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Hello and welcome along to another episode of Walk into Your Next Grade. I'm, Fiona, your host and resident professional development coach. And today I'm recording indoors because two things. Firstly, it's a bit breezy outside and I didn't think that would go so well on the recording.
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And secondly, because I'm just trying to squidge this in between meetings because I really want to get an episode out this week and, things have gone a little hectic, so let's dive in. This episode is for you, if you've ever had the thought.
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Things are going quite well in my team now. I need to fix that thing that's going wrong in that other team. It's an innocent enough sounding thought, but it's kind of a problematic thought process that crops up once someone has tackled the management development thresholds that we covered in some of the earlier, episodes.
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Team is functioning well. There's no drama coming up in your own area. You've kind of carved out that time to think that we spoke about in the first episode In this series, you're focused at the appropriate level of strategy and operating horizon and all of that stuff, and then someone else drops a ball and you feel compelled to step in and fix it.
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Most often I see this in clients where the ball has been dropped in an adjacent team, where the thing that's gone wrong or hasn't happened has a real and present impact on your team's ability to deliver.
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So it might be that you're in recruitment and they're in admissions. It might be that you're in programme operations and they're in programme administration. You know, those kind of things where you're ultimately connected by the outcome and the objectives that you're collectively chasing.
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But you're like Head of Service over here or an Associate Director over here, looking at your peer in another team and they're screwing something up and it's having an impact on you and your area of work. So your instinct in that situation is to step in and either absorb the cost of the issue or take over the work.
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And this, I don't know if you see it, but I do. This is that rescuer pattern that we've explored in previous episodes. Resurfacing, but in a more sophisticated form, because it feels like you're doing the right thing for the institution.
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It's like your subconscious won't let you just let things be easy. So instead of handling this in the new way that is aligned with that more sturdy leadership approach that we've been developing, you slip back into rescuer mode.
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The problem is that can lead you into cannibalising other teams remits, often with a healthy side dose of resentment. It also erodes accountability because then the person who has made the mistake or whose team is causing the problem isn't being held accountable for their mismanagement of the team or for the situation that's happened.
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It can reinforce structural problems because you're just papering over the cracks and it can sort of damage that hard won time to think and peace of mind that you've been working so hard to cultivate for yourself since the very first episode we did in this series.
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But why, you might be asking Why Fiona, why? So I think there are a few things at play here. Firstly, there's that conscientiousness that we've talked about several times in previous episodes, where your high standards and either personal or institutional low tolerance for failure come together to create this compulsion in you to step in.
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And you know, those things can be a virtue and a curse because actually by continually stepping in and rescuing your peers from the problems that they're having in their team, you're staying stuck in this, manager level rather than stepping up into leadership level that we're really trying to move towards in this second arc, of development.
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So earlier episodes were about management. This arc of episodes is really about leadership. So this sort of conscientiousness and your pursuit of those high standards and inability to let things fail sound virtuous, but might be the very thing that's keeping you stuck.
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Secondly, we've got the structural reality. So a lot of institutions across he don't tolerate failure well. And there's this insidious expectation that good people will fill the gaps without complaint and it becomes an unspoken cultural rule that you just all muck in.
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It kind of comes together, I think, particularly in the post 92 that I worked at. There was this like, well, we're a bit scrappy, but we're all just mucking in and getting things done. But what that means is the, the culture and the structure of things isn't sort of airing the problems appropriately and making sure that they get resolved.
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And third is the failure of accountability and boundaries at a more senior leadership level. So if the peer in the adjacent team isn't delivering on their responsibilities and their senior manager isn't insisting that they do so, that's causing, you know, the continuation of this type of problem.
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And your instinct to rescue will probably feel familiar because it echoes back to other things that we've talked about before. So first is delegation threshold and that, belief that my team can't handle more, so I'll do it myself.
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This is the same thing, but instead of in your team, it's echoing across the way to your peers, where it's like, oh, my peers are a bit inept, so I'll have to step in and rescue them. It also echoes across to the boundary threshold where you're sort of staying in the realm of nice and supportive rather than taking appropriate action to mitigate risk.
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So here we want to think about, well, at this level of leadership and where things are actually working well in your team, what does the appropriate risk mitigation action look like in this context? In crossing those thresholds, you or my client, whoever we're considering, learned not to rescue, not to over function and not to absorb work to avoid discomfort.
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And now you have to do the same thing, but at this more senior level and in more politically visible ways. You know, the types of things that are happening now, if we're really considering letting failure be failure so that the price of that failure can be seen, more people are going to see that failure and it will have a bigger impact.
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And it also has, you know, wider stakeholders that you don't manage directly, which is quite different than if it's something happening within your team where you manage all of those people. Now, if we're looking more broadly across a directorate or, you know, series of directorates or, faculties or whatever, the sight lines of that are different and the stakeholders are different and the level is different.
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And, it's really interesting. I've seen this play out firsthand. So when I worked in my last role in he, I was at, an away day for our directorate that I had planned in partnership with our director. And he said this thing that was like, it kind of landed like a hard slap across the face to a lot of people in the room.
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So we were going around doing this activity, unpacking some of the challenges that we're experiencing, like what gets in the way of us doing our best work. And some of the things that kept coming up were like, wow, this team doesn't do what they're supposed to do and this team doesn't do that, and this team keeps having this problem and that specific person's annoying.
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And, the director really clearly said, if you don't, if we, you. If we don't let these things Fail, they'll never get fixed. And it landed like a slap in the face for some of the people in the room.
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And I think some of the people probably felt like he was being really reckless and irresponsible, morally wrong even, because the room contained a lot of people who had that unconscious rescuer pattern. And what he said just wasn't compatible with their understanding of good professional behaviour.
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But I also think he was right and, you know, it's taken me a while to come to this conclusion, but the difference is that he was speaking from the other side of the threshold. And the reaction in the room highlights the difference between managers and team members who have built their entire professional identity on making things work compared to how senior leaders work at an institutional level.
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So he was the person in that room with the appropriate authority to give permission for things to fail. But I think most of the individuals in that room, like their own sense of professionalism, wouldn't let them let things fail.
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And I think that's sometimes where the rub is. It's like senior leaders are going, yep, I'm owning this. I'm having accountability for the fact that something might go wrong here and it needs to go wrong in order to demonstrate the thing that we're struggling with. But the team members are going to keep just covering for those issues.
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So I think there's a sort of tension here in the structure of it. And there are two patterns here for us to address. One is the complaining behind closed doors version where it's vocal, so there's a lot of talk happening, but it's essentially unproductive, because it never reaches, is the point that actually requires action.
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It just becomes part of the cultural noise and, people can learn to tune that out. Right? Like if it's just, oh, yeah, it's like, you know, another day, another problem with Dave, or if it's, and again, apologies to any listeners called Dave, or, you know, oh, yeah, it's just whatever the student success team, like knackering things up again, like, that's not helpful if it just becomes part of the cultural noise and where it's just established that some departments are, where actions go to die like that, that's not helpful because then it's just acknowledged institutionally that there are parts of the institution that, are not collaborating that are not working and where those things are just not happening.
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The second part is the stealth rescuer. So this is where you're not making a first and this is, I think, what a lot of those team members at that away day were doing, not making a first. You and your team are just taking on more and more to cover up mistakes or shortcomings in other teams.
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Like, well, you know, they don't have capacity to ring round all of these applicants, so we'll just do it, you know, those kind of things. It's like, actually, that's not really our job, but we all collectively agree that for the success of clearing and confirmation or whatever the process is, we'll just step in and do that for them instead of like, actually, addressing that in a different, more sort of strategic way.
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And the problem in the adjacent team stays invisible because you're papering over the cracks and the system looks fine from above because you're making it look fine. Which again, echoes across to that coping as identity sort of pattern. Both patterns share the same underlying issue where the senior manager, or my client in many of these cases, hasn't learned to surface the risk caused by the adjacent team as institutional risk that requires a leadership response.
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So what that would sound like if we were doing that well. So if we would like raising the institutional risk in a way that requires a leadership response, that would sound like, here is the risk to our shared work, here are the mitigations I can put in place from my perspective and with my remit.
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Here's what I think needs escalation and here's what I need from you, dear Senior leader. And, you know, the director I was working with at that time was great at that. Like, we could constantly just turn around to him and go, oh, we need this, this and this.
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Can you go and have that conversation with your counterpart in that directorate and get those things agreed? And he would just come back and go, yeah, I've done it, it's fine. So it's a bit of managing up where you're asking your senior leaders to give you what you need and where you're explicitly stating the risks that you can see and where you're telling them what mitigations you can and can't make, but where you're protecting your scope of practise as a manager and leader.
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And this surfaces the issue in a way that senior leaders can actually act on. If I were going a step further, I'd probably be asking for that team's failures to be added to the institutional risk register, but it depends on your local relationship with risk registers and how those operate in your institution.
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It's also a bit hyperbolic to go that far, but sometimes necessary, and it shows you understand the risks and what your scope is and what your team scope is and what those boundaries are around what you should and shouldn't be doing.
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And the institution either has to provide a response or consciously accept that risk. And both of those are better than letting the problem fester invisibly. This is the same risk to, kind of strategy, type of thinking and communication that we covered last time in the career progression threshold episode, where we're thinking about managing up about institutional risk rather than complaining about personal impact.
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So last time it was about our own sense of wanting reward and recognition for a job well done and thinking about how we position those promotion requirements in terms of the work that needs to be covered or the risk that needs to be mitigated.
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It's the same kind of thing here. So with moving from having personal level complaints about what we're experiencing or what that team's doing, moving through to, okay, what are we going to do about escalating this risk in a really appropriate way?
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It also works with the being the adult in the room threshold, which we'll be covering maybe next time, it might be the time after that, thinking about what that takes from us and what it looks like for us to really step into being the adult in the room when other people maybe aren't doing that in the way that they should be.
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So what are you going to do if this is you? Well, here are five steps. So, number one, recognise and resist the urge to rescue. So if this is you and you know this pattern is part of your makeup and habit, we need to get quicker at noticing when we have the urge to step in and rescue.
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Number two, understand the institutional impact of doing nothing or continuing to cover up issues, thinking about the fact that the adjacent manager will never learn if we're just covering for them. And senior leaders, as we talked about earlier, just don't see the problem if you're covering for it.
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Number three, escalate appropriately with the leaders who should be holding accountability. Sometimes you might have to call them out a bit too. So, you know, I used to work with a senior manager who I'd go to him with a problem, be like, oh, I just had this conversation with so and so in estates and it's really annoying because they did this, this and this.
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And he'd go, yeah, me too. Eventually I had to say to him, listen, when you join in with my complaint about whatever the thing is, that actually isn't helping me. I need you to coach me through finding a solution to that issue instead of joining in. So you might have to do some of that here and calling those senior leaders to account to make sure that they are doing what they are supposed to do in relation to this risk as the overall leader of the section or, you know, the institution.
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Number four, hold your boundaries and support your team to hold theirs. So do what is yours, refuse what isn't yours, even when things begin to break. And it can be really, really hard to stand by and watch things break. I know that. But like as we've already discussed, things won't change if you keep papering over those cracks for people And then 5, trust that this is leadership.
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So like we talked about last time, in the last few episodes, sometimes we get busy managing everything and we're not practising the skills of leadership. This is a critical moment to trust that this is is leadership.
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So you're stepping out of managing this situation and into leading through this situation. It's not abandonment, it's not pettiness, it's not refusal to be a team player. Leadership sometimes requires letting things be seen by the people with the seniority to actually act.
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And then you're going to get busy working to stabilise yourself and your team through the uncertainty and discomfort of it. You get known eventually as somebody who communicates in terms of institutional risk, not just complaining about local issues.
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Leadership see you as thinking more like one of them. You're seen as someone who can demonstrate strategic judgement and all of a sudden, which is the point about why this episode's in here, you might find that career progression begins to open up again when those senior leaders are seeing you as somebody who's doing this really well.
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And I'm not saying this is easy, I really know it's not. And it involves letting things fail visibly. For the fixers and the copers among us. This will be deeply uncomfortable. I know that if this is you and you want some practice, then a couple of options for you.
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So first off, on the 11th June, I've got management practice day in central London. If you want some help actually having those conversations and escalating those risks appropriately come along to the management practice day. I'll put a link in the show notes for how to find information about that or if you want some one to one coaching, this is absolutely my sweet spot.
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Some of my favourite types of coaching happen around this kind of theme. So, if that's of interest, you can cheque out my website, follow me on LinkedIn, drop me a message or an email and we can have a chat about how I might be able to support you. All right, that is all for now.
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Thanks so much for listening and I think next episode will be, as I said, about being the adult in the room, even when people around you are not doing that. So yay, one to look forward to. All right, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.
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Bye.
