Embracing Bad news as leaders

As hilarious as the sequence is in the show, it brings to light a common pitfall for leaders. Not keeping a channel open for news to flow up, especially bad news, often leads to surprises and at worst disasters like in the case of Nucleus. As leaders, it is important to embrace bad news and relish the taste of success. Had Heidi given space to the team to express bad news and had Gavin given space for Heidi to communicate when things are not going well, it would have saved Gavin his face ( and made the episode boring of course).

Is bad news really that bad? Imagine going on a long road trip and the fuel indicator goes up. The indicator going up is a setback alright, we have enjoyed the drive too much to notice our gas was running out. However, it also gives us a moment to take a detour to fill the gas. This adds a bit of a detour but, continues to keep the trip enjoyable. If we had not liked the light going up and ignored it, it would have disturbed our experience even worse with an extended stopover, call to AAA, and not to mention a prevailing regret as to why we ignored the light in the first place.

Day-to-day, as leaders, can be filled with such indicators. Some are good and some might need our attention to detour and ensure things are on track. There is a miss in the deadline, someone is quitting, the project hits a blocker, there is an outage and the list goes on… Paying attention to them and correcting the course, while we still can, can reap a lot of benefits

So what kind of a leader are you? If only there were a monitoring dashboard or an indicator light that would tell us. However, we can get a sense of it through reflection by looking out for the following symptoms/red flags. This is generally a good indicator to see if your team trusts you to take bad news constructively and whether there is a free flow of information in your team.

If ….

Baam! you may have something to look out for and make room for a better flow of information to you.

It may not be as hard as we think and we can do few basic things right. However, old habits die hard and we need to keep reflecting to ensure the trust and transparency in information is intact.

So how do we actually make the room for bad news to flow in? It cannot be done overnight. It requires consistently paying attention to minute aspects that we tend to fall prey to every day. For starters, ensuring the following on a consistent basis might go a long way in increasing the flow of information

As unpleasant as the bad news is, the leaders will not do any good for themselves when they punish the messenger who carried the bad news. A couple of instances of coming hard on the team member who brought the information shuts the member from coming to you again. Punishing the messenger can be explicit ( yelling, taking aggressive actions, etc) or can be subtle ( like being defensive when given feedback, being in denial of the issue, etc). The best will be to thank the team member for bringing it to your notice and diligently following up to find what happened.

There are always learnings from any initiative. Creating a forum to call out what went well and what could be better goes a long way in the team's reflecting and learning. Initially, it could start off as anonymous retrospectives. Over the course of time as the trust builds there can be open debates within the team.

I owe this term to a friend and colleague of mine Evgeny. It is very easy and natural to always lean on individuals who feed you information that you want to hear. If as leaders we derive information from only a single source, we might be blind-sighted by things we do not know. As my colleague advised, always triangulate.

Try to gather information from multiple sources and make an assessment yourself on what the true state is, pose more questions, get more perspectives and the cycle goes on.

Debatably the most important thing for a leader is to be vulnerable. Leaders can come off as too firm and project a superhero/ know-it-all picture. The truth is they are not. To err is human and a leader is a human after all. It is critical for your team to know that you can go wrong sometimes as well. Admitting mistakes, apologizing for getting things wrong, sharing your past failures, laughing at your mistakes can all go a long way in letting your team know you are prone to mistakes too. When the team realizes even their leader can make mistakes it makes it a lot easier for them to come off with the true picture and makes them feel safe to open up

Having a close challenger circle helps in going a long way. Someone challenging your ideas enables you to see different perspectives or to strengthen your idea further. Having as many challenging buddies closer to you will help. We need to be careful in picking our challengers as there is a difference between challengers and general pessimists

As a parting note, if leaders are the heart of a team, a flat line means disaster for the team. A healthy heart means a sinusoidal wave pattern, that has ups and downs.

It's in maintaining the balance of these ups and downs that marks the great leader.

To great leadership…

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