One of the most vital services a manager can perform for a team is acting as a human firewall between team members and stakeholders. To shield one another from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Unfortunately, your shield is not made out of iron, but flesh and bone — the shield is you.
Your savviness as an intermediary is vital to maintaining morale and happiness. The viruses you protect against are not malware and phishing scams but resentments and failures. These are threats to the software of the person and can be more destructive than any Nigerian prince or Bonzi buddy.
To defend against this ultimately takes tenure and the wisdom that comes with it. To know if you should say something, when you have to, and how you should.
Designers are an oscillating fan between highly logical and highly emotional — the more logical it seems, the more emotion becomes attached. Here we’ll break down two of the most common threats to a designer’s happiness: the rug pull and the stakeholder lash out.
Dealing with rug pulls
When a design is completed or nearing completion and is suddenly sent to the recycle bin or altered beyond recognition a rug pull has occurred. The amount of emotional investment will vary by project and person but repeated rug pulls will permanently alter a designers happiness no matter what. The more sudden the rug pull, the greater the threat.
To deal with this, it’s important to be upfront and use breadcrumbs. Sometimes an effort is obviously high risk for a rug pull but must be pursued nonetheless. When your spidey sense tingles, warn the designer before handoff to deter emotional investment before it has a chance to spread through their files.
Premonition isn’t always possible, however. From your vantage point in the grapevine, should you get rumblings of a rug pull during an effort, drop hints to your designer. Whether it’s a direct message, an offhand mention in feedback, or any other number of incarnations it will prepare the designer to wind down emotional attachment.
Dealing with stakeholder lash outs
Lash outs from time-to-time are part of the trade with passionate people, big ideas, and rapid timelines. This can mean heated, overly-direct feedback.
There are two sides to manage here: the stakeholder and the designer. If in direct communication with the stakeholder at the time, it’s best to ask targeted questions. This will let them come down to earth and give actionable feedback for your designer.
For the designer, you bear the cross. Under no circumstance should a designer be privy to the raw data of a lash out. Ideally they’re privy to none of it unless it threatens their job. All that should be communicated is actionable feedback.
Should the two be in the same room at the time you can only try to mediate. Offer them cigarettes, make jokes, show them a video of a cat, it doesn’t matter. Most designers know when to be quiet so this happens very rarely and hopefully you won’t ever have to employ it. Never hurts to have a strategic reserve of Newports, though.
The wall
Something we have overlooked a bit here is the firewall itself. This is by design. The purpose of the firewall is to be virtually unknown to those affected by it. A human shield full of invisible arrows, bleeding invisible blood.