Bumbling, Stumbling, and Ungainly: Embrace the Awkwardness of Management

“Do everything at once, awkwardly and badly” is one of my favorite pieces of advice.

A little background:?I work with CEOs, executive leaders, and their senior teams to change the way their culture works and their business runs – in real time, and in a few months. The change is so significant and happens so quickly that, years ago, I realized I needed to add an extra preparatory briefing to warn leaders, one more time, just before kicking off the main process. It begins with “I’m about to grab the rug you’re all standing on and pull it,” followed by a list of what may happen, beginning with “the work will keep getting done – more efficiently, actually – but it will take a little time for people to regain their balance.”

You probably don’t believe me, and I don't blame you. The phrase “culture change initiative” conjures images of multiple years, dozens of messaging points, and hundreds (thousands?) of PowerPoint slides. The idea that some guy could just show up with a laptop and in a few months and a handful of meetings shift group behavioral patterns – patterns set in stone for years – is unfathomable. (Big deal, I wrote a bestselling management book. A lot of people write books.) I get it, and while I often find myself talking about how it’s both possible and useful, as it was for this CEO and company, that’s not what I’m here for right now. At the moment, my message is both more mundane and more broadly applicable:?If you’re in management, get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

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Which brings us back to my odd advice. After I’ve helped leadership to practice new patterns of behavior in their own work (LOTS of practice comes first), after I’ve helped them to understand the the patterns we’re trying out (a LITTLE theory comes second), and after they’ve committed to adopting the new behaviors as their own (they nearly always do), somebody always asks this very natural question: ?what should we work on first??“Oh, that’s easy,” I say with a grin.?“Do everything at once, awkwardly and badly.”

I appreciate that my answer is somewhere on the continuum between unsatisfying and downright offensive. See, on this subject, we usually occupy a sort of shared hallucination that effective, useful change is supposed to feel something like a linear hike up a consistently graded hill to a beautiful vista – or maybe like the physical training montage from an old 80's movie like Rocky in which the hero prepares for victory. We’re OK with hard work.?We’re OK with effort and struggle, to a point. But we’re conditioned to expect a straightforward ascent that’s simultaneously challenging and exhilarating – perhaps with Eye of the Tiger playing in the background.?

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Real life is always messier. Getting better at complex cross-functional work may be less physically demanding than a prizefighter’s exercise regimen, but it’s no less difficult.?It’s also no less awkward.?Just replace sweat, pain, and mistakes with frustration, misunderstandings, and miscoordination. ?People get annoyed.?Coworkers argue and misunderstand each other.?Stuff gets missed, and work gets out of synch. This is not a sign of failure any more than sore calf muscles after Rocky's 29th consecutive day of jogging behind a car would be. It’s just... what happens when humans try to do useful and difficult things together.

I think this is one of the main reasons why companies who operate in an iterative way – constantly revisiting and adjusting plans, resource allocations, and even goals – perform so much better.?The typical North American approach to management, in which people sit around in meetings trying to describe their current status in the most flattering possible light, is wasteful in ways that go far beyond being snooze-inducing. Things are going to go wrong, forecasts are going to be wrong, people are going to get out of synch and make mistakes. Yes, bringing those things up and dealing with them is super awkward. But failing to deal with them, instead whitewashing the story so that everything appears fine when it's not, is managerial malpractice with serious organizational consequences. We all know this: we don't just hate meetings because they're boring; we hate them because they're dishonest. So it's no surprise that successful companies, who avoid this sort of management theater at all costs, usually end up with better retention numbers too.

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Of course, I wouldn't blame you for wanting to avoid this. Actually, if you’re one of the lucky few who works in a world where the work is simple and the silos are no problem, you’d be right to shy away from the kinds of interactions I’m proposing. Feel-good meetings where everyone says things are going well, followed by things which in fact do go well, and then celebratory pizza, are a lot more fun.?If you can get it done in a montage with catchy music where everyone works hard for a few minutes without mussing their hair, more power to you.

But, if you’re like the rest of us, your output demands that a bunch of people with different perspectives and mismatched information collaborate continuously. That means you’re going to have to try new things, do confusing work, make mistakes, solve problems incorrectly, solve them again, try new behaviors, blindly repeat old behaviors, and stumble around a bit with your well-meaning coworkers as you figure everything out. In that case, I suggest you get as friendly with awkwardness as you can. You might even want to contemplate a management approach that embraces it rather than pretending life shouldn't be that way.

Oh, and if you find one, be sure to do all of it at once – even though it feels awkward, as if you're doing it badly. You're not. You're just... in management.

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