Self-Awareness for Managers: Avoiding the antipatterns that block your team

Make it safe for team members to disagree with you by actively thanking people who bring up concerns or counterpoints

Ask for feedback in neutral ways that don’t put pressure on people to agree, like “what challenges are you seeing?” rather than “do you disagree?”

Talk to people at different career levels and parts of the organization to get diverse perspectives on how decisions impact different groups

Remember that people have built-in incentives to agree with managers (performance reviews, career growth) which can obscure real feedback

Be explicit about priorities and make it clear when things can wait or be deprioritized to avoid creating “iceberg requests” that seem small but have hidden costs

Follow through when people give feedback - demonstrate that input leads to actual changes

Reframe disagreement as helping rather than confrontation - suggestions and concerns are valuable data points

Don’t assume you know the full impact of decisions - actively seek out perspectives from those directly affected

Create regular opportunities for unfiltered feedback through casual conversations and by building trust over time

Guard against the “palace of theory” where decisions sound good in isolation but create problems in practice for teams