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ARM'S LENGTH AND THE KITCHEN SINK

Writer's picture: David MacleanDavid Maclean

Updated: Aug 24, 2022

Busyness is a pandemic. If all of us who use busyness as an excuse for tardiness and arm’s length engagement were required to wear a mask, we’d be excused for believing it was March 2020.



A common source of organisational overwhelm is the negative impact we unintentionally place on others through too little ‘scaffolding’ when providing context, feedback, and support. Think FYI, read the How To guide, and you’ve done well, here’s a promotion, shout if you get stuck. Think also about how different your life may have been without your best teacher, your favourite coach, and inspiring mentor. And think of every person who has taught you something or given you a chance. Would these people be the positive influence they are if they were too busy being busy to be helpful and supportive?


Let’s explore three examples for context:


- You’ve performed well as a specialist and have been identified as a ‘high performer’ eligible for promotion to a manager. You’re clearly delighted about the recognition and elevation in your status and earnings. You report for your new role and haven’t a clue about how to lead people and manage things because you’ve never done it before. Your boss is seldom available and, regardless, you don’t want to let her know that you don’t know what you’re doing and that you’re anxious. How do you feel?


- You’ve just started a new project and have had no onboarding for your orientation and context. You receive an email from the ‘project lead’ with numerous attachments and ‘FYI’. How do you feel?


- All staff receive a communiqué with ‘We’re delighted to provide all of you, our valued staff, with access to portal XYZ where you’ll find hundreds of courses that you can do in your own time for your continued professional development and the cost is on us!’. How do you feel?


This is how recipients feel when we impose responsibility on them without providing useful context, support, and management of expectations before they start.


In years past, I believed I was facilitating an environment of thriving when I hired ‘talent’ and welcomed them with "Make the role yours, and shout if you need help." It didn’t take long before we had a group of high-functioning low-output people who were resentful. As I’d hired high performers who were not performing, I too became resentful. Luckily, my colleagues told me why: “We know you have a big plan. We know you are sincere and mean well. However, you dump directive after directive on us, until the project looks like the kitchen sink after Sunday lunch. We’re the ones having to do all the sorting out and cleaning up to make your directives a reality. We want to help, but we need you to include us so that we can help -- not after you’ve worked it all out, but while you’re working it out. While we’re working it out, together.”


What happened?


I engaged my colleagues at arm’s length - because I was busy … The irony of my busyness is that I was busy eroding morale, enthusiasm, and the purpose we were all serving.


Continuing the theme of information overwhelm and deficient support, let’s explore the abundance of online learning platforms that offer us ‘the world in one environment’. While the ‘democratisation of access’ is noble, is it always relevant and impactful beyond our good intentions? Access alone doesn’t denote interest or need. One only need look at the analytics on many learner management systems (LMS) to see the level of actual versus perceived engagement of participants.


It's easy for us to be self-congratulatory about our ‘democratising access’ by simply providing access. Access without scaffolding is alienating and, in many instances, compounds overwhelm and stalls the progression of people and organisations. As Pepe Marais posits, knowledge is not power, without implementation.


Engagement is exactly that. It’s continuous contact and interest, person-to-person, to impart relevance, and impact. This builds enthusiasm and trust. It isn’t the six-monthly ‘line manager check-in’ or tired HR templates and regulatory frameworks to ‘onboard’, ‘develop’, and ‘build talent’. Most managers genuinely want to build their people; how discerning are they in the quality of support they provide to their teams beyond their own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and immediate needs?


Building self and others is complex, nuanced, and requires patience. Performance plans and review templates tell us rather little about the people themselves, and what gives them purpose and fulfilment in the world – and they know it. Before your organisation invests in a magic bullet eLearning solution or ‘talent pipeline’, think about what is required to form connection and sustained engagement between people. The world-saving tech solution to feel great about our democratisation of access, or meeting our short-term KPIs, may not be it.


Let us be mindful that all our communication holds potential for overwhelm and alienation of the recipient. Let us take time to discern whether what we are communicating, and how we are providing support, is genuinely helpful, or just getting something off our 'to do' list.

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