Sometimes you need to lead your leaders
Often in my innovation work, I see employees, who sit close to the challenges and customers and weave change and innovation initiatives thwarted by their direct managers who on their own with little input from anywhere, have come up with their own solution. And now they have to drop what they had worked on and get cracking on this new thing that they intuit is going to fail, or under deliver.
I meet a lot of frustration, anger and even desire to find a new job (or boss, at least).
Let’s break down what’s happening here and what needs to happen.
Typically, employees who spend time closer to customers or stakeholders have a much better understanding of change and innovation opportunities. Because they live them — they meet first hand the effects of poor services, products and policies. These are not abstract concepts in a PowerPoint or Excel sheet. When I train them with design tools they also get a process to create and iterate and learn from. Maybe they don’t always create the most earth-shattering solutions but the ones they do create make life better for customers, stakeholders and employees. You can say that the dataset they work from comes via human interactions, emotions and needs.
The manager, or boss, has a mirror reality. They usually sit far from customers and stakeholders but seem highly attuned to the messages coming from above — from their bosses and company leaders. The managers work from directives and budgets. Their dataset is typically more abstract, as in a numerical representation of reality. Their want to please their bosses and move up in the hierarchy. (Not all managers, obviously, there are some who focus primarily on enabling their teams — but this post is not about them/you).
That’s when we meet these collisions in priorities — the qualitative and insightful work done by the innovation or customer leads runs smack into new initiatives and directives from managers. What to do?
Typically, I see meetings where the innovation and customer leads tries to reason with the manager’s new initiative. This never works. As I said before, the manager is working off of a different data set — budgets need cutting, staff needs trimming, priorities need prioritizing. Unless the innovation team has numbers to undercut the manager’s numbers, they will lose the argument.
Right here is problem number one: this is not a discussion between only the manager and his team, it typically is a much bigger strategic conversation.
I’ve witnessed managers reacting to this discussion by running out of the room with their fingers in their ears, a childish gesture that they will not listen at all. Or they might even start raising their voices with not so veiled threats of insubordination, that the employees are the ones who are not listening and acting disloyally.
Now, innovators have two choices: they can obediently go along with something they have no belief will work, or they can advocate for what they believe is better for the organization and its stakeholders. The first one is easy and typical. The second is hard and risky. Most employees choose the first option. They shouldn’t.
Instead they should take a step back and digest what happened. They should use their same insight skills to try to understand why the manager is acting the way they do. And they should use their human-centered and storytelling skills to describe actions and consequences to the leaders of the organization.
Usually this involves going up a step or two, to the manager’s manager or boss. No one likes when this happens, but obviously happiness isn’t anyone’s priority here. The innovation lead and their team need to put together a meeting with higher ups and the manager to outline the challenge, their solution and potential gains, and the manager’s solution and potential risks. This is simply a strategic discussion, one that all leaders claim they want employees to engage with.
You may need to have more than one meeting. You may need to create different stories for different leaders (financial, operational, etc.). The point is: if you want to stop the wrong thing from happening, you need a determination and perseverance beyond what you typically do. This is a defining characteristic of change makers.
Of course it may not work. I’ve seen leaders react to these meetings by saying something like that, even if the innovation team is right, the leader really needs to show their support to the manager in this case, to keep them engaged. The response should be: why is it more important that the manager stays engaged while multiple employees feel disengaged? This response, also somewhat typical, is an example of poor leadership. You should be prepared to show why (there are lots of studies about employee engagement and results).
Even if you are at first unsuccessful, you should also make it known that you and the team are going to keep pushing for changes, and also to start documenting resistance in a new organizational systems/friction map that you can use in discussions with others, so that they might learn from this. This has two purposes: it turns a negative into a positive by making this whole thing learning experience and it puts the leaders on notice that, just like they monitor employees’ actions, you are monitoring theirs. It’s important to frame this as something extremely positive.
Within all of this, you need to continually book short coffee discussions with your leadership team about change, culture and resistance. This is a long play, but you need to keep this resistance to change top of mind in your work. You will run into this again and again. And by the way — this happens everywhere, even in creative, innovation and design firms.
In essence, you are training leadership and managers, over the long run, to embrace rather than undercut your innovation initiatives. The next time something like this happens you will be better prepared and managers will be a bit more hesitant to face your reactions. Make sure you are measuring and keeping score of the initiatives that you drive and those that your bosses come up with.
You won’t win them all. But you need to win the most important ones. Let me tell you from experience, giving up never wins. Training your leaders takes time — because they have had a lot of time to develop some of the bad habits that stop you from delivering customer value.
Lastly, lots of people will fear losing their jobs if they do something like this. But it’s actually not that many more people than the ones who end up leaving their current jobs because they don’t want to work with managers and leaders who undermine them.
