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Hello and welcome along. This is Walk into Your Next Grade and I'm your host, Fiona Bicket. This is a podcast for thoughtful HE professionals who are exploring career progression. And I'm your resident professional development coach, here to support you week in, week out to figure out the moves that matter most as you get ready for your next grade.
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And this is a walking podcast. So I hope you've got your keys and your shoes and your headphones and you're ready to take a little walk with me. I'm actually recording indoors today because it's incredibly windy and you know those, like fuzzy covers that people have over, their microphone?
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Did you know those are called a dead cat? Gross. As a cat owner, ownership, household, I find that a bit upsetting. Anyway, today I wanted to bring you an episode all about what I am calling the Repeating Conversation Loop because I've been going through this, bit of work where I'm debriefing 360 feedback reviews with clients who are participating in a bigger, leadership development programme at big London institution.
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And I've had this same conversation about six times in the last 10 days and so I've really captured it as a key shift in the life of a manager. And I think it's one of the real threshold moments.
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It keeps coming up in those 360 conversations, but also with my 1-1 clients and also with clients in my group programmes. So needs an episode. And the repeating conversation loop is where, very lovely, very supportive manager has somebody in their team where there's some sort of behaviour issue.
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Either it's a, you know, sort of conductee behaviour issue, they're a bit annoying in some way, or there's a performance issue. And so the manager keeps having the conversation, you raise the issue, it's a very supportive conversation normally, asking them what happened.
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How can we make sure this doesn't happen again? What support do you need? The person, you know, might do one of a few different things. They might apologise, they might sort of just shrug it off. Either way, the manager kind of checks it off, like, right, I've had that conversation, hopefully everything will be fine, go back to your work and then things get better for a little while and then the next thing it might crop up again, either in exactly the same format or maybe in a slightly different format.
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The manager's thinking, oh my goodness, I have to have that conversation again. And you get in this, process of just going around this repeating conversation loop. We keep bringing it up, they keep apologising, you keep being supportive, they keep apologising, nothing really changes and you're just going round and round and round.
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Often there's also a sense that whatever they've done or not done isn't really serious enough to move this into performance management processes according to the formal part of the HR Policy and Procedure. So you're kind of feeling a bit stuck with it, just going round and round and round.
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Ultimately, what this leads to is it kind of saps your energy as a line manager. I know one of the people I had this conversation with recently said, I've been going around this loop with this person for two years. Two years!
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It's been draining that manager's attention and energy. And, you know, now she's on this leadership threshold of. She recently stepped into a new role, she doesn't have time for this anymore, you know.
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These are the things that keep us awake at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're sitting at the kitchen table looking at your to do list, going, I've got to figure something out here. I can't do all of this. And actually, that one conversation that keeps going round and round and round can be one of the critical pieces of that puzzle where if you can move that conversation out of the loop and into its next phase, whatever that may be, we'll get onto that in a sec, you can move it along, then suddenly you start opening up some more bandwidth so that then you can get onto the things that we all know that you're meant to be doing in order to show readiness for the next grade, like the strategic thinking and the planning and all of that kind of stuff.
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So really being stuck in this repeating conversation loop is absolutely draining focus and attention and energy away from the things that matter most when you're a senior, you know, a manager, a senior manager or even into leadership.
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And, this I don't want you to feel any shame if you're in this sort of loop with somebody right now, because I've seen people really quite senior who have progressed really far in their careers who still haven't cracked this.
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And, I think there are a couple of things we can do to unlock your thinking about this loop and to move it forward. The first one is I think we need to think differently about the function of that conversation. So usually it's a kind of supportive conversation and, you know, you might be giving feedback, you might be raising some concerns rather gently, but what it's not actually is a boundary conversation.
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And I think it really needs to be a boundary conversation. And we get boundaries kind of wrong largely. I think we get them wrong through a sense of not wanting to upset people and because often we haven't ever really been taught what a good boundary is.
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And so what we end up doing is making requests. We're either giving feedback or we're making requests. And that sounds like, please can you do whatever the thing is, so please can you submit your report on time? That's a request, it's not a boundary because boundaries require a request plus a consequence and follow through.
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So you're going to give a consequence. If you don't do that, then this is what's going to happen on the other side. And the thing that is going to happen on the other side, the consequence is something that you, the manager, are, taking responsibility for implementing.
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So if you don't give me your report on Friday, then I will take that piece of work out of your portfolio or whatever is appropriate consequence for your area of work. But what happens is we don't ever set the boundary or certainly don't set a proper boundary because we're just trying to be nice and supportive and we're not really moving it forward.
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And I think again, that makes loads of sense, right, because we don't want to upset people on our team and sometimes we can be a bit conflict averse, we're kind of afraid, some part of us is worried and afraid about the other person having an outsized emotional reaction. But actually, really, when you consider it, most clients that I talk this through with realise that they can actually handle those big emotions.
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And so we're kind of imagining it to be worse in our mind than the reality or, you know, even if there was a big emotional reaction, we do kind of know how to deal with that as a manager. You know, we know that we're not going to tolerate that and so we can close down the conversation and come back to it another time.
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And I think the other big unlock here is when managers understand that there's a bigger risk at play or series of bigger risks. Oh, my cat's arrived.
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Can you probably hear her on the background? So the other risks that we might not have considered are, well, what happens if this person continues to not do whatever the thing is that they need to do? What's the knock on effect of that? And what's happening with the rest of your team?
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Are they absorbing that work? Are they seeing that you're not really dealing with it? Are they continuing to be annoyed by that person's behaviour? Are you having to step in and cover for stuff that they haven't done? All of that is a much bigger risk.
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And so you need to, you know, through coaching we'll do a bit of a risk assessment and check out well, what actually is the bigger risk here? Is it having the conversation and upsetting the person or is it the integrity of the work and the respect of the team?
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Because it seems to me like, you know, really when we're considering it calmly and with support through coaching, then we know what the right answer is and that kind of unlocks it for people often because usually you do know what the conversation is that you really need to be having next, but you just haven't been doing it because there's that, that worry and fear underneath.
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And so this is really a boundary threshold, right? This is one of those moments in our managerial careers where when you learn this distinction and you can start implementing boundaries, it has a really big knock on effect because all of a sudden, you know, you're moving from somebody that is thought of as nice and supportive, to becoming somebody who's firm but fair, your team start respecting you, senior leaders will see you unplugging some of those things in the team that have been gummed up and stuck going round and round around this loop.
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You get some headspace back because this thing is moving forward. Even if it ends up going into performance management as a formalised process, at least then there's a sense of getting out of the cycle and you know that there'll be an end at some point, be that because the person's decided this actually isn't for them and they're going to leave because you've got to the end of performance management process and they are invited to leave or because they improve and you know, maybe the behaviour resolves and everybody goes back to just getting on and doing a nice job and everybody's fine.
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And that, clarity gives you back your management and leadership, the mental bandwidth that you need for that leadership type of activity about planning, strategic thinking, risk analysis, all of that stuff that we know we should be doing, but that we don't have time for because we're busy having that conversation with Dave again about his behaviour or whatever it is.
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Apologies to anyone called Dave, who's listening, I'm sure you're delightful and great at your jobs. So this is a real, threshold moment for a lot of managers where you learn to move out of nice and supportive and into firm but fair in a way that doesn't compromise your values.
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If anything, it puts your values back into balance. So the values that are out of balance often are compassion, where you want to do things to help your team, and conscientiousness, where you don't want anything to fall through the cracks.
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And so as a manager, you're stepping in too much. And what we want to do here is step out, but create the conditions for the rest of the team to be doing what they need to do. That is the real shift here and senior leaders will see it when you do that and usually start giving you more exciting work to do because they see that actually you're a really capable manager who's got capacity to hold more accountability.
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And that is the way into, you know, progression, promotion, kind of reconciling our sense of who we are as a manager and leader with what the demands of the roles at the next level are. So if that sounds good, there are a couple of things you can do.
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Firstly, the Getting Ready for Leadership programme is where we work through exactly these leadership thresholds and be able to make those moves into leadership. Or if you don't particularly want to move into a more senior role right now, but you've got this cycle going on in your team, then you might like a new thing I'm doing, which is called resolve.
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It's a little two session intervention where we unpick this loop together. We help you to understand why you've been stuck in it, how to get out of it, prepare for the conversation that you need to have next with your team member.
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Then we do a debrief afterwards to just really stabilise you and make sure that you're ready for the next step, whatever that is, depending on how the person has reacted. If you want that, I'm imagining most people will want their employer to pay for that, so I've made a little PDF that's for your budget holder.
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If you want it, drop me an email and I will send you over the PDF and you can share it with your budget holder. And hopefully I can help you get out of the, repeating conversation loop and into a bit more clear mental bandwidth for actually doing the things in your job that really matter most.
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Thank you for listening. I will speak to you soon. And, good luck with those conversations getting out of that, repeating conversation loop. Take good care and I'll speak to you next time. Bye.
