“Communication with others takes place when they understand what you're trying to get across to them. If they don't understand, then you are not communicating regardless of words, pictures, or anything else. People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means that you must get within their experience.” – Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Exhibit A:
Also, this morning I fixed myself a bowl of cereal, mixed up a nice chai latte, and immediately forgot both of those things on the kitchen counter when I walked empty-handed to my dining room table.
This isn’t a post about how stupid I am, but it is about why your boss — and I — might seem to not know things that you feel you’ve told them about a thousand times.
See if any of this sounds familiar:
You’ve got yourself a project! And you want to do it right, so you create clear places to share project updates in Slack/Teams and in your project management tool
At every stage of the project, you share updates. You start by posting an outline so that everyone can weigh in before you do too much work, and you have clear dates and deadlines for every step.
Work work work! You hammer away at the project for a couple of weeks and do work that you’re proud of
It’s Thursday. Launch is next Wednesday. You get a note from your boss’s boss — who is on all of the update threads — asking about the status of the project.
You share the status and hop in a quick call to present the work. BUT OH NO WAIT. The executive is confused. Why did we work on this when we should have been working on [other thing] or taken the project in [other direction]?
How duuuuuummb is this exec! They were on all the threads right? Why couldn’t they have said something earlier so that you wouldn’t have to sacrifice your weekend and redo a ton of work? What an asshole.
Your boss’s boss still might be an asshole (I don’t know them), and if this happens to your team repeatedly it’s definitely their fault — a manager is the person ultimately responsible for what happens on their team. But pump the breaks before you get pissed so you can ask why this happened and what you can do about it.
I used to be frustrated by this until I decided it was my fault (even if it’s not entirely my fault) and tried to fix it starting from the assumption that it was my fault. Now as the manager I take what I learned to avoid this scenario on my team.
Because there’s a communication problem here that you personally can fix, and fixing it will come with resources/budget for your projects, respect for your work, raises and promotions, and world peace.*
*world peace not guaranteed.
Why your boss doesn’t know obvious things you feel they should know
“The nonsense was the essential lesson I learned from my first managerial fall: when communications are down, listen hard, repeat everything, and assume nothing.” – Michael Lopp, Sr Director of Engineering at Apple and author of Managing Humans
When my content director wants me to review something for a huge campaign we have coming up in February (stay tuned), I’m happy to do it. Communication is key, teamwork makes the dreamwork etc. etc.
I also have to prioritize that ask against the partnership my affiliate manager gave me and the product announcement we unexpectedly turned around in 4 hours and the the customer research survey draft from someone on my team and the 2023 budget and my long-term hiring plan and thinking about the next step in our approach to pricing and packaging and the problem our VP of support just brought up and and and and…
The point is NOT that I have more work than anyone else on my team, because I don’t. The point is that I (and probably your manager) are thinking about a broad range of mostly disconnected projects at any given moment, which requires switching quickly between projects and prioritizing things that don’t have obvious ways to compare their level of priority.
There are three reasons your boss and I messed up in the above scenario, even though everything we could have needed to know was posted for all to see:
I want to encourage discussion and problem solving within my team, and the boss chiming in is the fastest way to shut down conversation about it. When an update is posted in a general channel, it’s unclear who should be reviewing it — if the boss reviews it before other people, it will discourage team autonomy. But by the time other people have reviewed something I’ll have moved on to my next priority, even if I saw that the initial update was posted.
If an update is shared without an explicit ask, it’s unclear what feedback you want from me. As the manager, my feedback tends to come at the very beginning and very end of a project (at the beginning for big picture direction stuff, at the end for polish). If an update is in the middle, I don’t want to review the work as though it’s a final product because that’s not a fair or accurate representation of the work.
I missed it or wasn’t sure the priority level. Can’t monitor every channel, and even if I see a message the ambiguity makes its priority level unclear. Should I prioritize the VP of support ask, the feature announcement, the 2023 budget, or this?
Long story short, the updates are ambiguous even when you think they’re clear. If it’s not clear who you want feedback from or what type of feedback or by when, you’re not likely to get the type of review you want and you open yourself up to surprises happening later.
When last minute direction changes happen, it’s because your boss isn’t reviewing the work in the interim.
Here’s a list of things that don’t count as you telling your boss about something (and one that does)
These don’t count:
Posting an idea or request for feedback in Slack or Teams
Sharing a general status update at a weekly team meeting
Updating project management software with status/deadline
Sharing work in an email or other message that has more than two people on it
Talking to your manager (but not your manager’s manager) about it, without confirming that the big boss has reviewed
Sharing the work in a direct message without additional clarification or comments
This does:
Directly asking your boss for a specific type of feedback on a specific idea or piece of work in a direct message with only the two of you (or where you ask them by name for their thoughts)
This sounds dickish, but it ties back to my initial idea “how would I fix this if I assumed it was my fault.” How could someone be on so many communications and still be oblivious to what happens? If you lead them by the hand to your work and tell them exactly what you need from them, they won’t be.
My point is that your boss and I are both toddlers who need to be told to put each sock on individually, or else will run out on December morning with one cold foot.
Ask for feedback about 3 times
When should you ask for feedback and what should you ask? There are no hard and fast rules, but three times seems about right.
First, ask for feedback on the outline or idea, at the stage where you’re thinking through the big picture of the project (so you can get directional feedback before sinking in a ton of hours)
Then, get feedback immediately after incorporating the previous feedback. Basically “is this what you meant,” to avoid miscommunication.
Finally, get feedback on the near-finished project before it goes live
Your boss and your boss’s boss should ideally be creating a system (not a process) that avoids large-scale miscommunications like the one I opened with. But not every boss does and even well-run teams will have miscommunications here and there — this is what you can do to advocate for yourself so that you get more of what you want and grow in your career.
Great piece. This must have been tough / fun to write. 🙂
This = 💯...
"My point is that your boss and I are both toddlers who need to be told to put each sock on individually, or else will run out on December morning with one cold foot. "