10 August 2024
"Wait, your boss said you were doing a great job, why are you on a PIP now?" "Beats the hell out of me. What's worse, did you hear that Jaime got a promotion, of all people?" "Jaime? Didn't he literally set the server room on fire? What the heck is your boss doing?" The Sphix manager, inspired by the Egyptian structures, believes that the best way to manage a team is to always present the calm, serene face that never shows any negative reaction.
Context:
The Sphinx often holds to the belief that "no news is better than bad news", despite the fact that bad news often leads to bad consequences, which in turn means the bad news gets delivered eventually. They often hold to this because they don't want to be the bearer of bad news, preferring instead to sugarcoat things.
The Sphinx also has a tendency to move people around within the team, changing priorities, without any sort of notice or warning. Often, this is done in response to upper-management shifts in priority or new strategic direction, but the Sphinx, believing that they are "sheltering" their team from upper management, refuses to explain the reasons for the shift or the rationale behind some of the decisions made.
Consequences:
The Sphinx of legend were guardians, immortal beings that prevented casual trespass through their gates by the use of inscrutable riddles that have become the stuff of legends. The team members of a Sphinx manager often find themselves in much the same position, huddling together after any team-wide meeting to try and decipher the Sphinx's ambiguous statements against the rumors the team is hearing elsewhere.
Loss of trust in the Sphinx's statements. When the team can't trust what the Sphix is saying, because subsequent actions provide evidence to the absolute contrary. The engineers feel like they’re always on murky ground, and their work could change overnight. 1:1s become exercises in silence, as the engineers quickly grow accustomed to asking no questions (why bother when the answers can't be trusted?) and the Sphinx offers up no information.
Project quality suffers. Engineers who can never trust that they will remain on the project long-term inevitably look to short-term solutions in order to make sure they have accomplished the task assigned to them. This often has the unfortunate side effect of creating technical debt within the project, far more than what might normally be expected.
Mitigation:
If you work for the Sphinx. Until the Sphinx comes to understand that their inscrutable ways aren't actually helping with anything, about the best you can do is look to get your information from elsewhere, most likely your skip. If the skip isn't available to you (possibly because the Sphinx is blocking you from meeting with them), you may be out of options. You can try to signal further up the hierarchy by going through HR mechanisms (employee survey, contacting HR directly, etc), but keep in mind that because the Sphinx is often not an obviously-bad manager, HR may not give much credence to your complaints.
If you are the Sphinx. Until you can embrace that your vagueness isn't helping, there's not going to be much psychological safety on your team, and your team will turn into a revolving door of participants. If you've come to accept that you need to change, then you'll need to:
Reconnect with your team with honesty. "I apologize for not being more forthright in my earlier meetings--I thought I was shielding you from bad news, and I realize now that I was just keeping myself from having to be the bearer of bad news. I'm working on that, and as of this moment, I'm clearing the slate and working to give you honest, actionable feedback." Anything less than this and your team simply won't believe what you're saying.
Deliver improvement plans. As bizarre as it may seem, one way to start rebuilding their trust in you is to start providing some of that feedback you've failed to deliver in the past, both good and bad. Focus on specifics, not generalities. You don't need to go for the "compliment sandwich" (almost everybody recognizes it as a ploy by now anyway), but you do need to start being more straight-up honest. You don't want to start harping on everything negative, though; instead, focus on the things the team has done well, and talk that up. "I liked the way you approached this most recent sprint, focusing on getting each story done serially, rather than going at all the stories in parallel. I think that yielded better code and faster results." comes across better than your old way "You did great this past sprint!" or a more-negative-slash-"corrective" way: "Your approach writing code two sprints ago, where you attacked them all in parallel, was a bad choice. Don't do that anymore." Focus on the results the team has accomplished well.
If the Sphinx works for you. The first signs of a Sphinx manager is when the employee survey comes back indicating an extremely low degree of psychological safety within the team; in the absence of surveys, acceleration of transfers out of the team and/or exit interviews indicating a lack of trust in the Sphinx's statements will signal the danger. To mitigate the Sphinx's impact, you must:
Train the Sphinx in how to give corrective feedback. It's never easy to be the bearer of bad news, and few humans are particularly good at it from birth. Providing some guidance and training on how to have sensitive conversations will help the Sphinx be more comfortable telling a team member when they are not meeting expectations.
Demonstrate accountability. Part of the Sphinx's problem is a lack of holding team members accountable, which often may feel "wrong" or "unfair" to them. Demonstrate this by holding the Sphinx themselves and/or their peers accountable, to show that doing so can be done without involving HR or performance-improvement plans.
Insist on skip-level 1:1s. Having the Sphinx's team members have opportunities to speak with their skip-level management helps unpack some of the mystery around the Sphinx's actions, as well as provide opportunities for the team members to gain deeper perspective on what the Sphinx is seeing. Note that the Sphinx may well resist (strenously) the idea of the skip-level 1:1--they may see it as either your attempt to micromanage their team, and/or a signal that you don't trust them as a manager. Emphasize that this is necessary to give the team better visibility into what's happening at the executive levels, and/or that this is an opportunity for the team to hear upper management's thoughts and priorities "straight from the horse's mouth", as it were, so that the Sphinx is not put on the spot defending policies they may not agree with. Worse case, cast the 1:1s as your own way of holding your Sphinx accountable.