Exchanging narratives or concepts
- Eliot Muir
I realized recently I only had half the picture. What I wasn’t aware of at the time I wrote this article is that you’ll get a lot more out of your staff as a manager if you are open to learning from them. Everyone you talk to knows stuff you don’t. You learn better and faster if you are open to learning from them.
I think one the most valuable techniques in building up a team and trust is right from the get-go: making it okay and safe for people to be honest about when they need help understanding a concept.
John Qi on of my developers I think really explains well why this is so important:
Inversely, making an environment where people feel like they will be judged if they do not understand a concept creates a negative culture as people feel guarded and compelled to hide the fact that they aren’t clear on the information someone is sharing.
I find it personally works well to just set expectations that I will continue repeating a concept until the person I am talking to tells me to stop - hey I got this now
Building up people conceptually is a great way to build up trust. It’s also a key tool in building up a common shared language. When a group of people builds up a common shared language then it becomes faster and faster to effectively communicate - but the group has to do the ground work to build that common language.
About the worst thing one can do for anyone is shame them for not understanding a concept - “you ought to know that!”.
Another important thing I observe with people is that building people up one concept at a time is much more effective and faster than handing them an entire book to read. A good analogy to understand this is to imagine handing a book on 12th grade calculus to a 3rd grade mathematics student - it’s going to all sound like ‘blah blah blah’.
One highly effective tool I find for being able to recognize if people have a conceptual gap is to get them to reflect back in their own words a work task, problem or concept I have explained to them.
Another thing to realize is that building up people conceptually isn’t just for a manager building up a report but it also needs to go the other way. For instance for me as generalist CEO, when speaking with someone who is an expert in say marketing, sales or finance, they will probably find they get better conversations from me if they take the time to feel out what concepts I am aware of and what ones I am not.