Staying on Your Side of the Net
When I am collaborating with others, I sometimes find that I want to anticipate how my requests, assertions, and actions will affect others. I “read their minds” and then tailor my intervention based on my internal analysis: “If I do this, they will probably do this.”
This is a good thing – to a point. Emotional intelligence is characterized by a deep curiosity about (and, over time, a detailed understanding of) our impact on others.
And sometimes, I get caught up in my analysis. I anticipate upset, fear, and/or dismay around any sense that I might be misaligned with my colleagues. “Why did my Program Manager say it that way? Doesn’t she know that I see this differently? Am I being dodged/avoided/disputed? Why would she do that?”
The result can be freeze, flight, or fight rather than lead. If I am the leader of a team but hesitate or equivocate because:
I have an “analysis” that constrains my approach.
What I am doing might be wrong, partial, or silly looking (it is pretty likely that some will object in some way to your assertions. So get used to it and use it for generating “productive conflict.”)
Some team members will disagree
Some will think I am completely wrong
Etc.
I have reduced my effectiveness as a leader and partner. Rather than driving the agenda and stoking a powerful conversation, I’m holding my cards to my chest. I am relying on feelings and my reactivity rather than hard evidence. I am reducing the chance of generating productive disagreement, which can often lead to an excellent solution to the challenge at hand.
I’m acting like a tennis player who runs across the tennis court, leaps the net, reaches out and holds the arm of the player across from me, and tries to guide their volley. I have disempowered myself as a player. And I have disempowered my tennis partner by acting like I know how their backhand works, how strongly they can hit the ball, and everything else about their game. The game goes flat.
There is a third position. It begins with:
Being clear and assertive about your vision, requests, and performance standards.
Being deeply curious about how that vision, those requests, and those performance standards feel to your team.
Being authentically open to feedback, adjustments, and clarification.
One way to do it is this:
Make your requests and assertions. Make clear what success looks like, and why that is your standard.
Ask a lot of questions.
How clear is my vision?
What am I missing?
What inputs, information, perspectives can you provide that would enhance my thinking?
How might we do this differently?
What else can I do to increase alignment between us?
Help me understand why this isn’t working for you.
What am I not seeing?
What changes could I make to enroll you better?
How can we do this better together next time?
After collecting LOTS of information, reissue your original proposal edited to adopt the best of what you heard. And ask: “here is what I heard. Did I get it right?”
And then restate once more your request from the team, modified as needed.
As long as you develop and hold to:
a performance standard, and
your vision of what needs to happen
willingness to adopt revisions and suggestions, both for inputs and outcomes;
this negotiation will lead to empowered employees and a forward-moving operation.
The added bonus of being a “net-conscious” leader is that it forces your colleagues to think. Often we are not sure why we react to, object to, misunderstand, and otherwise lose connection with the people around us. It just happens (see the voluminous material on the neurology of relationships for more on this).
By asking questions and encouraging dialogue, you strengthen the muscle of self-reflection and analysis in those around you. You are upping their game by encouraging their best thinking and inviting it into the process.
CASE STUDY
Alice is the CEO of a community development agency. She sent an outline to one of her senior managers, a man named Ali, asking for a plan to develop and fund a job placement program, and asked that Ali use the template and fill in, as best he could, his conclusions about the program and his approach to its development in the form that she was used to.
Her goal was to move the program forward, and also have the program managers all using a similar template that she could use to inform stakeholders and raise funds. She was pressed for time, and also unsure about the budget allocation that would be available. She was clear that a proposal from Ali was the next step.
Her manager’s first version came back and it felt wrong to Alice. It did not follow exactly the template and the outline that she proposed, and also had paragraphs about the mission and vision of the effort that were not fully aligned with the overall strategy of the organization. And he proposed a budget number that was surprisingly out of line with the financial constraints that Alice was dealing with. She accidentally went into reactive mode and had these thoughts:
Doesn’t Ali know we have already settled on the mission and vision language?
Does he feel like we’re not doing this right and that his vision is better?
Is he trying to sneak this by me because he disagrees with me?
These budget numbers will break us—how could he have missed that?
Didn’t he listen last time we had this conversation? Is he deliberately ignoring my wise counsel?
Am I being disrespected here?
Is this relationship in jeopardy? Is he the right person for the job? Do I need to do something?
Maybe I will stay at work all weekend and rewrite this thing. I’m the only one that can get things done correctly around here.
Instead, she took a deep breath. She realized she was making things up about Ali’s intentions and perspective because she was triggered. She was climbing up the ladder of inference with no real data.
The sense of misalignment with a colleague was causing her to react rather than think carefully about how to manage. She was triggered. She struggled with her instinct to fight and/or freeze rather than be curious and look into the apparent misalignment. She realized, after a day, that she was missing an opportunity to learn (“perhaps Ali has an insight into this that I do not”) and to lead. And she was forgoing an opportunity to train an employee with the ultimate goal of increasing the capacity of the agency and reducing her workload.
So she took the time to re-sync her approach. She scripted herself. She first sent a note and then asked for a meeting. The note went something like this:
Hi Ali,
Thanks for the proposal. As you can see from the notes attached, I’m appreciating greatly your thoughts on how to build the constituency, your marketing plan for the program, and also how you expect to evaluate the effort. I think that the angle you’re taking on the target community is also just right, with a few of the amendments that I wrote.
I need your help with a few things first:
The language on mission and purpose doesn’t match precisely the other materials we’re using. Help me understand if this was an oversight or if you think that we might be describing this wrong.
The structure of the document doesn’t match precisely the template that I sent out. I may not have mentioned that I need the match to be a bit more perfect because I’m using this across the organization to build the description for funders and other stakeholders. So, alignment between how you build this document and all the other managers has to be pretty tight.
I’m sorry if I was not adequately specific about the budget constraints. This proposal has to fit inside this budget model. We can discuss how much your rewrite will be altered under this new budgetary constraint.
I may not have been clear enough about some things that have worked for this type of program in the past, and I’d like to revisit them with you.
So the agenda for our next meeting (let me know if this is good enough or if I am missing something).
Check on our collaboration, and the pace and rollout. Are we seeing this the same way, under the same constraints, with the same schedule?
Revisit mission and vision language. Are we aligned on this?
Check in on the program document structure.
Check in on the implication of the budgetary constraint.
Check in on my learnings from past such efforts, so that your up-to-date fully on my sense of what’s worked in the past and what hasn’t
Finally, let’s check in on our collaboration and our workflow, to see how we can be more efficient in making our partnership work. We can make a list of takeaways and next steps after this meeting.
Anything else?
Thanks for your good work, Ali, I look forward to getting this done.
Here’s what happened next. It turned out that Ali’s proposal submission to Alice was based on a variety of experiences and motivations that he was having. He was in part not fully aligned with the language in the mission and vision, and was hoping that he could influence the way the agency thought about and framed its work. It was not a well-thought-out strategy for making his misgivings known, but it slipped out as he was writing the document. He did not see it as an act of defiance but rather as an encouragement.
In addition, he was not aware of how important it was to Alice that the proposal fit the template she provided. She had not made it clear to him, or he had not sufficiently understood, that this was not an arbitrary outline, but an organization-wide effort to synchronize all of the plans so that they could be effectively aggregated into a larger set of collateral for the agency.
In addition, although he knew that his budget numbers were higher, he assumed that, like his last job, the CEO would take his numbers and adjust them. It was the process he was used to – in his last job he’d been encouraged to add 50% to the budget, so his boss can see his “blue-sky” thinking in action. He did the same thing in this new role out of habit.
Finally, because he’d been on the job for just a year, he did not have the organizational history that Alice had about the key attributes of a successful program as she understood them, and as this agency had rolled them out. So, any further clarity on best practices in this particular domain could only add to his capacity. He was aware of this, and very open to learning more.
So, what is the take-away for each of them here? For Alice, it was clear that she needed to practice staying on her side of the net–that she was triggered by the proposal and made up stories about Ali’s intentions, perspective, and approach to his work. She wanted to jump across the net and fight (in one minute) and retreat into her office and simply do all the work herself (in the next) rather than be open and curious about the true story behind this misalignment and use the misalignment to realign and also train her program manager effectively.
After thinking about this, as you can see, she:
Very effectively took all the responsibility possible for the miscommunication.
Framed her understanding of the misalignment around questions rather than assertions.
Became curious rather than dictatorial.
Embedded her corrective feedback inside a communication that included positive feedback—she noticed what Ali did well and pointed to it rather than focusing on the negatives, and
Offered Ali the opportunity to share his understanding of the misalignment and readjust and set the agenda for the meeting as he needed.
She stayed on her side of the net, assumed good intent, asked strategic questions, and realigned her collaboration with her program manager without giving away or compromising her authority or standards.