Author: handsrm

Now what?

by handsrm

Teams in the US today – and likely for awhile longer – are going to be struggling. There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, some celebration, and every feeling in between.

As a leader, your job today is figuring out what your team needs in order to keep their heads in the game and keep them from spiraling out into fear and anxiety. Today I’m taking some cues from political organizers, who are no strangers to working hard and not being able to see the results they were fighting for.

Validate what they’re experiencing.

Just about every concession speech will show supporters that they’re seen: I know you’re disappointed/frustrated/anxious right now.

Your team, especially those from minoritized backgrounds, might be feeling extremely legitimate fear, anxiety, frustration, and more. Those are hard feelings and sometimes the only way out of the intensity of them is through it. Acknowledge (sincerely) that those feelings make sense. If you can identify some clear ways that you’re committed to helping mitigate or solve the root cause of that fear, now’s a good time to share those.

Show them their impact.

There’s a reason why political campaigns tell you how many voters you contacted, how many people volunteered, how many signatures they got. It shows people that all the work they’ve done isn’t for nothing.

People are more likely to spin out when they don’t see a point to what they’re doing. Leaders, you’re in the best position to show them what their impact really is. If you can point to numbers and past performance, great; if you can’t, re-orient them toward your vision and remind them of your mission.

Create space for togetherness.

Election night gatherings, whether virtual or otherwise, are there because people need a sense of belonging and community when faced with uncertainty (and because celebrations are better together).

In a remote world, this is possible, if just different:

  • Keep an optional video call open throughout the day. This is not a meeting! No agenda, no action items, just the presence of other humans working toward a common goal with you. Don’t force people to join or turn on their cameras, but use it as an open “working together” space for those who want some company or accountability.
  • Open extra (and optional) 1:1 time slots in your calendar. Invite your team to book even just a 15-minute check-in with you to make sure you’re understanding where they’re at.
  • If you don’t already have a standing all-hands meeting at least monthly, get one on the calendar. Let everybody remember that they’re in this together, even if right now it feels like each person is trudging along in isolation.

Put your own oxygen mask on first.

You can’t do any of the above if you’re spinning out yourself. Let yourself feel your feelings before you face your team. Then, look at your mission statement. Literally put the words on a screen or write them on paper in front of you. Remember that you’re in this because it matters to you, to your patrons and constituents and customers and staff. Even if your mission isn’t one that feels like it should be anyone’s top priority right now, find what’s persistent in it: maybe that’s community, equity, understanding, learning, amplifying impact… I could go on. Focus on that and know that even in these times of wild uncertainty, those things still matter.

It’s hard. I know. We’ve got this. Vamanos.

Vote.

by handsrm

That’s it. That’s the post.

If you can vote in the U.S., that’s your most important task this week. Do it, and make sure you’re not getting in the way of your team doing it.

I’ll see you on the other side, friends.

Goal-setting for clarity

by handsrm

We’re all scrambling for any bit of clarity we can get our hands on right now. As a manager, you’ve got an opportunity to help create that for your team, in a way that can have outsized impact for them and for your organization.

In any time, clear goals, and your ability to meet them, are at the core of your organization’s effectiveness. No matter what team you’re in charge of, it’s critical to your organization’s success at meeting its mission that you’re able to identify and communicate clear goals for your team.

You’re responsible for holding your team accountable for meeting both team-level and individual goals. There are plenty of frameworks for setting useful goals; whether you’re a devoted “SMART” goal person or all-in on OKRs, there are a few aspects of goal-setting that are particularly relevant to the clarity of the goal:

  • A timeframe. If your goal does not have an attached timeframe, you can never tell whether you’re making appropriate progress toward the goal.
  • Some degree of uncertainty that the goal will be reached. As my friend Michelle Paul says, “A goal that you’re 100% confident you can reach is not a goal; it is an item on your to-do list.” Conversely, a goal that you’re 0% confident that you can reach is a fantasy. You want some confidence, just not total confidence.
  • An explicit understanding of how you’ll know when the goal is reached (the “measurable” part of SMART goals, and the “key result” part of OKRs).
  • Connection to your overall mission or larger objectives (the “clarity of purpose” for a particular goal).

Some managers approach goal setting from a top-down perspective: the manager sets the goals, the reports are responsible for them. I advocate for a more consultative approach, especially if your team members are relatively senior or have expertise in areas you don’t (that’s most teams!). In particular, you want your team’s input to understand how realistic your goals are to achieve, and to give them a chance to voice concerns about how their other work will be impacted. This process allows you to help them prioritize their current workload against a new goal, so that they understand that a new goal doesn’t mean they’re expected to simply take on more and more work.

Depending on your reports’ individual confidence levels, you may need to coach them toward a more ambitious target – it’s scary to set a goal that you aren’t sure you can reach, especially if you aren’t sure of the consequences of failing to meet that goal. Be as clear and explicit as possible about what happens if the goal isn’t met: “This is a new grant for us, so the worst-case scenario is we continue as we’ve been going. In that case, we’ll spend some time afterward reviewing the grant and looking at who was awarded it, so that we can focus our efforts more effectively in the future. But getting it would be an opportunity to expand our programs and have a significantly stronger impact toward our mission, and we also anticipate that it can strengthen our other fundraising efforts.”

If the goal isn’t simply a nice-to-have, but is instead a mission-critical job requirement, make sure to state that explicitly, and outline how the report will be held accountable for meeting that goal. Meanwhile, you need to be accountable for making sure that they have the resources they need to accomplish the goal – make sure the report knows that.

As early as possible in the process, detail what resources you know are already available, identify any moments when you want to be approached for help, and as the employee brings up new requirements, advocate for them to your board or leadership team while at the same time helping the employee identify any possible alternatives to meeting those needs in case additional resources can’t be made available. And speaking of what resources you know are already available… one of my favorites, The Management Center, has tons of resources available to help you delegate and goal-set with clarity.

Why performance reviews matter

by handsrm

If you’re like me, it feels borderline preposterous to think about performance reviews right now. We’re going to talk about it anyway.

If you don’t already have them in place, it may feel silly to create a formal evaluation rubric and review process, particularly for small or especially close-knit teams; you might feel like you know good work when you see it, and you’re confident in giving developmental/corrective feedback when it’s needed. It’s easy to deprioritize creating an evaluation rubric for a new role; I’ve been known to procrastinate on creating an evaluation rubric for senior-level employees for an embarrassingly long time. (I still do performance reviews on time, though!) It’s one of those things that rarely makes it to the “urgent” corner of our attention. If you can bring it to that corner now, you’ll have time to make thoughtful and impactful changes before the end of the year.

If you’re looking for details about what to include in a performance review, Alison Greene and Jerry Hauser’s book Managing to Change the World has a great overview of the logistics that go into setting up performance reviews, including a sample evaluation rubric. Here, I want to go a bit deeper into why they’re important for effective and equitable teams:

Evaluation rubrics help to create clarity around what’s expected of an employee, especially when they’re introduced to the employee outside the context of their first performance evaluation. Even in a highly communicative, collaborative team setting, until you codify the expectations of the role and how you’ll tell if someone’s doing well at it, your direct reports will be guessing about whether they’re meeting expectations, and that takes mental and emotional energy away from actually doing the job.

Having your expectations and evaluation points codified also gives you a basis for addressing performance issues before they arise. Conversations about significant performance problems are already difficult; they’re easier if you can point to a shared expectation about how the job performance will be assessed, rather than needing to first come to a consensus about whether that performance should be acceptable.

Having an evaluation rubric for senior or management roles can also facilitate conversations about career growth with a more junior employee, and help you make better promotion decisions in the future. Rather than simply promoting the person with the longest tenure or the most effective individual contributor, you’ll be able to point to specific skill sets that are required at the next level and help the employee to focus on developing those skill sets. Establishing those shared expectations across the board helps you identify and mitigate the impact of unconscious bias on your assessment of your employees – setting you up for a more equitable and effective team in the long run.

On showing up when it’s hard

by handsrm

In most of the circles that I run in, the last week and the last couple of days in particular have been some of the toughest parts of a year that has been hard in a million ways – ways that are somehow both unique to each person and common to all of us. For me, the loss of Justice Ginsburg feels, in some ways, both difficult in itself and as a symbol of many of the other things that have been difficult about this time.

It’s tempting, in moments like this, to create distance between showing up at work and showing up in the world. It’s tempting, as a manager, to encourage your team members to disconnect from work, to take time off, to engage in self-care. To model that, as a manager, by taking a mental health day or volunteer time off when the going gets roughest. And for many, that might be the right answer.

I want to offer another option: to create a space at work where you engage in genuine community care. To create an environment where you can say not just, “please do what you need to take care of yourself,” but “we will do what we need to take care of each other.” This looks different in a remote environment than in a physical one, but it’s no less meaningful.

One way that I try to do this is by naming the thing that is creating or increasing the need for such care. When there’s an event in the world that has deep, meaningful, personal implications for many people, even if I’m not sure they have that implication for those people directly on my team, I generally send my team an explicit acknowledgment of that impact, and sometimes will hold open virtual “office hours” for anyone who wants to hop in and chat about what that means for them and their work. (And I’m still their manager! I still need to help them connect back to what they need at work – this isn’t a venting session.)

In this communication, I try to draw explicit lines between the work that we’re doing and the creation of the world that we want to see. This is as much for me as it is for them. It’s a reminder that almost regardless of your organization’s mission, if you knit equity and effectiveness into the fabric of your work, you’re setting yourself up to have a meaningful and sustainable impact on the world. It’s what anchors me in the ability to see my ongoing, everyday work as worth showing up for; to see my and my team’s work as much a part of “the fight” as professional political activism or providing legal aid to those who need it most.

Justice Ginsburg taught us an uncountable number of lessons. One that I find myself returning to in moments of difficulty is the insistence on keeping focus on the long game, on creating change that persists over time, on relentlessly directing your energy to what you believe will endure. As a manager, you have the opportunity to make your team a place where you can create enduring change. Start by letting your team know that’s what you want, and then let them help you do it.

Let’s go.

What if self-care, but at work?

by handsrm
A bouquet of fall flowers, seen from above against alight gray background

In the U.S., many of us just had a long weekend, thanks to our forebears in the labor movement. Are you feeling refreshed? Did you engage in some self-care activities? Are you feeling some dread about letting that go now that we’re back at work? Today we’re going to dig in on what that care looks like in the context of work.

The kind of self-care that I’m talking about is understanding what you need to be at a base level of “all right” – at the very least, a neutral state where you may not feel your absolute best, but you can handle pretty much anything that’s likely to need your attention – and then doing what it takes to stay at or above that base level as much of the time as possible.

There are two dangerous paths to avoid when thinking about self-care in the context of work. One is path laid out by the industry constructed around the trendy idea of self-care, made up of companies who want to sell the idea (mostly to women) that you can buy a face mask and check off “self-care” on your to-do list. Limiting your concept of self-care to that idea can lead to some extremely un-caring behavior, as we saw in an exposé on the company culture at the luggage company Away last winter:

As the holidays approached, the team had to work around the clock to keep up with customer demand. In December, [a customer support rep] was wrapping up work at 1AM when she saw a Slack message from [her manager]. “Okay everyone! Take a photo with your computer in bed when you get home. Here’s mine!” She was sitting in bed wearing a face mask, still working.

Here’s one important factor in why this doesn’t work: As a manager, your reports will not believe you if you simply tell them that self-care is important and then proceed to ignore your own basic needs. You have to model it and show them that it’s both acceptable and necessary to prioritize their health.

The other dangerous path is assuming that self-care has to happen on an employee’s “own” time, that every second of a day needs to be dedicated to meeting the needs of the company in a visible way or else. Encouraging your reports to take (paid) time off from work is critical; understanding  what they need to do through the course of a regular workday to keep at the base level of “all right” is just as important. In particular, if the work that you do requires a lot of emotional energy – which it often does for mission-driven organizations, since most folks are there because they care deeply about the work – it’s important to recognize that people will often need a quick reset during the day to recharge that energy.

Maintenance and recovery anchors

I like the phrases Jeff Toister uses in his book Service Failure to describe what those things are: maintenance and recovery anchors. The idea behind a maintenance anchor is that it’s something that you do consistently and relatively frequently (at least weekly) that keeps you at a pretty solid level pretty much of the time. Examples might be:

  • Shower and get dressed every day, even when working remotely.
  • Exercise regularly (with goals).
  • Eat well.
  • Drink enough water.
  • Get enough sleep.
  • Make your bed in the morning (no, really).
  • Spend (socially distant!) time with people you care about.
  • Read things that aren’t the internet.
  • Write in a journal or draw in a sketchbook.

Recovery anchors are things you don’t necessarily do every day or every week, but they are things you turn to if you need to reset. You should expect your employees – and yourself! – to need to do some of these shorter-term things during the course of the workday. Maybe there’s been a difficult interaction with a customer or a colleague; maybe you’re deeply concerned about something happening in the world outside of work; maybe there are kids at home pulling your attention away from the screen. Some recovery anchors might help you shake it off quickly; some might take more time and give you a chance to make deeper repairs. Here are a few examples:

  • Make a playlist of songs that make you feel better, and listen to it on headphones.
  • Double-check: have you eaten in the last four hours? Are you hydrated? Have you showered in the last 48 hours? If not, do those things immediately. (If you can’t shower immediately, wash your face.)
  • If you’re able, engage in some kind of physical activity: do some planks, pushups, or jumping jacks, take a walk, have a five-minute dance party.
  • Look at puppy GIFs.
  • Take your PTO.
  • Identify whether your most pressing need is to process or to problem-solve; talk to someone who can help you do that: a friend, a trusted colleague, a therapist.
  • Deep-clean your living/working space.

I recommend actually writing a physical list of your maintenance and recovery anchors, because when you really need to reset, you’ll have a ready set of instructions and won’t have to come up with ideas from scratch.

As a manager, I like to encourage my team members to keep this list handy as well. I don’t need to know what’s on each person’s list – if I sense that stress is building to a point where it’s going to negatively impact the person’s work, I can ask them to pick something from the list and take five minutes to do that thing.

Building trust at work: Effective autonomy

by handsrm

Often, when we think of having autonomy at work, we frame it against being micromanaged. Today I want to dig in a bit about why that is, and how we can go beyond “don’t micromanage” and into more compelling ways of providing autonomy to our teams.

When we feel micromanaged, we usually feel like our autonomy is being limited in an unnecessary or unproductive way. We feel like we aren’t trusted to handle the fundamentals of whatever it is we’re doing, and that lack of trust feels unfair. We feel instinctively that it’s bad because several of our core needs at work, as defined by trainer, speaker, and equity and inclusion expert Paloma Medina, are threatened: we lack choice, improvement is difficult, our significance feels diminished, and the dynamic feels unequal. It’s so impactful that it’s often quite clear to the person being micromanaged that that’s what’s happening.

It can be a lot harder to identify micromanaging behavior when you’re the one doing it. For a deep dive into how to recognize and avoid your own micromanaging behavior, I recommend checking out the resources the team at The Management Center has shared on how to avoid micromanaging and on developing the skill of delegation generally. Pay close attention to those delegation resources: developing effective delegation skills is the best defense against accidental micromanagement.

But you don’t have to stop there! Effective delegation is the right foundation to build on; from there, you can build up more challenging, interesting ways to establish autonomy for your team without sacrificing the effectiveness that you’re accountable for as the manager or the support your team needs from you.

Understand your team members’ key questions.

The best balance of autonomy, support, and effectiveness leaves a team member feeling like they have control over the areas they’re best at, and clear guidance in the places where they need it most. That’s different for every person and every project, so when you set out to create that balance as a manager, it’s important to start by understanding your team members’ working styles. I like to use the framework Carson Tate puts forth in her book Work Simply, in which she describes productivity styles partly in terms of what questions you tend gravitate toward without prompting, and which questions you have to be consciously reminded to pay attention to.

In Tate’s framework, I’m a Prioritizer/Planner, which means questions that start with “What” and “How” are naturally going to be at the front of my mind at any new project. It also means that I have to consciously remind myself to pay attention to questions that start with “Why” (a key question for Visualizers) and “Who” (a key question for Arrangers), or I’ll present a variety of risks to the success of the project: difficulty collaborating with my colleagues who have other productivity styles; outcomes that miss the mark for key stakeholders; or elegantly crafted solutions that don’t get at the ultimate desired goal.

Because I gravitate toward “what” and “how” questions, as an employee, I tend to feel motivated when given autonomy in answering those questions, not just because I see those as my own strengths, but also because I default to seeing those answers as important to the success of a project. (Who and Why questions are important too! It’s just that I need more active reminders about them.) In Medina’s BICEPS terms, if I sense that my manager trusts me to answer my key questions, it feeds both my Choice and Significance core needs at work.

For a senior-level employee who already has lots of autonomy in the area of their key questions, the next step is to help them frame their work against the key questions of others on your team, on the board, or in leadership. This can be tough emotionally: when you have answered your key questions deeply and thoroughly, interrogating the work from another angle can feel like a challenge to your expertise. Letting go of that defensive feeling and allowing yourself to ask those other questions opens up all kinds of possibilities for effective collaboration, and if you can enable that effective collaboration as a manager, you’ll be doing your most valuable work.

Building trust at work: Vulnerability

by handsrm

So far in this series we’ve talked about a bunch of ways that you can show your team that you’re trustworthy, but we’ve yet to talk about one of the most important: showing that you trust them.

Vulnerability as a leadership principle is a big topic – Brené Brown has a whole book about it – and I won’t pretend to encapsulate it all in one blog post. I also want to be super clear: this isn’t something I consider myself personally good at. In that sense, this blog post is as much a reminder for myself and the ways I want to show up for my teams as it is advice for my fellow mission-driven managers of the world.

How do I know that I’m not good at it? Because generally, when I tell people directly about the things that make me feel unsure or unsteady at work, their reaction is some version of “I would never have guessed that.” And, almost unilaterally, they’re better able to trust me for having seen me display my trust in them. My goal in writing this post is to enable you, and me, to understand what’s at stake in showing that trust – that is, to name the fears that underly our failure to fully show up for our teams. As Brown writes:

The courage to be vulnerable is not about winning or losing, it’s about the courage to show up when you can’t predict or control the outcome.

Our vulnerabilities, as managers, are often rooted in a few specific kinds of fear that we have to find the courage to work through. This list isn’t exhaustive by any means, but it represents the conversations I have with fellow-managers most often when we’re feeling uncertain about our work, and starting points for handling these fears.

Fear of losing control.

This is a counterintuitive one for many first-time managers: the loss of direct control that you experience when you move from an individual-contributor role to a manager role is often unexpected and startling. Many of us become managers because we’re exceptionally good at the individual-contribution work that our teams are responsible for, and the moment we become managers, how good or bad we are at our jobs is contingent on other people doing that work we’re so proud of. Agency you may not have consciously felt before you were a manager suddenly appears obvious: other people can just choose not to do it your way! (If this is something you’re up against right now, check out Molly Graham’s metaphor of giving away your Legos as a way to frame this fear.)

Fear of losing influence.

Because as managers, the degree of control we exercise over our team’s work is contingent on our ability to influence others, anything that feels like it can take away that influence is something that can make us afraid to act. That can mean admitting we’ve been wrong or don’t know about something. It can mean not being able to advocate successfully for something our team has asked for. It can mean learning that someone else’s approach to our team’s work is more effective than ours. It can mean anything that we think will reduce our stature in the eyes of our team.

The gag here is that pretending we’re never wrong, that we know everything, that we’re all-powerful doesn’t work. Our teams know that we are human people with human limitations, and occasionally they want to see that for themselves so they know that we know it, too.

Fear of misusing power.

I’m not going to tell you to try to overcome this one. This is an important fear. Listen to what it tells you about what you’re doing. And remember: like all feelings, it is not a fact, but it is data.

It’s especially common among those who are impacted by or see the impact of power structures on societally marginalized groups. Keep this fear healthy, but don’t let it keep you from having the hard conversations your team needs in order to be effective.

Fear of doing it by ourselves (AKA loneliness).

Generally speaking, being a manager comes with fewer built-in peers than other roles on a team. No matter how transparent your team culture, there will be things you can’t talk about with your team members. You need to be able to talk safely with others who at least understand facets of your situation, if not the whole situation. Management coach Lara Hogan suggests building a manager Voltron – a group of people to help you sift through work issues that may or may not include your direct manager (if you have one). If you don’t have a direct manager yourself, it’s even more important to have this kind of group around you. (Side note: I include my therapist in my manager Voltron, and I recommend it highly.)

Okay, now what?

All of this is very easy to type in a blog post and very difficult to name and improve in our everyday work. My own goal is to make sure that when I’m feeling resistant to acting or speaking candidly with my team, that I’m taking a moment to identify whether any of these fears are at play and to what degree I need to work through them.

In our next post we’ll talk about one way to work through some of these fears: creating space for autonomy on your team.

Building trust at work: Predictability in unpredictable times

by handsrm
Garden scene with thick, visible tree roots in the foreground

In school, we’re taught to put our faith in the scientific method. That is, we’re taught that the core of our ability to trust the results of scientific experiments is their repeatability. Repetition, consistency, predictability – these aren’t always words that leaders wants to hear applied to themselves, but in the context of trust-building within your organization, they’re foundational.

The most straightforward path to building trust is, as Anil Dash puts it, “being boring. That is, being incredibly, mind-numbingly consistent.” In many areas of our lives at work, there are clear ways to do that: establish a pay schedule and stick to it; create evaluation rubrics that help people understand what’s expected of them and how to do “a good job”; keep meetings running on schedule; and so on.

However. We are living in wildly unpredictable times, and that makes it even more important for us as managers and leaders to create patterns of consistency wherever possible. (If you haven’t yet read through all of Lara Hogan’s writing on creating predictability in times of crisis and generally leading through difficult times, I invite you to carve out an hour over the next week to read through them and think about what actions those ideas might prompt you to take with your team.)

And I fully believe that doing that work now will pay off in the long run, not just in moments of extreme difficulty: if you’re able to create a measure of predictability and consistency with your team now, you’re going to be able to build on that foundation of trust to do incredible things when your team is operating at full capacity.

So how do we approach creating those patterns of consistency?

In times and industries where “the only constant is change,” the real constant for managers and leaders is decision-making. The more you can create predictability around your decision-making process, the easier it will be for your team to understand your likely responses to change, and to trust you to lead the team through change in a way that enables them to continue to do their best work. If you don’t yet have a clear sense of what drives your decision-making process, here’s where I recommend getting started:

Articulate what’s most important to you.

Now is a great time to have your organization’s mission, vision, and core values front and center in your workspace. It’s (always) likely that you can’t make everything happen that you’d like to; assess the priority of your various projects and day-to-day work based on what keeps you closest to your mission, creates motion toward your vision, and aligns with your core values. Having a clear sense of what’s important – and ensuring that “the health and well-being of our employees” is high on that list – will help you make decisions that have a clear, predictable pattern.

Overcommunicate the “why” behind your decisons.

Once you’ve articulated that set of priorities to yourself, it’s time to communicate them to your staff. That means not just holding an all-hands meeting where you share that you’ve been doing this thinking – although I recommend that! – but also establishing that communication as a pattern by constantly sharing why you’re making decisions, even on judgment calls that feel small or inconsequential. Yes, sometimes you need to make quick, time-dependent calls, but the more you can articulate the reasoning behind your decisions, the more your team will be able to 1) anticipate your decisions based on those reasoning patterns and 2) see the consistency in your approach to change.

Your team won’t always care about the “why” in the moment. That’s fine – it’s still important for you to share, not least because it holds you accountable for understanding the motivation behind your own decisions.

When you change your mind, share the “why.“

Establishing predictability and consistency is often hardest when we need to reverse a decision we’ve shared with our team, something that feels constant right now but happens regularly even in the best of times. Sometimes you’re going to make one decision that’s the right one based on the information you have at the time, and then you’ll get new information that requires you to change your mind. That’s “expected behavior,” as we say in tech.

Those moments are perhaps the most crucial for you to share the “why,” both of the original decision and of the new direction. As long as your team understands what drives those decisions, they will be able to trust your ability to lead through change, which in turn bolsters that ability for you.

One final note here: What I’m asking you to do here is to be vulnerable with your team, to show that you don’t always have all the answers, to let them in on your thought process. That kind of vulnerability is both very difficult and essential to leading through moments of difficulty. More on that in our next post.

Building trust at work: Focused transparency

by handsrm
Rocks and blue sky reflected in still, clear water at Joshua Tree National Park

Transparency, as a management principle, is complicated. In its simplest form, it’s just sharing information with your team. A policy of total transparency would mean that you hold no information back from your team, regardless of how small the detail and regardless of how much potential it has to change over time. It’s related to clarity and to trust, but there are important distinctions between all three.

I think of the difference between transparency and clarity as being essentially a matter of focus. To illustrate what I mean by that, think of a pair of prescription eyeglasses compared to a pair of fashion glasses with no prescription in the lenses. Both are transparent; only the prescription eyeglasses have a goal of increased clarity. Your goal as a manager is to be the right pair of prescription glasses for your team: some individuals will need a stronger prescription (more help focusing within the range of information that you’re being transparent about) and some will need less (just give them the facts, they’ll extrapolate for themselves).

Focused transparency is one of the raw materials needed to build an infrastructure of trust, because it helps a team understand what they’re trusting their manager to do. “I trust you” is a complete sentence, but in a work context, a more complete sentence is “I trust you to [verb].” That can be as general as “I trust you to act from our company’s core values” or as specific as “I trust you to catch any grammatical errors when reviewing my marketing copy,” but it’s always tied to some kind of action.

Building trust on a team requires that a manager is transparent about several categories of information:

What the team’s goals are

The statement you want from your team here is “I trust my manager to keep our focus in the right place.” If the team doesn’t know what its overall goals are, no one on the team can tell whether or not they are doing a good job, nor can they trust the direction that you’re leading them in (because they don’t know what direction that is). It’s the manager’s job to communicate the team’s goals, and to do it clearly and consistently. In a remote environment, having the goals recorded on a document that’s shared, easily accessible, and referenced often can help to bake this into an organization’s process. For example, if you have a shared meeting agenda, keep your high-level goals written at the top of the document and review them, along with any progress that has been made toward them, at the start of each team meeting. It’s also helpful to ensure that the team understands any major obstacles that need to be cleared in order for those goals to be met.

How each individual’s work ties back to the team’s overall goals

An individual who knows how their own work connects to the overall team goals will have an easier time trusting that their manager has a clear vision for their work. They’ll be able to trust that the manager is including them in the overall team strategy, and that the manager sees them as an integral part of the team. You can create this understanding by framing each new assignment with its potential impact on team goals (The Management Center has a great delegation guideline to help you make this framing a habit). Follow that up with regular check-ins in your one-on-one meetings with your direct reports, and reinforce it by bringing the team’s attention to high-impact individual accomplishments in a shared online channel or during team meetings.

How the team knows if their goals are being met

Now that the team goals are clear to everyone, being able to see for themselves when an overall team goal is being met is the next step in effective, transparent communication. Quantitative goals can be tracked through easily accessible (though maybe not easily editable!) reports in your team’s database, a well-placed pivot chart in a shared spreadsheet, or regular updates in a shared team channel. While it’s possible to track progress against a qualitative goal with regular team conversations, surveys, and individual check-ins, it’s worthwhile whenever possible to find quantitatively measurable/trackable questions that can act as proxies to indicate you’re reaching that goal (a “key result” in the “objective/key result” or OKR framework) that you can use to report on progress toward that goal over time. For more on OKRs, check out Christina Wodtke’s book Radical Focus.

How an individual’s work is evaluated

We’ve talked about the importance of a consistent feedback framework when you need an employee to change how they’re working; similarly important is a clear set of expectations around how an employee’s work is evaluated. We’ll dig into the value of clear evaluation rubrics in a future post.

When to limit transparency

There are also some forms of transparency that can negatively impact a team’s ability to work together. Just as important as sharing the information above, a manager sometimes needs to build trust on their team by keeping certain kinds of information confidential, only sharing with those need to know in order to do their jobs effectively:

  • Information about interpersonal conflicts
  • Personal or medical information a team member has disclosed because it’s affecting them at work
  • A team member’s status relative to any disciplinary action at work

There are also some areas where opinions and cultural norms vary widely regarding how transparent one should be at work, and whether you choose to be open about these will depend on your situation.

  • Salaries or salary ranges (my personal preference is to be transparent about salary ranges for every role, at a bare minimum)
  • Upcoming potential changes that aren’t confirmed, or not certain yet (in particular, this can negatively impact folks who have a tendency to be anxious about change – which is a lot of people! – without providing them with anything they can use to make a decision)

Although we’re rarely in a position to provide 100% transparency to our team, it’s incumbent upon us as managers to provide context to our teams to help them understand the relationship of their work to the effort of the team as a whole. Understanding that context helps team members understand what they’re trusting their colleagues to do, allowing them to reinforce and maintain that trust when they see the results of everyone’s work.