Introduction and Episode Question

[00:00:03] Paul: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:08] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:00:09] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:11] Karen: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, what about my work? 

Challenges of Unused Work

[00:00:18] Paul: One of the things that happens when we work in groups, is that we sometimes change direction, right? Sometimes we might delegate something off to a team, to a working group, to an individual. Say, we want you to go do this thing, and then they come back at some point later and they've done some work and they've got, you know, some result from it.

[00:00:36] Paul: And for a variety of reasons, we may not end up using that, right? It could be it turns out we were incorrect about the direction the market is going. And so this code that you've built and the product that you've specked out works great, but we can't actually sell it. We were wrong. Or it could be, we realized that like we were not clear about what we actually needed.

[00:00:56] Paul: And the thing that you did doesn't fulfill the need that we actually have, like there were some key elements of the proposal we asked you to come up with it, that we left out. And so you don't have that and so we're not gonna use it. There may be a whole variety of reasons why an individual or a group has done some work that the larger body and the larger organization isn't going to use.

Acknowledging Efforts and Avoiding Hurt

[00:01:17] Paul: And what Karen and I want to talk about today is how to handle that as gracefully as we can. 

[00:01:23] Karen: I think way too often, like we settle into, well, it's the right decision not to use the work, so we're good. Bye. We're done. And we missed the relational piece about the people who did the work, got invested in that work.

[00:01:38] Karen: It mattered to them. It was important to them. It was a contribution for them. And if we ask them to do all of that work and then we don't use the work, that's actually really hurtful. 

Preemptive Measures and Delegation

[00:01:50] Karen: And in addition to talking about how we can clean that up when we have to be in that position, I wanna talk a little bit about how we can avoid being in that position in certain cases as well.

[00:02:00] Karen: So starting with, we're in that situation and either because we made a mistake or because the market changed or whatever the reason is somebody's done a bunch of work and we're not gonna use it. It's just really important to acknowledge the work. 

[00:02:15] Paul: And I think it's important to acknowledge it individually.

[00:02:19] Paul: Like, so I've seen this before where a group delegates something off to a working group, to committee to go do a thing. They come up with a proposal, like the committee reports back, and then the board says, okay, great, thanks. Thank you for your work.

[00:02:31] Paul: And then they take the proposal and they do something else with it, and they make a big announcement about what they're actually gonna do. And that's the first time that any of the members of that working group have heard about what's going to happen and that it's not the thing that they came back with.

[00:02:46] Paul: And I think absolutely, if you're going to do that, which there can be very legitimate reasons to do. You need to give those people the heads up and the appreciation, right? To come to them and say, Hey, next week we're gonna be releasing our statement around this, and here's what it's gonna say.

[00:03:04] Paul: It's not gonna include this thing that you came back with. Here's why. And we're super grateful for the work that you did. The reason we're doing this has nothing to do with you. It has to do with these other things, right? And closing that loop before you make the bigger announcement does a lot in, as you say, that relational space. 

[00:03:23] Paul: Because it sends the message that we asked you to do a lot of work and we actually appreciate it. We appreciate you as people, as individuals who did this. Not that you're just some sort of disposable cog in this machine that has no feelings about the work that you've done.

[00:03:40] Paul: I think, you know, and to the degree to which you can acknowledge, like, I can understand that this isn't what probably what you want us to do with this. This isn't the direction you hoped it would go. That acknowledgement is one of the most useful things. And I think why we avoid doing that is we feel like having the conversation and recognizing that other people are gonna be upset about it means we have to change our position.

[00:04:03] Paul: And we're not prepared to do that. But being able to stand in that place of saying like, I get that you would like us to take your recommendation. This is the reasons we're not going to, I understand that you have feelings about that. And you know, what can we do about that? I actually care that you have feelings about it.

[00:04:20] Paul: Also, my caring about your feelings doesn't mean that we're gonna change the reasons for doing the thing that we are gonna do. 

[00:04:25] Karen: And I think part of that conversation, sometimes it has to go exactly the way you just said. 

Importance of Consulting the Group

[00:04:34] Karen: And sometimes instead of coming and saying, we're not gonna use it because we're just not gonna use it, we come back and say, we're afraid we're not gonna use it.

[00:04:39] Karen: Let's talk about that. Because that working group probably developed a bunch of expertise that nobody else has about that topic. So deciding not to use the work when you haven't had a conversation with them about it, risks that you're moving ahead in a direction that's actually uninformed and ill-advised.

[00:04:59] Karen: Doesn't mean that the conversation is gonna go one way or the other in particular. Like you don't know how it's gonna go, but if you can come back and say. It's looking like we can't use this work because want your input about that and be serious about being curious and interested. If you can do that, then I think it's really useful.

[00:05:18] Karen: If it's, you know, in some other department and it's been handed down and there's just nothing we can do about it, that's a different category. But most of the time I think there is room for that. And if you make a decision about what to do with that work in a way that doesn't consult the people who did the work.

[00:05:34] Karen: I think you run a really big risk of making a poor decision. 

[00:05:36] Paul: And to further that, like as you point out, when people work closely with an issue on a topic, you know, they develop expertise in that, right? And they can help advise you, you know, okay, great. If you're not gonna do exactly what it is that we said, here are the things you should think about, what the things you are gonna do.

[00:05:52] Paul: And when you don't do that, you now are inadvertently most likely sending the message. You do not value their expertise. That expertise that they spent the time developing, you know, now it's really sends the message, it's not only that we're not gonna use your work, but we also don't value your perspective, your opinion.

[00:06:10] Paul: Like it can be hugely damaging to the relationship. And I've seen this, you know, in volunteer groups, right? Where people get asked to go do a thing, they go off and do it. They really gung-ho about it. And the way that this gets handled. Leads them to sometimes leaving the group, sometimes continuing to stay in the group, but never volunteering for anything like that again, I think that there can be huge damage there that is almost always inadvertent, but, that's really kind of why we wanna raise the issue is that like, this is an important thing to think about.

[00:06:43] Paul: You know, that closing the loop in that way is really important to the relational space. 

Delegating Authority and Decision Making

[00:06:49] Karen: And I think on the more preemptive side, it's really important, I think, to think about if we're delegating the research and we're delegating the proposal drafting and we're delegating the expertise, go build up the expertise.

[00:07:02] Karen: Go figure out what you think is a good idea and come back with a recommendation. Why aren't we not also delegating the authority? And what is our reason behind that? And being clear and clean about that at the upfront is super important. And I think that's a step that we miss and very often, particularly in more consensuses spaces.

[00:07:23] Karen: I think in the business world it's a little different. You've got some hierarchy and the buck stops with the boss, and there's some reasons like that. Why in the end, the boss isn't really gonna delegate the decision making. But in a lot of spaces, a thing that I see in the consensus type world, is that the group says, well, we all decide things by consensus.

[00:07:42] Karen: So we'll have a task group that goes and writes up a proposal, like, we've got a problem, we've got a dispute, we need a solution to it. Whatever it is, a task group is gonna go write up a proposal, and then they'll come back and we'll vote up or down. And if we don't consense on it, then the thing that they proposed isn't gonna happen.

[00:07:59] Karen: And I saw an example of this actually, where there was a pretty intractable issue. A consultant had come in, identified a piece of it that was just too stuck. And the consultant said, have a task group go work on this. And that happened and a couple of people who were really committed to the community and really engaged and cared a lot, spent like two years actually interviewing members of the community, like trying to get all the perspectives and working through different drafts and circulating the drafts and like they did a ton of work to figure out like what's our best option with this?

[00:08:31] Karen: And the community said, yeah, we don't like it. We're not even gonna bring it to a meeting for consensus. And those two people never participated in the business of the community again because they said, why would we bother? And so this process of, well, we're protecting everybody's right to a consensus vote to our participation in consensus came very much at the cost of the participation of two really valuable members for decades after.

[00:08:58] Karen: And I think where I wanna go with this is, especially in consensus groups, most of the time I'm gonna suggest that if you're delegating a huge chunk of work related to a decision, probably you need to delegate that decision, at least as a temporary, like at least as a, you're gonna go make a proposal and we're gonna try out that proposal for six months.

[00:09:19] Karen: That's kind of my favorite. Of the way we're gonna honor your work is we're gonna try out the thing that you're suggesting and then we'll come talk about it. All of us having experienced it and tried it out as opposed to the other scenario where you go off and spend hours and hours and hours working through every imaginable hypothetical, and I show up to a meeting and say, nope, and that's the end of it.

[00:09:39] Karen: It doesn't work. And it doesn't work to make good decisions, and it doesn't, you know, like it's just problematic in all kinds of ways. So I think being really thoughtful, if we wanna delegate the work, can we also delegate the decision? And if we can't delegate the decision making authority, then we need to be really thoughtful about whether it's a good idea to delegate the work.

Corporate Examples and Best Practices

[00:09:58] Paul: I think you have the opportunity to delegate pieces of the decision, right? And it's about delegating bounded authority to a group. So I've seen this in the corporate world, in my software background, where teams basically get delegated, not just go figure out what you we ought to do and like make a recommendation to the VP of product and this and the other thing.

[00:10:19] Paul: Teams are basically told, you're funded for the next six months. These are the measures we actually want you to improve. This is the box, right? These are the constraints you need to work inside of, and anything inside of there you're empowered to do. And so that's a way of saying, you have the decision making authority inside of this scope.

[00:10:37] Paul: Now at the end of six months, this is how we're gonna evaluate the success of this project and whether or not we're gonna fund it for the next six months, you know, kind of thing. And you let people know that ahead of time because then, they may come back and go, yeah, we didn't move the needle on any of these things.

[00:10:53] Paul: And so you have the conversation and you go, yeah, we're cutting this off. Like we're not gonna do it anymore. And you go back to the thing we talked about at the beginning of the episode, which is the whole, how do you honor the work that they did do. But like it's much clearer because people know it's coming, right?

[00:11:07] Paul: They know, they go, great. We've had this freedom to work inside of this. And oftentimes, I mean, I've been on teams like that where we've come back and we've said, we think we should go do something else because this isn't working. Like we're in the wrong space here. We've explored this, we've run these things to ground.

[00:11:24] Paul: And in other cases we've done things where we've said, yeah, we haven't achieved the level of success with this that you asked for yet. These are the indicators that tell us we are moving in the right direction. So we think three more months and we can get to where we need to be, and here's why we think that.

[00:11:40] Paul: And so that decision is not, you know, but the bounds of our authority were kinda laid out at the beginning, right. That a part of it was delegated to us. Ultimately, the larger responsibility for decision making was still maintained by the organization. But you have some leeway to do that.

[00:11:56] Paul: So you, your example, the whole idea of we're gonna delegate this out to a working group and you might say, and we're gonna try out whatever proposal they come back with for three months, or we're, at the very least, we are going to bring this to the whole body for a consent round on it.

[00:12:13] Paul: Like, there's some degree of promise that is useful to make that I do agree. And again, we've talked before about the importance of laying out constraints and conditions and factors in decision making and criteria, and again, to the degree to which you're able to be clear about those upfront before you delegate out, the less likely people are to get surprised, right?

[00:12:33] Paul: That's also kind of your preemptive measure of saying, whatever you come back with, we're gonna be evaluating it against these criteria. If you haven't done that ahead of time, then it does become more likely that group's gonna come back with something you're not gonna use. Now you're gonna have to be in that space of saying, yeah, so we're not gonna do it.

[00:12:51] Paul: And that's on us. 'Cause we didn't lay the criteria out if you're doing it well or just going, thank you for your service. 

[00:12:56] Karen: Yeah. 

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

[00:13:01] Karen: So I think what we're saying is that when work has been done. Whether or not it turns out to be work that we're going to use, it's really important to appreciate it. And actually, if you're not gonna use it, it's even more important to appreciate it because the sort of inherent, oh look, I did a thing and it worked and it, you know, did what it was supposed to do.

[00:13:16] Karen: Doesn't happen. So you need something else, which is the appreciation, the acknowledgement of the group or the leadership or wherever that comes from to say you did the thing you were asked to do. We see that the effort was made and the work was put into it, and it's going this other way. And if we are gonna decide not to use work that we asked for, we think it's a really good idea to consult the group about that.

[00:13:39] Karen: To say it's looking like we can't use that. This is where we're headed, and we want your input before we make that a final decision because of the group's expertise that they will have built up working on it. We wanna make sure that if there's any chance that their expertise would shift the decision, or maybe we end up using part of it, or maybe it will tweak the decision in some kind of way.

[00:13:58] Karen: We wanna make sure we do that 'cause we're likely to get to a better decision. And then we wanna be thinking about this preemptively that when we're delegating work out. And I think this is especially problematic in consensus spaces, but it absolutely happens in corporate and other spaces as well. When we delegate work out.

[00:14:16] Karen: We need to have a plan for how that work is going to be honored, probably by giving some amount of the decision making authority with the delegation of the work involved in being ready for that decision, the research and the drafting, and all the kind of stuff that goes with that. And so if we can't give the decision making authority, we wanna be really thoughtful about why not.

[00:14:39] Karen: And maybe we shouldn't delegate all the work. If in the end I'm gonna make the decision, maybe I better do my own damn research. But, or maybe the work is go do the research because you're gonna bring it back to me and the research is gonna help me make a decision that still honors the work. But if we're asking them to do the work, we probably wanna say something like, okay, we're gonna try that out for three months, six months, if that's an option, as opposed to.

[00:15:02] Karen: We're gonna decide whether or not we like it on the basis of what's written on a piece of paper. And if we don't like it, all of your work is for nothing. And so that's the thing we wanna avoid is that devaluing of the work. And so if we can do it on the front end, that's great. If we can't and we have to do it on the back end, we just need to be super intentional about it because at the end of the day, if we don't value the work, we will damage the relationships.

[00:15:28] Paul: That's gonna do it for us today. Until next time. I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:15:31] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.