Manage-Wise

Management through conversation

This might sound strange, but it took me a long time to understand the value of talking to people in the workplace. I would chat and joke around, but I rarely confused socialising at work with the actual doing of work. My upbringing and experiences in college led me to believe I had to solve problems on my own at work.

In my first year at Microsoft, I had rarely sought out the opinion of others or found someone who had more knowledge than I did and reuse it. I had grind it out on my own and worked hard instead of smart. At the same time, I watched two of my earliest managers, Ken Dye and Joe Belfiore, exhibit the curious behaviour of spending a great deal of time talking to other people. I had see them, sitting in various other people’s offices, chatting away. As busy as I was, I couldn’t help but wonder how they could afford to spend so much time “socialising.” Being new, I didn’t ask them about it. Instead, I just labeled them “extroverts,” which at the time, given my background, was a minor kind of insult. Their behaviour annoyed me (shouldn’t they be working at least as hard as I am?), and I didn’t see any value in what they were doing. How wrong I was.

As my responsibilities grew, I slowly understood what Ken and Joe had been doing. Through trial and error I learned that manhandling, bullying, dictating, or demanding things wasn’t an effective tactic when I needed things from people who weren’t obligated to listen to me. I noticed similar results in non-communicative programmers or testers, and that they were ineffective when getting work done that involved other technical people. The implication is that everyone can benefit from better communication and relationship skills, no matter how isolated their work supposedly is.

I found that the more times I demanded or assumed things from people (“You need to code it this way, OK?”), the lower the probability was that I had got the best work from them. Even if they did what I asked, something about my approach killed some of their motivation or minimised the probability that they had add value beyond what I had asked for. However, I found that when I conversed with them (“Hey, I think we need to do X, and I think you are the right person to do it. What do you think?”), instead of barking orders, I received what I needed sooner than when I used those other tactics. And, as a bonus, the odds increased of them suggesting good improvements on my ideas. I learned that dialogues are better than monologs.

Building relations

Despite how obvious it is that you need to have a positive relationship with someone in order to have a good conversation with him, people are rarely rewarded for their skills in doing so. Those informal chats and conversations Ken and Joe invested time in were not a way to kill time. Those conversations were investments in people and information, giving Ken and Joe knowledge and insight into what was going on that few others in the organisation had. But specific to my point: when they needed to request advice, an opinion, or a task, they could talk to almost anyone on the team, at any time, and start from a healthy and positive place, rather than from scratch. Their relationship with the team accelerated their ability to communicate with everyone.

A matter of trust

This made it easier to cut to the chase without being rude, or even to make exceptional requests of people that ordinarily would be rejected. In matters of opinion, they had built enough trust to get honest opinions from the right people in a casual manner, and, if so inclined, they could incorporate those suggestions and ideas into their own thinking well in advance of larger discussions.

In short, through those informal conversation and relationships, Ken and Joe were ahead of the rest of the team. They knew more about what was going well and what wasn’t, and they had more influence on it through their investment in relationships. They had paved the way for all kinds of additional support and benefits, simply by talking and listening to people.

In Tom Peters and Nancy Austin’s classic, A Passion for Excellence (Warner Business Books, 1985), this sort of behaviour is called management by walking around (MBWA). It’s described as a central quality in the successful managers they observed (an entire chapter in their book is dedicated to it). But it’s not easy to do well.

They recommend explicitly picking a small number of people, at different levels and roles in the team, and investing time in building this kind of informal relationship with them.

Excerpt from ‘The Art of Project Management’ by Scott Berkun. Published by Shroff Publishers & Distributors Pvt Ltd. Price: Rs 350.