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Hello, and welcome along to Management Matters. Oh, that's nice to say. I'm Fiona, your resident professional development coach, and I'm here with another episode for you this week. This time I'm recording indoors because it's a bit windy again, but I've left the window open because I know so many of you really love the bird noise.
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So we'll see if that picks up on the track. All right, this episode is covering a topic that I know some people find so tricky, particularly right now, is a lot of institutions are going through restructures and what seem to be lovingly called workforce redesign processes.
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What? So let's get into it. So the thing that people bring to coaching often here is this worry that it doesn't sit right with me that this person doesn't have all the information I should tell them just to give them more time to prepare.
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So we'll dig into it in a sec, but I just want to kind of situate this in terms of the wider arc of the episodes that we've been covering. So we've done arc one, which is those kind of foundational skills around delegating and accountability and how to stop rescuing your team, that kind of stuff.
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This is the closing episode in arc two, which is the slightly more complex collection of thresholds, which are covering what to do when things are going wrong in other teams and stuff like that. So this one is also falling in that kind of slightly more senior manager space before we move into arc three, which is the more leadership-ey space.
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And I think this one's quite tricky because it's about confidentiality, which I think a lot of people think they're really good at, but actually not, sorry to say aloud, I include myself in that.
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This is one of those things that if, you know, when I was a senior manager, if you'd asked me, I'd have said yes, of course, I'm good at confidentiality. But actually, I think we get it wrong a lot of the time. And so this is a place where some very experienced managers can land, often middle managers.
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So you've got pressure coming down from Director level, maybe Associate Director level. You've also got the sort of expectations and care for your team, which is especially difficult in the context of all the restructures and redesigning that's happening at the moment, because you've probably spent the last few years really skillfully and caringly.
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Is that a word? With a lot of care, building this lovely team that, are getting on and doing great jobs and stuff. And there's a lot of trust in the team and in those relationships. And then you get told there's going to be a restructure.
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Maybe you are holding more information about what is coming than your team members currently have. And so we need to think carefully about your sort of ability to hold the discomfort of having more information and I think it really comes from empathy and from a protective place where you really feel for your team members.
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You want to give them as much of a chance to react and respond as possible. You know, it's driven from a value around transparency and honesty and you want to be upfront with people and so you might be awake at 3 o'clock in the morning wondering if you can just give them a heads up.
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Maybe I'll just give them a heads up and then that'll give them a bit more time to prepare so that they can, whatever the thing is that, contribute to the consultation or start looking for a new job, whatever that looks like. But the issue, the trickiness in this is that, the role has changed, so you might not have quite caught up with the fact that actually the information that used to flow past you now flows to you.
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So you might be looped in on various conversations and given information in advance as a professional courtesy in response to your seniority. And that information may very well not be labelled as confidential, which I think is where there's a sort of, well, nobody told me it was confidential, but I think we need to assume that it is confidential and to treat it with due discretion.
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And the deeper shift of identity here, I think, is from. It continues with a really early stage of management development, which is where brand new managers step up out of a team and then have to start identifying as like part of management and sort of being the bad guy in some situations. This is like a middle manager extension of that same identity shift where you're no longer, able to operate purely with the team in mind.
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And actually you are now increasingly part of the institution, which I know totally sucks in a context like a restructure where you probably disagree with how it's been handled. You might not agree with the fact that your very own team that you've spent years building is getting sliced down to the core.
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People are getting moved around. You maybe don't have any input or say, into what's happening, but you are having to identify as part of the institution. And with that comes the discomfort of holding this confidentiality. And the honest bit is actually sometimes that desire to tell the team member early isn't only about the team member.
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It's actually about that middle manager's discomfort with having to become someone who holds institutional information. And it's kind of a way of like telling that person early. Divulging this confidential information or, you know, sort of having like letting people in on stuff earlier than they should have it, or then it's planned to be released, is a kind of way of discharging your own discomfort about what's happening.
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And it's kind of a way of signaling, no, no, I'm with you, I'm not with the institution, And so it feels like kindness, but actually in some ways it's signaling a refusal of your role and seniority. And I wonder if it might be healthier for you to be able to hold on to that role seniority and to hold on to the confidentiality or even just the discretion if it's not overtly confidential.
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And the paradox that arises here is that the behavior designed to protect the team is the behavior that sort of quietly don't know about you. But I've noticed AI makes me want to use quietly less because it shows up in writing.
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AI, AI created writing all the time. But in this case, I think it is the right word. It's quietly eroding or disqualifying you from being able to protect the team properly. Because the long game of this is if you are known by senior managers and institutional leaders as someone who lets things slip, they're less likely to trust you in future.
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And so you won't be invited into the rooms where you can actually shape those outcomes for your team in future. And the leak ends up creating this kind of powerlessness where the mature version is actually about holding those confidences, being known as somebody who can hold discretion and confidentiality and professionalism, even when it feels gross, so that you can then be invited into those rooms.
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And that is a more powerful position long term. And, I also think this is one of those key moments, because often beyond this shift, then is where HR will start to invite you to do things like leading on HR disciplinary or grievance hearings and investigations and those types of things that very senior managers are called upon to do as, like, an act of service to the community of the institution.
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And, these are the types of moments where HR and senior leaders are watching to see who can hold this information discreetly and who's kind of leaking it to team members. So just have a think about what that means for your reputation and future as a leader.
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I do think it is quite tricky here because when we think about it at scale, I think we see the impact of this kind of threshold and, like, the ability of managers and senior managers and even senior leaders to hold the discomfort of the things that need to be done, even when they feel gross.
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And the ability to hold confidential information to the appropriate time and to do so honestly kind of comes up then when we're thinking about, like, the scale, the scale and the language that is used here.
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Like the fact that we've shifted from change to transformation to redesign, or, you know, restructures are now being called workplace redesign processes. And I don't know about you, but I, for myself and for a lot of my clients were like, can you not just say what it is?
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But you don't need to give this thing a sort of euphemistic language because we all know what it is. And in that kind of way, there's a bit of, like, we don't want to be part of that thing because it feels gross.
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And it also, I think, happens we see it more with like institutional leadership teams prematurely announcing restructures that need to happen. Like, University of Edinburgh is the one that string springs to my mind.
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The institution announced that there would be some sort of restructuring. They announced it before Christmas, 2025. Was it even 25? Was it, I don't know, a long. No, it must have been longer ago than that.
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I don't know. But they announced that this restructure was going to be happening, and then they didn't give any information, no meaningful information about what that would mean, what size it was going to be, how it would impact people's roles for months and months and months and months and months and months.
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Like, disgustingly long. And I think it's just a hypothesis, but I think it's that those senior leaders have discharged their own discomfort with holding confidential information about what was going to happen.
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They've like discharged their discomfort about it in the name of being transparent and, you know, having appropriate communication plans by telling everybody it's coming, which then sent everybody in that institution off into the Christmas holidays worried for their jobs, and then for months, months, didn't give them any information about how it was going to affect their roles.
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I think that is like, the grand example of this structure or this kind of threshold moment. In practice, where in the name of good communication, they've announced that there's going to be restructures.
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But what's happened is instead of a small group of people feeling deeply uncomfortable about what's happening, thousands of people are now feeling deeply uncomfortable and uncertain and worried. And yet those people have had to operate and function for the majority of an academic year not knowing if they're going to have a job come September.
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I think I find that deeply troubling, and I know a lot of my clients do as well. And it's the same even before all the restructure. All of these restructures started happening like, in 2020, no, 2019 maybe.
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The last institution I worked at, had a new Vice Chancellor. And everybody, like loads of people knew who was being appointed before the announcement came out. because even though the recruitment panel members had signed NDAs, it had leaked.
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And yet even though there were NDAs in place, nobody held those people accountable for the fact that this information had leaked. And again, I just think it's really difficult for then middle managers who are going through processes like this where you need to be able to hold the discomfort without escaping it through early disclosure.
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It is really difficult to do that against a backdrop where you see the most senior leaders in your institution, either through valid channels like internal comms or, you know, even press releases, or through more back channels like leaking appointments and things like that, or sort of cozying up to people and going, well, this is confidential, but I'm just going to give you a heads up.
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It's really difficult if you're an emerging leader, looking at that backdrop and being able to make your own decision to hold the line, to not announce early, to not leak information, to hold the discomfort of the fact that, you know, some of your team are going to have either fixed term contracts, not extended, or restructures, job losses, all of that kind of stuff.
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And so there are, three key moves that I want you to think about here. The first is recognizing the obligation as real, even when it's unspoken. So even if someone doesn't say to you, "This is confidential" if there is a timeline attached to an announcement, don't say anything until the announcement comes out.
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Just. Just don't say anything, please. Next is finding an appropriate channel for that discomfort. So it might be through coaching, it might be through a trusted peer, it might be the line manager, if the line manager is also aware of the information that you hold and kind of framing that conversation with the line manager as process feedback rather than disclosure.
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So it's like, I need to talk to you about how this is being managed because of these issues and be willing to be experienced as part of the institution. So even when it's really uncomfortable with your own sense of who you are as a good colleague, just stick with the line.
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I know it feels gross. I really do. I think some institutions are doing some really gross things right now, but in the long run, I don't think it will help you if you let those confidences leak or if you tell people something early before you should.
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I don't think it helps. So, what happens on the other side of this? Sorry, I feel like I've got a bit, heavy and on my high horse about it. But what happens on the other side of this?
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Well, you genuinely will become trusted as a senior leader and invited into the difficult conversations. So like I said, HR and senior leaders, they are watching. They're looking to see who can hold this and who is becoming the kind of leader the institution can rely on.
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And the relationship with the team deepens because discretion turns out to be more important and durable in building trust than shared transgressions and sort of letting slip information.
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Because the other thing is, and you know, BrenƩ Brown talks about this in a great, there's a great video. If I remember, I'll put a link in the show notes. If you're sharing confidences with somebody, the message they are, if not consciously, subconsciously understanding is, oh, you're sharing this confidential information with me.
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That means you might also be sharing confidential information about me with other people. And so trust gets eroded. That can be really tricky. Okay, I think I've said enough on this one.
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So it's a bit of a short episode, but it's also kind of a heavy one. If you would like some one to one support to work through this, since it's exactly the kind of things that are hard to navigate alone, but as said, you can't really work this through with your team, let me know.
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This is one of those things that coaching is really appropriately placed to help and you're sort of processing that discomfort. All right, really good to be with you today. Take good care of yourselves. Keep going. I know you're doing great and I will speak to you soon.
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Bye.
