Getting Out to See a Better View In

Managing a group of people well has, in my book, always meant getting them moving in the right direction, getting out of their way, and addressing course changes and escalations as needed.  This approach is a very tried-and-true method and very popular.  As times get tougher and resources get more constrained, though, there’s a common problem with this approach.  Tighter resources mean more frustrated people, pulled in more directions, and they will come to you more often, with more problems.  They’re so busy, or face so many conflicting priorities, you’ll see more folks referring to you for direction.

This in and of itself is not a bad thing.  If you can help reduce stress by taking on a little extra escalation during hard times, you should.  The real danger in this is, as you see more escalations, more “negative” things will be flowing to you.  Worse, the same thing will go on with your peers.  If you manage shared resources in the company, such as in IT or Marketing, your names will show up to more and more of your peers- and pretty soon, if the same people are mentioned in the same discussions as problems, a dark cloud can start to form around otherwise perfectly normal activity.  Somehow, with all the increased escalations and contention, things that are actually running just fine may become painted in a bad light.  Just like surrounding yourself with negative people, getting surrounded by negative news has a bad effect.

The answer in times like this is simple:  get out of your office.  Bad news (or bad news-like information) will be flowing to you, and in increased amounts.  Get out of your office and go talk to people.  Pick your busiest people, your most productive people, your most honest clients.  Do reality checks.  Yes, more escalations are flowing to you, but are things actually going wrong?  Are your clients still getting good service?  Other than more busy, are your people really having problems?  If there’s positive out there, go find it.  As people get more and more busy, the positive won’t flow to you.  People will get things done, then  move on quickly to the next thing.  Track it down.  Make sure things are okay.  Encourage the same in your peers.  Don’t let “busier” get confused with “out of control”.

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