Thinkydoers Ep 03: Replacing "managing up" with a culture of self-management
Show notes:
In our last episode, our host Sara Lobkovich took the antiquated concept of "managing up" to task. This episode is part two in this two-part series, where we dive into why and how organizations can replace "managing up" with building a culture of self-management. With norms established around expectations and goal alignment, communication, and candor and truthfulness, organizations can center their most important outcomes more effectively; manage healthy conflict to achieve necessary change; and trade inefficient spin- and politically-motivated posturing for increased comfort with difficult truths so that blockers can be tackled head-on. A culture of consistent self-management reduces cognitive overhead for workers and leaders and gives everyone in the organization a shared language and practices to help increase mutual understanding of expectations and how people can succeed, together. We'll introduce the three foundational elements of self-management:
Clear expectations (and aligned goals)
Mindful communication, and
Candor & factfulness
and seven supportive factors that improve self-management effectiveness:
Intentional fidelity
Accountability & ownership
Collaboration and cooperation (and knowing the difference)
Emotional regulation
Conflict competence
Self-awareness, and
Intellectual humility.
These skills can be learned and developed by leaders and "doers" alike.
You'll hear how self-management ultimately enables everyone in the organization to do their best work: from the C-suite to the summer intern.
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Key Points From This Episode:
An introduction to today’s topic: replacing “managing up” with self-management.
What we will be talking about: the ten elements of self-management.
The first three elements organizations need to focus on: clear expectations, mindful communication, and norms around candor and factfulness.
Working with intentional fidelity to activate our feedback muscles.
Why accountability and ownership are so important.
The element of cooperation and collaboration and why these words must be used with intention.
Why emotional regulation is important in the workplace.
Conflict competence and why it can be a superpower.
Cultivating self-awareness of your behavior and why it is so important.
The final element: intellectual humility.
Why each person is responsible for self-management and why it has a flexible definition.
A mention of how goal-setting practices and planning mechanisms scaffold self-management.
Why everyone in the organization benefits from self-management.
Tweetables:
“We have to foster trust for people to be able to tell the truth with confidence.” — @saralobkovich [0:08:48]
“Those are the three most important things: Clear expectations and aligned goals, mindful communication and norms around candor and factfulness that are supported by organizational behavior.” — @saralobkovich [0:08:59]
“There are specific management practices that are important at those different levels but it is also true that every person in the organization, from the CEO down to the summer intern, has to self-manage.” — @saralobkovich [0:15:55]
“This might sound like a lot of work but if you are a person who has listened to this and doesn’t feel the need to increase your self-management toolkit, you may already be incurring a tremendous amount of overhead within your organization.” — @saralobkovich [0:23:11]
Full Transcript:
EPISODE 3
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:05] SL: Welcome to the ThinkyDoers Podcast. ThinkyDoers are those of us drawn to deep work where thinking is working but we don’t stop there. We’re compelled to move the work from incite to idea, through the messy middle to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action. I’m Sara Lobkovich and I’m a Thinkydoer. I’m here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction and more flow in our work. My mission is to help change-makers like you, transform our workplaces and world. So, let’s get started.
In episode three, we dive in on why we think it’s important to replace managing up with self-management here at Red Currant Collective. That’s going to lay the foundation for future episodes where we dive deeper into each of those self-management elements and principles that we talk about but it gives you a good overview of if we move away from managing up then where do we go from here? I hope you find it valuable and I’d love to hear your thoughts, give it a listen and my contact info is at the end.
[DISCUSSION]
[00:01:22] SL: Hello friends, this is the second in a two-part series of podcast episodes. The first was episode two. So, if you haven’t listened to that, jump back and do that. Episode two covered why here at Red Currant Collective, we don’t coach or teach the concept of managing up. This episode today is giving a quick introduction to what we replace managing up with, which is an idea around self-management or a set of practices around self-management.
The upside as you’ll hear in episode today is that these self-management practices are available and helpful for everyone in the organization. So I’ll dive in here with why we recommend self-management replace managing up in our organizations.
So next, let's talk about why we work in a model of self-management, and why that matters. The downsides of managing up have appeared to me over the years as I've worked with managers and teams. But when my work turned increasingly towards CEOs, especially leaders new to the CEO role, or people who were preparing to step into the CEO role, I noticed a few patterns. A huge part of the role of the CEO is to project confidence both internally and externally. And in my work, I see two basic ways that happens. Some leaders, like we talked about earlier, perform confidence in their organization's performance, and some leaders, project confidence based on actually feeling confident about their organization's performance.
Now, that's a bit of an overgeneralization. But it's a really important distinction when we look at organizational behavior and culture. In the first, the leader must perform confidence to both internal and external audiences. So in that type of organization, it's important that information that might shake the leader’s confidence be hidden, or spun. This is where we might see those status reports that are in the green even when performance on major objectives or metrics is behind pace. It might not be safe or encouraged to raise issues.
In these environments, we may also see metrics and measures adjusted to make them look better in our reporting and dashboards. Now, that style works best for some leaders. In fact, there are many organizations and leaders that operate that way with a lot of success. But for organizations in transforming spaces, where they're pushing into new territories, innovating and working to change or evolve the status quo, the behaviors that stem from that style become seriously problematic.
Overhead increases because of the effort required to protect the leader’s ability to perform confidence, data must be spun, numbers must be massaged, and problems may be hidden until they become a crisis, and then the organization goes into crisis mode. Many of the leaders I work with kind of grew up in that type of culture, and then stepped into the CEO spot themselves and found that way of working incompatible with their style. These leaders crave more truth from their teams. They spot that watermelon metric behavior of we're hearing in the green on our status reports, but then our major metrics like revenue or growth are in the red.
These leaders crave early warning of issues so that risks can be assessed and mitigated before they become crises. They want their teams to work with more inspiration, more accountability, and more ownership, even if that increases the risk of a mistake or problem arising. Because they know that if everyone's playing it safe, they're not innovating or evolving with any kind of speed, and they want to project confidence, because they are confident about the organization's performance and capabilities.
As a result of observing this pattern over and over, we’ve shifted to working with clients around the management and leadership model that replaces managing up with consistent practices around self-management, using a set of standard practices and bargains that the entire organization can agree on and implement together.
It shares many elements with some of the better teaching on managing up but the implementation is quite different. First, I’m just going to mention those elements and then these are each a topic for a podcast episode on their own but we’re going to just talk a little bit about them today.
Today, we’re just going to introduce the 10 elements of self-management. They’re a little bit like a set of nesting dolls, there are some that, kind of, are sub-elements of others but we’ll list them all today, so you can hear them and talk about some of the relationships between them. We’ll dive deeper into each one because like I said, each one is probably a podcast episode on its own, so we’ll do those deeper dives over time.
But when we work with clients around building organizations that are self-managing, there are these first three of the 10 elements that are really at the center of what organizations need to learn to focus on and do. And that is, number one, really focus on clear expectations and aligned goals, and have our clear expectations and aligned goals documented and communicated so that they can be understood without mindreading.
So that brings us to the second element of mindful communication. That’s a whole host of norms and practices that often times are kind of assumed or implied within organizations but we work to make those overt and then have repeating and efficient practices around our communication.
Number three is, the organization’s norms and expectations around candor and factfullness. If you ask most leaders, they’re going to tell you that they want to hear the truth, but self-managing organizations create practices and expectations and norms that encourage truth-telling. We have to foster trust for people to be able to tell the truth with confidence.
So, that’s the first three elements and we could stop right there. Those are the three most important things: Clear expectations and aligned goals, mindful communication and norms around candor and factfullness that are supported by organizational behavior.
But there are a few more factors, a few more elements that I’m going to mention as well, that kind of support those first three and those are around working with intentional fidelity. This is connected to expectations and communication. When we work in low fidelity, that encourages collaboration and collaborative or creative feedback, when we work in high fidelity, that activates our critical feedback muscles. We work with organizations to develop norms and better language around expectations for fidelity and work so that we achieve the collaboration level and feedback type and style that the work requires.
Another element is around accountability and ownership and creating again, behaviors and practices in the organization that encourage individual accountability and ownership. That also leads us to the factor of cooperation and collaboration. We use those two words with a lot of intention because some organizations have a real emphasis on collaboration but then might find ourselves doing a lot of ideation and verbal processing and collaboration but then, not cooperating to get to a final product.
Another important factor, and this sounds weird in an employment context but one element of self-management is emotional regulation and learning a toolkit, we have to emotionally regulate and have our feelings in the workplace and manage our reaction to our feelings in order to maintain healthy relationships with our colleagues.
That connects to the next element of conflict competence, which is one of the factors that is very rarely really talked about at work and conflict competence can be a superpower within organizations. So much conflict happens because of conflict avoidance or accommodation. So, building that conflict competence is really important. Then, those last two of emotional regulation and conflict competence, also connect really closely to people and teams having high self-awareness of their own behavior and cultivating self-awareness of their behavior.
The 10th element that we talk about is intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is a concept that doesn’t get much conversation in business. We’re trying to change that because it’s really important in business, but intellectual humility is the idea that people really need to wrap their heads around the idea that what they think is right may not always be.
Sometimes, what we think is right is based on accurate information. Sometimes what we think is right maybe based on misinformation, it might be based on bias or assumptions or heuristics, preferences that not everyone in the organization shares.
Again, intellectual humility is kind of connected to that candor and factfullness, that information savvy, being able to know whether we’re talking about information, opinion or potentially misinformation and also, connected to cultivating self-awareness.
That’s a hefty list, 10 elements there. But they’re also closely connected and what we see in working with clients is that, beginning to work with these elements of self-management tends to become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Investing in some of them, the others tend to follow.
So, we’ll talk a bit about each one in future episodes, but right now, we’re going to talk kind of collectively about this idea of self-management and the foundational principles here include that everyone in the organization shares self-management responsibility equally. Although, different people might need different things to do so. We are all responsible for self-management and we can tailor our self-management to our role and to our own needs. Self-management has some mechanical, some cognitive, some emotional and some behavioral elements. Different people have different strengths and needs and fall in different places on those spectrums. So that’s why self-management becomes a flexible model for people and roles and teams that have different needs to adapt these practices to their actual needs and realities.
When we work in a self-managed way, we’re able to honor both authority, when authority is the right tool for the job and equity, when power should be removed from the equation in favor of a focus on the outcome. So, self-management is really important because shared models for expectation clarity, communication and truthfulness are essential building blocks when we’re working with other people.
When we work alone, we can often meet our own needs by using our instincts and in some organizations, there are different practices used to manage up versus manage down, placing employees and leadership in the position of having to figure things out for themselves individually. But in an organization with leaders who are self-aware, who understand how the group dynamics interact with each other and who are wired for maximizing team functioning, then regardless of the leader’s strengths and gaps, they can be present for others in the organization.
We do recognize that leaders, especially CEOs and founders have a different job than the rest of the organization, as do the different levels of leadership. There are specific management practices that are important at those different levels, but it is also true that every person in the organization, from the CEO down to the summer intern, has to self-manage. Because we work in systems with other people, we have to align on expectations, we have to communicate, we have to resolve our conflicts and we have to do all of those things with self-awareness.
And then on the other hand, some roles may require less active self-management. The orders are the job to be done maybe fairly clear and then there is less of a cognitive burden on employees and those roles to figure out how to figure out how to successfully execute on their orders or job to be done. But a lot of roles have multiple priorities, multiple stakeholders and a level of complexity to the work. That translates into a higher cognitive burden as employees ask themselves, “What is most important? Why does it matter? What do I need to do next?” and those type of roles benefit the most from investing and self-management in addition to our leadership.
How does self-management work? This is where those elements we talked about a minute ago come in. We can agree on clear organizational expectations around the enterprise-wide self-management practices and then, document that in a model that is extremely simple. Most of the models in practice don’t include a list of 10 factors. We focus in on a smaller subset of principles, and then develop practices that model the other elements and then we can decide within a given organization what needs to be told and what can be shown.
Organizations can agree on those clear organizational expectations around enterprise-wide self-management practices and while an organization may recognize that people have different needs in their self-management and require a certain degree of flexibility, it can also recognize that we need to have some clear shared models around expectation, clarity and goal alignment, communication and what our appetite is for the truth and those other elements of self-management.
As a practical matter, these expectations can be scaffolded along with goalsetting practices and our planning mechanism. We can assess people’s strengths and gaps around self-management and individual leaders and individuals can work together to figure out mitigation approaches that work for the people and teams who are doing this self-management prep.
Essentially, these self-management elements and practices correspond to something similar to executive functioning, only in the workplace. We can surface strengths and gaps within the context of these self-management practices that lets individuals seek skill building help where they need it. It helps people develop shared strategies, contextualized to the organization that support both the org and the specific people in it. It also means that we learn a shared set of self-management practices, language and expectations so we don’t have to read each other’s minds. We can then replace mindreading with that shared vocabulary, shared practices, shared approaches and then apply curiosity to how to solve problems together.
So, who benefits from self-management? I’d arguer that everyone does. The CEO has a different job than anyone else in the organization and the CEO can model competency in those self-management elements, setting an example for the rest of the organization. The same is true for other levels of leadership, whether they’re working with the levels above or below them in the organization.
Modeling self-management skills, showing instead of telling how we operate, also solves the, “What got you here, won’t get you there” challenge of career development, enabling people to move toward or even into the C-Suite without having to learn a new way of managing themselves and you can’t manage up a board.
The CEO has to be able to deliver on the expectations. In what we practice and learn as we move up in an organization is focused on outcomes, on achievement of these self-managed expectations in alignment with the organization. These benefits apply to employees at every level because instead of having to learn different self-management practices at different levels of the organization as their career progresses, people can learn a consistent set of self-management norms for their organization from the very beginning. As they move through their career, they can work on developing around their self-management gaps and focus more on developing their subject matter expertise because they’re better supported around how they work in their self-management toolkit.
They have a clear vision and understanding of their work’s connection to what’s most important and can self-manage and prioritize their workload with their direct supervisor. This also helps when you change organizations because there is a learning curve to how different organizations work, but people who come in with a consistent set of self-management practices are better able to basically onboard themselves to an organization, independent of the quality of the onboarding they receive within the organization.
Applying these practices increases our ownership of our careers and our work, even when we change organizations. This model has broader benefits to employees and the organization also. So, having a consistent set of practices and expectations support successful internal mobility since when people move from team to team, they’ve already got a common foundation for operating established.
When people progress into more senior roles, they don’t have to learn how to self-manage in a new environment or a new role. They can focus on the role related competency because their fundamental elements of self-management are in place.
Now to some of you, this might sound like a whole lot of overhead, like a lot of work but if you are a person who has listened to this and doesn’t feel the need to increase your self-management toolkit, you may already be incurring a tremendous amount of overhead within your organization. You may be one of the people that the organization is managing up around. The people who work with you might be trying to read your mind and fill in a whole bunch of gaps in communication, fidelity, clarity, conflict, operating expectations in order to do their best work with you.
This might be an opportunity to check in with a few of your trusted collaborators around to what extent their needs are met in their working relationship with you. Get some feedback. Do people get the information they need? Do they have the expectation clarity they need? To what degree are they having to try to read your mind in order to operate? To what degree are they putting effort into managing up to you that could be going into the work itself?
This is an opportunity to practice that self-awareness, to self-assess because if you are a powerful leader in an organization, you can wield that power to make the organization better by reducing the organization’s need to accommodate you. Instead, increasing your self-management skills and practice to meet the needs of the rest of the organization and help other people do their work better. That’s going to reduce the amount of overhead that people in the organization are spending, managing you up or managing up to you.
On the other hand, some of what you’ve heard today might really resonate with you or with members of your team who struggle hard to understand the expectations of their organization. Those folks, if this speaks to you, no matter what’s happening in your organization, you might benefit from some personal goal setting related to these self-management elements. Recognizing when you need information and what your self-management practices are, so that you can reduce mindreading, perfectionism and performance anxiety, and focus on doing your best work and succeeding at your mission.
Employees who don’t need that level of structure can benefit from increasing their expectation clarity and their communication with their team. So even when the role doesn’t demand consistent proficiency in all of the self-management elements, each individual grows further faster as they get some familiarity with these practices and then see them modeled and used in the organization.
[END OF DISCUSSION]
[00:26:28] SL: All right team, that’s enough for today, thank you for joining and listening. I would love to hear from you about what here resonated, where you got stuck or confused, that’s on me, not you. Also, if there’s anything you have questions about, you can find me at Sara Lobkovich everywhere. It’s S-A-R-A L-O-B-K-O-V-I-C-H. I know, I wish my name was easier but on the other hand, you don’t want Sara Lobkovich, you just own it. I think I’m the only Sara Lobkovich there is so that makes it a little easier.
My email address is a bit easier, that is sara@thinkydoers.com.I’d be thrilled to have you as an email subscriber for infrequent, more formal, just business messages, you can subscribe at redcurrantco.com or I’ve got a more personal list that takes side trails into topics around wellbeing, mental and emotional health and my motorcycle life and other serendipity at saralobkovich.com. You’ll find the shownotes for today’s episode at thinkydoers.com.
Tune in for our next episode for a conversation about one of the least understood parts of goal setting, key results. We’ll cover some of what we’ve learned to help make key results impactful and useable for you and your organization and to help you in your organization, use key results well to help close your own hope and confidence gaps and help increase the likelihood that you will achieve your big, bold outcomes.
So, thanks again. Now, go practice what we just learned and I’d love to hear your questions.
[END]
