“Signposting” to create safe and fruitful conversations
My team and I have written a number of times about building a design culture over the last 6 years of learning how to do it well here at Lightspeed (née Vend).
Over the last two years we’ve seen significant growth and change within our team. We’ve iterated on our growth tools, we’ve added language around our review practise and ensured greater inclusion by evolving our feedback culture but for me, personally, the biggest change has been managing managers.
Just like moving from an individual contributor to a manager is a big and often disorienting step — so is moving to managing managers. On reflection I found that I need to go through a familiar pattern.
In the early days of figuring out how to lead a team and build a culture I needed to:
- Become conscious about the ways I saw the world and approached problems
- Then find a way to articulate those with my team in a way they could understand
That’s only the start — as I described, from there we iterate. But it’s going from nothing to something that’s hard for me. Primarily because I’m not necessarily conscious of the strategies I have developed to succeed. I don’t know what support and warning my Design Manager’s are going to need so they can be prepared for what’s coming their way. That means that me and my team of Design Managers over the last year have been figuring things out together. Running into car crash moments, then having to reflect and figure outwhat went wrong. Often I had assumed something was obvious but I needed to actually say it. Other times there were skills and preparation we could have developed that would empower Design Managers in the moment. I am hugely grateful to Thomas Le Bas, Ann Nguyen and more recently Nicola Horlor for their patience as we worked through this. And we’re all grateful to the rest of our team who have been along for the ride.
There are a number of things I hope to write about in the near-term future. Now’s a great time for me to put pen to paper, because we’re hiring in Montréal for a Design Manager role in my team. You should apply if you are in Montréal and you’ve been leading in Design for a while (you don’t need management experience).
Today I want to talk about “Signposting”. It’s a technique that I’ve realized I use frequently throughout my day, and one that my team and other managers at Lightspeed has found particularly useful to be aware of.
A word on emotions. Emotions are useful and healthy. This post is not suggesting that emotions are bad. Emotions provide a lot of information about what’s going on for people and are often helpful for people to get closure as they process what’s happened to them. However reacting to emotions without being able to choose your response rarely looks to non-regrettable outcomes. Reacting leads to escalating which tightens one’s perspective. You make the best decisions with the widest perspective and the greatest ability to choose a response. If you end up in a venting session, that’s OK. Identify that this is a rant and you’ll revisit the conversation once things have calmed down.
Why signposting?
Signposting achieves two complementary outcomes:
- It helps our reports feel safe and in control
- It helps us keep our own emotional distance so that we can remain helpful
Helping our reports feel safe
The aim of signposting is to help someone you are having a conversation with to be able to stay in the moment — not have their mind race off with “What ifs” and end up getting hijacked by their amygdala’s response to what they perceive as a threat (see BICEPS or SCARF as useful threat models).
In my experience positional authority has a habit of amplifying the words you don’t say almost as much as it amplifies the words you do say. Why are they asking that? Do they not trust me? Ugh! They’re not even listening to me — they totally don’t care about me at all!
You end up in a distrust spiral — or you find your report starts to pull back from you, stops sharing, quietens down and tries to manage it all themselves. You don’t know why — you have their best interests at heart — they know our values, they know I’m on their side, where has the trust gone?
Keeping our own emotional distance
It’s also particularly useful to make sure that as the manager in the conversation that you maintain an adequate distance from the conversation so that your own reactive emotions can be kept at bay.
There are two ways that our own emotions can get in the way of being useful to our report in 1:1 conversations:
- We over-empathize with our report and get stuck in a pit of empathy with them. That’s not great — your job is to help them see the light and get out of the pit (compassion, not empathy is the goal). That gets really hard when you’re stuck in there with them.
- We become frustrated with our reports. Maybe we become blinded by the injustice we feel we’re experiencing in the moment as they give us feedback, or we’re just completely over them being stuck on the same ferris wheel over and over again.
It’s important to remember that your job as a manager is to help your report succeed. The goal of these conversations is to improve their chances of succeeding. It is not just to make them feel better, and it is certainly not about you.
We can only help our reports succeed if we maintain a healthy emotional distance from, especially, emotional conversations and signposting helps us do that.
What is signposting? And how do I do it?
Signposting is simply being aware of what you are about to do or say, and why — and prefacing out loud what you want to say with those intentions. It’s really hard to do in the moment when you most need it, so you’re going to have to practise.
- I’m trying to understand so I’m going to ask a couple of questions…
- I’m going to reflect back what I heard so we can confirm I understood correctly. Please tell me if you disagree or any of this feels off or not right.
- I’m going to go into a bit of a teaching moment now — is that OK?
This helps your report understand where you are going with the conversation and why. It helps them stay in control of their emotions by keeping them present and allowing them to slow down and choose a response. It keeps the “What ifs” out of it. Their mind can’t run wild with worst case scenarios.
It also slows you down. It forces you to remember your role in this conversation, what is your goal and why are you here. It makes you say that out loud which reminds you of those things and it helps you keep that emotional distance: so that you can also choose your emotional response.
Finally, it allows everyone to feel safe and in control of the conversation. “Actually, I’m not quite ready for a teaching moment, I feel like you haven’t heard what I said.” or “Thank you for trying to understand, I don’t think you quite got it. This and that bit is not the main thing for me. It’s this other bit.”
You need to practise
As a manager this is one of those skills that is useful to practise because when you experience an amygdala hijack it’s basically game over the conversation. You can’t both be in “reacting mode”. That means you need to be managing your response from the start of the conversation and you need to be able to do signposting with as little cognitive priority as possible — most of your cognitive load should be on listening and understanding, not figuring out how to signpost in the moment.
I also recommend mindfulness or meditation so that you can practise “watching”. In order to manage your response you need to be able to “watch” the conversation at a distance and not be sucked into the emotional energy. Mindfulness or meditation is a great way to train for these conversations and stay “match-fit”.
We’re still learning — we’ll continue to learn, we‘re a teaching hospital and that includes our managing team! We’re hiring in Auckland and Montréal. Product Designers in both locations, and a Design Manager in Montréal. I think we’re a great team to be in if you want to grow to the next level. Apply today!
And keep an eye out on some follow-up posts about how we’ve put language around our review culture and a couple of other concepts that we’ve found useful in our growth toolset for designers that we’ll try to write about soon.
