How much of your weekend goes on reworking your team’s documents?

Yet again this week, I asked a leadership group that question, and the room sighed.

Leaders often end up rewriting the docs and decks that reach them. They take home hundreds of pages to fix each week(end). It might feel like adding value, but usually, it’s a sign that something isn’t working.

The team is effectively delegating their work upwards so their manager does it for them.

So, what’s going on here, and how do you fix it?

The solution is to exercise your own judgement and encourage your reports to do the same to avoid a frustrating game of red-pen ping pong. Here are the three things I focus on when thinking about my own judgement and that of my team.

Use your judgement to decide what level of message to deliver.

Here are the five levels of problems you might bring to your leader, nicely articulated by Daniel Debow in his Medium article. All are useful, but not in every setting. Which one sets you up to deliver a clear and compelling point of view in your specific situation?

1. There’s a problem. Unless you have found a real emergency, hopefully you aren’t operating here very often unless you are both very junior and very new.

2. There’s a problem, and here’s what I think caused it. Again, for a junior employee, not a senior one, except in quick updates on the way to providing a richer perspective when your thinking is complete.

3. Problem, cause and some things we could do. If you have ideas of what you could do, my bet is you have a view on which would be best. Don’t make your leader guess: share your expertise and allow them to debate it with you.

4. Problem, cause, options and here’s the one we should pick and why. Now we are getting somewhere. Covering all of these points (not in this order, though: offer your recommendation first and back that up with why it’s the right way to solve the problem and fix the cause compared to other options).

5. I found it, fixed it and am keeping you in the loop. Wherever your delegations allow it, do this.

Train your judgement muscle.

Be explicit about your point of view while being polite about your own constraints. This requires you to have and share your judgement on the relevant situation.

Format matters here too. Providing your perspective as a clearly laid-out one-pager invites collaboration on the message. Providing a fully developed, elegant document invites the red pen.

Your leader knows you don’t have the same organisational visibility that they do. But when you are clear about the outcome you need from your communication, be sure to share your point of view about how to achieve that.

Know that practice alone doesn’t make for good judgement.

Research indicates that judgement can be built. But practising the wrong thing over and over strengthens the wrong muscles.

So, seek advice early and often as to what your message might look like, both in relation to the structure and content of your communication.

The structure (if you are a structured-thinking believer, like me) helps you refine your message. Know the rules, and they will guide you to see the holes in your thinking.

As the saying goes, ‘You can only break the rules once you know what they are.’ Be creative by all means, but know that’s what you are doing if you want to be both clear and compelling.

The content can be shaped by the structure but ultimately requires judgement about your context, your analysis and what’s needed in that moment.

And the good news is that for now at least, we humans are the judgement factories. Not AI!

More soon,
Davina

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