What did they say when you told them?
Photo by mali maeder.
Ages ago, we worked with a tech company unlike any company we'd ever encountered. They originally started as not a tech company. They were doing a whole other line of business when they built their own internal tool to solve a problem. And then figured out that the small, narrow problem was actually an enormous, common problem.
So far, that could be any number of software origin stories. But the thing that made this company different was that the tech division spun out in the 1980s. So by the time we met the bosses, many of them had been working together for three or four decades.
We came to find out that they had not only attended each other's weddings. They had also attended each other's children's weddings. Their working relationships were forged, calcified, and then punctuated by major life milestones.
But it wasn't all weddings and kid's weddings. The thing about working together for long periods of time is that the grievances accrete. In that way, it's more like attending an awkward family reunion. You know those relatives don't talk to those other relatives. But the original affront is sorta murky.
The cool thing about being outsiders, stepping in to work with leaders where the interpersonal dynamics are vast, is that you get to play dumb. Like, you can guess that there's some stuff coming into the room. But you don't know the details about that thing that happened in 1989. Short of, you know, that really, really important one that later turned into an album.
This ignorance-tinged flavour of naïveté is a gift. Because when you aren't holding the specifics of interpersonal drama, you get to suggest something radical. Talking to each other about how it's going. And how to make it great. Which is exactly what we did.
We say it all the time, most people show up to work wanting to do a good job. When an individual working relationship is sorta broken, few people want to stay in that spot. They just don't know how to turn it around.
Given an opportunity to talk about how it's going and how it might be better, you can cover a shocking amount of ground in shockingly little time. We gave them 15 minutes. They'd been colleagues for decades. And do you know what they had the nerve to say as they came back?
We should have done that a long time ago.
Decades. Literal decades of working together. And 15 minutes to untangle some complex shit. It's a wonder more colleagues don't try actually talking to each other.
Everything escalates
Wanna know the single most popular service that you can provide to your team, as a boss? One that makes them feel heard, and makes you feel valued? That puts you at the centre of the action, and is almost universally popular across industries, functions, and levels of seniority?
Complaint laundry.
Once your team finds out that you're willing to take their grievances — about their colleagues, or other teams, or the direction of a project — and make them your problem? Incredible. Hugely popular move. Organizations are made of people, and people sometimes have conflict, and conflict gives many people the ick. They would like to be free of the ick. And if you are selling ick-removal — giving it away, even! — they will line up overnight like you've got Taylor tickets.
There are comforting things you can tell yourself, when you're running a complaint laundry. Maybe that this is servant leadership? That you are getting obstacles out of their way? Or that you're dealing with the politics so that they can focus on the work?
Some of the time this is true. As a manager your job is make your team more effective, and it is good and valid and in-bounds to listen to them about what's getting in their way. If they point out structural barriers to their work. If priorities are unclear or the resources they expected aren't there. If there's a problem with a leader elsewhere in the org that needs to be addressed by someone with power-parity. And of course of course, if they are unsafe. If they are being mistreated, discriminated against, harassed, or bullied. There are cases when your boss-badge is required, and when it's appropriate and properly your job to get involved.
But most of the time, those aren't the grievances. More often it's things like:
Sam is ignoring my request
Prashant is being really grouchy in my code review
Grace's fundraising plan is missing several items we talked about
Xi doesn't like me
Alex doesn't listen
and so on and so on and so on.
As a boss, you will hear all of these. And sometimes you'll be surprised, and sometimes you won't be surprised at all. Maybe because you know that Alex is frustrated with the pile-on that's happening in that email thread. Or maybe because that's just how Prashant is. You're at the centre of it all, you can help smooth it out. Shouldn't you smooth it out?
By and large, especially as a first step, you shouldn't. Running a complaint laundry is a popular choice, but it's a bad one. "Manager" is a catch-all job a lot of the time, you're often asked to step in when the team needs something and it isn't clear whose job it is. Fair enough. But every person working on your team is an adult. And it is fair (again, outside of cases of abuse, harassment, or toxicity) to expect adults to make a good faith attempt to work out interpersonal conflict directly before they escalate.
When a grievance like this lands in front of you, there's a sentence to get good at. If you need to, you can practice it in front of the mirror first. It goes, "what did they say when you told them?"
It's a gentle shove. You're not saying "I don't want to hear it." You're just reminding them that it's a fair expectation that they would try to resolve it directly. Many of your people will feel like they're on their back foot the first time you ask it. Especially if you've been running a thriving complaint laundry all this time, they'll be surprised to be asked to clean up their own messes. But after a few tries, it's actually delightful how quickly most people will take the implied feedback and change their behaviour.
Nothing escalates
The exception, of course, is you.
Like, maybe not you you. But maybe actually? The avoidance of interpersonal conflict is not a trait restricted to individual contributors. Most managers eventually figure out how to communicate with their directs about areas where they need something to be different. But many fall into the same trap when it comes to giving feedback upward, to their own senior leaders.
We hear from bosses who say that the product strategy doesn't make sense. That the organization's priorities are a mess. That they can't sell what product and engineering are building. That the leader of that department over there is a shitshow, or that the whole department is. That hybrid isn't working, or remote isn't working, or in-office isn't working.
The buck stops with executives and so, in a sense, if those things are true it's the executive's problem. But if you're a member of the management team, it's your problem, too. We pay you to help your team thrive. And if the things up there are true, then no one is thriving. The org gives you things like authority, decision-making powers, the ability to hire and promote and fire, in order to help the organization succeed. If you are a good and diligent manager with your own team, but the organization is failing, then you're failing.
And we get that it isn't easy. That senior leaders have a bad habit of dismissing feedback they don't like. Of filtering you through the lens of eight other complainy managers they've heard from this week. Even if it isn't career-limiting to raise concerns, it's a giant pain in the ass to get them to listen, and probably uncomfortable besides. And still, it's part of the job.
So, what did they say when you told them?
— Melissa & Johnathan