G8 Career / Being Managed, And Managing Upward

Bring Problems With Options Attached, Not Problems Alone

The difference between raising an issue and dumping one is about ninety seconds of preparation.

Everyone has been told not to bring problems without solutions, and the advice is usually delivered badly enough to sound like a ban on raising bad news. It is not. Some problems genuinely have no solution available to you and must be escalated raw and fast. But most of what lands on a manager's desk is not that. It is something you have been living with for a week, that you understand better than anyone else in the building, and that you have arrived to describe without having spent any time thinking about what could be done.

The preparation is small. State the problem in a sentence. State what it will cost if nothing changes, in terms of time, risk or rework rather than adjectives. Then offer two or three courses of action with their trade offs, including the option of doing nothing, and say which one you would choose and why. You are not asking them to rubber stamp your preference. You are giving them something to react to, which is far easier than generating options cold, and you are demonstrating that you have actually thought about it rather than transferring the discomfort.

There is a version of this that goes wrong, which is over engineering. If you spend two days building a comprehensive analysis of a problem that needed a five minute conversation, you have wasted two days and possibly let the problem grow. Match the preparation to the size of the issue. Urgent and serious means walk in now with what you know and be explicit that you have not analysed it. Slow and structural means take the time. The judgement about which is which is itself part of the skill, and you get better at it by being wrong occasionally and noticing.