Use Your Turn Signals

Each of us has our pet peeves. You know, the things that really bug us. One of mine is when drivers don't use their turn signals when driving and turning ahead of you on the road. Man, this really gets me.

The other day I got caught in the left lane of a two lane city street behind a guy who was turning left, but who didn't bother to signal. A steady stream of cars passed me on the right as I waited for the entire light for this putz to make his turn. Luckily, I was able to get through the light before it turned red, otherwise I may have had a cerebral hemorrhage right then and there caused by my fuming.

The thing about turn signals is that they're supposed to give advance notice of an important change event. I started thinking: shouldn't leaders in the workplace also give advance notice of important changes and events? Of course. But they rarely do.

I can't count the number of times through my career when I've heard an individual contributor (non-manager) lament that the boss just changed directions or changed such-and-such. Information dissemination – especially about important changes – is rarely a strong suit of the managers and leaders I've seen through the years.

Consider how things unfold. A certain set of decisions are made. If you're lucky (that is, your team dynamics are good), everyone is made aware of these decisions and a direction is set. Detailed plans are made against this set of decisions and direction. The work begins. Individual contributors slog away, doing the actual work to make things real. Then, for whatever reason – even if justified – a change of some kind is decided upon by "management." But, of course, these strategic decisions are "best made by people with strategic roles" and besides, the individual contributors are busy working hard and we don't want to bother them. So, the boss (or a collection of managers) makes a decision to change something, perhaps strategy, perhaps product features, whatever. Now this is the critical part: how often do these changes get effectively communicated to the people doing the work? Rarely.

Instead, the managers adjust their thinking to match the change that they've agreed to. They start expecting that this change is being made, or worse yet, already has been. Why, of course, for them the change is made and their work – deciding on the change – is done. But the work for individual contributors – implementing the consequences of the change – has just begun.

When the change isn't made instantaneously whether because the rest of the group didn't know about it or because of the reality that implementing change is far more time consuming than deciding on change, management is disappointed and critical. I'm not exactly sure how we expect a different outcome, but we almost always seem to do so.

I have a suggestion: use your managerial turn signals, folks! That's right, once you've made a change in plans, communicate this change to every single person in the company. You'll be surprised just how interdependent things are and how many more people than you think are affected by any given change. In fact, don't just communicate – over communicate. That is, continue to talk about the change well beyond when you think that "everyone's got it." People don't know what you know. At least not individual contributors who weren't part of all of the discussion leading up to the change.

Beyond this, there's another reason to be certain to communicate changes to individual contributors: Most individual contributors have a much greater intolerance for uncertainty and change than most managers. I'm not sure if being able to handle uncertainty allows a person to become a manager or whether being a manager allows a person to better handle uncertainty (although I suspect it's the former), but this difference in ability to handle uncertainty and change has been the case in every group in which I've been a part. So, do your organization – your entire organization, especially the individual contributors – a favor: use your turn signals, will ya? In fact, leave ‘em on well after you've changed lanes just to be sure everyone knows what happened.