How Teams can overcome Trust and Visibility Issues
As I continue to write, more and more friends are approaching me about the problems they are facing either as managers or as team members. Manager friends have told me that they need to work later to fix their team's mistakes. Whereas, those who have yet to become managers have told me that their managers place a large volume of work upon them, then walk away. A poor dynamic of balancing workloads across a team is often the source of low morale. Recognizing that a problem exist is the first step, but we need to find the optimal balance, where both manager and team members are working productively and sustainably.
When I speak of 'balance', I am referring to the balance between the work load of the manager and that of the team members. If we are not in balance, there are four potential issues: trust, visibility, effort, and burnout.
Each quadrant represents a different issue. Effort and burnout issues usually imply that the overall amount of work is insufficient or excessive. In these cases, we need to raise our hands and mention to our manager that the volume of work is not matching our needs. Trust and Visibility / Indifference issues are much more common and can be solved with the appropriate intent and communication approach. We will dig into these latter two, discussing how to solve these issues from both the manager and the team member perspective. Afterwards, we will go over the optimal area to find balance on this diagram.
Trust Issues (Underworked Team, Overworked Manager)
When the team produces mediocre results and the manager ends up solving the problem, this will lead to trust issues. If the manager does not trust their team, the manager will become overworked and the team will become under utilized. This is the most common trap for young managers, because they were promoted for being excellent executors. When a problem arises, these young managers try to carry the team and end up doing work on behalf of the team. Trust issues will lead to manager burnout, while concurrently slowing down the development of the team members.
To solve for trust issues from the manager side, the manager needs to invest more time in team guidance and development. To refine guidance, additional effort needs to be placed on ensuring the team understands how to approach the assignment fully before beginning. One tactic to gauge their understanding is to ask them to provide their planned methodology before beginning. They should only start executing after the manager has approved the plan. The development perspective translates to having more joint working sessions. Instead of doing the work for the team, the manager needs to work with the team to solve the problem. These working sessions will increase the capabilities of the team members, which should then increase the confidence the manager has in the team.
From the team member side, we should recognize that our manager is executing our work, which slows down our personal development. To fix the problem, we need to ask for feedback 1) before beginning our work and 2) at major decision points. These two feedback points are crucial to building trust with a manager. If we are still lost after the feedback, we need to ask the manager for a working session, where they can walk us through the thought process for approaching the problem at hand. Once we developed our manager's trust, they should extend our leash and give us more opportunities to solve problems on our own.
Visibility / Indifference Issues (Overworked Team, Underworked Manager)
When the team is overworked and the manager is breezing by, there are two potential issues: 1) visibility or 2) indifference. Visibility issues arise when the manager is not familiar with the amount or detail of work the team needs to execute. For example, the problem can be more complicated than the manager believes or the team could be less prepared than the manager perceives. Indifference occurs when the manager is fully aware of the workload, but is not concerned about the team's morale. Visibility and indifference issues are unsustainable for the team and toxic for the manager.
An indifferent manager is poisoning their trust with the team. By not caring, the team loses interest in sharing. If the team does not share, the manager will not gain visibility into the team's work. The solution from the manager angle is to simply care about the team. Practically, this involves sincerely and regularly asking the team, "how can I help you [do your job better] today?" Asking this question should provide us a magnified view on their daily activities, increasing our visibility. We need to be genuinely concerned about their bottlenecks or roadblocks so that we can help them overcome these obstacles. If the team is working too hard, we have not provided enough assistance to guide them to work smarter.
As a team member, if the manager is not supportive enough, we need to actively ask for their support. If we run into problems that are taking much more time than anticipated, we need to inform the manager so they are aware AND ask if the manager has suggestions for solving the problem in a different manner. This will give the manager visibility and provide us tools to execute more efficiently.
Balanced Distribution (Balanced Team, Balanced Manager)
We have discussed issues that can arise when managers and team members either have too little or too much work. In between these extremes is balance.
The diagram paints an ideal picture of balancing work between a manager and team members. This ideal image then still leaves some questions: In practical terms, what is balance and how will we know when our team is in balance? Balance occurs when we are delivering impact and mentally engaged at our own desired levels. There is no hard number of hours that qualifies as too much or too little work. Each person may have a different definition of output and workload We will know our team is in balance once we observe that the other four issues are absent. We are not burning out and not working with minimal effort. We trust our team and our team can discuss issues together and solve them together. Once we reach this point, managers and team members will be able to work productivity and sustainably.
Closing Remarks
Finding the balance in a team's workload requires patience and open communication on both sides. Managers need to genuinely care about their team, such that they actively gauge their teams' workloads and capabilities. If there are ever misalignments in capabilities and workloads, the manger needs to step in and work with the team to guide them, not do the work for the team. Team members need to raise their hand when problems arise so that they can build trust and increase visibility concurrently.
Is your team facing any of these issues? If so, are you willing to be the one to start the conversation to work towards balance?
