Why you need to embrace knowledge exchange between leaders and staff

**This post is written by Michael Ferrabee, a former senior executive with the Canadian government for more than 20 years. **

• **The problem: **Manager-subordinate meetings often meander.
• **Why it matters: **This is where trust is established.
• **The solution: **Be deliberate and strategic.

LMX sounds like the upmarket edition of a fancy new sports car, or maybe the three-digit code for an airport near Las Vegas or Monaco. Those would have been my guesses until about a week ago. Then I learned last Monday that it stands for “Leader-Member Exchange”, an academic theory.

The theory suggests that interaction within organisations depends heavily on relationships that are forged through these “exchanges”. When they work well the leader provides their subordinate with interesting work, shares important insights, and allows them to do cool stuff. When they don’t work, the leader gives their subordinate the boring transactional stuff that most people don’t like.

If you’ve had people reporting to you for any period of time, or have had more than one manager in your working life, this seems so much like common sense that it borders on the mundane. “Duh”, as my teenage son would say.

As self-evident as it seems, it also seems like no one has taken this seriously as something that can be managed. I have been training and advising people on how to manage these exchanges for 15 years, but until last Monday didn’t know it had a name.

Exchanging knowledge

Of course, the most important exchange is the one-on-one meeting between the leader and the person who reports to them. Here is my best advice:

Respect the time of busy people: Time is the one thing you can’t buy, win or bargain for more of. If you need a decision or direction, lead with it – don’t start with some long song-and-dance. If you don’t need a decision or direction, cancel the meeting – you’ll be a hero.

Be strategic with your issue: Every manager has had someone at some point just come and dump an issue on their desk and – directly, or more often in-directly – try to turn their problem into your problem. Come with solutions, and if you don’t have one, at least the outline of a path that could get you there.

Think about what they would have to do to say “yes”. Our world is our world, but it isn’t their world. They do different things and many more things than just manage us. Ask yourself: can they say “yes”? because often they can’t. They may have to get approval above them; they may have to get money from somewhere else; they may not have the extra bodies to make it happen. If this is the case, propose you “look into” making it happen and get back to them. They will say “yes” to this, and then you can go away and figure out how to help them get a “yes” from others.

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