By Dr Than Lwin Tun
NAVIGATING the Grey Areas – If you’re the person who’s doing a task that is not clearly defined, your initial reaction might be confusion, frustration, and even blaming someone else.
The Oxfords dictionary’s definition of a grey area: is “an ill-defined situation or field not readily conforming to a category or to an existing set of rules.”
When dealing with the grey areas, here are 3 steps to help you sort it out: Step One: Analyze whether the statement you are making is always true or whether are there different rules or societal rules/norms. Step Two: Consider whether there are house rules or personal rules based on where the person lives or their past experiences. Step Three: Create an “okay, not okay” grid and list those different rules. Make the grey area, black and white. Use a grid to teach these concepts and create less confusion.
There are numerous and subtle grey areas in our society and it can be difficult to catch all of them. These 3 steps will help you think through the grey areas and turn them into black and white. Turning the grey to black and white makes your teaching more effective and the learner better equipped for a world full of many shades of grey.
How to deal with Grey Areas in the workplace – An important skill in the workplace is figuring out what to do in situations that aren’t clear-cut. In corporate speak, we call this “navigating the grey areas,” What does it mean? It means there’s not just one way to get things done, not every situation at your work is black and white. There might be times when it’s not crystal clear what the steps are in a process, or there may be a few ways to do those steps, and it’s not clear which one is correct.
What Grey Areas Look Like; Example 1: The Company made changes to the organizational structure and certain roles were changed or eliminated, which left responsibilities and tasks in the grey area.
Example 2: There was a new marketing campaign with techniques and content that had never been used previously. Because it didn’t follow the exact process of all the other projects, it left a lot of questions about how to get it done. Who was going to do what? Who was going to delegate tasks?
What you can do instead: Be curious – Is there something to learn from this situation, suggest solutions- Do you have a new way to do it, Great. Put that idea out there, but be ready to listen to other ideas as well, and consider picking up the slack- Can you do more and know that the responsibility is a team effort when there is a grey area – Can you solicit the help of others and be open to their way of doing things.
Instead of perceiving grey zones as a cause for alarm, top executives should try to understand why they exist. The top management should make the effort to watch grey zones for serious abuses of time and resources — but with the awareness that, more often than not, grey zones signal a higher aspiration among employees that immediate supervisors believe worthy of pursuit.
Paradoxically, grey zones can also provide a measure of professionalism or engagement. Though senior executives might not see grey-zone activity right away, direct supervisors are quick to notice it. It’s worth thinking about bringing grey zones out into the open by finding official ways for employees to engage their occupational identities.
Managing the Grey Areas breaks fresh ground. An amalgam of philosophy, science, art, medicine, business and history – ‘Managing’ delves into such topics as values, ethics, decision-making, incentives, staffing, critical thinking, communication and more. In Managing the Grey Areas, Jerry Manas explores the most challenging dilemmas that leaders struggle with, offering guidelines, principles and tools to help managers navigate these murky waters. He addresses challenges and issues regarding the management of grey areas such as ensuring accountability without micromanagement, implementing the right level of internal processes, balancing individual needs with organizational goals, communicating with simplicity and context, assembling teams with the right mix of people, creating positive images for organizations, teams and products and building flexible, yet integrated organizations. Managing the Grey Areas is about understanding and managing complexity, rather than taking black & white approaches, ultimately toward leading with grace and humanity – as well as improved morale, productivity and the many other benefits such leadership brings.
The power of embracing the grey areas – Learning how to live in grey areas can have a bigger impact on your life than you might realize. In fact, it can help you: Experience less anxiety – Black-or-white thinking feeds anxiety, worry, doubt, and fear. If there are only two options, you’ll feel like your chances of happiness or success are much slimmer. Accept imperfections- Perfectionism is dangerous and unhealthy. Because it’s impossible to be perfect, setting standards of perfection will always leave us feeling like we come up short. Grey areas allow you to see that even if “perfect” is not achievable, “good” is an acceptable alternative. Develop healthier habits-People who think in black or white tend to try to avoid grey areas at all costs. This often leads to unhealthy habits — alcoholism, drug use, numbing behaviours, etc. Embracing the grey can help you be more comfortable with the uncertainty of the middle ground, so these unhealthy behaviours don’t feel as necessary. Be more positive-the negativity bias states that negative things tend to affect us more profoundly than positive things. That is if your day is filled with five good things and one bad thing, you’ll probably still focus on the bad thing. When you have black-or-white thinking, which effectively makes everything either “good” or “bad,” with no room in between, you’re more likely to let the negative have more of an impact on your mood and your life. Grey areas can help you see that most things are somewhere between “good” and “bad”, and you don’t have to see everything as one or the other.
Remember, a job description is never just black and white. A workplace is full of grey areas. Even though it can feel a little unnerving when you can’t control what’s happening, remember that you can control what you do in those situations.
Furthermore, in order to make gray area management more effective and efficient, not only we may find it useful to adapt, use, and adopt the experiences that have been documented and actions but also, we need to conduct collective thinking, a collaborative approach, respecting each other and competency attitude.
References
-Managing the Grey Areas – Essential Insights for Leading People, Projects & Organizations – by Jerry Manas
-https://www.graymattercareercoach.com/resources
-https://hbr.org/2008/05/ working-in-the-gray-zone
-https://design.org/how-to-live-in-gray-areas
