When I started my career as a manager, I was told that I should never be prescriptive: if I did I would end up owning the problem I was never to own any of my report’s problems.

As time passed by, I tried to follow that rule but somehow it never felt totally right for me. I had experienced good managers who sometimes were prescriptive and I had also experienced bad managers who never were. Clearly, things were not black and white and there was something missing.

What was missing, I know now, is that being prescriptive it’s not a binary situation, it’s a spectrum. Being a manager requires sometimes to be prescriptive and sometimes requires to take a passive role, and most of the time, it requires being somewhere in the middle. Only truly effective managers are able to understand for each situation in which part of the spectrum they need to be.

100% prescriptive managers

Managers who are prescriptive in all situations are not fun to work with. They tell people what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. They ignore people’s input and disregard the work they put together, and often invalidate people’s ideas without any effort to understand the rationale behind it.

This type of manager often (always) thinks their way is the best (and possible only) way. They often drive hard-working, motivated people away until they lose any connection with the work they are supposed to do.

0% prescriptive managers

On the other side of the spectrum, you find managers who always take a passive role in any discussion or problem. This type of manager never has a point of view and never stands for anything. If you report to one of these managers chances are that every time you share a situation with them looking for a different point of view you get nothing.

Contrary to what these managers tend to think, they are not really empowering their team. Rather, they are presenting themselves as someone inconsequential to whom there’s no point in bouncing ideas off.

How and when you should be effectively prescriptive

If being prescriptive is a spectrum, then there has to be a place and time for it.

Imagine, and if you are a manager you probably have experienced this, your team is having a discussion about a given problem and you see that the conversation is going in circles, there are too many assumptions being made on top of each other, there is really no decisions made and it seems the topic is about to run dry.

What you should not do at this point is to tell them the decision they need to make or even tell them to make a decision. You would be taking agency out of them. Instead, let it play out. Let the conversation go in circles a couple of times, let the same question be asked and answered more than once. Give people a chance to recognize the pattern and self-correct. But pay attention! Too much of it and people may start to get frustrated.

If you still don’t see any progress, I would suggest taking a step further and start asking questions to move the conversation in the direction you think it needs to go. If you feel the conversation is going around solutions for a problem but you sense it is not clear which is the problem to solve, then literally ask “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?”. You will be surprised at how many times a group of people discuss solutions to a problem without really understanding what the problem is.

If you feel the conversation goes around a solution that doesn’t address a concern that is obvious to you then ask how is that solution supposed to address a given concern.

This approach is very effective because it allows you to move the conversation’s focus if you think it needs moving without making any assumptions about the people involved. By asking questions, and listening carefully to the answers, you may find out that the concerns you thought were not addressed actually were or that other people had also recognized the conversation wasn’t moving but were not confident enough to say it or didn’t know how to steer it. That’s helpful information.

As a last resort, if you’re not successful with questions, I think it is totally fine to be prescriptive. At the end of the day, you as a manager are responsible for the direction the team takes and the output it generates. But by doing this as a last resort, after giving the team time to figure out things by themselves and after asking questions to help them figure them out, you have earned being prescriptive.

In my experience, I’ve found that this is the most effective way to behave as a manager. Most people have really appreciated my being prescriptive in these types of situations, where they recognized they needed a push in a direction, albeit not necessarily the “right” one. Even if they were not able to recognize the patterns and break them, they usually recognized they were not able to make progress and needed someone to help them move.

Sometimes all a team needs to get unstuck is to move in any direction so that they can adjust it later by themselves.