Supervising people is hard. Even in the best of times it’s challenging to stay aligned, manage expectations and engage concerns so that you can unleash both individual and collective potential to get the results you need.
These days many of us are needing to do all of this from a distance, in a time that is as unpredictable as we’ve ever seen.
These times are uncertain in both large-F-Future ways (when will our business come back?) and small-f-future ways (in the meantime, how do we make a decision about next week?).
Supervising people from afar in the midst of uncertainty means prioritizing a few principles that are simple but not easy.
1. Be Transparent
Transparency is always important. Sharing your intentions and reasoning when making decisions helps your team trust you. And that transparency is particularly important—and difficult—in the midst of uncertainty.
People look to leaders for answers. Yet answers are in particularly short supply at the moment. When will things be back to “normal”? What impact will this year have on my future within this organization? The future of the organization itself? What happens if my kids can’t go back to school in the fall? These are the questions that keep people up at night, and that we all wish we had answers for. Right now, being transparent means sharing what you know, and what you don’t yet know, along with how and when you’ll figure it out together.
And don’t fall in the trap of making promises you can’t keep. It’s tempting to make promises when you are trying to reassure your team, to boost morale, or to set a positive tone. Promises that depend on a future you don’t control destroy trust, and actually raise anxiety rather than provide comfort. In his Summit 2019 talk, Todd Henry warned against “declaring undeclarables”—don’t make promises about a bear who just might show up in your neighborhood—lest you lose credibility and people’s trust. Instead, share your intentions for what you are hoping for and working toward—and when and how you anticipate those answers will become clear.
2. Ask What Your Team Needs
What do people need from their supervisors? Ask ten people, and you may get ten different answers. Inspire them. Give them room to make their own mistakes. Provide guidance on how to do the tasks. Partner with them in figuring out their career.
That’s (maybe) what they said in your last year-end conversation. And if you ask those same ten people now, you might get different answers: Help me get the visibility I need. Help me wrangle stakeholders who also are having their own reactions to this pandemic. Help me figure out how to create boundaries between my personal life and my work life.
Because people have such different expectations of what a supervisor should be—and what they need right now—the first step is actually a conversation with yourself. Ask yourself first—what kind of supervisor do you want to be? What do you need from your people right now, and what are your assumptions about your role in making that happen?
Then talk with each of your people. What do they need from you right now? What are they struggling with? How might you help? Expect different answers from each person and expect those answers to change over time. Eduardo needs coaching on how to approach a decision-maker with the team’s novel idea. Anna urgently needs help prioritizing; by next week she could use some encouragement. These are ongoing two-way conversations as we adapt together, and flex to help and support each other through the rest of the year and beyond.
3. Provide Appreciation and Coaching
No matter what era we are in, one of your responsibilities as a leader is to help your people stay engaged and to grow. This means providing 3 types of feedback. In times of fast adaptation and remote work, appreciation and coaching are particularly important.
Appreciation – Do you see how hard they are working? Do they know what you appreciate about them? Do they feel seen, known and heard? Appreciation is what keeps people motivated and engaged. It’s also particularly important when we’re working remotely, stretching to solve novel problems, and having to be creative about how we manage to get everything done.
Coaching – To keep learning, growing, and figuring out how to work together, you will need each other’s help and coaching. Your team members need your advice as you figure out how to work through this together. You need their coaching for how to lead them most effectively. It’s particularly important that we don’t wait for a year-end conversation, but instead create a practice of checking in, and learning from each other as we go.
Being a supervisor is hard, yes. And the unknowns and stresses of this season don’t make it any easier. But putting a few key principles and practices in place will help you lead your team through to the other side.
Elaine Lin Hering
Managing Partner | Triad Consulting GroupSheila Heen
Founder | Triad Consulting Group3 Strategies for Supervising in Uncertain Times
Published September 7, 2020TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Leading OthersSupervising PeopleTeam BuildingWomen LeadersWomen Leaders - Leading OthersSupervising people is hard. Even in the best of times it’s challenging to stay aligned, manage expectations and engage concerns so that you can unleash both individual and collective potential to get the results you need.
These days many of us are needing to do all of this from a distance, in a time that is as unpredictable as we’ve ever seen.
These times are uncertain in both large-F-Future ways (when will our business come back?) and small-f-future ways (in the meantime, how do we make a decision about next week?).
Supervising people from afar in the midst of uncertainty means prioritizing a few principles that are simple but not easy.
1. Be Transparent
Transparency is always important. Sharing your intentions and reasoning when making decisions helps your team trust you. And that transparency is particularly important—and difficult—in the midst of uncertainty.
People look to leaders for answers. Yet answers are in particularly short supply at the moment. When will things be back to “normal”? What impact will this year have on my future within this organization? The future of the organization itself? What happens if my kids can’t go back to school in the fall? These are the questions that keep people up at night, and that we all wish we had answers for. Right now, being transparent means sharing what you know, and what you don’t yet know, along with how and when you’ll figure it out together.
And don’t fall in the trap of making promises you can’t keep. It’s tempting to make promises when you are trying to reassure your team, to boost morale, or to set a positive tone. Promises that depend on a future you don’t control destroy trust, and actually raise anxiety rather than provide comfort. In his Summit 2019 talk, Todd Henry warned against “declaring undeclarables”—don’t make promises about a bear who just might show up in your neighborhood—lest you lose credibility and people’s trust. Instead, share your intentions for what you are hoping for and working toward—and when and how you anticipate those answers will become clear.
2. Ask What Your Team Needs
What do people need from their supervisors? Ask ten people, and you may get ten different answers. Inspire them. Give them room to make their own mistakes. Provide guidance on how to do the tasks. Partner with them in figuring out their career.
That’s (maybe) what they said in your last year-end conversation. And if you ask those same ten people now, you might get different answers: Help me get the visibility I need. Help me wrangle stakeholders who also are having their own reactions to this pandemic. Help me figure out how to create boundaries between my personal life and my work life.
Because people have such different expectations of what a supervisor should be—and what they need right now—the first step is actually a conversation with yourself. Ask yourself first—what kind of supervisor do you want to be? What do you need from your people right now, and what are your assumptions about your role in making that happen?
Then talk with each of your people. What do they need from you right now? What are they struggling with? How might you help? Expect different answers from each person and expect those answers to change over time. Eduardo needs coaching on how to approach a decision-maker with the team’s novel idea. Anna urgently needs help prioritizing; by next week she could use some encouragement. These are ongoing two-way conversations as we adapt together, and flex to help and support each other through the rest of the year and beyond.
3. Provide Appreciation and Coaching
No matter what era we are in, one of your responsibilities as a leader is to help your people stay engaged and to grow. This means providing 3 types of feedback. In times of fast adaptation and remote work, appreciation and coaching are particularly important.
Appreciation – Do you see how hard they are working? Do they know what you appreciate about them? Do they feel seen, known and heard? Appreciation is what keeps people motivated and engaged. It’s also particularly important when we’re working remotely, stretching to solve novel problems, and having to be creative about how we manage to get everything done.
Coaching – To keep learning, growing, and figuring out how to work together, you will need each other’s help and coaching. Your team members need your advice as you figure out how to work through this together. You need their coaching for how to lead them most effectively. It’s particularly important that we don’t wait for a year-end conversation, but instead create a practice of checking in, and learning from each other as we go.
Being a supervisor is hard, yes. And the unknowns and stresses of this season don’t make it any easier. But putting a few key principles and practices in place will help you lead your team through to the other side.
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About the Author
Elaine Lin Hering
Managing Partner
Elaine has worked on six continents and with a wide range of clients in corporate, government, and nonprofit organizations where she has diagnosed challenges and built management capacity in negotiation, influence, and conflict management skills. She has trained political officials, union leaders, instructors at military academies, and educated leaders at Fortune 500 companies including American Express, Capital One, Google, Merck, Nike, Shell, Pixar, the Red Cross, and Workday. Known for her cross-cultural fluency and ability to educate across power and difference, Elaine has worked with coal miners at BHP Billiton, micro-finance organizers in East Africa, mental health professionals in China, and been a speaker at multiple conferences ranging from the World Business Dialogue in Germany to the Auschwitz Institute on Peace and Reconciliation. She currently coaches women and minorities navigating executive leadership in majority white spaces. She has facilitated executive education programs at Harvard, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Tufts, as well as served as the Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, Elaine taught negotiation and mediation at Monash Law School in Melbourne, Australia and was a Senior Consultant for Conflict Management Australasia, helping them expand their practice in the region. She is the author of the forthcoming book Unlearning Silence.
Sheila Heen
Founder
Sheila Heen has spent more than two decades teaching Negotiation at Harvard Law School, specializing in our most difficult conversations—where disagreements are strong, emotions run high and relationships become strained. Her firm, Triad Consulting, works with executive teams to strengthen their working relationships, work through tough conversations and make sound decisions together. Heen has applied her expertise across a diverse range of companies and cultures including Pixar, Hugo Boss, the NBA, the Federal Reserve Bank, AT&T, and many family businesses, as well as not-for-profits, the Singapore Supreme Court and the Obama White House. She has written two New York Times bestsellers, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, and Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well.