10 August 2024
"Hey boss, can we use this new library for the project?" "Hmm, not sure, let me check with the VP." "Hey boss, can we move to a more agile development process for our library?" "Great question, let me ask." "Hey boss, what do you want on your pizza?" "You know, let me run that up the flagpole...." The Flagpole Manager, for whatever reason, refuses to make any decision on their own, preferring instead to pass everything to somebody above them instead.
Context:
In many respects, management is there to make decisions that the team either cannot, will not, or doesn't have the broader perspective to effectively make. Decisions are a fact of life in any software development team, and if the decisions aren't made in a timely fashion, the team is hamstrung (if not crippled entirely) in their ability to deliver on their expectations.
However, as many the employee has learned, "You can be many things at this company, but the one thing you cannot be is wrong." Making a decision that costs the company money, time, or even just a hit to their reputation can all result in termination, and regardless of the state of the tech labor market, nobody really wants to be fired. (Leave on our own terms? Totally different story. But fired, even when we were planning to quit tomorrow? No thank you.)
And given the degree of complexity that sometimes accompany these decisions, making a decision is often not an easy thing, particularly when so many of them are more in the nature of a bet than a logical evaluation. In fact, as a general rule, managerial decisions are hard because if they were easy, somebody below you would've already made it!
Consequences:
Since making a decision can leave one vulnerable to the liability of being wrong, managers will often hedge their bets by "running things up the flagpole", which is to say, ask their boss for their input (and, tacitly, their decision). If a manager has ever been chewed out/disciplined for a decision, then later run a different decision past their manager that turned out to be wrong--and got no flak for it--that manager is now firmly convinced that any decision, no matter how insignificant or trivial, is best run past the boss first.
Were the boss always available, always informed, and always opionated on the topic in question, this habit would be only mildly irritating at best; unfortunately, the boss isn't always available, which means decisions are delayed until the boss can meet with the Flagpole. Likewise, the boss often isn't informed on the decision to be made, which means before the boss can make the decision, they will need background information and insight, which inevitably ties up members of the Flagpole's team, who must prepare to present the arguments "pro" and "con" to the boss, as well as any background materials. And, in certain cases, the boss simply won't care--or, more accurately, have a strong opinion, or the time required to form one, making all the time spent educating the boss and meeting with them for a decision a waste.
All of this leads to:
- Excessive meetings. A plethora of meetings will descend upon the team's, Flagpole's, and the Flagpole's boss's calendars, leaving less room in the week to get development done. Worse, these meetings will often have "pre-meetings" and "prep meetings" and "planning for the meeting meetings" to go along with each decision-presenting meeting, leaving even less and less room in the week for anything else.
- Delays in execution. If every decision has to go through a third-party decisionmaker, then any decision is going to turn into a major dramatic production, and the team will find itself bogged down relentlessly. Eventually, the team will either embrace this new "learned helplessness" culture, or begin making decisions on their own and not bring them to the Flagpole at all. This solves the problem in the short term, but eventually one of those decisions will backfire, and when upper management begins the process of understanding how the decision was made, the whole mess will be exposed--the Flagpole's reluctance to decide which led to delays which led to the team taking matters into their own hands--and quite possibly yield multiple terminations.
- Reduced faith in the Flagpole. This isn't hard to understand: If the Flagpole is just going to pass all the decision-making up to their boss, what, exactly, does the Flagpole do to earn their keep? An email bot could likely do the same job, forwarding all emails to the boss and back again, and at a great deal lower expense. This loss of faith will be coming from both above and below the Flagpole, and the Flagpole will feel the lack of faith (and the lack of respect that comes with that) before long, and begin to doubt their own competence, which only further hieghtens their insecurity about decision-making.
Variants:
Mitigation:
Dealing with a Flagpole Manager is simultaneously simple and hard.
If you work for the Flagpole. Well, as presented above, there's really two choices here:
- Embrace the learned helplessness. Seriously, if your manager can't make the call, the team is going to go slow, which just means you have more time to work on your tan. Or your next programming language. Or brushing up your LinkedIn for when you go job hunting next month when you're finally fed up with all this.
- Embrace decision ownership. To quote the old adage, "Sometimes 'tis better to ask forgiveness than permission." It's not ideal, but if you are comfortable with owning the possible costs and blowback from making a decision, make the call and lead the team as a kind of "shadow" leader within the team. In some cases, the Flagpole might even embrace your decision-making skills, as often the Flagpole doesn't care who makes the decision, so long as it's not them. If you go this route, consider having a 1:1 with your skip (the Flagpole's boss) to tell them of the situation and your offer to make decisions. Chances are you'll be told in no uncertain terms that making those decisions isn't your job, it's the Flagpole's, and your nascent management career, however informal, comes to a crashing halt--but it also brings the Flagpole's inabilit to make a decision into sharp focus for your skip. If nothing happens after that, shrug you warned them; either start making the call yourself or see the bullet point right above this for your other option.
If you are the Flagpole. First of all, good on you for recognizing the problem. Now you need to take the second step, which is to accept that the problem lies with you (not the organization, not your boss, not your team, not the kinds of decisions that need to be made, not the lack of information, it's all you), and do something about it.
- Make some small decisions. If you're nervous about decision-making, make a few small ones and see what happens. Prefer decisions that won't have much of an impact outside your team or last for more than a few days. See what the results are, and more importantly, notice how the roof doesn't come crashing down on you if it turns out to not have been the best decision.
- Keep in mind that most decisions aren't binary. Being an engineer trains us to think in binary--ones and zeroes, true and false, right and wrong. However, most decisions aren't binary. There's no "right" answer and no "wrong" answer, only answers that lead to certain consequences and other answers that lead to different consequences, and it's hard to tell sometimes which was the objectively "correct" one to make. (There's a Family Guy episode about this, where Stewie and Brian go back in time and make a decision, then go back in time to undo that decision, then go back in time a third time to undo the undoing of that decision, but then more Stewie and Brian pairs show up claiming to be from the farther future, and need to undo the undo of the undo of that undo over there....)
- Tell, don't ask, your boss about your decisions. If you've made a few, let your boss know what decisions you made and why, and ask for their feedback on the decision. Note that you're doing this after you've made the call, not before, and you're not asking for what decision they would've made, but what their input or feedback is around the decision and/or the process you used to make it.
- Know what your boundaries are. Some decisions truly do lie outside of your hands, and you need to be familiar enough with the company's policies on various matters to know what you do and don't control. Case in point: One of your team comes to you and says they feel a little under the weather. It's very much within your purview to tell them to take the day, or work from home, or leave early, or something along those lines. However, if they come to you and tell you of a mild cancer diagnosis (Is there even such a thing?!?) that means they'll need to take an afternoon off each week, this is probably HR territory. If in doubt, ask for a meeting with you, your boss, your skip (if necessary), and your peers, to make sure the boundaries are clear. "Good fences make good neighbors", after all.
- Take credit for your good decisions. All the worry and anxiety over decision-making usually centers around "What if I get it wrong?", yet nobody ever really focuses on "What if I get it right?" When you make the call, keep an eye out for the positive ramifications and results of your decision, and file those away for your own meditation and reflection later. Yes, you will be wrong at some point, but weigh that in response to all the times you got it right and the benefits to the team or the organization or the company that came out of those right decisions.
If the Flagpole works for you. For the love of Drucker, stop enabling them! Your willingness to make the decisions for them is what's enabling their Flagpole-ish behavior, so cut that off right at the knees.
- Have no opinion on any decision besides those that are truly outside of their purview. Flagpole Managers, like most humans, are smart. You say "I'm no longer making these decisions." They wait for a bit, then come back with, "Well, hypothetically, if you had to make this decision, what would it be?" You're going to have to take a significant step back, and insist they make the call.
- Get them some peers to bounce ideas with. Some people do find it helpful to talk their thoughts out with others in order to know what they themselves are thinking. (In psychology, these are called "external processors", and I'm one of them.) Meeting with you to do this is probably not the best use of their 1:1 time with you, so help them find a collection of peers that can serve as that sounding board for them. If those peers are inside the same organization, they'll also benefit from peers who are making similar kinds of decisions, and may even periodically find that a particular decision was already made and they just didn't know it.
- Check the psychological safety of your team. There's a strong chance that the Flagpole wasn't always like this, but learned their helplessness somewhere along the way. Now's a really good time to check in with yourself and your teams and make sure that things are psychologically safe. People reporting to you need to know that it's OK to be wrong some of the time and that you won't fire them for choosing the wrong flavor cake for the office party (or other small, correctable, mistakes).
Tags:
management
antipatterns