I’ve been working in the Digital space for well over a decade now and have spent most of those years in a subgenre of Digital: Agency. I primarily focus on delivery, program management, and digital transformations. With over a decade of experience, I’ve started to notice patterns and how to either maximize or be weary of them. I’ve started to hone-in on personality traits; ones that require less management and others that require a lot of management. I’ve also learned that when something feels off, it usually is and when I have an instinct to take the team in a slightly different direction, it’s usually the right one. All of my “practical” experience I’ll call it, the day-to-day, combined with thousands of successes and failures has heightened and sharpened my intuition. My gut. More than ever, I’ve learned to really trust my gut and take advantage of it.
Gut Instincts
Gut instincts are a combination of wisdom and experience, which combined are a lethal recipe for amazing things! I hear from many people at all levels of an organization that “they don’t know what they don’t know” or that “they need more info before they can make a decision” or insert whatever variation of those comments here. I always remind my people that regardless of the requirements, the documentation, the team, the data they have in front of them, they have their experience. Then, I ask them, “Based on your experience, what do you recommend?” They pause and hesitantly come up with a brilliant answer, possible solution, next steps, you name it! This is because of your gut and what it’s telling you is based on your wisdom and experiences, which allow you to make informed, rational decisions.
Trusting my gut comes into play in many ways, but I have found them to be divided into two categories: People Management and Engagement and Delivery. On the people management and engagement side, it’s typically about body language and what’s unsaid. On the delivery side, it’s heavily weighted toward the planning phase when it comes to estimating and timelines as well as in the “near completion” phase getting to a state of done. Where do you find yourself asking more questions than normal? Or struggling to provide an update on something because the intel just doesn’t seem right? This is your gut talking to you.
3 Scenarios to Trust Your Gut
The “gut feeling” that you keep getting is an instinctual response from your brain to protect you from making what it perceives to be the wrong decision, which is driven by your foundation of life and work experiences. I trust my gut consistently in these three scenarios.
- “It,” whatever “it” is, is outside of my expertise. In my day-to-day, I rely on subject-matter-experts (SMEs) a lot. I can’t tell you how to code something and I surely can’t log in to a system and immediately determine if those marketing campaigns are configured correctly. Yet, I can ask good questions to understand status, efficiency, quality, and timeliness. Since my expertise lies in these areas, I have an idea of what I’m expecting to hear from the SMEs, even though what they do and what they’re talking about is not my area of expertise. Depending on the answers I get, my gut (aka my experiences) will give me a positive or negative sense and guide me in what to do next.
- When someone “goes dark.” Believe it or not, this happens more than we’d all care to admit in professional settings and this topic really crosses over the boundary of people management and delivery alike, at least for me. Maybe for you, too. People set up clues for us to understand, to find the missing pieces, and ask for help. When someone goes dark it’s very rarely because they’re delinquent. It’s almost always because they need help, they’re over-tasked, or simply unaware that they need to be doing something. In all of these instances, this type of non-verbal behavior sets off my gut. It’s telling me to reach out to them to “check-in,” send an email outlining tasks/needs/priorities, or may even evaluate staffing to ensure they’re not overworked. One of these items typically opens the door enough for the person to speak up and have a safe space to come out with why they’ve gone dark, leading to problem resolution.
- Something comes out of nowhere. In agency life we do everything we can to plan, estimate, evaluate, discover, and document everything before beginning work. We spend weeks pouring over estimates and timelines. We agonize over staffing and if it’s right. If it will be efficient. So, in agency life, when something comes out of nowhere, my gut instincts start firing off like it’s the Fourth of July. In my experience, there’s always a resolution to whatever it is that now needs to be dealt with, but getting to the understanding of why this came out of nowhere must be handled sensitively and tactfully. Listening to my gut in terms of where to begin the understanding and how to start working through the solution allows me to have honest and efficient conversations with project leads and clients, without causing and over-escalation or creating a hyper-sensitive situation that will take weeks to calm down.
What’s your gut telling you?
I’m willing to bet that each of you uses or have used, “What does your gut tell you?” or “I don’t know why I just have a funny gut feeling” in your professional world. The next time you use it and more importantly the next time you have a gut feeling, stop and think about it. Ask yourself why. Allow yourself to reflect a bit on what’s causing this feeling, then start to maneuver your way through it with questions, conversation, and ultimately action.
