Nudge: Guide without taking over

As Project Managers, we often feel this need to provide all the answers to our teams.

What if we didn’t need to provide the answers and just a little nudge in the right direction was enough for our team to get to where they needed to?

I was once made to realise by my supervisor that I already knew how to solve a certain problem, a certain dilemma I was facing at a moment in time. I just couldn’t see that myself being in the context.

She saw me heading in the right direction with the program that I was to deliver.

But she saw I was stuck.

She didn’t want me to fail obviously. She also didn’t see it right to give me or better said she didn’t see it right to spoon feed the solution to me.

So she walked over to my desk, did a quick check-in on how I was doing and asked me just 1 question that made so much sense in my context at that time. That got me thinking.

“What assumptions have you not yet validated? “

As a project manager you might think you are not a change agent. There is a separate team designated to drive change in the organisation. But it is important to remember we are change drivers too. We do get stuck in our own change journeys and sometimes just need a bit of a nudge to move forward.

This nudge that I got from my supervisor got me to challenge my own thinking.

I questioned myself what could I do differently than what I am doing now. I ofcourse did the obvious. I re-looked at all the assumptions I had made. This got me to ask myself even more questions.

• What am I not seeing right now?
• What if I removed some of the variables in the program that I saw today? Would that lead to a different result?
• How would people outside the system view this?
• Does the environment have all the enablers embedded to make the teams and program successful?
• What are we missing?

Anyway, you see the point..

This is also when I discovered the 6 Thinking Hats 🎩 by Edward De Bono for the first time.

I am so glad for that. So strong, so impactful that I still use it today in so many contexts!

So, I wasn’t on a completely different track. I just needed a bit of guidance to get closer to where I needed to be. My supervisor’s questions moved me towards that direction.

What I learnt from my own context

• My supervisor was not handing the solution to me on a platter and never took over.
• She gave me the confidence to learn things and grow.
• She showed me my own potential by getting me to navigate the context with her 1 question
• She showed me the power of asking questions to move change forward

The question we always have as managers - when to nudge or guide and not take over? To this, I’d say

• when you want your team to take the opportunity to learn and grow
• when the delegated decision area is less to medium critical. (Though in my own context it was actually high in criticality and I strongly believe my supervisor did the correct thing by not telling me what to do, but nudged me with 1 question)
• when you want to enable problem-solving skills
• when you know your team is just so so so close to getting to where they should be

👉  Today and this week, try nudging and not taking over. Instead of providing a solution to a problem to your team, ask a subtle, yet impactful open-ended question (What / How questions), or give them a hint that gets your team to start thinking how they could solve the problem.

This is the 2nd of a 3-part series on 🚀 The Delegation Balance: A 3-part short series for Project managers 🚀. Stay tuned for the next article on 3️⃣ Step in with a clear purpose