Somebody Takes the First Hit

Apriel Biggs: That is our responsibility: is to catch the first impact, so that you know. For us, it might feel like somebody knocked the wind out of us. For them, it might feel like you know they they cut a corner too quickly, right? Like they just brushed against something. Devon Morris: She's describing a job, not a role, not a title. A job somebody on your team is doing right now that isn't in anyone's plan, and that nobody is counting. And the whole point of the job is that you never feel it? Well, think about it. Name what you think it is, because somewhere in your organization this week, there's a conversation about somebody who's checked out. It's usually that person who was the actual opposite of that. They used to be the person that caught things early. They used to push back. They used to volunteer for everything. Now they're quieter meetings, slower to respond to emails, and they stop volunteering for anything, and the conversation is always the same conversation. Are they still engaged, or even sexier than that? Are they quiet quitting? Do they even care anymore? There's an industry built on that question. You know, engagement surveys, pulse checks, discretionary effort, stay interviews. I want to talk about why that's the wrong question, and I want to be careful about it because it's the question that I would have asked too. This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. I'm Dr. Devon Morris. This is a sidebar. Tuesdays I sit down with somebody. On Thursday I take one thing that they said, and go all the way in on it. Today, it's one sentence from Tuesday, and an argument that I think most of us are actually losing. One thing before I go anywhere with this, because I've been thinking about this for a few days now, Apriel called that responsibility ours to carry, ours to accept, and I nodded my head clearly when we were having the conversation, and I actually think that she's right about it, and I actually support it, no question. But I've come around to thinking that responsibility is a smaller version of the idea. See, a responsibility is something that you actually take on, and what she's describing is something that gets spent; those aren't the same, and the difference is the entire episode here. So here's my problem with the engagement conversation: it's just the wrong argument, and I don't mean wrong like people having it wrong. I mean, it's the wrong argument because the situation is built differently, and it's there to actually start the argument. It's the loudest thing in the room, and it's standing directly in front of the most important thing in the room. See, watch what happens the second you decide it's engagement. Everything you do next is aimed toward motivation. You know those one-on-one conversations about their goals. You know improving the recognition program. A conversation about whether they are in the right seat for them at this time, and every one of those are reasonable moves to make against the problem that this person just doesn't have. So you spend six months treating motivation; they're getting quieter, and now you got the evidence right. You see that they're checked out even more. Meanwhile, the actual thing sitting in plain view, somebody on the team finds out first every time something goes wrong, and they've been doing it long enough. That is costing them. Sometimes it's the leader. Usually, it isn't, right? It's a coach. It's a scrum master. It's a project manager, senior leader, a developer. Everybody's quietly routing the problem through because they always handled it. Apriel spent her career on transformation. I mean, she's one of those people who walks into the room when the ground is actually shaking, and here's how she describes why that person matters. Apriel Biggs: And so I spent a lot of my time working with folks in the army, and one of the things that I remember is that in combat a soldier defaults to their to their lowest level of training, and so coaches like you and I are taught how to be emotionally strong, right? And so we have tools that we can rely on in those moments, and so for someone who has a large amount of responsibility, but does not necessarily know how to be emotionally strong can wreck a team. Devon Morris: Under pressure, nobody rises to the plan. You fall to whatever you've actually practiced, which means what a person has in reserve on a bad day is the entire ball game. All right, here's the part I actually want to give you. When you use two words like they mean the same thing and they don't, trait, resource. See, a trait is something you are. Some people are resilient. Some people aren't, and that's the hand you've been dealt. And that's how almost everybody talks about this. A resource is something that you have. It's something that you can actually spend, but it's also something that can run out, and those two words are different. They got different jobs, man. And the second one is the one that actually applies. See, put on your researcher hat with me for a moment, because this is where our work actually begins. People spend their working lives building and protecting a set of resources: their energy, their attention, their emotional reserve, the stuff you draw on when something actually goes wrong. See, stress isn't an event. Stress is what happens when those resources drain fast enough, and they haven't come back. See, that's the shift. It isn't a bad day. It's an accounting balance. It's your checking book, and the loss just compounds. The more depleted someone is, the less they have left to actually protect what's still there, and so the next hit costs more, and then after that, it costs even more until that last one hits, which is why the person absorbing everything looks fine eight months ago, and then all at once it comes crashing in. Nothing dramatic happened in that last eight months, but month nine, that reserve ran out, y'all. Same things worked at the team level. Team resilience isn't the sum of everybody's grit. It's the state that the team is in, built on what it has, on what it's built, and what is put in reserve, which is kind of good news, right? Because if it can be spent, that means it can be built up. Where my own work lands is resilience sits on a path between coaching and whether team actually adapts when the ground is moving around them. Coaching doesn't make a team perform better directly. It works by building the things the team spends when things actually go wrong, and this is where you got to understand the guardrails because you can utilize it to actually build up the resource that's gonna be spent when everything is moving. So here's the part that bothers me: the person catching the first hit is doing invisible work by design. The whole point of the job is that nobody else feels it. Done well, it looks like nothing actually happened. Invisible work doesn't get counted. It's not in the plan. It's never going to be on any status report, and nobody is going to staff for it. It shows up in nobody's goals. So the better they get at doing it, the less anybody notices is actually happening, and the reward for absorbing well is actually to absorb more. That loop runs quiet for years and years and years, and here's the trap in it: the organization isn't being cruel, y'all. Not at all. Nobody's decided to do this to them. It's just the routing is efficient, and the cost is invisible. And those two things together will drain a person to death that is acting in good faith. That's the same shape that everything else is on this actual show. Nobody stopped caring. The job changed underneath them, and guess what? The agreement was never rewritten. Here's what it looks like from the other side of that, Apriel Biggs: teams become disenfranchised. They become absent. They are looking for new roles, and you see, you know, them quietly quitting, or best performers, you know, are exiting the organization, or just suddenly they've just started doing just enough in order to get their paycheck, right? Because they don't believe that their body of work matters. Devon Morris: Now go back to the top of this episode, because this is the exact person that we started with, and that is exactly the person the disengagement conversation is about to get wrong. See the second pair of words. This is the diagnosis: disengagement and depletion. Here's what depletion actually looks like. Well before anybody actually hears the word burnout. Responses get slower. Initiative drops. They stop volunteering. You don't hear as many questions in meetings. The same person that used to flag things three weeks ago has gone silent. Now write that list down and read it back to yourself. I'm waiting. No, I'm not really. I'm not gonna wait, right? Because it's the perfect description of disengagement too. Identical from the outside, kind of wearing the same clothes, the same symptoms, opposite causes. Disengagement is won't. Depletion is can't, and you treat those two things completely opposite directions. One of them you address, the other one you relieve. The silence isn't disengagement. It's an empty tank. All right, three things Monday. None of them cost any money. None of them need any permission. One, name the catcher. Ask your team one question: When things go wrong, who finds out first? You'll get a name really quick, and it probably isn't the name that's on the org chart. Whoever they name is carrying more than their job description actually says. You can't manage what has not been named. Two. Count the invisible work. Go to the actual person and ask them what they handled in the last month that never showed up on a status report, that isn't in their job description, that they're quietly not telling anybody about, and I want you to write every single thing down, all of it. That list right there is the load that nobody staffed for. Until it's on paper, it isn't real, and nobody's going to even worry about it. But that particular person who actually caught it. Three, replenish. Don't just recognize. Here's a third pair of words for you, and it's the one that people get wrong the most: recognition and replenishment. Thanking somebody for absorbing costs you nothing. It gives them actually nothing in return. It confirms the load; it doesn't move a single thing. See, replenishment is subtraction. Take something off the list, put a second person on that path so they aren't the only door. Give real recovery time after a hard stretch, and then don't schedule over it. Recognition is a receipt; it isn't a deposit. Now, here's what would make me wrong and and really put egg on my face about this because I want you to check this instead of just taking my word. Go ask the question. If the name that comes back is the actual person with the most authority, the one person that has to approve everything, this is definitely not what I've been describing. That's a bottleneck. That is not the catcher. That's a different problem. It deserves a different fix. Taking work off their plate will not change anything whatsoever. See, the thing that you have to understand is that the name that comes back is the person with the most traffic, the one everything routes through, because they're always just handling it, whether or not they're supposed to. This is where you should be looking. Authority is a design problem. Traffic is a resource problem. That's one more pair of words for you. And if you ask everybody and they name different people, you've learned something too. That means nobody's catching it. It's landing on the whole team every single time, and that's the third thing. Look, here's the deal. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict, and part of what puts a team in that position is the one person quietly running out while everybody else thinks things are fine, you don't fix it with the pep talk. You don't fix it with an engagement survey. You fix it by finding out who's catching it, counting what they've been carrying, and putting something back. Resilience isn't a trait; it's a resource. It's something you're spending, but the question is, do you know who is? And if you want to talk about this and what it looks like for your team, go to thelaggingteam.com/start. That's thelaggingteam.com/start. That's the sidebar. Now you know where to look. Oh yeah, one last thing before Tuesday: ask your team who finds out first. Just that. Then tell me what the name is. Right, come back. Whether it surprises you or not is what I really want to hear from you. Comment right wherever you're listening. Come and find me on LinkedIn if you need to. Next Tuesday is going to be another conversation. Make sure you follow the show wherever you're listening, and it'll show up on its own. Trust Devon Morris: me.