PMP - Ask the Expert - August, 2024

David Rice: [00:00:00] This is our latest Ask the Experts, uh, session in our community event series. Uh, hopefully we're seeing these grow, you know, steadily as we keep doing them. Uh, we want this to become a valuable way for our members to engage with experts who contribute to the people managing people community, and we're looking forward to sharing more.

Uh, valuable stuff today. So for those of you who don't know, my name is David Rice. I'm the senior editor for people managing people, and I'll be your host for the day, uh, today's session is going to focus on keeping your employees aligned with your organizational vision, and we'll be speaking with one of the leading voices in the space, uh, around organizational vision, someone who's been building and leading teams for 45 years and former vice president of HR at Microsoft, Chris Williams.

Uh, Chris, welcome.

Chris Williams: Hi, good to see you. Thanks for having me.

David Rice: [00:01:00] Yeah, no problem. You just hit 250, 000 followers on tick tock and you've managed to do this by creating actionable content around leadership guidance. Michael will share your tick tock in the chat. But, uh, I'm curious, did you do anything to celebrate the milestone?

Chris Williams: Well, I did. I created a little video. I, I, uh, to be honest, the idea of having 10, 000 people watching me do those things was stunning when I first started. So the fact that when it first went to 50, I thought it was insane. When it went to a hundred, I was just. flabbergasted when it went to two, and then it just hit a quarter of a million, which is just absolutely crazy.

But so I prepared a, a little quick video that I think it said something like, um, if you had told me a couple of years ago that I would hit the This number, I would have asked you to pass me whatever you're smoking or something like that. I, I prepared that video. I put it, I noticed, Oh, look, I went to two 50.

I screenshotted the two 50. I put it up there and I [00:02:00] lost a few followers. And so while the video was up, there was a two 49, nine for a little while, and I was panicking, but then I gained followers back again. So now I'm at 250 and a little, so it's great though. I it's, it's absolutely mind boggling to me and I love it.

It's great. It's, it's wonderful to see that, um, I, I don't grow a channel the way many people do. I don't do all the like and follow for more and I don't do an awful lot. A lot of, you know, uh, salesmanship and what I'm doing. I just put out stuff that is on topics and, and give what I think is really straight, hardcore advice.

And for that to have gained a significant following is just amazing. So, um, I I'm just absolutely flabbergasted by it. I love it. Um, Uh, Tik TOK was not the place I thought I'd, I'd end up with a quarter of a million people following me, but I'll take it. It's been fun.

David Rice: You got to go to the channel where everybody's at.

Right. So [00:03:00] wherever your audience, wherever you find your audience. Um, so getting into today's topic a little bit of this, this idea of this organizational vision. Uh, I think a lot of folks on the call are here because their teams are either not on the same page, or maybe they're getting the sense that things are veering off in the wrong direction.

Uh, so let's start. By getting some things straight, right? Well, what are some of the warning signs of misalignment in your organization? And at what point do you need to step in and do something about it?

Chris Williams: Um, the, you know, there's, there's, uh, a lot of people would, will tell you that, that, Oh, if you're tracking the metrics really well, you can start to see things happen and, but what I've seen teams that are kicking it on the numbers, but are still badly misaligned.

So I don't know that. That metrics and numbers are the way to do it. What I advise leaders to do is to pay close attention to all the signals that you're hearing from your team. And you can hear a bunch of signals of misalignment. [00:04:00] Um, one of my favorite ones is to be in a meeting with a group of people and to hear them talking past each other.

One person talking about one issue, another person talking about another issue. Neither of them really aligning on, you know, nobody's getting together to solve a specific issue. They're all just sort of. Talking past each other that tells me that they don't have some centralized vision or focus that they're all trying to hit because otherwise they'd be pointing in that direction and they'd all be working on it together.

Another thing that I, I like to do is when I'm sitting down in one on ones with my director. Reports I look at, you know, they come usually with, Hey, I'm working on these 11 things or whatever, and if they're working on eight and seven and 14 on that list, you know, you've got a problem, right? If they're not working on one, two, and three, you know, you've got an alignment issue.

And so I see that quite often people will come in and, you know, Oh, cool. I hit the ball out of the park on number five. Yeah, great. But what about one? [00:05:00] You know, cause we're like, one's the one we're working on here. Um, that's really important. My favorite technique for figuring out and finding misalignment though, is to have people in the organization who you absolutely can trust to tell you the truth.

I love to find two or three people somewhere deep, preferably deep in the organization who you can just chat with and say, Hey, how's it going? And those people will, you, you get people who will tell you the truth. They will tell you, Hey, Um, uh, there are usually three possible responses from that it's, Hey, everything's great.

And I love it. And things are going great. And, you know, I love where we're headed and everything's, you know, okay, cool. That's neat. Frequently. You'll also hear, Hey, um, I really love what our vision is or whatever, but I'm having trouble getting there. And I have this roadblock or that roadblock or whatever.

That's great. You can work on whatever the roadblock is. And that's fine. The worst thing to hear happen though, is, Hey, I'm working on [00:06:00] this thing over here that has nothing to do with what we're trying to do. And I, you know, and so suddenly in the back of your head, you start to realize that, aha, the message of what we're all trying to accomplish isn't finding its way down in the organization.

David Rice: Absolutely. Um, you know, you talk about kind of alignment and 1 of the things that we can all kind of in theory align around is metrics and what we're going to track. And it doesn't always happen. Are there any metrics or methods you use to track alignment itself? Uh, so that you can be on top of this before it gets.

To derailed.

Chris Williams: I've seen a bunch of people who figure out some ways to do alignment tracking and they do some kind of surveys or metrics. I'm one of my favorite are one of the ones I see a lot. It's not really necessarily a favorite, though, is to do some kind of a regular survey of some kind to. To see what people think the focus is, or what, you know, what are the [00:07:00] objectives?

And does that objective sound real? And do you a lot, you know, agree with it and that kind of stuff. The problem with those things is that they're always lagging indicators that they're always happening. Um, you know, you, you, whatever that metric is happens a month or two after a problem has surfaced. So this is where I think a really in tune manager, a manager, a leader with some sense of, of understanding of his employees will be able to know employees, particularly their direct reports, well enough to be able to sense when something's not going right, when things aren't just firing on all cylinders and know when, you know, geez, what's going on and sit down and talk with that person and find some kind of an issue.

Um, I, I, those things will happen significantly faster than any kind of alignment surveys or, or, or, you know, one of the things I hate is when I see leaders who rely on the annual employee survey to try and figure out whether, [00:08:00] you know, I mean, a year you've gone an entire year with people out of focus and you're going to know, Oh, now I'm going to try and do something about it.

Oof, boy, you know, again, that's the ultimate lagging indicator.

David Rice: Yeah, we've got our 1st question in the chat. I love this. I want to keep make sure I keep up with the chat. So I'm going to go ahead and ask that. Uh, what are your suggestions for cutting through a situation in which teams did not know what the priorities are of other teams?

Chris Williams: Well, so, so there's a couple of things. Um, uh, specifically my first one is that whoever is on top of all those teams needs to be talking with a common message, a common set of voices, right? There needs to be some common objective, uh, across all those teams. But each one of those teams, of course, is working on something different.

That's part of the larger vision. So one of the things you need to do is make sure that those people, leaders [00:09:00] of those teams are connected in some way are communicating in some way. I am a, just a huge fan of, of making sure that the people who work for me also communicate amongst themselves with each other and not, I don't rely on status meetings or, or, you know, team meetings working together because not enough.

Rich communication happens in those meetings. It's just sort of a status, how we're doing, how we're doing, how we're doing. And I think those kinds of status can be done through some kind of a tool. They can be done in a Slack channel or in a spreadsheet or in a project reporting tool or in what, you know, the status, where, where is this team on?

This is one, but the I'm working on this and I have a problem with you working on that and our teams aren't working together. That's a problem for those two people to talk together. And one of the things that I think is the manager's job in that scenario is to know who's working [00:10:00] on what. And when this person says, Hey, I can't get X done to be able to say, you should go talk to this person over here, because that's what they're doing and connect those people.

Not necessarily have a three way meeting, but make sure those people are connected and talking to each other. One of the things that I love to see in my direct report community is connections between them, and I work really hard at fostering connections between them, not, and for them to do that in their directs and their directs and so on, but to make sure that those people feel free to reach out and connect with the other people that are their peers.

David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more about the status meetings. I think that there's kind of 2 problems that come along with them. 1 is it gets confused for communication amongst like, on an organizational level. And the other thing is that people sort of become numb to it. And so somebody might be trying to express what's going on, but.

Because it's just so regular and [00:11:00] becomes just this noise that happens. Sometimes the people who need to see it, they didn't even see it there, you know, because they've almost become numb to it.

Chris Williams: The other problem is I've seen with status meetings that, you know, if you, you know, the, the, one of the ways that scrum tried to solve that problem was having a daily stand up.

But, but one of the problems I have is if you, let's say you have a weekly staff meeting and it happens every Monday morning and some big, huge problem comes up. Problem comes up on Wednesday. The question is, do I wait for the status meeting to bring that up? And isn't five days a long time to wait for, to bring up a problem.

And what, can't I just go figure out who the person I'm having a problem with is and work it out between them. And, you know, so do I save it for the status meeting? Well, it's kind of a little thing, or it's a big thing, or I don't know if it should I say, man. And then you, so you save it all up for the status meeting.

meeting. And then what happens is things by that point, it's blowing over a blowing up. And so you have a staff meet or a status meeting that is just a dumpster fire. And I just, I, as you said, they either [00:12:00] turn into this sort of clockwork, boring, nothing ever happens thing, or stuff has gotten so badly out of control because of the week that's gone by since it, it turns into a dumpster fire.

And I just, those kinds of, you know, regular status meetings don't seem to accomplish very much.

David Rice: Yeah, I would agree with that. Um, we have sort of a two parter question that we got from one of our members who couldn't be with us today, but it was, you know, we'll be watching the recording, so I want to make sure I get it in.

Um, how do you keep vertical avenues of information unclogged to maintain alignment from top to bottom while avoiding the inefficiency of excessive huddles and meetings, like, like we're talking about, that's part one. Well,

Chris Williams: well, um, uh, The first thing, and, and this, I, I'm, I'm going to veer into the squishy.

Sort of avenue here, but I really work hard to make sure that the people who work for me feel [00:13:00] completely safe to come to me with some terrible issue, right? That they can come to me and talk to me about some problem that is happening in their organization and know that I'm not going to blame them for that problem, but that I'm going to say, okay, so let's see if we can figure out what the issue is here and work on it.

And if that kind of safety in Talking about dumpster fires as they happen up and down the chain can happen all the way down through the chain, then you have less worry about, about things getting stopped. The reason why things frequently get stopped and clogged at some level is that somebody doesn't want to report that up.

Right. It comes up to a certain level and that person is either afraid to report it up or, or, or doesn't want to be seen as somebody who can't handle that, or they're worried that it's too small of a net or whatever, and they won't report it up. So one of the things I work really hard with my direct reports is to [00:14:00] model the behavior of being really willing to, okay, That's a problem.

Let's figure that out. How can I help you? What can I do to help, you know, um, thank you for letting me know and not sort of blaming the messenger and not getting, you know, Oh, damn it. Why did you do this? Or, you know, how come that happened on your watch? And, you know, you better fix that. And those kinds of behaviors just make people not want to report things up the chain.

So. The communication up and down the chain is usually blocked by these clogs. That's not blocked by a lack of wanting to know.

David Rice: Well, on the idea of the clog, the second part of the question is, you know, how can you diagnose where the clog is happening? If it's something that exists in your current vertical.

Chris Williams: I love going around people. I love, I love having, I love having skip meetings. I love, [00:15:00] I love when, when we were all in the office back in the, you know, whatever, um, I would wander into somebody's, you know, by somebody's desk and plop myself down next to them and say, Hey, what's up and just, and try and, you know, just, uh, Hear what the real truth is beyond them.

But one of the ways I love doing skip level meetings, I love making sure that the, that, and that will tell you a ton about where the blockages are, because if you start to hear things around a manager, you realize that you've got somebody in the middle there, who's. probably scared, right? It's not, it's usually not, um, nefarious.

It's usually not Machiavellian. It's usually not because they're trying to hoard stuff. It's almost always because they're afraid of telling the truth up the chain. And that tells me as much about me as it does about that person. It tells me that I haven't made [00:16:00] that person feel safe enough to be able to come to me and tell me what their problem is.

So if I have a skip level meeting and I find some problem down underneath me, my immediate reaction is why wasn't that Where was the source of that clog? And a lot of times, I mean, I'll be honest with you. I'm a pretty, uh, uh, a type personality and I can swarm people and I need to make sure that they understand that, Hey, I'm just trying to figure out what's going on.

I'm not trying to police blame. Let's work this out, but skip levels are great. And I really love. You know, multiple levels down. Um, one of the things I love to do, and I got a lot of heat when I posted a video about this is what I called the sup zoom call, you know, the, where you can just call somebody up, zoom somebody up and say, Hey, what's up?

And just have a chat and, um, several levels down in the organization. I mean, with your peer or with your, [00:17:00] your directs or people underneath you. Um, and I've found that if you do that enough. People aren't freaked out by it. They don't think, Oh my God, I'm about to get laid off. They think, Oh, wow. Hey, Chris wants to talk to me.

Cool. And you spend 15 minutes and say, what's up? How's what's blocking you? What are the kinds of things that are working well? Do you agree in our vision? Does our vision make sense? Are you making, you know, what do you think about the competition? Did you see that product that the other guys are making?

Do you think we're going to kill it? You know, whatever it is, have a quick sup zoom call. Hey, what's up? You know, I love those.

David Rice: Yeah, that's a, it's a good way to at least keep in touch, keep your finger on the pulse of like, what's going on? Um, so going back to the chat, there's, uh, the next question was for those of us that are just starting out, what are some proactive, uh, steps we can take before the teams slash committees get started on a, on a project or whatever they're doing

Chris Williams: [00:18:00] scope limitation.

Scope limitation, figure out what you actually there to try and accomplish and limit it as much as you can. One of the first things I see, particularly in young managers is trying to, we used to say in the tech business, we used to call it boiling the ocean, right? Trying to solve every problem that there is in the world and whatever you have to pick something that you're.

Focused on. You have to figure out what it is that you actually, you know, can solve. One of the first things I love to do with new managers is tell them, go sit down with your, you know, each one of your team members individually, one on one when you're a new manager and figure out what their issues are, what's working, what's not working, how things are going.

Listen, listen, listen. And once you've got that, you can then come back and sit down and decide, okay, what is the first thing I'm going to attack? I frequently recommend attacking something small that you know you can hit right away, solve some little tiny problem, solve another little tiny problem, and then work your way up to the bigger [00:19:00] problems.

But sometimes you've got some huge festering boil that you have to lance, and it will make big differences if you solve it immediately. So you, but as the leader, you have to figure it out. But do not sit down and say, okay, here's our nine priorities. right? Nobody can track that. Nobody will see you make progress on nine priorities.

No one will figure out. So if you're starting a committee, figure out what that committee is to solve. If you're the manager of a team, figure out what is the point of my team? How does my team make money? How does my team help the company? How does my team, whatever, and focus on what is the main goal there?

Uh, there was a great quote I saw recently with somebody said, um, priorities are like hands. Anybody who thinks they've got more than two is out of their mind, right? So, um, you, you just need, you can only have a couple of things in the air at the same time, right? You just can't have a lot of them. [00:20:00] Um, uh, and, and, you know, the minute you say to somebody, um, uh, well, we're going to work on our new project.

And while we keep the old one working and Oh, by the way, we're going to go and fix these seven things. And then we can't forget about this. And don't forget, we have to go back and deal with that thing over there. People just like, I don't know which one of those to worry about. I can't worry about them all.

So I'm just going to like cry.

David Rice: I love that quote. I'm definitely stealing that one. Um, so it's the same,

Chris Williams: but I could be wrong.

David Rice: Oh, stick it with the chat. And there was a lot of good advice in there for, for managers. And this is a question about managers. It says it is difficult to align when the employees in the organization don't trust the managers.

Managers are stuck back in command and control. And we hear this a lot. We see this a lot. How do we get these managers to welcome input from others and to kind of move beyond that approach?

Chris Williams: So, um, uh, [00:21:00] this is, this is really tough. Um, but I've seen people who are good at it. The key to it is that you, I, I've not seen it happen in bulk.

In other words, I have never seen a situation where you've got a command and control manager, and they've got. Seven direct reports and the seven direct reports gang up on that manager, right? I've never seen that work, right? That just doesn't happen. Um, what happens is that manager goes further into their bunker and starts to, you know, think everybody hates them and they're, it's just, it gets worse.

Almost instantly. What has to happen in that scenario is somebody has to break past the wall. Somebody has to understand what that is, what the issue is. Somebody has to make a connection. Somebody has to make some level of trust with that manager. What I've discovered works in those scenarios is for somebody to really deep dive and try and understand what the manager is trying to accomplish.

What is the thing they're [00:22:00] keeping awake at night? Most often a manager who's stuck in a command and control scenario and stuck with that kind of behavior is absolutely panicked about some metrics, some, some things there, there's some, you know, driving, they're being beaten from above. To meet some numbers, some something, and the only way they can deal with it is by command and control.

So if somebody can figure out what it is, that's keeping that manager awake at night and offer some empathy, offer some help, offer some, Hey, I see that you were trying to deal with this and this other problem over here has come up. Can I handle that other problem for you? Can I, and if you from underneath.

Can show some empathy and show some willingness to work and understanding of the situation that manager's in. You can't, and like, it doesn't happen all the time. Some of these people have been doing this a long time and they've got a pretty thick wall built up. But you can break past there and get to the manager suddenly [00:23:00] realizing that, Oh, there's somebody huge, you know, going to go help me with this problem.

They're going to figure out how do I solve, you know, One of my favorite things to do is to find some corporate initiative that they've been charged with, right? There's this main focus, but the corporate initiative to do more, I don't know, sustainable stuff or whatever. And they've been given this random task by corporate that they just can't stand.

If somebody from underneath goes, Hey, how about if I take over the sustainability initiative and take that off your plate, they will. Love you. They will give you a big hug. Please, please take the sustainability issue. I would love it. If somebody took that off my plate and you can gain their trust by taking something that is something they don't want to deal with off their plate.

But, and then what happens is you, you, you've sort of breached the bulkhead and somebody has gained a level of trust. And then with, with that, you can occasionally then get another, [00:24:00] you know, Scout. Pass the wall. And then another, and eventually I've seen people turn command and control managers into people who are, who can trust people, but, uh, you know, it doesn't happen quickly and it's hard work and it takes a brave scout.

Right. It takes somebody with a brave sense of, of willingness to attack the problem.

David Rice: I love that. That's, that's great advice. Um,

Chris Williams: how long is the eventually Diane wants to know, um, you know, um, I've, I've seen, I've seen progress be made in six, eight weeks, that kind of thing, because you can get, particularly this, this idea of taking over some kind of an initiative that is driving them insane.

Um, that usually can. Oh my gosh, really? You're going to take, okay, fine. You here, here's everything I know about sustainability in our organization, deal with it, right? You w you can break pat. The first beachhead can [00:25:00] be broken fairly quickly. The developing trust thing can take a year. You know, I mean, it can take a long time, but if they can see one person and then maybe another, and then start to, you know, but it takes a, one of the biggest problems is it takes self awareness and, you know, that's self awareness is, is, is not something human beings are generally well versed in.

Right. Um, it, it takes that manager being able to realize, Oh man, I've been being kind of a jerk. Right. Um, but it can happen. I've seen it happen. And Diane, I will be honest with you. It doesn't happen all the time. I mean, I've seen people, I've seen people throw themselves at the wall and bounce off. Right?

So, um, but, but it's in my experience, it's your only hope you occasionally in a skip level meeting, you can create enough noise that forces a change down from up [00:26:00] above. You know, the manager of your manager is usually got 2, 700 other things to deal with and dealing with your manager being a jerk is, you know, not way up on their list.

David Rice: It's crazy times for managers. Like a lot of them are navigating some interesting things, whether that's a changing work model, maybe they're doing hybrid now and, or they've gone. One of the

Chris Williams: problem that is, it's an outstanding observation. One of the problems we've had is that That a bunch of things have changed on managers in ways that caught them off guard and things were changing before the pandemic.

So there was an, uh, one of the things, a tiny story. Um, I was in the original meeting at Microsoft where Bill Gates woke up and recognized that the internet was the thing. I was in that meeting that [00:27:00] it was called. I don't know if you read about it, but there was this meeting of executives. Um, and he released something called the internet title wave in which he recognized that the internet was going to be a thing.

And, um, he said, you should see this. There is this Seattle company where you can order. Any book you want, and it gets delivered right to your door and you just go onto this website and you can get any book you want. He said, it's got some weird name. I think it's like called Amazon or something, right?

This was literally at that moment. So this was 95 or something like that. And at the time, Bill said, The internet is going to do some amazing things. And one of the most amazing things it's going to do is democratize information. So that one of the things that we had seen in the marketplace at that time, for example, is Sears, which had stores all over the country would sell the [00:28:00] same thing for vastly different prices in different markets because it costs them more to ship.

To Dubuque, Iowa than it did to New York or whatever it was. And, and, but, but, but the democracy of pricing information suddenly made it so that you couldn't do that. Right. And so the person in Dubuque knew what a lawnmower should cost. And so there was going to be this democratization of information so that everybody would know it.

Well, one of the things that happened is that happened in the job market. And it only really started to affect the job market in the 2000, 2010 area, where people were starting to realize that getting a job elsewhere, it used to be when you went to go look for a job, you'd look sort of around where you lived, but then you would, when you had more complete information, you might consider, Hey, I'll move to Seattle.

I'll move to New York. I'll move to where, because you could get a job because there was more complete job information. As that picked up steam. People started to realize they [00:29:00] could change jobs more frequently. So it used to be that someone would be in a job for five years, eight years, 10. If you were in a job shorter than that, you look, you know, you're a job hopper.

And it was right. What changed on managers was all of a sudden that gave employees some power in the job market. So that, and it completely changed what. Tenure looked like what you should be looking for when you're hiring employees, where you're bringing employees in from. So that really messed with a lot of managers, standard thoughts about what it meant to be an employee and what did loyalty really mean?

And it really messed with managers a lot. Then we have this pandemic come along and completely. So. So getting employees was hard, but all of a sudden managing employees was different. It's not really much harder. I will, I'm a huge advocate for remote work, but it's very different, right? You have to get used to this mechanism.

You have to be good at being able to communicate. You have to be, you know, [00:30:00] many of the signals are different. You know, um, you have to consciously, uh, do it. You can't suddenly, you can't all, everything can't be a meeting. You do have to be able to have one on one chats. You and I have had several one on one chats, right?

Um, uh, you need to be good at this medium and figuring it out and managing in this way and managing with information coming in, in a bunch of different ways, other than all sitting in a conference room together, right? That threw a bunch of managers heads up sideways. And so there's a bunch of. Stuff that has been the nature of management forever that is really confusing.

And the worst one, I would argue, is the speed of information. It's not, you know, I, I, I, um, uh, It used to be, for example, that, that between, uh, sites, you would send letters. And then it was fast. faxes and then it was, you know, telexes and then it was right. And then it was emails. And then [00:31:00] now it's like, you know, instantly.

Right. Um, and that level, the, the speed at which information changes just changes the speed at which things happen. It doesn't necessarily change what happens. It changes the speed. So this has caused a. A world for management that is not necessarily, I mean, most of the same rules, managing a team's always been hard.

I mean, the guy's building the pyramids probably fought over, you know, my manager's a jerk, right? I mean, I'm sure those people were having arguments about my manager being a tool. I know that the case, right? Um, so those kinds of things that, you know, the vision for the pyramid, right? There's some, some poor schmuck trying to roll a rock up a thing was not.

Clear that there was going to have a peak at the top. It just wasn't obvious to him, right? So that stuff's been happening since forever, but it happens so much faster now that it requires managers to be on top of stuff. That's why. Rolling [00:32:00] it all the way back to what we were talking about in the beginning.

That's why I think some of these classic metrics of team health and those kinds of things are too slow because stuff changes too fast, right? So I think you need to make sure that you are paying a much closer attention at a much higher rate of speed. You know, listening to your employees and what, Oh, wait a minute.

I just heard something weird in the meeting last week. We should talk about that, right? That stuff has, is happening so fast. I don't know, I, I, I got off on a tangent there. I apologize.

David Rice: It's good. It's good. Um, well, one of the things we're thinking about when we think about changes is like growth changes, right?

So sometimes it's, you're growing, you're getting bigger. Sometimes it's, you're, you're getting smaller, you're having reductions and layoffs and org restructures. So how do you kind of achieve alignment through those changes? And, you know, stay aligned with your sort of ongoing business strategy.

Chris Williams: Um, uh, two questions embedded in there.[00:33:00]

Um, one is, and I'd like to actually attack it. Um, one is how do you deal with getting bigger? And another is what do you do about a layoff scenario? Because I think those are similar scenarios, but sort of obviously different trajectories when you're getting bigger. One of the things that I've seen happen is that each, you know, First of all, you got to be obviously careful to promote people into those management roles.

As you get bigger, who actually want to be managers who are, who are people focused managers who aren't just the best one at doing whatever it was. And suddenly they're the, you know, you need to make sure that those people accept and understand the responsibility of managing a group of people. They want to be a person who's a manager.

They want to grow as you go up. But the problem I discovered when I rose from. You know, being responsible for a team of 20 to a team of 500 to a HR team of well over a thousand was that I realized [00:34:00] that my voice carried much more, each notch up that thing, my voice carried much more weight each time I went up.

So my voice got bigger and, and, and heavier, the larger I went up in the organization, and that meant that I had to slow down and be careful about what I said, because some of my thinking, fast reacting, whatever. Didn't play well when it got to a thousand people. Another problem was that I could no longer talk about details anymore.

And that first drove me nuts, but then I re I cannot, as you move up in the organization, you have to let the people underneath you handle the details as you go up further in the organization. And what that. Meant for me was narrowing my message narrower and narrower and narrower. And so when I [00:35:00] finally got to be VP of HR, I would talk to teams about one or two things.

Period. I just if I came out with three or four things, people would get confused. Which one of these is important? Which ones matter? What do I do? One or two things. I'd have a meeting with people and they would ask me a question and I'd come back with the one thing and then they say should be working on this.

I'd say the one thing right? And I just I just found that the Bigger I got in the organization, the more heavy my weight was. And if I started to get distracted, the entire organization would get distracted. As the organization gets smaller. The biggest problem is that most companies spend most of their energy in a layoff.

On the people who are leaving, which I'm not saying is a bad thing. You of course should pay attention to the people you're leaving, but let's say you lay off 10 percent of the company. That means 90 percent of the company is staring over their shoulder and wondering if they're next. [00:36:00] They're wondering, what am I supposed to do now?

Oh my gosh, my friend, Mary just got laid off. Should I be worried about being laid off? What am I supposed to be doing? Am I now doing Mary's job? So one of the problems I see as companies get smaller is that they don't pay attention to a, you know, a vision of what are we accomplishing? This is what we got smaller.

So we could do this better. Right? That's what the message needs to be. We're getting smaller so that we can focus on this. This is what we're focused on. This is what we're doing. This is what your part in that thing is, right? It can't be, oh, you know, if you spend all your time worrying about those 10 percent who are laid off, you've got 90 percent people who are panicked.

David Rice: It's interesting, you know, you're talking about the different size teams that you worked with and kind of how to manage things as this team size changes. I'm curious, sort of, how does your approach to establishing sort of like communication channels and how you speak [00:37:00] with folks change differ depending on the size of the teams and the organizations you're working in?

Chris Williams: In a, in a managing people is a, is a, is a, uh, uh, single sport. It's a, it's a solo sport. It's it's tennis. It's not football, right? In other words, you need to manage people as individuals. And so when you're in a team of six. You know, and I've led, you know, little tiny teams who are accomplishing one thing.

It's really easy to manage that team because, you know, all six of those people and you can figure it all out and you can have one on one conversations with them all in the country. When you're suddenly managing a team of 40 and you have five people working for you, you know, all of a sudden it's good.

How do I make that work? How does that, you know, how to, the answer is you need to know your five direct reports as intimately as you used to know Your team. And when I got to a team of 500, I had [00:38:00] people leading up huge portions of major projects. And I knew each one of those people incredibly well. And I make sure that they know exactly what their objectives are and that they can communicate that down to their team.

And so at each level, it's really, um, it's a one on one, you know, hand to hand combat, as it were, sport. The larger you get in the organization, the more you've got to trust the people you're working with to lead and manage the organization underneath them. The minute you start to be You know, that person who swoops in and, and changes, excuse me, but Elon Musk's the, the Twitter safety team, right?

All of a sudden, nobody understands what's safe, what to worry about. What's the most important thing. What's the, it's just really, you have to trust your direct reports. That's why one of the things I tell, um, new people managing. An organization is [00:39:00] if you've got a team of five and one of those persons is a loser or is not performing, 20 percent of your team is in trouble.

Right? If you've got a team of a thousand and one of those people is a problem, 0. 1 percent of your team is in trouble. So really focus on the people you have directly working for you, because they make all the difference in the world. They're the people who matter to you.

David Rice: Yeah, we've got another question in the chat from Danielle.

She wants to know what are your thoughts on this structure? And this is what it is. It's a team who reports into a manager, but has weekly one to ones with a director. It's worth noting that the structure was there before the manager joined. And as a second part of the question, what would your recommendation be to that manager?

Chris Williams: Um, I, I would, uh, want to figure out why that director feels like they don't trust me. And, and you, you obviously can't go in and sit down and say, why don't you trust me? [00:40:00] Right. But, but, but you can say, Hey, um, uh, I'd love to have a meeting with my team on this subject and not necessarily, uh, you know, I'll come back to you with what the answer is on that thing, see if you can disconnect the man, the director from the team's operations in some way.

And if they say no, then try and understand what is it that you feel like. Is an issue here. How can I, how can I earn your trust about my team? And you're going to have to figure out that you're probably gonna have to start with something really small. Like, uh, you know, Hey, what if we do a weekly status meeting with just my team?

And then. You and I, or then you meet with the whole team every other week, right? And let's see how that works and see if that works. And then maybe what you can eventually get to is what you really want, which is you meet with the director and the director leaves you to run your team. But you'd have to get there somehow.

Right. And my [00:41:00] suggestion is maybe figure out, can, Hey, how about if, how about if we go to every other week with you and every week with me or something like that and see if you can walk before you run. The other thing is I try and figure out in my one on one with my director, you know, why don't they trust me?

Now, again, you can't just sort of say, how come you don't trust me? Cause they're not going to tell you. You have to try and figure out what it is that you're doing that makes them not feel trustworthy. And if they're just an old school command and control person, you're going to have to try and figure out a way to wean them from that.

Does that help? I don't know. Danielle, does that help? Kind of, sorta. I see you're nodding your head. It's hard. It's hard.

David Rice: Yeah, that's a, that's a complex

Chris Williams: situation there. There is a trust problem there that, that manager doesn't, that manager doesn't trust the team leader. And one of the things, I mean, if you, if it really gets to be terrible, you can [00:42:00] say, Hey, I thought you put me in charge of this team.

Don't you trust me, but boy, that takes a lot of guts, right?

David Rice: Absolutely. Um, this is kind of a follow up question, but it said, uh, regarding Daniela's question, isn't the one to one with the director, essentially a skip meeting, which can be a positive.

Chris Williams: Wait, maybe I misunderstood. I thought it was director manager team.

And the problem was the director was in the, all those meetings. So the team, the manager, if the director insists on being in every team meeting, that's an issue. If the director is doing the occasional chat to the director, you know, people one on one meetings with the occasional team member, that's healthy.

That's the director trying to make sure that you're not, you know, You know, out of it, but maybe I misunderstood, but the director being an absolutely every single status meeting is somebody who won't let go. [00:43:00]

David Rice: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the, that sounds right. So that's a, it's a double count of meetings.

Chris Williams: And, and, and Mike's Michael says it's, Micromanaging.

Exactly. I mean, what that is, is I put you in charge of this team, but really, I'm in charge of this team. And I really, frankly, don't know what your job is here. Right. Which is like, come on, seriously. Right. So you need to figure out what do I need to do to convince you to give me my job?

David Rice: I went on another question in the chat, and so this one's about communication.

Uh, and it says effective communication doesn't seem to come naturally. Certainly not for everybody. Um, what is the essential element of communication that a manager has to master?

Chris Williams: Um, something I have a significant problem with, which is less is more. Um, uh, uh, I, I'm, I'm working in an organization right now.

Um, uh, with somebody who reports [00:44:00] directly to me, who is, um, incredibly detail oriented and all over absolutely every single, and when she sends me an email message, it's four pages long. And it's just, I mean, like, I got to admit, I just like, I can't, I can't, you know, and then, and then 3 days later, she'll say, how come you didn't respond?

It's because, like, I can't, it's 4 pages, right? I don't know how to answer this, right? And the problem is it will somewhere buried in that 4 pages is a question, right? What do you think I should do about it? Like, you know, Uh, so one of the things that I've discovered is a key to communication in general, and one of the reasons why, by the way, TikTok has been amazing for me is that 60 seconds is not a hell of a long time.

And so I, one of the first things I did is I started to do videos and I realized that they were going to be four minutes long and you know, on Tik TOK, a four minute [00:45:00] video is gets like seven views. So I realized that I had to edit, edit, edit, and get down to what was the point I'm trying to make and edit some more and then get down and get that.

And so I've discovered, I mean, that was something I knew all along and anybody who's ever written a book or whatever will tell you that the editing is the best part because it actually, you know, separates the good parts from the bad parts. But as a manager, you've got to remember one of the things I keep trying to, I tell every employee is to look up at your manager, look up at the person above you and ask what they want to know about this thing, right?

You could almost always cut down what they want to know into. Like a sentence or two. Should I be doing this or should I be doing that, right? Yeah, and and if they want to know wait a minute. I don't understand. Why would we not do this? Then you can reply back with well, here's the details and we don't want to oh, I see.

Okay, fine But the first stab at it, it's one of the I did a video on it a long time [00:46:00] ago Probably a year and a half ago The key to speaking with an executive is to get to the chase scene instantly, is to say, this is what I think we should do. And yes, you wanna have those 27 backup slides in your deck back there because they may ask that question, but 90% of the time they hired you for this job 'cause they trust you to do this job.

And so if you say, look, I was stuck trying to decide if I should do A or B, and I should do B. Most of the time that manager will go. I trust you do be right. Um, uh, they're not going to want to know. Well, I couldn't decide if I could do a and a is these three pages and B is those four pages. I'm not going to read them.

I can't. I don't have time. Don't care. Got to trust you. Which one should we do be fine then do be right. So think up to your manager. What do they know? What do they want to know? What do they want to hear? Yes, you will get the [00:47:00] look. I, um, one of the tricks that Bill Gates used to play was that you would come in and say, we should do B and he would go B and he would drill all the way down into B until you were down into the semicolon at the end of a sentence, you know, all the way.

And you're like, Oh, my God. And, and what he would do is he would go until you said, geez, I don't know. We just sort of chose and he would go fine. Cool. And pop all the way back up to the top and be done. And all he wanted to know was how far you went down this hole. How far did you understand it? Do you really understand what you're talking about?

And once he understands that, cool, I trust you. Go for it. Do it. Do what you think is right. Right. So limiting what you say and my answer here was the worst possible answer to that question, which is limiting what you say is the key thing, right? You gotta just get to the point.

David Rice: Well, that's something I

Chris Williams: clearly have a hard time doing,

David Rice: No, no, that's good. . So you've [00:48:00] kind of thinking about, you know, uh, communication going up, but then. We also see the communication breakdown and cause of misalignment from inconsistent or confusing messaging from the leadership team at the very top. So what practical steps have you taken to address this with your teams?

Chris Williams: Um, I try and remember, I don't know. Did you ever see the movie up the, the cart, the, the, with, uh, the old man who has house in a balloon with a whole bunch of balloons. Um, uh, there's a scene in there where the dog is constantly distracted by. You know, and I, that's the biggest problem with most leaders. I find they will get off to some other issues.

So they will be, they'll say our vision, our mission, we're going to do this. This is what we're into. And they will say that to 12 times to 12 different teams. And they think they'll pat themselves on the back because Driven us to this vision. And this is what we're and you ask them a tough question and they say vision, vision, and you go, great, everything is wonderful.

And then they come in on Monday, having read some [00:49:00] article in Forbes and go and off to some other thing over there somewhere else. And they're bringing up something completely different. And it's like, wait a minute, are we supposed to worry about it? Wait a minute. I thought it was vision, vision, vision. No, what's this thing over there?

And they go, yeah, no, we need to do that too. Right. And then they'll go to the, they'll go to some conference and they'll come back and they'll go, Oh, look, we should be doing AI in every. And you're like, wait a minute, vision. What happened to vision, vision, vision? Why don't we were doing this? Right. And so one of the things I try and do as, as a consultant to, to leaders and also as a leader myself is to try and remember, you know, um, uh, exactly what the point is here.

And even though your brain can handle doing 17 things at once, the organization cannot, the organization can handle the Thing you're trying to accomplish and then and you've got to be, that's one of the, as I said, I have to be really learned to be really careful. The higher you go up in the organization because everything [00:50:00] you mumble suddenly gets taken for gospel.

I can't tell you that I've been in meetings where, you know, we have this great meeting on some specific topic and we all break for lunch or something. And we come in and at lunch, I mentioned, you know, Jeez, I saw this thing the other day and that was pretty cool. And all of a sudden, the entire organization is completely distracted by that thing I casually mentioned at lunch because I was not paying attention to what I was saying.

And the, Oh, did you hear Chris said we want to do this? No, no. Chris mentioned at lunch that that was interesting. I still want you to, so I just. It, it happens all the time, particularly the higher you go up in an organization, it happens all the time, all the time. Most senior people do not believe their job title.

That's another thing I've talked about a bunch. They do not believe, I've, I've met CEOs who think of themselves as, you know, a line manager. They do not recognize that there's 700 [00:51:00] people underneath them listening to every burp they make.

David Rice: Yeah. And it's interesting. It creates an interesting scenario for, for managers, because I've worked in orgs where like, as a manager, you almost felt like you had to sort of shield everyone when the CEO would say something.

So it was like, you were protecting them from freaking out, you know? Well,

Chris Williams: and, and so, so what I got to be good at doing when I was working for somebody, I, I worked for someone whose name I will not mention, but who's Uh, been in the news, we shall say, um, who, who was remarkably bad at squirrel. And I would, we would come back from some meeting in which they had squirreled the whole thing.

And I would say, you just completely distracted the, Oh, bullshit. I didn't do that. There was no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The entire organization heard you're from. Fascination with this thing over there. And some people in [00:52:00] the organization are going to go focus themselves on that thing. You said was interesting, right?

You need to go back to everybody and say, no, no, no, no. This is important. This is important. This is important. I wanted to end up with a kind of a Carol Burnett thing where I pull on my ear, you know, no, no, no, no. You're getting distracted here, but he never listened to that.

David Rice: All right, well, I want to give everybody 1 last chance to put some things in the chat before because we're coming up.

It'll be about 5, 6 minutes here till we're at time. But I do want to give everybody a chance. You know, if you got any questions, be sure to get them in now. Um, but 1 thing I wanted to ask you about, you know, it's kind of we're talking about this impact on people and it has been some morale and engagement questions that have come up recently and drastic changes in sort of the macro environment, which has a significant impact on people.

Uh, effect on our day to day when we're going through these periods of significant change, what are some steps that you recommend in order to mitigate the negative effects on morale and to keep people engaged?

Chris Williams: Um, [00:53:00] it's interesting. Um, um, peep, this is going to sound like a weird analogy, but, but one of the ways, if, if you, um, have done any investing of any kind, they will tell you to not check your.

Stock every day, right? And just pay attention to them over a period of time. And that's one of the things I suggest to employees is to not check their, um, you know, current value, their current situation, their current market value, their current whatever, every single day, because all it will do is make you depressed and, and, and, and want to do something different or look at the job market out there and freak out.

If you've got a job and you've got to figure out how you can make the most of the thing you're sitting at and staring at now. And pop your head up out of the sand less often than you might otherwise. It's one of the issues with social media and reading things on LinkedIn or wherever you, whatever your social media platform of note is, is that it's really easy to have all this sort of negativity and everything's, [00:54:00] swamping in upon you.

And if you've got a job right now, and yes, it's got challenges and whatnot, I strongly recommend that you don't just sort of go down the rabbit hole of what should I be doing differently every other day? Because it's just gonna be a sewer by the time you get there. It really is gonna be really hard. Um, you just gotta try and Make the most of what you got, um, rather than, than, uh, looking out.

But I realize, I mean, there are, at the same time I say that, then there are people who are working for absolutely sewer managers or in terrible situations and vastly underpaid, and so I don't want to minimize that I do see a lot of people who are, you know, they got a pretty good job and things are working.

Okay. And then they look at social media or they look at the job market and they think, Oh my God, what am I going to do? And how am I going to make this better? And I don't know what to do. And that just makes your life. Just terrible. So don't check your stocks all the time and don't check your market value all the time.[00:55:00]

David Rice: All right. We've got just a couple of minutes left. I'm going to ask one more question, but before we do that, uh, I know a lot of folks need to start peeling away and they've got to go to the next meeting. If that's you, I just wanted to say, thank you for joining us today. Being a part of this, this conversation.

If you really like this content, don't forget to RSVP to our next event, which is a panel discussion on how HR leaders are adapting their tools and systems to stay ahead of AI. Thank you. There's a link of that link for that in the chat. Yeah, and if you're a guest today and you're interested in becoming a member and checking out more of our events or having access to all of them, uh, after they end, check us out at people managing people.

com forward slash membership, uh, just to learn more about what it costs and what it entails. All right, so, uh, I did want to ask this question from the chat before we go. Any tips for a new manager to a growing org and taking over a disgruntled team?

Chris Williams: Um, uh, the. The, one of the things [00:56:00] I have discovered is that the, the one on one with every single member of the team in which you don't literally say anything, but listen, fixes a lot.

In other words, just sit in that thing and say, Hey, tell me about what you do and then sit back and wait for them to unload on you. And what, if you do that with every single person, very frequently, what has happened with that disgruntled org is that nobody has listened to them. It's not that you're, and you probably can't solve every problem they've got.

You probably can't fix it. But you, you, you, the mere fact that you have listened and heard what they have, what their issue is, what the problem is, is going to go a long way towards fixing it. The other thing is once you've done that, you will find that there will be one or two little tiny stupid things that have been bugging people since the early Mesozoic era that you can knock off.

[00:57:00] You know, why do we have this form with this Checkbox at the bottom. And this checkbox is stupid. I don't understand what everybody clicks. Yes. On the checkbox. Why do we, so go in and say, we're going to take that off of there and you will get people who will go, Oh my God, we took the checkbox off. Right.

And stuff you will find little tiny, silly things that you can solve that are just. Tiny little, they're just little fingernails underneath the edge of it. And you will fix a couple of those and people will go, Oh my God, I brought up the checkbox and the checkbox was fixed. Right. And it doesn't have anything to do with how much you're getting paid, which you don't have any control over how much raise is going to be because you don't have any control over that.

You know what it, but it's going to be the. A couple of little things that you have listened, you've heard them and you've solved that will change their disgruntledness significantly.

David Rice: Oh, that's, that's great advice. I love that. Well, um, unfortunately that is all we have time for today. Chris, I want to thank you for [00:58:00] joining us and for sharing all your insights.

Chris Williams: Thank you all. I just, this has been fun. I really enjoy it. Thank you for listening to me. Babble.

David Rice: All right. Excellent. And well, everybody, thanks again for joining us. And until next time, don't check your stocks every day.