“I had a difficult conversation with my team lead.”
You manage the team. Your team lead reports into you. Do I have that right?
“Right.”
Tell me about your conversation.
“During our 1:1, my team lead dumped our entire team’s concerns on me. Our team is worried about growth. Or lack of growth.”
What’s driving their concerns?
“Not only that, but our team thinks other teams across the org have a poor impression of us. Other teams believe that we can’t get things done.”
What else?
“Our team is overloaded. We’re down a couple of people. We can’t backfill the positions.”
What’s the real problem for you?
“We don’t have the people needed to meet all of our project commitments.”
Are you sure that’s the real problem?
“I’m certain.”
What if I told you that’s only part of the problem?
“I don’t need any more problems!”
Logic not included
Managing people is tough. And frustrating. That’s true of being a manager in any industry. In technology, the frustration is even greater, given that logic is such an integral part of our jobs. For example, computers use Boolean logic. The outcome of a command can be 0 or 1. That’s it. No gray areas. True or false.
People?
People??
People!!!
People don’t act logically. With people, there’s true, false, half truth, sorta false, a little true, a lot false, blue true, green false — except on Sundays when false is red, unless it’s a leap year and on and on and on.
Frustrating!
One of the most valuable skills for a people manager is intuition. I like this definition of intuition: Intuition is a process that gives us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and non-conscious parts of our mind, and also between instinct and reason. In our coaching scenario, the manager used sound reasoning to conclude that his team is hurting from the effects of being understaffed. However, the manager only got it half right, overlooking a critical part of his assessment.
“What part of the problem did I miss?”
Nice job! You’re open to feedback, which means you can improve in your role and be a more effective leader for your team.
In our coaching scenario, the team lead conveyed his team’s concerns to the manager of the team. No doubt most of the team has expressed some of those concerns at one point or another. Based on years of experience as a people manager, I have a hunch: The team lead used his team as a proxy to vent out his own concerns to the manager. Unless the intent was to mischaracterize his team as a bunch of complainers, expressing personal concerns through the team isn’t a bad thing. In an ideal world, people are direct when it comes to expressing their concerns to their manager. Remember, we don’t live in that ideal world. Logic doesn’t apply. People don’t always say what they think or feel, sometimes out of fear or an inclination to avoid conflict.
Enter intuition
That’s where intuition comes in.
Intuition is an invaluable skill to use for getting to the root of a problem, one of many skills to rely on in a leadership role. Intuition is innate, not a skill to be learned. All of us have intuition. We’ve all been in life situations where something doesn’t feel right. Nothing tangible or specific to the situation is wrong. Yet, our intuition kicks in, signaling that some aspect of the situation feels off. We don’t have a rational explanation for our sense of intuition. Logic can’t explain how intuition kicks in. Intuition just happens.
To effectively use our intuition in a people manager role, we need to build relationships with our team members. Use your 1:1 meeting space for relationship building. Consistency in meetings is essential. Don’t punt your 1:1 meetings. You gotta show up. Don’t use excuses, like “But I’m having a bad day”, to cancel. Show up. Relationship building takes effort and time. You won’t always be at your best, but that’s okay. Making an effort and being consistent counts.
As your relationships with team members develop, you’ll learn each person’s communication style. Certain team members will be direct and vocal. Other team members will be indirect and reserved. Or some combination of multiple styles. You’ll also pick up on verbal and non-verbal cues. As you become familiar with each team member’s style, you’ll develop the ability to read between the lines of conversations and interpret body language. Verbal communication doesn’t always tell the entire story. At times, people send messages and signals through the things they don’t say. Although a team member may sound positive about a talking point, their body language may not reflect the tone of their words.
Why intuition?
Think of intuition like a radar, receiving signals from external events that we need to process for additional evaluation. Intuition can help us to detect underlying issues, such as the frustrated team lead using his team members to channel his own frustrations to his manager. Having developed a relationship with the team lead, our intuition should kick in during the venting session, sending us a warning signal: The team lead is asking us for help without asking for help. That’s concerning. Our team lead’s underlying frustrations make him a flight risk.
Maybe.
Just maybe.
Intuition isn’t based on reason or facts. Therefore, intuition needs to be used with great care. Don’t jump to conclusions based on intuition alone. When our intuition radar detects these types of warning signs, we need to follow-up and investigate, vetting our hunches to uncover facts. Fact finding builds a bridge to reason. If we skip this step, we run the risk of taking rash actions or making poor decisions based on inaccuracies from our intuitive biases.
Time for us to follow-up our intuitive deduction about the team lead. Our goal is to determine if our team lead is the true source of the team’s concerns, making him a potential flight risk. If so, we need to retain him. We don’t want to lose good people. But we have a problem. Remember our hunch: Our team lead used his team as a proxy to vent his own concerns. If our hunch is correct, our lead isn’t comfortable having difficult conversations. That’s problematic. We can’t engage the lead in a direct conversation. Well, we can try, but we may get more of the same venting by proxy, which will lead to a dead end.
There’s a better way.
Find those facts
Schedule a follow-up 1:1 meeting with the team lead. Prepare a twofold meeting agenda. First, focus on the concerns raised during the previous 1:1. Either the team itself or the team lead is feeling frustrated. Regardless of the origin, we need to address those concerns for the betterment of the team. The second part involves finding the facts we need to confirm our hunch about the source of the frustrations. We’re going to marry together both meeting objectives, using finesse on the second part. For our fact finding exercise, we’re taking a gentle approach, easing our team lead to a safe place where he (hopefully) feels comfortable enough to share his personal concerns.
Establish a positive tone for the 1:1 meeting. Begin with the team concerns reported by the team lead. Be constructive. Lead a collaborative discussion, working towards actions to mitigate pain points for the team. As you discuss each concern, incorporate the fact finding exercise. Ask gentle questions such as: What do you think about X concern? Do you share the same concern as Team Member Y? By asking these You questions, you’re shifting the subject away from the entire team to the team lead, nudging a seemingly reluctant person to express his personal concerns. You want to make a hesitant and reserved person feel comfortable, giving them a safe space to be frank with you.
Your conversation has several possible outcomes. After you shift the subject to the team lead, he may unload his personal frustrations on you, validating our intuition-based hunch. Now, we can take actions to address our team lead’s personal concerns and mitigate a flight risk. Another possible outcome is that our hunch was wrong. The team lead showed no signs of personal frustrations during our follow-up discussion. That’s a good thing. But our hunch was wrong. Why is that good? Because we did our due diligence and investigated our hunch. As a result, we’re not going to act upon a faulty hunch and create more problems for the team. Also, there’s another possible outcome, one that will be hard to accept for binary thinkers.
Doubt.
Yeah.
Even after we take the time to follow-up our hunch, we may not reach any solid conclusions. After all, we’re dealing with people. Logic doesn’t apply. That’s okay, too. Good people managers care about their people. Taking extra steps, like following up with the team lead about an intuition-based hunch, helps the well-being of the team lead and the entire team. Good managers don’t care about being right. Good managers care about doing the right thing for their teams.
Conclusion
Intuition is a valuable skill for people managers. Intuition can help us to detect underlying problems. To use intuition, build strong relationships. Always validate an intuition-based hunch before taking action.