For some people, grey is too uncomfortable. They seek structure, definition, black and white.
To create that structure, people hallucinate crises to make up rules.
They hallucinate all the ways someone can imagine a choice or action turning out “bad” and then create rules designed to “prevent it.”
Many leaders and managers are professional crisis hallucinators. They attempt to define every possible way something bad can happen, then craft rules and policies that are said to be there to prevent it.
In truth, most of those rules and policies exist to punish someone who does the thing in spite of the rules and policies. Even when what they did may have been a better choice than compliance.
And when there is a crisis, you end up with more new rules. As if the thing someone did wasn’t probably already against some policy, and as if someone else in the future won’t do it “because there’s a rule specifically ‘preventing’ it.”
Trust Space
In any context shared by more than one human, there is a space of trust.
On one end are choices and behaviors that are explicitly prohibited.
The other end is made up of things explicitly allowed.
In between exists a grey area. All of those “Yes, but” and “What if” questions that your professional hallucinators come up with usually live here in the grey.
Grey
High performing teams thrive in high-trust environments. That means spaces where decisions and actions made in the grey space are accepted to be genuine, best intentions, positive behavior. It does not mean that there is no grey zone.
In places that try to eliminate the grey zone, there is no trust. Something has been allowed or disallowed. Often with a flowchart of conditions and modifiers that make the same action acceptable in one case and totally not in another.
Even with a rulebook 10000 pages thick, there will still be edge cases. Plus, everyone’s so busy consulting the rulebook before doing anything.
Nobody wants to be a worker in a place with that level of rules. It’s crippling and insulting.
The alternative to “everything is black or white” is not “nothing is black or white.” That’s the land of caprice, where everyone is paralyzed because it’s unclear what’s okay and what’s forbidden.
What works in between those extremes?
Just Right
There is no perfect formulaic answer to “how much grey is just right?”
It depends on your leadership first and foremost. If the CEO and executives are directive, right/wrong people, then the grey zone gets dark and small for team members quickly.
If your leaders (or you, if you’re the leader) default to trust, then establishing clear guardrails centered on widely-known and lived values will create a healthy grey area. It will also create safety for people who have concerns about “is this getting too grey?” to speak up and ask for help.
People need familiar shapes and touchpoints to navigate in the grey, just like being able to see outlines of furniture when you’re walking through your living room at 3am.
When you’ve just moved in to a new place, you don’t have it all muscle-memory-mapped, and you bump into the ottoman. Live there a few years, and you set a course through obstacles without conscious thought.
Can you help build that kind of trust culture? Think about what that would unleash for your teams.
You can do this. I can help.