#179 - Why Won't They See That I'm Right?

Being Right Isn’t Enough

We spent a lot of time doing very technical work. We went deep into the details, understood all the nuances. We did great work and we could do that because we were right a lot.

Then we stepped up to become a manager, and suddenly it’s not about what we individually do or know any more. Getting big things done — and getting almost anything significant changed — means navigating people and relationships.

Merely being right about something is table stakes. Other human beings have to be open doing the thing. And that’s going to be easier or harder depending on your relationship with them.

People talk about "influence" like it’s a skill you build or a property you have. It’s not; It's just an umbrella term for all the various ways people choose to shift (or not) what they're doing because of their relationship with you.

Relationships = Influence

People can have a lot of different kinds of feelings about you, and that’s going to shift how they react to you, your ideas, and your requests:

• Affinity To You - They like interacting with you as a person

  • What they're asking themselves: "Do I enjoy working with this person?"

  • Impact: They're more likely to do you favors and prioritize your requests

  • How to build it: Regular social interactions, showing interest in their work and challenges, doing favours for them

• Respected By You - They feel understood by you

  • What they're asking themselves: "Does this person get what I'm dealing with?"

  • Impact: More likely to take your input seriously because they know you see their perspective

  • How to build it: Active listening, acknowledging their constraints, offering genuine help

• Respect Your Competence - They see you as a capable, reliable do-er

  • What they're asking themselves: "Does this person reliably get things done?"

  • Impact: More likely to entrust you with more responsibility, or be more willing to do something that relies on you also getting something done

  • How to build it: Consistently delivering useful quality work (and being seen to do so)

• Respect Your Expertise - They see you as an expert in a domain

  • What they're asking themselves: "Do I see this person as an expert in this topic"

  • Impact: More likely to defer to your technical opinion

  • How to build it: Consistently demonstrating useful (to them) insight on a topic

• Deference To Your Structural Power - You have organizational authority

  • What they're asking themselves: "Do I have to listen to this person?"

  • Impact: They comply with your requests, especially on process matters

  • How to build it: Being put in charge (but this alone isn't enough!)

• Deference To Others’ Relationships With You - “Social Proof”, your reputation

  • What they're asking themselves: "I don’t know much about this person; How do peers I respect feel about them?". Note that a single peer with a single strong negative relationship to you can outweigh multiple peers with positive relationships to you

  • Impact: Absent their own interactions with you, they will tend to treat you like their respected peers do

  • How to build it: Having good working relationships with people across the organization; when you do have some kind of professional disagreement with someone, keep it respectful and polite.

Developing Influence (Relationships) Isn’t Hard But Takes Time

A single interaction won’t make someone a friend of yours, and a single interaction won’t make them like you or defer to your knowledge.

None of these kinds of relationships can be developed quickly or with one or two interactions. They take consistent repeated interactions to develop; which is why it is part of the manager’s job to manage up, down, sideways, and diagonally (#171) - which is to say, to develop good professional relationships with people throughout the organization.

Influence Can Shift People But Not Arbitrarily Far

Just because someone is more inclined to do you favours doesn’t mean they will do absolutely anything you ask of them.

Some things are harder to do than others. Many things are much harder to do than they would seem to someone who doesn’t have to do it. I think we’ve all had experiences where someone has asked “well why don’t you just do [some completely infeasible thing]”.

Changing almost anything of any significance is one of those “just”s. Change is always disruptive, and even if the new way turns out to be better, there is first a long phase of things being worse while the change is happening.

And that’s why it’s important to recognize that:

Influence Can Be Limited To A Particular Sphere

While there can be a “halo effect” of sorts, the kinds of relationships above are not interchangeable when it comes to how a person might be willing to shift their willingness to do something/change something/consider an idea.

Someone liking you and being willing to do you small favours like bumping your request up the queue doesn’t mean they’re willing to change the entire process by which their department works.

You being their boss or their bosses peer probably does mean they’ll take seriously request for process changes. But when a boss who they know doesn’t know anything about their technical work continually weighs in on that technical thing (“can’t you just do that with AI now?”) respect for them is going to plummet.

If they recognize you as an expert in a field, that’s great, they’ll take your opinion seriously in that field. But that doesn’t mean they feel like potentially incurring the wrath of other stakeholders by changing how they’ve always done something, even if the new way is 10% better.

Because sure, something being right or better is awesome! But it’s only one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

It’s Important To Know What You’re Really Asking Of Someone

And so it’s important to see more of the puzzle. That just means talking to people, learning how their work works, what they find challenging, and what they’d like to see change in other parts of the organization.

It means talking to them about why things are they way they are, and what would be affected by different changes.

This is why it’s important to build buy-in before officially asking for a big change (#147) and to understand the underlying dynamics to make effective change (#162).

Small conversations Add Up

This may seem like a lot to think about, and a lot of work. Organizations are (intentionally!) hard to change, and coordinating people to do something new is always a challenge.

But don’t be discouraged! “Influence” is not some mystical property some people are born with, some charisma from within. It’s just the integral over the effects of a lot of small pleasant professional interactions with others.

And in those conversations, what matters most is listening to the other people, learning what matters to them, and acting accordingly.

We tend to actually be pretty good at this. We know what it is to build a strong professional reputation in another context. In this managerial context, it takes being a bit more intentional about having conversations with people and maybe even jotting down the odd note about what they’re thinking about or what’s hard for them. But careful observation is already a skill we’ve nurtured! We just usually point that skill at things not people.

And the thing about organizations being hard to change? Once they’ve made a change, it’s likely to stick for a while.

Other resources I like for this sort of topic:

• Roy Rapoport, Being Right Doesn’t Matter

• Manager-Tools, The Three Types of Power

• Nitze & Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy, (talked about in #135)

It’s also worth asking, does being right about this thing even matter in the grand scheme of things? For that,

• Wes Kao, Picking your battles when you’re hyper-rational

And now, on to the roundup!

Managing Individuals

Avoiding the Micromanagement Spiral (Video) - Laura Tacho

I normally avoid linking to videos, even short ones, but Tacho is succinctly making a really great point here. (And here’s a thread on X where she lays it out in text)

Tacho describes a pattern where being overly worried about being “micromanaging” by setting clear expectations at the outset ends up driving us into being overly involved in the work, our team members into wasting work and redoing things, with the result that everyones unhappy.

When we assign or delegate a task, it might feel easier to just give a very high-level description of what’s wanted, and let them go off to do the thing.

But people can’t read our minds. If we know full well that success for this effort requires X, Y, and Z, it is managerial malpractice not to express clear expectations for X, Y, and Z up front. This isn’t just a “constraints breed creativity” thing, although there is that - the effort won’t be successful without this information.

And then there’s a spiral:

1. Assigning/delegating a task with unclear expectations

2. Stepping in and being directive when the results (inevitably) aren’t what you want'ed

3. Feeling bad because you were so directive, so

4. Next time you’re even more hesitant to set clear expectations

5. Go to step 1.

People want to succeed at their work. That means we have to give people the appropriate amount of guidance and oversight necessary for them to succeed (which will depend on their experience with these kinds of tasks - #148). Us choosing not to do that because it makes us feel icky about ourselves is us being selfish.

Managing Teams

Unlocking SME Productivity: A Deep Dive into Management Practices - Oxford Innovation Advice

Even if we’re not working in small and medium sized enterprises (SME), our teams within our larger organization are often comparatively small. In that light, its interesting to read the latest report from Oxford Innovation Advice, which points out how important management is for innovation and productivity: “SMEs with strong leadership that excel in customer and staff satisfaction focus outperform others.”

A weak spot is strategy, and agreement between managers across the organization about what

Project Leadership

Is your project on schedule? How do you know? - Lawrence Krubner, Respectful Leadership

As people of science, we know the power of good questions. The right question can lead to important insights!

Insightful questions are also incredibly important when working with people. It’s a way for us to gather information, for sure. But also, famously, it’s the Socratic teaching tool, showing our team our thought processes, how we connect the dots between efforts, and where things could go wrong.

Combining our experience with probing questions with the greater context and scope we in our role as managers and leaders gives us powerful tools to monitor and guide efforts that we’ve delegated or assigned, without being micromanage-y or in the weeds.

Here Krubner shares how a project manager he worked with used questions to help a project team identify issues and paths to correct them, rather than thinking everything was ok until it suddenly wasn’t.

Managing Your Own Career

Managing Your Time as a Middle Manager - Claire Lew

In research we got used to doing it all, buckling down and somehow getting everything done. That fails - badly, with burnout - when you're a manager and you have multiple very different kinds of responsibilities.

Instead, you have to actually leave some worthy stuff undone - maybe "for now", maybe "forever". That feels like anathema to us, but we should be able to relate to it a bit - there were lots of interesting research ideas that we never pursued, too, because there's only so much time in the day.

Lew boils her recommendations down to four points, but if you're interested you should definitely read the article:

• Stop chasing “balance.” Commit to making a tradeoff.

• Choose one priority to focus on at a time, and the period of time for which you’ll focus on it

• Communicate this choice to your team and to your supervisor.

• Readjust and reassess as needed.

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