Bubble Management – How Fizzy is Your Organisation?

Bubble Management – How Fizzy is Your Organisation?

·      When should you micro-manage?

·      When should give your team lots of space and keep out of their way?

·      How do you monitor staff without undermining their direct managers?

As your team grows the challenge of effectively managing multiplies.

If you are naturally "hands-on" in your approach, it becomes impossible to grab hold of every issue as your team expands. Doing so will likely lead to you missing other significant problems elsewhere in your organisation.

One of my past managers referred to this constant challenge as "plate-spinning" just trying to make sure no plates stopped spinning and fall.

There are times when you need to drill in and get close to the action. There are other times when you should stay out of the way because you add no value and possibly slow things down. There are times still when you need to apply pressure because people are slacking. Doing the right thing at the right time becomes more demanding as your team gets bigger. 

The question is "when do you do what?"

For many people in management roles, they go there because they are effective "doers" who keep on top of everything. It's an irony of management that to be effective; you feel like you have to let go of the very quality that helped get you there.

However, it's not about letting go. It's about learning to pick your battles and trust others to be on top of things for you.

"Bubble Management" describes a method that I use that developed as a result of finding ways to be effective as I transitioned to managing larger teams.

Disclaimer – This is not a comprehensive management strategy. It is far from that. Bubble management is just one small tool of many that you can use in your total management approach.

Bubble management revolves around waiting for problems and issues to bubble up to you and not going out and proactively looking for issues to solve.

Doing this, I can classify departments and teams as Too Fizzy, Perfect Fizz or Flat!

Too Fizzy means a large of issues are bubbling up to you. This is a strong indicator that you need to drill in and get hands-on to fix things.

Flat means that almost no issues are bubbling up to you. That's not good either. It requires investigation. Perhaps the team is not executing at all or worse still they are hiding problems.

Perfect Fizz means that a manageable stream of issues which require your level of experience is bubbling up to you, which indicates the team in question is working effectively and delegating upwards when it makes sense to do so.

Why does this work?

"Too Fizzy" can mean that the team is not making effective decisions, is not executing well enough and most important can't solve its everyday problems. Many of the bubbles will have you asking "surely they should deal with this without my help?".

"Flat" can mean people are hiding their mistakes, or not enough activity is happening.

"Perfect Fizz" should mean issues that genuinely require your experience or level of decision bubbling up to you. This also indicates your team is empowered and using that empowerment to make decisions and handle most everyday issues they face.

Gauging the fizziness of your teams can help you to decide where you may need to micro-manage or where you can rest easy that you can allow the team to operate with interference.

Bubble management means you are prepared to take a reactive approach. This comes from a starting point of trust in your team, assuming they can work autonomously and getting involved only when needed.

As stated earlier, this is not a strategy; management is a more complicated affair than "fizz" but over the years, I have used it a useful tool to help me manage my time.