MBA diaries: The messy situations? Ignorance is NOT Bliss in management.

Find your work style, your projects, your mails and everything professional hard to manage? Feel like losing the ability to notice the sky-high piles on your desk or the hundreds of unread emails in your Inbox. Functionally speaking, your mess becomes invisible to you. Ignoring all this? Find small stuff too small to be noticed? Bad habit.

Powerful phenomena take place right before your eyes. But you don’t see them. What should be visible becomes invisible. Like the captain of Titanic steering in the icy North Atlantic, these are precarious waters for a leader to navigate.

Mess is like iceberg. We only see 25-30% of it. Consider it too small and avoid it.

Do you notice the way your team conducts meetings, jumping from one topic to the next, never closing any issue before opening a new one? Why make note of the constant interrupting each other, the vague decision-rights, or the combative tone of conversation?

Small things matter.

The Mess of Managing People

In management you are required to lead people/ to manage people.

People are a messy business. Indeed, people working with other people create piles of clutter every day.

Difficult feedback that isn't shared. Mess
Resentments that aren't aired. Clutter.
Anxiety and confusion during various managerial transitions that go unacknowledged. More clutter.

Few factors that go unnoticed by us

“We have no idea what’s going on.”
“People expects you to deliver but gives no direction.
One member [may be you] took all the credit, no team spirit?

Piles and piles of mess beginning to crop in your professional life. And you have just started with your professional life?

You'll Get More Success When You Can See the Mess.What can you do about this common problem? How can you start to see things that you simply don’t see?

Here are a few places to begin.

FIRST - Learn to identify the problems

You miss a lot of stuff when you’re not looking for it. But amazingly, the minute you start actually looking for it –boom! There it is, hidden in plain sight.

SECOND ask other people what they see.

There’s no law against asking for help. If you are not seeing the mess, others might identify the problem areas for you. You are a manager, you should be interactive enough even for help.

THIRD, and here’s the tough one, ask yourself what you’re pretending not to see.

The hard truth is that sometimes you don’t see the mess because you don’t want to see it. The implications are too painful. Or too uncomfortable. Best to look the other way.

Mess? Dude, i don't see any mess.

Sometimes as management professional you will find yourself in situations where you would follow the strategy of "Ignorance is bliss"

Although this mindset might save you some short-term pain, it’s a losing strategy.

Had titanic captain listened to the warning of icebergs and not sailed his ship at top speed the ship might have actually remained "Too big to Sink". Avoiding small problems may actually lead you to hit you own messy iceberg.

Connect the dots, find answers in problems, don't be myopic.
So, if you want to see what’s become invisible to you, ask yourself the question.