jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #81 on 02 Jul 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other, Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools
Filtering your language as an engineering leader - Rob Begbie, LeadDev
Borrowing Lines from Great Leaders Around You - Lara Hogan, LeadDev
Everyone who’s managed or been a team lead for long enough has had the experience of thinking aloud or asking an idle question and then having a team member waste hours following up on what they thought was now a Suddenly Important Thing.
As a manager we need to stay involved in the work enough to understand what issues are likely to come up while not micromanaging the work - letting the team members make the decisions they’re best placed to make. That means we need to be asking questions, probing, and checking our understanding, while providing our team members clear context that that’s what we’re doing and inviting corrections rather than them thinking these are directives.
Begbie provides some linguistic context-setters - he, following author Robin Sloan, refers to these as “linguistic instagram filters” - that he uses (and when he uses them). My favourites in this context are:
Two things I’d like to add. First - that last approach in particular, where you listen to a problem or proposed solution and then try to explain it in your own words to check that you understand, is an incredibly useful technique in almost any setting. Communication is hard, and pausing to verify that accurate communication has in fact taken place is so so so helpful. My own version of that last phrase is: “[listens carefully, asking clarifying questions here and there]… Ok, so let me see if I understand this…. [my re-explanation]. Is that close? What did I get wrong?”
Second - as a new manager, it will feel weird to have set phrases that you say over and over again. Don’t worry about it. It is good and useful to keep using the same phrases. One of the things a decent manager brings to a team is a certain amount of stability and even predictability in their actions. If you want to experiment with a different phrase to see if you get even better results, outstanding, please do, but don’t change up things you say just because you feel funny repeating yourself. Communication is hard. A conversation starter that has been used often enough for everyone on the team know exactly what context it sets is a valuable thing.
In the second article, Hogan suggests going further and actively seeking out useful approaches and phrases in meetings and conversations you’re in, then poaching them and making them your own. She particularly suggests keeping an eye on how people:
As you start watching experienced (or just talented) leaders and team members participating in meetings for these sorts of approaches, you’ll start collecting lots of potentially useful tools for the tool box. You might have to re-cast them in your own voice, and they may take a few times to work in your team, but learning from others is how we work in science and in leadership.
