The Shield (only) ?
The Shield (only) ?
《The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change》
graph TD
be_a_shield ---|NOT| parent
be_a_shield --- what_should_know
be_a_shield --- what_should_not_know
what_should_know --- orgnization_news
what_should_know --- decisions_context
orgnization_news --- restructuring
orgnization_news --- performance
what_should_not_know --- gossips
what_should_not_know --- toxic_drama
what_should_not_know --- politics
decisions_context --- market_phenomenum
decisions_context --- key_skillset_in_future
Sometimes, we managers were told that we have to be the “shield”, to keep our team from those things that don’t produce values. It sounds reasonable, but sometimes we don’t know how to judge them well. When should we pick up those shit things to do ourselves, and when should we openly sync what we know to the team to build trust?
What info should we be the shield to keep them from our team?
- Gossips
- Toxic Drama
- Politics
Gossips occurs everywhere. Where has a pantry room and people, there has gossips. The most powerful damage of gossips is imagination. The beautiful assistant is seeing chief of our department, seriously? Tech lead entertains the manager for an expensive dinner, the manager may give higher performance rank than the engineering manager in the future, right? Those things may not be true, but if they accidentally come true, they are the best and powerful evidences to amplify those gossips again. People inevitably spend energy to turn guesses into actions to get benefits. Totally a huge waste.
Toxic people play toxic dramas. Why they are toxic? Because they complain shortage without trying to find solutions, they blame people hard to corporate without self-reflections, they have full of self-pity without knowing what they really have. If we just see those problems, they basically belong to those people only. But when dramas play over and over, the toxic spread around the team, others will infect the victim’s mindset. They inevitably become another toxic people, trying to drawn others down.
Just like gossips, where there are people, there are politics. What is “politics” after all? We can define this word as “Resource Contentions/Auditions”. People are the most valuable resources, our influences are currency to bid/trade. If we’re in college of commerce, it may be a good example or practice of competition. But if we are managing technical/developing team, that would be a catastrophe. That means our people spend brains on how to get resources as their first priority, not using resources to build great products.
If we have to be a shield, those things above absolutely are our targeted events to block.
On the other way, what things should we pass them through, to sync with our team member to build trust? Simply put, there are just 2 things we need to spare them into our team:
- organization news
- decisions context
No one can accept that he/she is the later recipient of the organization’s news. especially if the organization is preparing to restructure itself. The most important things to employees is the performance ranking. Mostly it directly hooked to bonus. And of course, it also hooked to who will be fired after organization restructure. The performance index usually comes from multiple aspects, managers have the duty to clarify how the final index of performance were made. Just like every manager has the responsibility to clarify the goal/task/objective meaning or definition to ask employee to accomplish.
Another thing that manager should not blocked from team members is how your decisions were made. Why this important? Because nowadays isn’t a industrial age anymore, everyone can be called as a knowledge worker, no matter what things they actually output. They want to know, how much does the head of the team know? Where does he bring us head to? Optimistically speaking, they may want to learn something from you, what strategics you had considered? What market phenomenon do you observed? What skillsets had you foreseen so we have to familiar them in advanced? Realistically speaking? They are just worried/afraid that you are wasting time to do nothing valued.
You may be a shield, but you are not a parent.
You and your teammates, are adults after all. You all came from different domains and have different experiences in careers. We all have something that others don’t have, we also have unfamiliar things that can learn from others. No matter what our positions differed with others, we are actually classmates/partners. You have duties to block toxic things for them, but you also have duties to learn things from them, to grow you up.