Manager Monday: Embrace Imperfection

This is the second installment in our Manager Monday series, helping you be a better manager, develop better relationships with your team, and create a space for more productivity, trust, and growth.

Because life is too short for bad managers.

As a manager, it’s easy to feel the pressure of feeling like you have to know everything, or have all the right answers, or to be so steadfast you’re infallible. But there are always going to be new situations and new challenges— and let’s face it, we’re all human, doing the best we can. We are always learning.

While it might be tempting to create a facade of perfection for your team, this can actually work against you over time, in several ways:

• Reduces Trust. Not only is there more pressure for you to “get it right,” but if you get it wrong and your team can’t understand why, they may not trust you as much to get it right in future situations.

• Invalidates Others’ Experience. In periods of upheaval or turmoil (e.g. upcoming layoffs or re-orgs), your team may have a lot of feelings and uncertainty. If you seem totally unaffected, it might make them feel even more isolated because their feelings are wrong or different.

• Creates distance. When you’re operating from a facade or mask and not from an authentic place, people can tell (look around- you can tell too, right? So others can probably see it when you do it too). This reduces the emotional connection between you and your team.

• Lose opportunity for additional information. Your team may have valuable information or context that will help you actually make the right decisions; if you don’t open up about things you don’t know, then you lose the opportunity to get that information to make a better informed decision, which could be bad for the business.

But won’t my team trust me less if I’m not perfect? Aren’t I supposed to be? Isn’t that why I’m the manager?

You are human. We all are. We are not going to be perfect, and actually embracing that creates more trust in your team than trying to pretend you’re infallible.

If you can embrace your imperfection with yourself and your team, not only can you reduce the pressure you’re putting on yourself (you know it’s there), but you can increase trust, bring your team closer together as a unit, gain important context, and create a culture where folks feel safer to learn and make mistakes. Your team can become complicit in actually helping you be a better manager.

It does take a healthy amount of vulnerability to admit you don’t know, or that you might not be perfect, or that you have things you’re learning and struggling with too. And it takes creating a culture of trust between you and your team— which doesn’t happen overnight.

So what can I do?

If you are a new manager or new-to-a-team manager:

• Start with vulnerability. You are literally new. You know it. They [probably] know it. You are going to make mistakes, and you are going to have a lot to learn. Call it out. “I’m here to support you, but I’m new to this space. I have a lot to learn from you all, and I’m going to have a lot of ‘stupid’ questions. You all have been doing this for years and I’m not going to gain that level of expertise in 30, 60, 90 days. I’m going to look to you to keep me straight here, and let me know when I’m wildly off base.”

  • If you’re asking for feedback like this, you might also want to define how and where you want that more specifically. For instance, “pull me aside and let me know.” Or, “I like to operate from a space of praise in public, criticize in private, so if I’m off base, I just ask that you let me know privately, rather than call it out in public because that doesn’t feel good to anyone, and I’ll do the same for you.”

• Start to create the culture you want from the beginning. Your early days on the team are going to set the scene for how folks are going to start to interpret and understand you as a manager. Be intentional. If you want to create a culture of openness, you have to be open too. If it’s important that there’s space for everyone to embrace their imperfections and learn, then you have to model that as well.

  • Take stock with your team- what do they like about their culture? What’s working? What’s not working? What would they like to see? What’s keeping them from getting there? What would their ideal culture look like?

• Make sure your actions back up your words, again and again. It is not enough to say you want to create a certain kind of culture, or to do an exercise once and figure that’s done. Cultures are created through actions reinforced over and over and over again. You might have to start with words, but make sure you’re living it.

If you are an established manager on an established team:

• Pull back the curtain. Your motives don’t have to be a mystery. Open up your playbook. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? If you’re trying to make a change, tell them. Tell them why. Involve them in the process.

  • I like to call this the logic train. Help people understand where you’re at and why you’re making the decisions you’re making (where you can; as a manager there are always going to be some bits that are off-limits for your folks, but that portion is probably a lot smaller than you think). Colin Powell once famously asked his folks to “tell me what you know, tell me what you don’t know, tell me what you think, and be clear which is which” (paraphrased). I find that when you do this with your team, even if you get the answer or decision wrong, if they understand the information you were operating with and how you came to that conclusion, you actually continue to build trust, rather than lose it.

• Understand it is going to be a journey. Cultures are neither created nor destroyed (or re-created) overnight. Keep your eyes on the prize and know it is going to take time to turn the ship around. Folks are not going to trust your newfound vulnerability overnight.

• Lead from the front. Whatever you want to create on the team, understand that comes from you first. You have to model the behavior you want to see. When you give yourself the grace to be imperfect and show that to your folks, it gives them the space to be imperfect too- to ask those stupid questions, and to not have to know everything.

  • Admit when you don’t know something. Ask questions. Even better if you can ask them in a group with your team (e.g. via WhatsApp or Slack groups) where you can demonstrate that openness and behavior in your team.

• Seek allies. There might be holdouts on your team, particularly if there are or were trust issues

  historically. Identify who you might be able to bring around earlier, who can also help partner to model the behaviors you’re seeking to foster, and who can advocate for you and the changes you’re trying to make.

  • Reinforce what you’re trying to do not just in the group but in 1:1s with your team members.

• Celebrate wins. Call out and celebrate when the desired actions are demonstrated. E.g. “Thanks for being so open about how you’re feeling. I’m really glad you feel safe to share that.” Or “Thanks for asking that question in our group- it’s important we get real clarity on issues, even it would be easy to think they’re pretty basic because probably more than one person had that question and you were strong enough to ask it.”

Remember:

You don’t have to have all the answers. And you don’t have to pretend that you do. Where reasonable, show the logic train.

Creating a safe space for imperfection is a collaborative effort and enables everyone to grow. Involve your folks in the process.

You have skills and you’re here for a reason, AND you are also growing. Both things can be true. There is always more to learn. You are already perfectly imperfect. Everyone knows it. There is no reason to hide it. It’s part of the journey.