Who does the thinking?

Dispatch · to the desk of one working leader

Who does the thinking?

The observation

A few years ago I was leading HR for a group of distribution facilities. I'd spent the day at one of them, and the operations manager walked me out to my car with his safety vest still folded over his arm. He waited until we were past the gate to say anything.

One of his shift supervisors had missed the handover twice. The second time, the day team put a hold on a damaged pallet and the night team loaded it onto an outbound truck before anyone told them about the hold. The manager had been carrying it around for a week, and standing between two parked cars he asked me for a script, word for word.

He'd promoted this supervisor himself. "If I go soft on this," he said, "he'll think it's fine." So he did what most of us would do. He sat the man down, said it clearly, said it kindly, got agreement, and the whole thing took five minutes. Six weeks later he called me about the same supervisor and the same handover.

Managers have been asking me for that script ever since.

It arrives at the same point every time. Something slipped, it's the second time, and there's an hour to get through before the week is out. They want the words, and they're holding a standard with the one tool they trust.

The pattern

He didn't want to be told to be a coach. The numbers on that site were his, and a coach sounded like somebody who asks questions and then lives with whatever comes back.

That's a fair thing to refuse. A manager who stops being the person on the hook has given away the thing that made the conversation matter. What I had in mind was twenty minutes on a Thursday. He could stay exactly who he was.

Press harder on the standard alone and you hear less about what's in the way, which is the information that would fix it. That was the paradox he was in, and Amy Edmondson laid it out in The Fearless Organization in 2018.

Psychological safety on one axis, accountability for performance standards on the other, four zones on a two-by-two. The one everybody tries to avoid is the comfortable team that stops improving, and safety didn't put them there. Dropping the standard did.

Look at where he actually was. High standard, low safety, which is the anxiety zone: people pushed to perform and careful about what they admit. Problems surface late in that corner, which is exactly what a missed handover is. The pallet went out on a truck before the news reached anyone who could stop it.

In that conversation, who does the thinking?

Two kinds of question, and written down they look the same. An inquisitive question has an answer you're already holding: ask when it'll be fixed and you know roughly what you want to hear, so the pause is just you waiting for it. The other kind you can't predict, and the answer might be something you set up yourself.

People know which one they're in, and they know fast. Whatever it sounds like from where you're sitting, the person answering can tell a file has been opened, and once that happens the answers get shorter and more careful.

It happens in a single move and you can't see it from your side. You start curious, you hear something you already have an opinion about, and the next question is one you know the answer to.

His five minutes came back six weeks later. He'd held the standard and done the thinking, both, and the supervisor had agreed to a plan built without him. He found out later where the handover sheet actually lived: on a clipboard in an office the night crew doesn't walk past.

Hold this line

The standard goes on the table before any question does. After that you can be as curious as you like, because they already know where you stand.

The move

There's probably a conversation already on your calendar. Before it, write the standard in a single sentence: what great looks like, and by when. Say that sentence out loud first, then ask.

Four questions.

What's your read on how this went?

What made it harder than you expected?

What are you going to do differently?

And what else?

The last one is Michael Bungay Stanier's, from The Coaching Habit, where he calls it the best coaching question in the world. The first answer is usually the one that was already sitting there, and the second is the plan, which is why it's worth asking twice.

Then wait. The pause runs longer than you want it to, and filling it hands the work back to you, so count to ten if you need something to do with your hands. The whole thing takes twenty minutes instead of five, and the first two or three feel slow.

Push any answer until it's specific, a name, a number, a step you could put on a calendar. The date arrives inside it without your having to ask for one. "I'll stay closer to it" is where most of these conversations end. Closer how?

If it stays general after you've asked twice, say what you need and set the date yourself. You asked first, and that still counts.

The standard is yours to hold.
The thinking is theirs to do.

Which conversation this week could use the extra fifteen minutes? If you run it, tell me what the fourth question got you. I read every reply.

See you Tuesday.

Rui

P.S.  Worth your margin: Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit. Short, practical, and the chapter on "And what else?" earns the whole book.

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