired, then the rules don’t change very much; you still need to communicate as transparently as possible under the circumstances, and as quickly as possible.
Evanish’s article is a good run down of how to think about these steps, and well worth reading.
The goal of a “strategy” is to change our own team’s behavior -
,As I’ve said elsewhere, too many teams start with strategy before they’re ready, or as a way to avoid wrestling with the reality of operations and how their team runs.
The goal of a strategy, as Vora so clearly states in her very clear article (read it), is to change our own team’s behaviour, and if we’re not able or willing to do that, then the strategy is a dead letter, might as well have not bothered.
Quoting Vora:
To make sure we’re ready to build a complete strategy, I’ve found it’s helpful to set up the strategy deliverable by asking specific questions up front, like:
How can we build enough conviction in this strategy that we’re willing to ask our team to act differently because of it?
How can we be specific enough about what we do and don’t need to do, so anyone on the team will know how to change their day-to-day behavior to match the strategy?
What has changed that requires a new strategy now? If the answer is “not much”, would our customers be better served if we did a shorter refresh of our existing strategy and focused more of our resources on execution?
And that leads us to…
Managing Within Organizations
Getting buy-in to get things done - Nicole Tietz
TBM 215: Shallow vs. Deep Alignment -
,To get things done, in our teams or others, we need to get buy-in. We need at least tacit and more likely positive, active agreement, because in the end it’s not going to be just us changing our behaviours and doing the new work, others have to as well.
Tietz’s article covers some very nice tips on gauging whether or not your discussions are generating some level of buy-in:
Are they making suggestions?
Are they giving anything up?
Are the details concrete?
Have they said no to parts of it? [I like this one especially - if they’re not pushing back on anything, they’re not expecting to have to actually do anything]
and some suggestions to improve your odds of getting buy-in:
First, explain the problem and listen.
Explain the why.
Help with clarifying the trade-offs.
Figure out concrete plans together. [A deeply underrated approach, I strongly agree], and
Work on building trust.
Cutler’s article makes a nice distinction between shallow alignment, the sort of alignment which results in a short term agreement of next steps, and the messier, more complex, more dynamic and ongoing deep alignment that really comes from ongoing collaboration. Neither are bad! The trouble comes when we think we’ve won for ourselves a deep alignment when we’ve just had a simple conversation that ends in a helpful but short-lived shallow alignment.
That’s It…
And that’s it for the week! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me, leave a comment, reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox, or schedule a quick Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.
Have a great weekend, and best of luck in the coming weeks with your team,
Jonathan