How To Be a Better Manager with Shifting Prisms
“Umbrellas” are managers that cover their team from not only noise, but from the politics and sometimes toxicity of clients, internal stakeholders, and upper management. “Shields” serve a similar function but the focus-shift is on protecting the work at hand vs keeping out negativity and distractions. Both forms of management are walls. They obscure, hide and block the intake of information.
Intake however is critical, information coming in from stakeholders is valuable and their frustrations, needs and desires are key in identifying focus within agile organizations and teams. But what can you do if the delivery would be morale crushing, or make the team feel defeated? What approach can be taken if the source is toxic, aggressive or harmful? A new paradigm would need to emerge based on transfer of information, transparency, empathy and positivity. This approach is a “Shifting Prism” and as a manager or lead is what you need to become.
Complexity of World Views
Frederic Laloux introduces a system of grouping the complexity of world views and interactions into bands of color in his book Reinventing Organizations. The colors range from aggressive and binary mentalities in red (mine/not mine) to highly collaborative, non-judgement driven and non-hierarchical mindsets in teal. Between those lay Amber (Us/Them), Orange (Based on hierarchy and achievement) and Green (where oppressive hierarchical systems start to break down and give way to empathy).
Communicating information from the warmer colors is often more difficult and ineffective
While this is a gross simplification of a nuanced topic, the above provides a decent abstraction. Organizationally, you may deal with departments that draw strict borders in an us/them mindset, or clients who do the same. In an organization with truly empowered agile teams, you may even be closer to the teal band in the color spectrum, but regardless of where your team is at, communicating information from the warmer colors is often more difficult and ineffective.
The Role of Management
As a manager there is a lot on your plate ranging from product oversight and process refinement to mentoring and career support of your reports. Communication however is your primary tool especially when moving information between tiers/departments within your organization. Hopefully by the time you step into this role you have developed the ability to work with various personalities and to diffuse or weather difficult situations. I assure you however, that your team is comprised of individuals with very different and varying capacities for these situations.
No matter how difficult the flow of information gets, it is still your obligation to pass that on to your team. When the attitude gets too chaotic or aggressive and you feel the need to filter complaints or changes, that is when you are shifting to umbrella/shield mode, and this is the perfect time to hijack that opportunity to become a “prism”.
Information Through a Prism
Perhaps on the dashboard of your car, through your engagement ring, or on a sunny day after a brief rain, I’m sure you have seen a rainbow form. As the moisture in the sky, the precious stone, or the dashboard gem intakes light it bends it, breaking it apart into a discrete representation of the color spectrum. You must become this for your team.
As information comes to you, whether in a mine/not-mine or us/them framework or simply in a complicated matter it is important to communicate every detail to delivery teams so they can not only understand the context and gravity, but also so they can assess what is actually desired or needed. To do this will often require “bending light” to pass along what is needed in a cooler color (from Laloux’s spectrum).
Separating the needs and asks from an explanation of the manner of receipt, and delivering both through a two way lens of empathy will help the team
The anger of a C-Suite executive over an incident is important to share but not in a way that provides negative pressure to the team. Separating the needs and asks from an explanation of the manner of receipt, and delivering both through a two way lens of empathy will help the team know:
• what needs to happen,
• why it is important and
• why the current state isn’t working out.
This complex delivery offers much more value than mandates, abstracted requirements or over the fence requests. Even better your team may volunteer new ideas to help smooth the situation in the opposite direction.
Next Level Management
As process and project management ever evolve so must our outlooks on collaboration and communication. As self-managing teams become the norm and managers shift to being coaches, it is no longer tennable to hide or obscure any part of the communication process. Instead managers must become tools of transparency providing clarity and context.
