While there are only so many hours in a day, it’s a fact that’s easy to forget when others are vying for your attention. If you’re a leader, it can be difficult to set boundaries around your calendar, but former Google vice president and Stripe COO Claire Hughes-Johnson, author of Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, says it’s critical to get better at disappointing people when it comes to sharing your time.
“One of my operating principles is distinguishing between leadership and management,” she says. “Management is about creating stability and predictability. It’s understanding what work needs to be done, assigning the right people to it, tracking it, and delivering measurable results. It’s very much about frameworks for execution and frameworks for individual development.”
Hughes-Johnson says leadership is less consistent. “The most inspiring leaders can be a bit unpredictable; they can make you uncomfortable and push you to try to achieve things that you don’t think are possible,” she says. “That’s quite a different skill set. But the reality is, when you’re pushing people to have such a high bar, you’re inevitably going to disappoint them because you’re a human being. You can’t be everything to everyone. How do you do that at a rate that people can absorb where they’re still inspired, but they’re learning to be realistic?”
Set Expectations
Leaders need to learn to manage themselves, set boundaries, and disappoint others. “The reality is, you have other responsibilities, you have other commitments,” says Hughes-Johnson. “I’ve learned to do a lot more work with people upfront about expectations.”
To reduce disappointment, Hughes-Johnson created a “Working with Claire” guide. She got the idea from an engineering leader at Google, who had created a reference manual to instruct their team for working with them. In her guide, Hughes-Johnson sets expectations, such as how to share information with her and the amount of time she needs to send a response. It also includes her preferences, styles, and approaches, as well as alternative sources for help when employees are in a pinch and can’t move forward.
“Make sure things are explicit,” says Hughes-Johnson. “Help people be comfortable to keep moving. You’re going to disappoint people with your time no matter what, but if you’re doing it to a degree that it’s slowing down your team, that’s a problem and you are not doing your job. You need to make sure you fix that.”
Make Sure You’re Realistic
After you create a guide, it’s important to have someone else review it. Hughes-Johnson sent hers to several people, asking for feedback and edits. “It has to feel like a believable document and not [something] aspirational,” she says. “It’s a good exercise in self-awareness.”
One piece of feedback gave Hughes-Johnson good insight on her behavior. “I went to great pains in the first draft of talking about how I was not a micromanager,” she says. “A person on my team at the time read it and said, ‘I sometimes experienced you as a micromanager.’ It was brave of him. Early in my management career, I was 100% a micromanager. I thought I had worked on that.”
The employee shared how he had felt micromanaged in an important project. His input lead Hughes-Johnson to edit her guide, adding, “If something is new that I’ve never seen before that feels very high stakes, I will be very involved. And that is not a comment on you. That is a comment on me.”
Build Trust
By setting expectations, Hughes-Johnson says you can get more comfortable disappointing people with your time. “If you don’t, you’re ending up in a pretty difficult place,” she says. “It’s one thing to disappoint people. But when you’ve said, ‘I anticipate we will have challenges with my time. There will be times when I am not available, and I will disappoint you,’ you’ve done a trust-building exercise.”
While workflow is fluent, leaders need to take steps to make some things predictable. For example, Hughes-Johnson says it’s important to keep one-on-one time in place. “Maybe I’m disappointing them with other time, but they know that they’re going to get their one-on-one every week or every other week, and they can then prioritize what gets covered in that meeting,” she says.
Another good practice is to hold a consistent weekly team meeting, where employees get a touch point with you. “That alleviates some of the anxiety as well,” says Hughes-Johnson. “You’re letting pressure out of the system by having consistent touch points.”
Finally, leaders need to look at their calendars and think about what they want to accomplish this year, this six-month period, this quarter, this month, and this week.
“I write at the beginning of every week what are the three most important things I have to get done this week,” she says. “I put them in a digital archive of my goals, but also physically on top of my notebooks with Post-it Notes. I am a person who is very empathetic. I like to be there for others when they need me. When I am disappointing someone with my time, I know that I at least did my priorities right.”
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