Rambling Lemurian

Author’s Note: This was originally an email sent to a protégé in an attempt to give her management advice after she took over my role.

An important management and conflict resolution skill is learning how and when to play defense vs offense, and manipulate (for lack of a better term) people into taking a more vulnerable position.

The first thing to remember is that it’s extremely rare that you’ll ever have a situation with an employee or another team where you must IMMEDIATELY address it with them with no time to spare. If someone made a mistake, or you get a complaint about your employee, or whatever, you can always take 10+ minutes, or even several hours or a day, to play through some scenarios in your head and plan on how you want to address things. It’s really important to mentally prepare for these possibly tough conversations because you as the manager have to be unflappable and relatively calm in these situations. This is where knowing the personality and history of your employees is really helpful. Some employees respond very negatively to being “attacked”, while with some employees that’s the only way to get the message across.

I’m debating what sport/game to use as a metaphor here. Chess would make sense but that seems cliché and I suck at it. Hockey probably makes the most sense here, so bear with me for a moment if you’re not a fan. Hockey is a very fast-paced sport because possession of the puck changes constantly with a lot of fluky elements outside anyone’s control, generally referred to as “puck luck”. Be prepared for a bad bounce here or there that will derail your plans. Anyway…

In hockey there are some subtle strategies that show how aggressive a team is offensively and defensively. One of these on the offensive side is Dump-and-Chase vs. Possession when entering the offensive zone. In Dump-and-Chase, the team possessing the puck will dump the puck deep into the opponent’s zone and chase after it to hopefully regain/retain possession nearer the opponent’s goal. This is a more defensive strategy because it avoids turning the puck over in an area more susceptible to quick counter-attacks while putting more pressure on the opponent’s defensemen in hopes they’ll make a mistake and fail to clear the puck out of their zone, giving you a clear scoring opportunity. This is essentially what a more defensive conflict resolution style is like.

Possession would be the more offensive style because the goal is to go straight at the defense with skill and varying speed to keep possession of the puck the whole time. The idea is to get the defense on their heels so they cede territory to you. Typically this requires more skillful play to avoid defensive plays so the more offensive-minded teams prefer this tactic. Some would assume that constant speed helps here but if you go too fast, you risk turnovers and not having proper support. But going too slow allows the defense to adjust on the fly and close their gaps. So you have to read the situation and adjust your speed to what’s in front of you, maybe pass the puck off a couple times to create new lanes. However, there is a greater risk of a costly turnover allowing for a counter-attack if a bad pass is made or there’s some bad puck luck causing a change in possession.

One time I had some issues with an analyst apparently not doing his work correctly and I decided I was going to confront him about it. I booked a conference room, pulled up my examples and lectured him. I was in total control and had a clear line to the goal. And then I was leveled to the ice with a clean hip check when he gave a very legitimate rebuttal disproving my allegation that he screwed up. Even though it was only about one-third of my overall message, I was put completely on the defensive. A turnover at the blue line, a cardinal sin in hockey. Maybe if I took more time to research the issue beforehand, or took a slower approach in my attack which would have allow me to retreat undetected, it wouldn’t be so bad. But had he not been the type of analyst that was naturally more defensive and liked to counter-attack, my approach probably would have worked out at least in the moment. Some people when faced with an attacking manager will instinctively retreat or surrender even though they were in the right, and some will instinctively defend themselves to the death even when they are wrong. So it wasn’t that my approach was wrong, the problem was the approach in combination with that analyst at that time.

As a young manager, I think you will find yourself more drawn to the offensive approach either because you want to prove yourself to be an authority, or because you just assume that’s the way it should be done. Open, direct communication, and all that mumbo-jumbo. First of all, you are already an authority. Your title in combination with your personal track record makes you an authority, which is why you’re the manager. So don’t get hung up on establishing something that’s already established. If you find yourself always being on the offensive, it’s because you might feel insecure about your own position and your qualifications, or it’s because you’re an asshole. And you’re not an asshole. I know I can’t just say “don’t be insecure” and suddenly you’re the most confident manager ever, but I think consciously playing more defensive will help you get there because you’ll realize how much unspoken authority you already have.

So how do you play defensive as a manager? It’s really about indirect communication in a few forms. One form would be to use general announcements/memos, etc to imply that maybe there’s been some kind of complaint and see if the offending employee(s) come to you on their own. Let’s say one analyst is constantly filing tickets incorrectly. Make an announcement in the next team meeting, or an email, reiterating how to file those tickets. There’s a decent chance the issue resolves itself without any kind of confrontation with the offending analyst, easy-peasy. Now let’s say they do come to you with some kind of argument that they are doing it right or there should be exceptions, whatever. Fair enough, but the fact that you took to the time to prepare for this in a team meeting or write out an email would suggest you’ve taken the time to think more about this process, which means you should naturally be more prepared to explain it further and handle those rebuttals. And even if that analyst ends up right, they probably ended up coming to you in a more productive and respectful manner because they were not personally called out.

The other form of indirect communication is actually directly to the offending analyst but in a roundabout way. The key here is to keep asking subtly leading questions about what the issue is without actually giving any kind of assessment or opinion until the analyst opens the door for you. This can be tricky to pull off and it won’t always be applicable but it can be super effective in keeping that analyst calm, on your side, and more self-aware. For example, you get a complaint that an analyst is not responding to some tickets. Maybe in your 1-on-1 with them instead of saying “I’ve been getting complaints about your lack of responsiveness”, you say “how are you doing?”, “how do you feel about your workload?”, maybe pull up an example where you talk about a slightly different aspect of it instead of the fact that they ignored two comments, like “when do you plan on doing the next HP PO for this one?”. Depending on their responses you can judge whether it makes sense to then bring up some more examples one and a time and be slightly more direct with each one. Taking this approach will make the analyst more agreeable with you (usually) as you build up to a final statement like “looks like you have a lot of these to respond to and you’re falling behind, make sure you’re responding to all these comments within 2 days”. Since they’ve been (probably) agreeing with you the whole time up until this, they logically won’t be able to be really defensive here and try to counter-attack. And maybe this will reveal something about them that gets closer to the core of the issue so you can help them with that instead of chasing the symptoms.

I think the defensive approach is a lot easier on people, but it’s not always an option. Sometimes it doesn’t work since some people don’t understand subtlety and will miss the point unless you bash them on the head with it. Sometimes you have to be direct and on the offensive. But try out the indirect defensive approach with people and I think it will help you out more than you might realize in feeling like a manager… and master manipulator.