Our team members usually do a good job at their work because they understand the fundamentals of the tasks. However, I find one of the hardest things to teach is nuance. Helping people understand the relationships, the departments, and the challenges that exist takes time to develop. However, this understanding helps our teams move from good to great in their work.
As a young employee, I made decisions in a vacuum without fully thinking about the context that exists. However, as I became more seasoned in my leadership, making a decision without considering context was setting me and my team up to fail. The nuance matters and can often change the decision we make.
Because nuance is so important, we must teach it to our teams if they’re going to be empowered to make decisions and succeed without us having to guide every detail. I’ve been wrestling with how to teach this, and while I don’t claim to have it all figured out, I have a few strategies that I think are helpful in honing this skill. I’ll share the five strategies and then offer a higher education example (made up) to help illustrate the point.
Five Approaches to Teach Nuance
Systems Thinking
First, our employees need to understand systems thinking. At its core, nuance is about how one action is going to impact another action, which aligns with systems thinking. Developed by Chester Barnard, systems thinking suggests we are part of multiple inter-connected systems. Because systems are inter-connected, impacts to the system in one area will create impacts in other areas. This is a good theory to explore how our actions impact others in the university, and how their actions may impact us. Understanding this helps team members begin to understand nuance and recognize its existence.
For example: Admissions is enrollment-driven. Not providing support for their event, even though it’s a last-minute request, could have negative consequences for enrollment. Not supporting something so critical to enrollment puts our department in a negative light.
Feedback Beyond Execution
Feedback is a great tool to teach nuance, but too often, we just provide feedback on the execution of a project. For feedback to teach nuance, we must go beyond how to make the project better and articulate why the particular feedback is being given. Additionally, we must help our employees not just apply the feedback to the one project but to apply it to future scenarios as well.
For example: Designing a schedule poster for Athletics, and the feedback is “take out the tertiary colors.” It’s better to say take those out because Athletics wants to make sure they have a strong presence with our primary and secondary colors because they face other institutions with similar tertiary color palettes. This now implies this should be done on projects moving forward.
Show Your Work
As leaders, we often have many tasks on our plate, and we are trying to get as many of those off our plates as possible. One way we typically do that is simply making a decision and communicating it. That can be a problem because people missed our thought process. Much like a middle school math problem, showing your work helps others see your process and learn how to do the same.
For example: A team member comes to you and wants to decline a project. Instead of just making the decision, walking through your process of evaluating the strategic nature of the work, the time required for the project, and the team’s capacity will help the team member better understand how to have those conversations in the future.
Be in the Room
I once had a leader who was always invited to things because his title had vice president in it. He would accept the invitation and ask if I could come too. He would tell the conveners that, because of my marketing work, it was important for me to be in the conversation. Because of that leader, I got to hear and see many rich conversations and debates that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Being in more senior rooms helped me understand the challenges of our work and how to navigate them when interests compete.
For example: A department wants to meet to talk about needing some marketing work for a new program that is being launched. Instead of taking the meeting and communicating back to the team about the assignments, invite members of the team who will be part of the work to join and hear from the department leaders.
Create a Place to Practice
Often one of the best ways to learn something is to do it. Instead of just giving an answer to a team member, when possible, allow them to make a recommendation. Then, you can have them walk you through their logic of how they arrived at that decision. This gives them a safe way to practice, and it gives you several moments to help coach them on aspects they may not have considered.
For example: An employee asks how to handle a situation they’re struggling with. Instead of just telling them what they should do, ask for their recommendation and work through it with them.
Nuance Takes Time
Developing an understanding of nuance doesn’t happen overnight. It’s incredibly complex because there is nuance about the tasks and the best practices within our profession, but there is also institutional nuance that must be learned. Both are needed to really be successful. As leaders, the more we can try these approaches the better our teams will be at understanding and using nuance in their daily work. If we want our teams to think beyond the task, we have to teach them to see beyond it.
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