Dealing With Grey Areas

Grey areas are the hardest problems managers face at work. When you have to deal with a highly uncertain, high-stakes problem, you face a challenge, not just to your skills, but to your humanity. In his new book, Managing in the Gray, author Joseph L Badaracco offers a powerful and practical way to resolve grey area problems. An excerpt.

The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often you face gray area problems, and these problems come in all shapes and sizes. For example, some are large, complex, and infrequent… The CEO of a small biotech company… had learned that a new, much-needed drug might be implicated in a very rare, but deadly brain disease. He had to decide what to do — even though he lacked critical facts or even a clear definition of the problem.

In contrast, other gray area problems are small-scale, but this doesn’t make them easy or unimportant... A senior manager in a medium-sized company… shared an executive assistant with three managers. The assistant had worked at the company for more than thirty years and had a strong record, but her work had been slipping badly for several months. No one knew why. The other managers who relied on her wanted to let her go, but the senior manager was seriously concerned that the standard HR approach — giving the assistant two weeks’ notice and a small severance package — might do her irreversible harm. But these concerns told the senior manager nothing about what she should do about the assistant, the work that wasn’t getting done, or her disagreement with the other managers.

What all gray areas have in common, whether they are major or minor, is how we experience them. When you face a gray area problem, you have usually done a lot of hard work — on your own and often with other people — to understand a problem or a situation. You’ve assembled all the data, information, and expert advice you can reasonably get. You’ve analyzed everything carefully. But critical facts are still missing, and people you know and trust disagree about what to do. And, in your own mind, you keep going back and forth about what is really going on and about the right next steps.