A Guide to Dealing with UH-OHs

Are any of the following folks familiar to you?The project manager who’s always singing dirges in the key of risk, no matter how well things are going.The ops person who keeps flagging a vendor dependency nobody else is worried about.The client-facing account manager who can “just tell” the customers are starting to drift even though the dashboard looks like a winning slot machine to everyone else.These folks might annoy you.They might be yucking on your collective yum.They might be bringing down the energy in every meeting.And they might be dead wrong.But the answer isn’t to get rid of them, or sideline them, or to give them useful feedback such as “for the love of Mike, can you be please just be a tiny bit more effing positive?”.Because here’s the thing.The folks who sense danger sooner and more acutely than everyone else have a vital role to play.Meet the UH-OHsThey’re what biologists would call a “hyper-responsive sentinel node.” (Aren’t you glad I’m not a biologist?)I prefer to think of them as Uncomfortably Hyper-Observant Humans, or UH-OHs.If you picture a bell curve, UH-OHs are the people whose nervous systems are calibrated to pick up weaker signals of danger earlier than anyone else.If you were living in our ancestral environment, in a hunter-gatherer band, you might not enjoy hanging out with UH-OHs, but you’d be grateful for their warning when the drought arrived or the locusts descended.In your organization, they’re still sniffing the air for danger, for fluctuation, for risk. And sometimes they imagine it; seeing patterns in one-offs and extending short-term random wobbles into ominous trend-lines.The Twin Dangers of UH-OHsUH-OHs pose two problems for leaders who, rightly, want their workplaces to be energetic, positive, optimistic, cheerful domains of achievement.First, their “constant drama” can bring down the energy of the team and the entire enterprise.Second, the room can bristle at their concerns, so that UH-OHs learn to keep their worried mouths shut. Then what feels like a calm, happy meeting is actually a dashboard with duct tape over the check engine light. What feels like better team chemistry is actually less information reaching you.Fortunately, these two problems aren’t opposite ends of the continuum. Rather, they’re both symptoms of a culture’s suboptimal relationship with the airing of risk.The trick is to honor the information that the UH-OHs bring and actively request it.How to Turn an UH-OH into an AssetMake Uh-OH into a function rather than a character trait. And celebrate the people who are highly skilled at it, the same way you’d celebrate those who are great at sales or strategy or inspiration.“Hey, you have a nose for these things. Can you take on the role of ‘early warning detector” and bring us your concerns as soon as they pop up? We won’t impulsively act on them or ignore them. Rather, we’ll take them seriously, debate them rigorously, and use them to keep our SWOT analysis balanced between positive and negative.”Given that explicit permission and encouragement, your UH-OHs can let go of their stridency or defensiveness, and name with clarity and pride what they’re offering:“This might not be anything, but my spidey-sense says we should look into this more deeply.”Now you can process early warnings and “constructive” feedback as data rather than attack.You can have debate without drama, and discernment without dread.Your MissionWho are the UH-OHs on your team?Instead of bracing when they raise a concern, be curious and open: “Tell me more. What are you picking up that the rest of us might be missing?”Ask them to evaluate their concern: “What’s the evidence that this is signal, and what’s the evidence that this is noise?”If you both agree, bring it to the team to get other data points and perspectives.You might discover that your most annoying UH-OH is one of your team’s biggest assets. And opening that channel of communication can actually reduce stress and drama by ensuring that you’re pinging the horizon for unpleasant surprises.