Boundaries: getting them just right

The word boundaries conjures different associations. I think of boundaries as creating fit-for-purpose spaces to channel energy towards a clear ambition, like a metronome or drum beat that allows for a melody to flow. That’s on a good day.

Perhaps you have also experienced boundaries as restrictive, as mechanisms for control, squeezing as much productivity out of people as possible.

The difference in experience could come down to personal preference: some people crave freedom and autonomy, and others prefer clear direction and a reliable structure. These preferences do exist and need to be understood, respected, and negotiated to ensure people have enough to go on.

However I also believe there are some commonalities that transcends this; some basic foundations we all require to be able to operate at work regardless of the context.

Questions to explore

• Which type of boundaries foster creativity and efficiency?

• Which role and organisational boundaries need to be defined, and which don’t?

• When should we let people figure things out for themselves?

Let’s take this current pandemic as a working example. Say you want to find out how productivity is impacted. There are various factors you want to understand: the impact of working from home, multiple responsibilities such as children and pets, of sick leave, the impact of virtual technologies.

You start mapping out the roles on the project you need, the skills and capabilities. You think about other stakeholders, interdependencies, and sources of data they’ll need. You realise you might be too busy to stay connected to the work so perhaps you need to give them KPIs and deliverables to clarify your expectations. Maybe you want a regular reporting channel so you can keep track of progress, or an online document the team updates for you to review.

A question begins to emerge here: who and for what purpose are we setting these boundaries? There is a risk that we set boundaries for others based on our preferences, i.e. what we would want in their position, and even more unhelpfully, to manage our own anxieties rather than to enable the people delivering on the task.

The opportunity is to review the boundaries, people’s experience of them, and re-negotiate to meet the various organisational and role-based needs.

Speaking of purpose

The most crucial boundary and anchor for our work is of course the purpose.
Not just ‘why are we doing this’, but adding context:

• Why is this project important to us, and why now?

• What do we hope it will achieve?

• What will we do with the information, and who will be interested in it?

• How does it move us closer to our wider organisational aims?

This allows people to make informed choices day-to-day, but also have a sense of how to relate to the work themselves.

Working with a team recently I noticed they were passionate about the purpose for their work - and all stated the same purpose - but couldn’t answer the above questions. It meant that they weren’t entirely sure who else valued their work, how that value would be expressed, and how this connected to the wider strategy. They were held back by this uncertainty and the insecurity this created.

Boundaries are intended to create clarity, allow for resourcefulness and collaboration, and create a modicum of certainty in the most uncertain of times. They help us tolerate and navigate the fog. And of course we know that the world is always uncertain and open to change and influences far outside of our control, it’s just that sometimes we already know more about what we don’t know than what we do. That awareness can be overwhelming and paralysing.

Although change is always on the horizon this doesn’t mean we can’t attempt to take a stab at defining boundaries. People know that strategies and plans can change despite best intentions, after all the best strategies are really working hypotheses to be reviewed as we learn and discover what works. But purpose and intention has greater resilience and must be named and thought about explicitly.

Boundaries aren’t just about the clear tasks and timelines we might assume, but the psychological boundaries such as the question ‘what meaning should I make of the uncertainty we’re in?’

What is in our control as leaders is the story we offer. By offering a narrative we can impact how people think and feel about the resources, changing conditions, and the task ahead. The risk is that we leave things open to interpretation, assumptions, expectations, and anxieties. Be transparent and share ‘here’s how I think and feel about it….’. This type of signposting offers a form of direction that is well within your reach, a boundary we all have access to in the most uncertain of times.

Getting it just right

We are of course talking about the adult world of work, and in that world we want to treat colleagues as the professionals they are employed to be. We can assume that as we start to state a purpose and some direction they may form ideas of their own. We don’t want to stifle creativity and unintentionally create a culture of dependency. This can result in leaders acting like the teachers and colleagues as children or students. It sounds obvious but I know far too many environments where employees are treated as if they are children or consumers of an employment service, rather than equal and active citizens ready to deploy their talents and energies as needed.

We also know the absence of direction or clarity can create a vacuum, and vacuums can be stifling. When the boundaries are too loose we are like fish out of water, gasping for oxygen.

So how do we get it right?

My proposition is that liberation in organisations comes about when we create fit-for-purpose boundaries. We can’t do this alone - we may need to work together to figure out how we create the conditions required for our work. We may need to be responsive to the feedback our teams give us, even if it doesn’t make sense to us and our personal preferences. And if navigating uncertainty is one of the challenges then we can think together about the boundaries to hold us through that. A policy of ‘sink or swim’ can be experienced as punitive - and we don’t need to let it get that far. There will be anchors if you work together to find them, even in the most ambiguous of contexts.