Falling Behind Is a Position, Not a Verdict

Devon Morris: I wasn't lazy. I wasn't unqualified. I was behind. Those are two different things, and the difference is the whole show. This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. Every week, we work to change that outcome. He drove four hours to get to work, not a commute, a distance you cover on a Sunday night and come back from on a Friday, he'd been doing it a good while by the time I had met him, because he couldn't find work near home, and he couldn't move closer to the job. He showed up every day. He was never late. He never complained, and if you asked him about the company, he'd tell you that he believed in what the company stood for, and I think he half meant it. He told me once that he had not been to a training in seven years. He stopped before the recession, and then the recession came, and it handed everybody a reason not to start again. That year, the company that he worked for was named one of America's best companies to work for, and it was like the second or third year that that had happened by that time. And one of the reasons it made the list was that nobody left, and they pretty much had the same exact sentiment as him. See, the thing that you have to understand is both of these things were true at the same time. Only one of them was on a plaque in the lobby, and nobody was actually lying-not the company, not the list, not even him. The number was real. Almost nobody left. Is the truth? They just couldn't. This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. I'm Dr. Devon Morris. Tuesdays I sit down with somebody who's been in it, and Thursdays I take one thing from that conversation and go all the way in on it. Today is special because there's no guest. Today is a story, and it's the reason the show is called what it's called. I came into that organization the second time they tried the change. Yeah, I was there for the first as well, and that happened prior to the recession. It was all about new ways of working, teams delivering around shorter cycles. But inside of a year, they kicked it out the building, and the story afterwards was always the method didn't work. It was never we didn't do it right. It always was. It just doesn't work here. A few years later, they wanted to try again. That's when they brought me back. Small group of us going team to team. Dozens and dozens of teams were making it happen. I say I want to be straight with you about what I believe walking in because I was wrong and it actually matters. I believe that the first attempt failed because of the politics, which I had no control over. I'm a contractor. I know what I'm good at, and I'm still good at it. That's not the problem I ran into. What I found in that building was not resistance. Resistance would have been easy. Resistance speaks to you. It argues with you in a room. It tells you why your thing will not work here. It gives you something to push against. What I found was agreement. Everybody nodding their head. Sessions went fine, and nothing actually moved. Nobody said the hard thing out loud. Not at any level ever ever ever, and here's what I didn't understand yet: management wasn't trying to change anything either, not blocking, not fighting, just not doing. The initiative existed, the behavior didn't. The people, they were frustrated. You could feel it. You couldn't get anybody to say it though. Something else that took me years to see is people had turned staying into an obligation, like they aligned themselves with the mission of the company. If you're somewhere for a long time and you didn't choose it, you have to find a reason. Nobody can stand being somewhere that long and believe it with nothing behind it. So they found one. They lined themselves up with what the company stood for, and they meant it just as much as the company did, and everybody supported. So it became like a real social thing, which means that if you were surveyed, you really got good numbers because you provided them, and every person filling out those surveys were telling you the truth as they understood it. And I know that's not just my memory of one building because somebody went and checked. Deloitte ran a survey right in the middle of those years. Eight out of 10 people said they planned to stay with their employer. Three of those 10 said they were unhappy in the job. Now sit with those two numbers right next to each other for a second, because most of the companies who read the report only ever looked at the first number. I don't want to gloss over something that hopefully you didn't miss, but I know you heard me say seven years. The way that he said it to me wasn't bitter. It was closer to being a joke. The kind of joke that you would make about a thing that you stopped expecting to actually change. He stopped going before the actual recession, so the recession wasn't it. And training is normally the very first thing that everybody's gonna cut, period. But after a while, nobody asked him, and after a while, it became a fact about him. Nobody decided it. It just accumulated. Now here's what a manager sees: he shows up, he does his work, it's fine, never volunteers, doesn't improve a thing. Not a process. Not tooling. Not even his own situation. Bring him an idea. He's perfectly pleasant about it, right? And nothing still happens. And there's a word for that, and it arrives really fast. Complacent, coasting, comfortable. Not a change agent is what I would say, right? But your organization has a term for it, so use that term. But I want you to notice something about every single one of those words. Every one of them is a description of a person. See, he wasn't a person who wouldn't move, he's a person who couldn't move, and there's a difference. Couldn't move house. Couldn't find work near home. Wasn't close enough to retirement to get out of the rat race, you know the recession hit us all at that time. Needed a few more years actually to make sure he could shore things up. That's it. That's the whole explanation. There's no second layer to that. There's not another story. And I want to be precise about couldn't because it's easy to hear that as me being generous about somebody I liked, at the bottom of that stretch in this country, there were roughly six people out of work for every single job that was open at that time. So six for every one. That's not a tough market. That's a room with no door in it. Okay, which brings me back to that list: the best places to work list. One of the things that that list rewards is retention, lower turnover, people actually staying, people looking forward to going there. A retention number only means something if leaving was an option. In that building, in those years, it was not. So the number went up, and it went to the scorecard. The scorecard turned into a plaque, and the plaque said it was a really healthy place for everybody to work. Nobody committed fraud. The number was actually real. It was just measuring the door, not the people. Now, here's the part I had wrong for a long time, and it's most of the reason I wanted to tell this story in the first place. I assumed his leadership had made a judgment about him, sat in a room somewhere, and decided he was done. They hadn't made any judgment at all. He got the normal thing. Review said the normal things. The language that's in every review means nothing. It offended nobody. Nobody encouraged him to make a move. Nobody named what was happening. Nobody said the obvious sentence out loud. For years, I just thought that was cowardice. I don't think that anymore. They were stuck too. All of them were stuck as the thing, and I didn't see that at all. I mean, a whole hierarchy standing in the same market he was standing in, same lack of a door, and you cannot stand in front of somebody and tell them to go find their future when you can't even find yours. You don't have the words for it. You hear yourself saying, and it doesn't sound real. So nobody said anything to anybody, up, down, sideways, or crossways for years, and we ended up with a building full of people saying nothing looks from a distance exactly like a building full of people saying everything is fine. So the question at hand is what did I do, man? I ran the playbook. I'm good at playbooks. I really am. Goals, ownership. Give him something that matters. See if it wakes up something. The stretch assignment, the conversation where you get somebody to reconnect with why they started doing this in the first place. You know, finding that why. I ran everything in the playbook, right? Even extra stuff, and every one of those tools has the same thing sitting underneath it, and I never once looked at it. Every one of them assumes the person is a variable. Change something inside that person, and the situation moves. The problem is, he wasn't the variable; his position was. And when you run the playbook on somebody with no room to move, it isn't help, y'all. It's pressure applied to a person with nowhere to put it. The only thing it produces is one more thing they're failing at. This time in front of somebody who says he's really there to help. Yeah, that was me. Nothing worked, and I mean nothing worked. I doubled down on that. I want to be honest with you about that. This very first episode, I did not fix this, y'all. Couldn't. I didn't really know how. See, what happened instead is that I stopped. I stopped bringing him things. I started just talking to him, you know, regularly, just regular conversations for a long time about work, and then about things that wasn't work, and he got out of that. He didn't get a development plan at all. What he got was somebody he could say a true thing to in a building when nobody was saying true things. And I'll tell you plainly, that was uncomfortable for me. I'm an introvert, you know. I felt like giving up. I felt like I wasn't doing my job. See, I'm very proud of the work that I do. Every instinct said to do something, and the honest answer in sometimes for me was just was nothing I could do. I have to. I had to feel better, really about making him feel better, and that's selfish. Let me not put you in suspense. Ultimately, he retired. It took him longer than he expected, a few more years, but that was everybody, and it was due to the recession. But he got out of there, and he got out more or less on his own terms, which is more than most people can say, you know, I still think about him to this day, and I remember his name clearly. I remember talking to him on afternoons in one of the buildings. I won't name what building, and I remember that he wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't a bad employee. He was quite pleasurable, had a lot of great sage advice for me, because I was younger and you know just really bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Now, you could listen to all of that and file that under that was the recession, a bad decade, but that's over, it doesn't apply right now. So let me give you two numbers about right now where we are. There are more than 7 million open jobs in this country at this moment. You heard me, 7 million. That is not a room with no door in it. That is a building with doors standing wide open, and people are leaving their jobs at almost exactly the rate they left back when there was nowhere to go. Hmm. Read those two things together, because I don't think most leaders have. See, in 2010, nobody moved because there was nothing to move to. That was a locked door. Everybody could see it, and he was honest about it. Right now, the door is open, and people are still not walking through it. I'm not going to stand here and you know tell you why that is. I have ideas. We'll talk about that on Thursday, maybe. I'd rather be careful about that and not move so fast. What I'll tell you though is what it means for you, and it's this: you cannot look at a door anymore and know anything whatsoever. See, in 2010, you could. Nobody was leaving, and the reason was no visible space. Today, somebody in your team can be stuck. They can be flat, done. Far from the last time anybody invested in them, in a market where on paper they have options, which makes the whole thing quieter, a lot harder to see. See, back then a frozen team looked frozen. If you bothered to look, now a frozen team looks like a team that you have chosen. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. A verdict is a judgment about what somebody is. It comes with a sentence attached to it, and it's finished. Complacent is a verdict. Checked out — verdict. Not a change agent — verdict. You can't do anything useful with a verdict except carry it. That's it. A position is a location. You got to it by some route, and the route can be retraced, which means a position can change, and the person standing in it doesn't have to become somebody else first in order to do that. See, he was never complacent. He was four hours from home in a market with six people waiting for every one job, seven years out from last time he trained or spent dollars on himself. That's a position. Every part of it coordinates, and here's what it costs to call it the other thing. In all those years, nobody ever asked him a question that would have found any of that out. No one, including me, because you don't investigate a verdict. A verdict is the answer. One more thing before I let you go. This show is about teams that are behind, and let me be honest. 10 days before it launched this show, it didn't have a trailer in any form whatsoever. The web address that I'm going to say at the end of this episode didn't exist. It was due three weeks ago. There were two people on the email list, and one of them was me. I'm not telling you that to be charming. I'm telling you that so you know exactly what I mean when I say the one thing I'm going to keep saying: I wasn't lazy, I wasn't unqualified, I was behind. Those are two different things, and the difference is the whole show. So here's the one thing that I want you to do with this sometime this week. Look at your team and ask yourself one question, and be, you know, really honest. Who here cannot leave? Not who won't, who can't, and I know how that sounds with 7 million jobs open. That's exactly why it's worth asking. In 2010, the question answered itself. Today, you have to actually go find out. Don't do anything with the answer yet. Just name it. If you want to talk more about what things look like for your team, go to thelaggingteam.com. That's thelaggingteam.com. You will find in the feed already the sidebar that is associated with this episode, and in it I take back something I said in the last 10 minutes. That's it. We're gonna take it apart really soon. Enjoy, and thank you. Thank you for joining us. Where every Tuesday and Thursday we work toward bridging the gap for teams that are behind.