Introduction to Employing Differences

[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, how much control?

Exploring Control in Organizations

[00:00:20] Paul: So we've talked before about issues of control and authority in groups, in organizations. And how sometimes we have kind of our default level of how much do I tend to try to control what's going on around me? How much do I just sort of stay hands off and things like that.

[00:00:35] Paul: What we wanna explore today is a phenomenon that Karen and I have both noticed which is that it's very common when something unexpected and probably not great. Something bad happens that people in organizations often move to exert more control over the things around them than they do sort of in their normal default, right?

[00:01:00] Paul: They oftentimes kind of shift more towards their end of the spectrum, right? Sort of thing. And so if I'm the sort of person who's normally, you know, somewhat hands-on when something bad happens, I'm probably gonna get really hands-on. And what we wanna explore today is, when is that a good and useful idea?

Emotional Responses to Unexpected Events

[00:01:17] Paul: Because that is often emotionally motivated, right? It is that something bad has happened, I'm having an emotional response. My go-to in this case is gonna be to try to exert more control. So to tell my people, the people who work for me, here's what I need you to do exactly. You know, and to give them less freedom of movement and things like that.

[00:01:35] Paul: And that might be exactly the right thing that the situation needs. How can we tell if that's just our, you know, psyche speaking to us, or what's really useful in this situation? That's what we want to explore here together today.

When Control is Necessary

[00:01:51] Karen: I think that I'm definitely in that one of my defaults is if it's going badly, take charge. And there are absolutely cases where total control by one person dictating is the thing. I mean, it's the thing they teach you in First Aid, for example, like tell somebody to call 911, tell somebody to, you know, whatever the things are you need to do.

Control in Emergency Situations

[00:02:10] Karen: Emergency situations very often, time is of the essence and talking about it is the least useful thing and action is needed. Those are all times when that makes sense. Organizations don't face that kind of urgency very often. 

Control in Organizational Crises

[00:02:24] Karen: What's far more usual in organizational settings, whether they're workplace organizations or community organizations is a situation where there is some sort of crisis, but it's unfolding over some number of weeks. Probably it's not unfolding in some number of minutes or seconds. And in those cases, I think control is not necessarily the thing that's needed. 

The Misconception of Control

[00:02:50] Karen: I think that the feeling, literally what we say to ourselves is things are out of control.

[00:02:54] Karen: I actually think we use that phrase broadly in ways that may not be useful. Like everything feels out of control. Therefore, the thing I should do is control it. And I think what we really mean is I'm really uncomfortable. Things are unpredictable. I can't know for sure that we're safe. I have reasons to think that there's some kind of threat.

[00:03:16] Karen: Is control the thing that's gonna fix it? And that's the question I think we wanna play with. 

Impact of Control on Collaboration

[00:03:23] Karen: And I think absolutely there are cases, as I've said that that is the thing, but also control by a single individual, if that's what we're talking about, has the tendency to reduce collaboration, reduce problem solving, reduce buy-in from other people who are not maybe feeling like they're as engaged or invested if they're asked to just follow directions.

[00:03:45] Karen: And so if those things are important, if you need collaborative problem solving, if you need really high buy-in from your group members, if you need a sense of cohesion and connection, control can very often work against you. And so that's especially true if you aren't good at it. Or if the situation is not one that can be controlled so that you know, I can't solve our budget, but I'm gonna tell all of you exactly when to work and how much to work and what tasks to do. That's not controlling in a way that's helpful.

[00:04:19] Karen: It's just a controlling in a way that's annoying and you can really break down the very things that might've helped your budget because you reach for control as a self-soothing kind of thing.

[00:04:31] Paul: I think there's two things that I wanna point at in what you just said there. 

Evaluating the Need for Control

[00:04:41] Paul: And one of them is, I think this is a useful guidepost is, you know, is this thing I can actually exert more control over? Is this a controllable thing? I think is one important question. And then the other question is, should I try to exert control over it?

[00:04:50] Paul: I mean, one of the things you're pointing to is that like, is it useful to do this, right? Is the reduced collaboration, problem solving, you know, thing, is that going to negatively impact the situation that I'm actually trying to make better. Because one of the things I wanna unpack here is that very often, you talked about it as a threat response or a self-soothing sort of thing. When something is threatened, we often feel like our sense of agency, our sense of control is threatened and things feel out of control.

[00:05:15] Paul: And so oftentimes we reach for, well, this is the thing that it feels like I can control to reestablish that feeling. So I feel like I have agency again. And agency and efficacy are super important. We've talked a ton about those on the show, and so I get wanting to do that. The thing is that you also have to recognize when you do that you are likely reducing the people around you sense of efficacy and agency.

[00:05:38] Paul: So you're probably putting them into even worse of a situation than you are in right now. Because you're actually saying this thing that was your purview before, you know, imagine that we, we worked in this way where I'm setting intentions and my staff is largely carrying them out and they're largely autonomous to do these sorts of things.

[00:05:56] Paul: If I just immediately shift into this mode where I'm taking all those decisions back up to me. Now they feel out of control. They're like, I used to be able to do something about this. I don't know where the boundaries of my job are anymore. This used to be a decision I could make, but now it can't. And particularly if we're not clear about what we are doing in exerting that control, why we are doing it, how long that will last.

[00:06:20] Paul: We can amplify that stress response, that threat response in all of the people around us. So it's not just that we have less collaboration, but we're probably freaking other people out.

The Snowball Effect of Control

[00:06:31] Karen: Yeah, and I think there's absolutely a sort of snowballing effect that can happen with that. Where I am in leadership enough to see that we've got an upcoming problem and maybe we tell people about it, maybe we don't. But my response to that is to try and grab control of things and that actually creates more of the problem, right?

[00:06:56] Karen: So then the problem gets worse. So I feel less in control, so I grab more control. And there are a lot of cases where trying to control other people in particular makes things worse. And so the thing to be looking at is, what's the group looking for? And, you know, can we get real definitions of the problem, right?

[00:07:16] Karen: So I'm feeling anxious 'cause it feels scary, there's some kind of threat, but if I haven't really defined what the problem is, I stand a pretty good chance of misdiagnosing the solution. 

Empowering the Group

[00:07:25] Karen: And then to look at the people around you and what's gonna help them feel better in the situation and not falsely better, but what's gonna help them understand what's going on, what's gonna help them have as much predictability as they can have and what's gonna help them feel empowered and actually be empowered to do what they can do towards solving the problem.

[00:07:46] Karen: So that sense of empowering the group, but as I'm looking at, okay, is this a place where I should be taking more control or backing off? One of the things to look at is how is my choice impacting other people. I was in a situation once where I'd handed off a piece of a job to somebody else and had visibility into how they were doing it.

[00:08:07] Karen: And I thought they were sort of getting behind on a few things, so I went in and helped them out. And I was just, you know, filling in some pieces. I got pretty clear feedback, fortunately, effective feedback as it turned out to say, if you want me to do it, just hands off and if you don't, I'll give it back, but, and I was like, oh, the last thing I want is to get it back.

[00:08:28] Karen: I don't want that. And I need to be hands off. And for me it meant also like just eyes off. Like don't it. It is something that I cared about. It was a system I had built and I, was handing it off for somebody else to use it. But unless I really handed it off, that person was not gonna have agency to do the work.

[00:08:45] Karen: That person's gifts that they could bring to it weren't gonna be realized. And they kind of thought, well, she's meddling in it. She must not like how I'm doing it. She must be unhappy with me, whatever. That wasn't even what I was thinking, but my tendency to over control was getting in the way.

[00:09:01] Karen: And so when I had the awareness of how it was landing for her, for me to quote help, it really helped me see, okay, if I'm gonna hand it off, I have to hand it off. And there were, in that case, really good reasons to do that.

Balancing Control and Collaboration

[00:09:15] Paul: I think there's also a key thing there and one of the things you said, right, was around problem definition. Are we really clear on what the problem is? And if we actually aren't clear about what the problem is, then trying to exert control probably isn't gonna help. Because if something has happened and now we're in this space of ambiguity, right?

[00:09:35] Paul: Of like, we don't necessarily even know what's going on, we need to be doing as much collective sense making as we can. On the other hand, I think there are cases where we are actually all aligned around what the problem actually is. And in some cases it's a problem of execution, right?

[00:09:50] Paul: Sometimes it really is. Actually, we have too many cooks in the kitchen right now. And so instead of that, like temporarily, we're gonna kick some cooks out, right? We're gonna go, okay, normally we would all do this together, but we're under this time pressure. Or because this vendor thing has fallen through, like again, exceptional circumstance, things that happened.

[00:10:09] Paul: The way I'm gonna deal with this is by doing this set of things that I wouldn't normally do. But what you're really focusing on there, and that's a case where, you know, you actually can take control or you can say, normally these things would be happening with all these different people. I'm just gonna centralize the schedule building in this thing.

[00:10:26] Paul: Or normally we would talk through how we were gonna do all of this. I am going to set the agenda on this thing. That's not our normal way of doing it, but I'm gonna do that because you can, and you're doing it in service of you're seeing that we're just not executing at the level we need to in order to get this particular thing done.

[00:10:46] Paul: Now, ideally, as we've talked about, like you wanna do that for a shorter period of time as possible. If you go through that exercise of not just saying, I'm going to, you know, these responsibilities are mine now, right? If you actually articulate that and say, actually for the next three months, you need to approve all of these things, or we're gonna do this thing until we are through this process. Until we are through this situation, and then we'll figure out what we're gonna do from there.

[00:11:12] Paul: I think that creates that predictability you're talking about for other people. They now know what to expect. They may not like the decision, but I think they're much more willing to deal with that than you inexplicably taking things off of their plate. And which causes that further snowball sort of thing.

[00:11:29] Paul: So I think being clear about the boundaries, you know, exactly how much more control you are taking than you would normally, I think is a really good way of making sure you're not taking too much, that you're actually doing it in a way that is of service to the situation, because you can then explain why it makes sense to do, not just, I'm doing this because this is my default response whenever I get anxious.

Decisiveness in Leadership

[00:11:55] Karen: And I think one of the things you're pointing to there is the flip side of where this can go wrong, which is there are people who don't like to take control, who just wanna be collaborative. And we're doing this as a group and we're all in this together. And I've certainly been in situations where the folks who I thought should be saying, okay, this is what we need to do next and this is the next place. And you know, even if we're all gonna ratify it, I'm gonna really strongly say, this is the decision we should make. And they're not doing that because they're saying we wanna be inclusive and we wanna be welcoming, and we want everybody to feel, you know, their own sense of agency and have their own role in this.

[00:12:33] Karen: I very often recommend to those folks that they need to be more decisive. They need to create more boundaries, they need to put more controls in place. I'm thinking of an example where I was in a meeting where there was an important decision to be made and there were half the people in the room had expertise in that decision, and the other half the people didn't have expertise, but had maybe more authority to make it.

[00:12:56] Karen: And the people who had the expertise were saying, okay, we need to make this decision and you guys need to go decide it. They were actually suggesting that the other group, like go consult with an even larger group of people who had no expertise and come back and say what you want. And at some point I went to the people who had expertise and said, okay, we have two choices.

[00:13:14] Karen: Do you want A or B? We went around the room and every single person who knew anything about it said, we need to do choice A. And I'm like, okay, we don't need to go make a decision. Right, but they were trying to be so collaborative that they weren't controlling it to the extent that was appropriate in that situation.

[00:13:31] Karen: I think that you can go wrong in both directions. I'm very unlikely to go wrong by taking not enough control. But there are people for whom that is a very common direction, I would just wanna say, while we are big on collaboration on this show, and we definitely wanna encourage folks to include people and enable and empower people, one of the ways to do that is to give them clear boundaries, clear expectations, clear guidance based on expertise or hierarchy or various places where it's very appropriate for it to come from.

[00:14:03] Karen: And it could be that the problem that you're in when you get around to diagnosing it is actually a problem of too little control. And that add in control absolutely will save you.

[00:14:12] Paul: We talked a bit about that on episode 275. We talked about the sort of open versus decisive and listeners would've learned that I do land on that other end of the spectrum from you, typically. But I think that is again, what we're really talking about there when you have a situation that feels out of control in the other way or your tendency is to go the other way again when we're talking about working with humans.

Setting Boundaries and Constraints

[00:14:34] Paul: The dirty secret is that we can never really control them, right? But the valuable thing to do is to put boundaries, right? To put constraints around things. To help us actually navigate that. And so it can be useful to say, to do things like, even if your tendency is like, oh, I don't wanna be seen as controlling.

[00:14:54] Paul: I don't wanna dictate, you know, what we're gonna do. I can still put boundaries around a thing saying, we're actually not gonna have this conversation until we've established these set of facts, like we need to learn this stuff. Like that is a way of kind of exerting control of saying, look, we're gonna make a collaborative decision, but we need to actually have all the information in the room first, as opposed to let's just get a meeting together and see what ideas come up.

[00:15:19] Paul: So that's another way of doing it. And I think that what, what we're talking about, even with the, where your tendency is to try to get your hands on everything, that putting boundaries around how you're doing that, right, is also useful. Because it's those, when people understand the edges of the shapes, of the situations that they're in, they're able to work within them much more effectively than when they have no idea where those are.

[00:15:43] Karen: Yep. And the last thing I wanna make sure we say here before we sum up, is that I think there's a feeling that I call vulnerability. This is the Brene Brown work, if you haven't read her stuff yet. But that feeling of vulnerability is the thing that tells us that, wait, we're anxious, we're scared, and we want to go control our way out of it, potentially.

[00:16:04] Karen: Or, I'm feeling vulnerable, so I don't wanna take responsibility for anything and I wanna not control anything either way. And very often that sense of vulnerability is actually an indication that powerful things are happening. And so getting used to the idea that the, very best thing could be the thing that makes me feel all squeamish and uncomfortable.

[00:16:25] Karen: Because that's how vulnerability feels is squeamish uncomfortable. I think is really useful so that we're not afraid of that feeling as long as we know where it's coming from and that, you know, like we don't wanna ignore the real threat. But vulnerability is not in and of itself dangers.

[00:16:42] Paul: The, it makes sense that I feel exposed here and it still makes sense for me to do it. Yeah. 

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

[00:16:48] Paul: So to cover, you know, the ground that we've talked about today. So we're talking about this question of how much control, how much control can I exert in a situation? How much should I exert in a situation where something has come up?

[00:17:01] Paul: This is not an emergency in the sense of we're not talking about first aid or landing a plane here. We're talking about some sort of crisis that's unfolding over time. Over the course of days, weeks, months in an organization, or in a group, right? Something that is stressful, that does have real impact to the group in the ongoing sense, but that we're responding to some sort of threat.

[00:17:25] Paul: And that when we have this threat response that comes up, it is very typical for many people, although not all of them, to want to exert more control over the situation because it feels out of control. And what we're really asking for is how can we figure out if that's a useful response or just our patterned response is what the situation actually needs, or does it not?

[00:17:47] Paul: And so we've looked at questions of like, can I actually exert more control over this situation? Is this situation more controllable? Are there actually levers that I can pull that will improve our response? And also what's the impact of me doing that gonna be on the other people around me.

[00:18:04] Paul: You know, if I'm feeling things are out of control and I start taking decisions away from other people and taking responsibility that other people would normally have, well, I shouldn't be surprised when they now feel out of control because my sense of efficacy and agency was impacted. And now I've, in response to that as a self-soothing mechanism impacted other people's.

[00:18:24] Paul: So be aware of that kind of thing. And to the extent that we do decide we wanna exert some control over a situation, mitigate those impacts by being transparent, by being clear about what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the boundaries on that are, because giving people a sense of, it's not that everything is up for grabs, it's these things have changed and we think it's going to last for this long, or this is how we're gonna proceed through it.

[00:18:50] Paul: Can mitigate some of those impacts and that when we do that, we might actually look and realize, hey, this isn't a problem of sense making, of where we need to figure out what the situation is we're dealing with. If it's a problem of where it's one of execution, sometimes it really can make sense to say we're gonna coordinate some decisions in this case where we wouldn't ordinarily, we we weren't, aren't gonna be using a consensus process for this.

[00:19:12] Paul: And we're gonna move through that. But sometimes that really can be the right response to the situation. And sometimes it's absolutely the response, the situation we want. If our tendency is to instead not take control of the situation and just let everything unfold.

[00:19:28] Karen: And that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:19:32] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis, and this has been Employing Differences.