The Official Blog of Benifys HR Solutions

It is said that you start your work life with black and white – mutually exclusive, clear cut choices or instructions that are passed on to you by your manager. There is little that you impact, and little that impacts you, relative to what lies ahead. The stakes are low, the people touched by your work are few, and lapses can be ‘managed’ by a small cover-up operation.

As you move up the ladder, however, ambiguity starts making its presence felt. Increasingly, your canvas is painted by shades of grey, reaching a stage where all that you can see and perceive is grey. Guess what, before you realize it, there is no black left, and no white either.

So what does it mean to you? Some people excel in ambiguous settings, some detest them – most lie in between. As it were, the same action takes on a diametrically opposite hue as the complexity and scale increase. What smaller organisations can get away with easily, raises a few eyebrows in slightly larger organisations, and as the size of the organisation grows, the reaction may be a national uproar. Why would this be so? The simple answer is, in the realm of the ambiguous, the same decision or action will impact a whole lot of stakeholders, will probably have much more far reaching consequences than an environment made up of only a few people.

As you grow in your career, your actions will increasingly have such far reaching consequences. What you do, or what you don’t do, will have to be carefully weighed. You will need to factor in a lot more data and be cognizant of all the feathers that you will ruffle and applecarts you will…. And so on, but you get the gist.

At the same time, complexity, and therefore ambiguity, is growing on other fronts too – your family needs attention, the number of your contacts and friends has exploded, your health is not what it used to be twenty years back, and hey – you need some time to yourself too, right?

The CEO of Coke, Bryan Dyson once in a speech, more commonly know as the ‘30 second speech’, said –

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, Friends and spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.”

While all of us might not agree with what is written because everyone has different priorities, most of which are rigidly reaffirmed in the way they lead their lives everyday – that’s why some of us are called ‘workaholics’ and the others ‘family oriented’. One thing that we can all agree to is that while juggling all these balls you need to keep a margin for error, and with that crawls in ambiguity.

Are you faced with questions, the answers of which are not very apparent or clear at the moment, but which have a big ‘perceived’ impact on your life nevertheless?

1. What if you took some time off to do that MBA, would it help you move along in your career faster or leave you behind a couple of years?
2. Why does your boss want you to do something he clearly knows you are not good at? Will it do you good or crush your confidence?
3. Should you make a change of careers to pursue something you are really passionate about? Will you be able to bounce back to what you are currently doing if case the change does not work as expected?
4. What if you are not being given the right information, how does it impact your decision making ability as a professional and an individual?

These are just some of the questions a majority of people are facing, or have faced while trying to find a balance between all the contradictory and conflicting forces that dominate our lives.

Why does ambiguity increase as one travels up the corporate ladder?

Jason Seiden, through his firm, SeidenLeadership, turns capable people into savvy managers and leaders. He thinks that the ability to handle ambiguity is a combination of problem solving and initiative that encompasses:

1. The ability to tell the difference between things that should be dealt with literally and other things that require interpretation,
2. The ability to conduct the interpretation, and
3. The initiative to act on your conclusions. (The ability to handle uncertainty is the same, but with less emphasis on the first part.)

Ambiguity increases as you move "up" in an organization because as your span of control increases, the number of potential interpretations for any given action increase.

Does it pay to keep ambiguity in check?

The best person to answer this question is you. Some people thrive in ambiguity, it brings out the best in them. Others, and there are more of these, would prefer that life had at least a semblance of structure to it. The reality is, ambiguity has its own perils – once you are in an ambiguous situation, there is little that you can do to manage the extent of ambiguity – and like the proverbial glass ceiling, sooner or later, the extent of ambiguity has a chance of crossing your ‘I-can-handle-this-too’ Rubicon. Remember, like e-mails and a tidal wave, ambiguity has the potential to develop a life of its own.

As a matter of fact, it does pay to keep ambiguity in check – here are 4 big reasons why:

1. It helps you plan more effectively – the less ambiguous the big picture, the more you are likely to plan effectively. The trick is to anticipate the problems and the pitfalls (yes, the opportunities too), and build in enough safety hatches in your plan to take care of eventualities that you did not (or could not) see.
2. It helps you stay in control – who wouldn’t like to stay on top of things, especially when the stakes are high. The Chief Executives who feign ignorance about the ‘mistakes’ their organisation have made fell prey to not removing ambiguity. One does not need to emphasize that there is potential for ambiguity all over, and the thought that only external ambiguity needs to be managed belongs to the ‘famous-last-words’ legion.
3. It enables you to focus – focus where you will add more value. Building processes, stronger go-to-market strategies, tackling the inorganic and organic growth dilemma, making those ‘build-or-buy’ decisions, ensuring customers are happy, empowering employees – rather than worry where the next landmine has been laid.
4. It makes you live longer – need we say more? However much you enjoy ambiguity, and the adrenalin that pumps through your system when the going gets tough, there is merit in understanding that the human body (ever since man stopped living in jungles and hunting to feed himself) has increasingly grown accustomed to being more comfortable in the ‘known’. Don’t invite ambiguity, you’re just playing with fire.

Do different personality types react differently to ambiguity?

The answer to this can only be given at a very subjective level, but the answer is yes. If you consider two major employee profiling theories – The Jungian Type Inventory and Belbin Team Theory, you will realize that some of the profiles have an inherent tendency to react in a certain manner to ambiguity – this is of course in theory though, but because they have been validated and accepted worldwide, the generalizations can be applied.

If you consider The Jungian Type Inventory and MBTI (The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory) test based on it, it has eight opposing personality traits – for sake of explanation, let’s consider four of them:

1. Judging vs. Perceiving – It’s pretty clear that Perceivers will generally be more comfortable being in a state of ambiguity or handling an ambiguous situation than Judgers. Judgers have a need to keep everything in their life structured – they have difficulty dealing with things if they go out of their set order, on the other hand perceivers like to keep their options open and are more adept at adapting themselves to situations as opposed to mould the situation to themselves.
2. Thinking vs. Feeling – The Thinkers make most of their decisions based on logic, they like to see the world in black and white, and dislike fuzziness. No prizes here for guessing who would be uncomfortable in a state of ambiguity; yes, definitely not the Feelers – who base their decisions based on social considerations and are more people-oriented.

Stating such opinions on the profiles in Belbin® Team Roles* get a little tricky because instead of individual characteristics, we have profiles that point towards ‘types’ of individuals and the ‘role’ they play in teams. But again, because it has been very widely used and applied – it stands the test of numbers. Let’s again consider two profiles out of a total of nine:

1. Team Worker – Can have problem making difficult decisions, especially decisions regarding people; and hence have difficulty when dealing with uncertainty associated with handling people problems.
2. Monitor Evaluator – Are used to seeing both the negative and positive aspects of situations, weighing the pros and cons of various options. It stands to logic that they would be more comfortable and rather thrive in ambiguity, because it gives their minds something to work on.

*Our extrapolation of the Belbin® Team Roles is our interpretation and may not be supported by the propounders of this theory.

You’re in the ambiguous zone, and you don’t like it – what now?

1. Learn something from it – Ambiguity is everywhere, and it has been there from the start, from the time you had to make a choice between science or arts, engineering college or medical college, startup or big organization – acknowledge that and be comfortable with it. Strive to find meaning in ambiguity without letting it overpower you.
2. Find a mentor – Find someone who challenges your thoughts and does not necessarily agree with them, someone who give you tough love advice when it is needed… and don’t be defensive and close yourself. It could be a boss, a friend, a colleague, even your mother – anyone who’s not afraid to make you aware of your shortcomings and provide guidance.
3. Give up control where necessary – This is more important when you are leading/managing a team, to lead means to be in a perpetual zone of conflicts and doubts, instead of trying to control the situation or people – find out how it is impacting you and other around you, direct your efforts in getting a grip on the situation instead of trying to mould it your way.
4. Focus on what’s really important – When you have a multitude of things needing your attention and time in finding the optimal work life balance, prioritize them and devote more time on the ones that directly impact your growth and success. And yes, there are some that have more impact than the others… remember the Pareto’s Principle (also know as the law of vital few and trivial many)? It says that only 20% of all the activities you do bring about 80% of your success.

And lastly, keep an eye on your stress levels, stress can decrease your ability to cope with ambiguous situations – read this article on what stress is, it’s symptoms and causes, or if you want to dig a little deeper, find out what you should do when you are stressed and what precautions should you take to avoid it altogether.

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”

~Lord Kelvin

Myths, stereotypes and preconceived notions, some shatter and some remain; Lord Kelvin would have been much more careful about saying what he said here if he had any idea how things would pan out in the future, anyhow – coming back to our article, quite a peculiar name, wouldn’t you think? This idea came out of brainstorming session our team was having (we do a lot of that) – so the question was if you could relate people at work with airplanes, who would be which type of plane! It occurred to us that airplanes like people have a personality of their own; some are lean, mean and ready to go; while others can look like they really deserve a break.

The Unpowered (Employee)

These people primarily come to office for recreational purposes, their own or someone else’s. All show and no go as far as work is concerned – the most common reason why they are kept in the team is because they are either funny or they have the ‘right’ gossip. They take their lives and careers as a joke and others are only too happy to play along.

Defining features – Generally slower, less massive, and less expensive than other types. Mostly used to glide off a cliff, catch wind on the beach or setting useless world records!

The Propeller (Employee)

These are people who applied the ‘take life as it comes’ adage to their professional lives with not so pleasant results. They are not updated with the new technologies or best practices and are satisfied with just working as they have been working. The two most common things you will hear them say is “I’m going with the flow”, or “just riding the wave”. By the way propellers are the planes used for crop dusting too – now we’re not suggesting anything!

Defining features – They are quieter, fly at lower speeds, and have lower load capacity. However, they are significantly cheaper and much more economical than jets.

The Jet (Employee)

The ‘with it’ guys. Good at their work and conduct, they know how to soar to success – literally! They use a variety of techniques to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd, including but not limited to – being loud and intimidating, being so fast and efficient that no one can catch up, taking the ‘lesser’ aircraft types for a ride. Needless to say, Jets are expensive, oh yes!

Defining features – More powerful than a than ‘unpowered’ and ‘propeller’ types. As a consequence, they have greater weight capacity and fly faster than propeller driven aircraft. One drawback, however, is that they are noisy.

The Cargo (Employee)

This employee was made to work, and doesn’t that make everyone happy! Anything and everything that walks in the office will offload their work on them, although the opening is usually – “hey, you busy?” or “can you help me with this small little thing?” Of course later on it doesn’t remain a small little thing. While the off loader is busy relishing the break they just created for themselves, they take solace in the fact that their work will be taken care of by this Cargo Airplane of employees. No one clearly knows what drives these people – maybe they really like helping others, or maybe it’s because of their inability to say no.

Defining Features – Has greater weight capacity than any other type of aircraft, not necessarily faster. Better stress handling capability as compared to other aircraft types.

Which type are you?