The Way Out is Through. Your Management Must Save You Now. Here’s How.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents what feels like a survival threat on every level, from personal to professional, from physical to mental and spiritual. And there’s nothing I could (or should) be writing about most of them. Honestly, I’m struggling with many of them myself – we all are. And I’ve been hesitant to add my voice to the chorus on the business side over the last couple weeks. But in my view one of the biggest threats we face in that arena is a management crisis. Since I’ve made a career of helping executives and managers wade with their organizations into unfamiliar territory in the most productive way possible – and, come out the other side successfully – I wanted to offer some thoughts.

For weeks, experts and laypeople have been talking about various aspects of what I call managING as it relates to the pandemic: setting and modeling policy, providing support and development, and helping employees deal with struggles in and out of the workplace. This is a complex area that crosses from compensation policy to interpersonal skills, from metrics definition to psychology (to name a few). There’s certainly a lot to do in that space. Equally, you’ve probably seen a lot of talk about change management, and how important it will be as the situation evolves to do a good job helping people move into the “new normal.” I see no argument with that either, and I’ll welcome a clear view of the new normal as soon as it comes along.

Meanwhile, the problem with both managING and change management is that they have a hard time standing alone when things are evolving so quickly. Much of managING is about helping employees succeed at well-defined goals. Nearly all of change management applies to mass movement from an old state to a new one. But how does it all work when the goals are already wrong? When the new state we define today is different from what we planned yesterday? How can an organization behave optimally to reach a new state – a “new normal” – when to quote a friend of mine, “there’s no there there”?

That’s where management comes in. That is, manageMENT, what I call teams of managers and executives working together to continuously readjust both the resources and the goals of the company at all levels. When I help my clients implement “Iterative Management,” we do so by creating management teams that are effective at making the best possible decisions they can make in light of everything they know today, learning from the results of those decisions collectively and systematically, and then changing everything again tomorrow.

Obviously, on most normal days, “change everything again tomorrow” is mostly metaphorical. Big shifts come up on occasion, but many are incremental. In fact, getting good at those small changes reduces the need for larger ones. But these aren’t normal days. For at least the immediate future, “change everything again tomorrow” is going to look less like metaphor and more like status quo. So, how can you get your own manageMENT teams better at this?

First, gather regularly for the purpose of making clear decisions without clear information. Get everyone together, and focus on a well-formed, useful question that needs an answer NOW to keep you on track. Be clear about what needs to be decided, why it’s important, and by when a decision must be created and implemented. Don’t get lost in the search for perfect clarity. Just try to come to the best answer you can with the information you have, being as transparent as possible about the fact that you’ll probably have to decide again soon.

Second, do your best to look forward instead of backward. It’s tempting to spend time talking about why things aren’t going as expected: blame a colleague, blame the virus, blame the economy. And all of that may be true. Even so, use precious management meetings to articulate some concrete thing you’re trying your best to achieve as a team in the future, and then spend your time talking about the most recent changes to your understanding of that future, and what can be done today in light of the new information. Decide on your best next step at the moment, because that’s all you can do.

Third, let outcomes overrule goals. Do your employees have clear, specific goals – guidance on how many of what things to do how often? Great. That’s good managING. But as you look again and again into an unclear future, at an outcome you’re trying to produce (or the closest, least foggy thing to that outcome you can envision), those goals are going to change. Often. Start socializing the idea with fellow managers and front-line employees that you’ll be doing a lot of figuring out – a lot of iteration – and that some long-held goals will move and shift in uncomfortable ways. Use management meetings as a forum to paint the clearest picture you can of those outcomes, so that people can adjust their own teams and work intelligently as the situation unfolds.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, encourage and allow productive disagreement during decision-making. As we band together personally in these troubling times, be sure that the need for support doesn’t morph into excessive agreement over complex issues. Be kind to people yet be diligently data-focused regarding problems. If you see an issue with something someone is proposing, raise it. Politely, of course – don’t over-personalize others’ proposals, and don’t take it personally when someone finds fault with one of yours. Just keep talking, debating, and focusing on the future until you come to the best solution you can that meets the most complete picture you can form of the situation at hand.

And then, get ready to change it tomorrow. Because it might literally change tomorrow. That doesn’t make it wrong, doesn’t make it wasteful, and doesn’t reflect on you personally. But it does mean you’ll need your management working well tomorrow, too.

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Previously published on LinkedIn