I 💛 yellow flags

Hi there,

I'm sharing some thoughts today on yellow flags: One technique to get your team to start bringing up issues before they become dumpster fires.

The null hypothesis: Just get everything back on track, and you'll be fine.

Some of the most timeless work advice I've received is to not surprise your boss. Surprises in business are not often the fun kind:

• "That customer wrote a scathing review and shared it with their 2 million followers"

• "I haven't finished the analysis we're supposed to share at the board meeting tomorrow"

• "We got the data late from marketing, so there's no way we'll have this done on time"

Yikes. But it doesn't have to be that way.

The nasty surprises are byproducts of an unhelpful line of thinking that your team member is practicing. It goes something like this: I can't show anything as being off track. If something is off track, that means it's my fault. If it's my fault, that means I'm not credible, bad at my job, probably going to get yelled at, one step away from getting canned. If I can just get everything back on track before anyone notices, we're all good, and nobody has to know.

Dramatic, I know, but I bet we've all been there.

An aha moment: Yellow =/= red, and yellow = solvable

One of my managers at McKinsey very thankfully flipped this thinking on its head for me early in my career. We were working on a wildly chaotic project, with a large team. As we kicked off, she acknowledged that things were inevitably going to go wrong, and explicitly asked us to bring up issues before they really hit. In her parlance, to raise yellow flags. It's a simple but powerful metaphor.

A red flag feels dramatic. And usually it means something is truly wrong. The deliverable is late, the customer is pissed, the team member has quit. There's a gulp and a squirm before the news comes out.

A yellow flag, on the other hand, is an early warning sign. Sometimes it means there's action we can take to get things back to green. Sometimes it means sit tight and keep an eye on things. Either way, it leaves you feeling more in control and in a better position to solve the problem.

• "This customer is truly, royally pissed. I'm going to give them a call, but depending on how it goes I might need your help talking them down"

• "I'm getting stuck on this analysis for next week's board meeting - who do you think could help me through it?"

• "We still haven't gotten data from marketing. We really need it by Friday, so if they haven't replied by tomorrow I'll stop by their office and check in"

Yellow flags are a win-win. As a team member, you're empowered with specific language to bring up issues and solve them before they become crises. And as a manager, you know where to apply your efforts and how to help your team… and you avoid the dreaded surprises.

How to get this rolling and avoid those scary surprises

There are two simple steps to start using yellow flags with your teams:

1. Ask your team members to raise yellow flags: Have the direct conversation. Give them the language. And then in regular team meetings and 1:1s, keep asking. "Any yellow flags to raise?"

2. Celebrate when it happens: This part is simple, but far less easy. Your immediate, gut response to someone bringing you a problem or a risk likely isn’t jumping for joy... but at least for a while during this shift, it needs to be. In fact, if your team has been hiding issues, your reaction to problems in the past is almost definitely at least part of the problem. Especially in the first few weeks after you introduce this language, explicitly thank your team for waving the yellow flag! "Thanks for raising that early… what do you think we should do next?" Without the positive reinforcement, it will still feel scary to bring up things that are going poorly. With a little coaching, your team will quickly be flagging growing problems and letting you know what they’re doing to get it back on track (or where they need your help)

It's worth noting, if you're an a**hole to your team, they're probably not going to bring you issues no matter what cute metaphor you employ. You'll need to do some work and build psychological safety. But that’s its own can of worms.

What do you think, will you be giving the yellow flag language a shot with your team? Do you already use it?

Thanks for reading,

Abby