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Falling Behind Is a Position, Not a Verdict · The Lagging Team

• 0:00
  Devon Morris: I wasn't lazy. I wasn't unqualified. I was
• 0:06
  behind. Those are two different things, and the difference is
• 0:13
  the whole show. This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is
• 0:21
  a position, not a verdict. Every week, we work to change that
• 0:27
  outcome. He drove four hours to get to work, not a commute, a
• 0:37
  distance you cover on a Sunday night and come back from on a
• 0:41
  Friday, he'd been doing it a good while by the time I had met
• 0:45
  him, because he couldn't find work near home, and he couldn't
• 0:49
  move closer to the job. He showed up every day. He was
• 0:55
  never late. He never complained, and if you asked him about the
• 1:00
  company, he'd tell you that he believed in what the company
• 1:04
  stood for, and I think he half meant it. He told me once that
• 1:09
  he had not been to a training in seven years. He stopped before
• 1:15
  the recession, and then the recession came, and it handed
• 1:20
  everybody a reason not to start again. That year, the company
• 1:27
  that he worked for was named one of America's best companies to
• 1:32
  work for, and it was like the second or third year that that
• 1:36
  had happened by that time. And one of the reasons it made the
• 1:41
  list was that nobody left, and they pretty much had the same
• 1:47
  exact sentiment as him. See, the thing that you have to
• 1:52
  understand is both of these things were true at the same
• 1:56
  time. Only one of them was on a plaque in the lobby, and nobody
• 2:02
  was actually lying-not the company, not the list, not even
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  him. The number was real. Almost nobody left. Is the truth? They
• 2:11
  just couldn't. This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is
• 2:16
  a position, not a verdict. I'm Dr. Devon Morris. Tuesdays I sit
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  down with somebody who's been in it, and Thursdays I take one
• 2:29
  thing from that conversation and go all the way in on it. Today
• 2:33
  is special because there's no guest. Today is a story, and
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  it's the reason the show is called what it's called. I came
• 2:43
  into that organization the second time they tried the
• 2:47
  change. Yeah, I was there for the first as well, and that
• 2:50
  happened prior to the recession. It was all about new ways of
• 2:54
  working, teams delivering around shorter cycles. But inside of a
• 2:59
  year, they kicked it out the building, and the story
• 3:02
  afterwards was always the method didn't work. It was never we
• 3:07
  didn't do it right. It always was. It just doesn't work here.
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  A few years later, they wanted to try again. That's when they
• 3:14
  brought me back. Small group of us going team to team. Dozens
• 3:19
  and dozens of teams were making it happen. I say I want to be
• 3:23
  straight with you about what I believe walking in because I was
• 3:26
  wrong and it actually matters. I believe that the first attempt
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  failed because of the politics, which I had no control over. I'm
• 3:37
  a contractor. I know what I'm good at, and I'm still good at
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  it. That's not the problem I ran into. What I found in that
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  building was not resistance. Resistance would have been easy.
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  Resistance speaks to you. It argues with you in a room. It
• 4:00
  tells you why your thing will not work here. It gives you
• 4:05
  something to push against. What I found was agreement. Everybody
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  nodding their head. Sessions went fine, and nothing actually
• 4:16
  moved. Nobody said the hard thing out loud. Not at any level
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  ever ever ever, and here's what I didn't understand yet:
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  management wasn't trying to change anything either, not
• 4:29
  blocking, not fighting, just not doing. The initiative existed,
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  the behavior didn't. The people, they were frustrated. You could
• 4:42
  feel it. You couldn't get anybody to say it though.
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  Something else that took me years to see is people had
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  turned staying into an obligation, like they aligned
• 4:54
  themselves with the mission of the company. If you're somewhere
• 4:58
  for a long time and you didn't choose it, you have to find a
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  reason. Nobody can stand being somewhere that long and believe
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  it with nothing behind it. So they found one. They lined
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  themselves up with what the company stood for, and they
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  meant it just as much as the company did, and everybody
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  supported.
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  So it became like a real social thing, which means that if you
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  were surveyed, you really got good numbers because you
• 5:29
  provided them, and every person filling out those surveys were
• 5:33
  telling you the truth as they understood it. And I know that's
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  not just my memory of one building because somebody went
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  and checked. Deloitte ran a survey right in the middle of
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  those years. Eight out of 10 people said they planned to
• 5:54
  stay with their employer. Three of those 10 said they were
• 5:59
  unhappy in the job. Now sit with those two numbers right next to
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  each other for a second, because most of the companies who read
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  the report only ever looked at the first number. I don't want
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  to gloss over something that hopefully you didn't miss, but I
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  know you heard me say seven years. The way that he said it
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  to me wasn't bitter. It was closer to being a joke. The kind
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  of joke that you would make about a thing that you stopped
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  expecting to actually change. He stopped going before the actual
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  recession, so the recession wasn't it. And training is
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  normally the very first thing that everybody's gonna cut,
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  period. But after a while, nobody asked him, and after a
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  while, it became a fact about him. Nobody decided it. It just
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  accumulated. Now here's what a manager sees: he shows up, he
• 6:59
  does his work, it's fine, never volunteers, doesn't improve a
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  thing. Not a process. Not tooling. Not even his own
• 7:07
  situation. Bring him an idea. He's perfectly pleasant about it,
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  right? And nothing still happens. And there's a word for
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  that, and it arrives really fast. Complacent, coasting,
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  comfortable. Not a change agent is what I would say, right? But
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  your organization has a term for it, so use that term. But I want
• 7:28
  you to notice something about every single one of those words.
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  Every one of them is a description of a person. See, he
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  wasn't a person who wouldn't move, he's a person who couldn't
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  move, and there's a difference. Couldn't move house. Couldn't
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  find work near home. Wasn't close enough to retirement to
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  get out of the rat race, you know the recession hit us all at
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  that time. Needed a few more years actually to make sure he
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  could shore things up. That's it. That's the whole
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  explanation. There's no second layer to that. There's not
• 8:13
  another story. And I want to be precise about couldn't because
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  it's easy to hear that as me being generous about somebody I
• 8:23
  liked, at the bottom of that stretch in this country, there
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  were roughly six people out of work for every single job that
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  was open at that time. So six for every one. That's not a
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  tough market. That's a room with no door in it. Okay, which
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  brings me back to that list: the best places to work list. One of
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  the things that that list rewards is retention, lower
• 8:59
  turnover, people actually staying, people looking forward
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  to going there. A retention number only means something if
• 9:07
  leaving was an option. In that building, in those years, it was
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  not. So the number went up, and it went to the scorecard. The
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  scorecard turned into a plaque, and the plaque said it was a
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  really healthy place for everybody to work. Nobody
• 9:23
  committed fraud. The number was actually real. It was just
• 9:28
  measuring the door, not the people. Now, here's the part I
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  had wrong for a long time, and it's most of the reason I wanted
• 9:43
  to tell this story in the first place. I assumed his leadership
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  had made a judgment about him, sat in a room somewhere, and
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  decided he was done. They hadn't made any judgment at all. He got
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  the normal thing. Review said the normal things. The language
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  that's in every review means nothing. It offended nobody.
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  Nobody encouraged him to make a move. Nobody named what was
• 10:13
  happening. Nobody said the obvious sentence out loud. For
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  years, I just thought that was cowardice. I don't think that
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  anymore. They were stuck too. All of them were stuck as the
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  thing, and I didn't see that at all. I mean, a whole hierarchy
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  standing in the same market he was standing in, same lack of a
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  door, and you cannot stand in front of somebody and tell them
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  to go find their future when you can't even find yours.
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  You don't have the words for it. You hear yourself saying, and it
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  doesn't sound real. So nobody said anything to anybody, up,
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  down, sideways, or crossways for years, and we ended up with a
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  building full of people saying nothing looks from a distance
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  exactly like a building full of people saying everything is
• 11:18
  fine. So the question at hand is what did I do, man? I ran the
• 11:24
  playbook. I'm good at playbooks. I really am. Goals, ownership.
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  Give him something that matters. See if it wakes up something.
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  The stretch assignment, the conversation where you get
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  somebody to reconnect with why they started doing this in the
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  first place. You know, finding that why. I ran everything in
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  the playbook, right? Even extra stuff, and every one of those
• 11:53
  tools has the same thing sitting underneath it, and I never once
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  looked at it. Every one of them assumes the person is a
• 12:04
  variable. Change something inside that person, and the
• 12:08
  situation moves. The problem is, he wasn't the variable; his
• 12:17
  position was. And when you run the playbook on somebody with no
• 12:23
  room to move, it isn't help, y'all. It's pressure applied to
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  a person with nowhere to put it. The only thing it produces is
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  one more thing they're failing at. This time in front of
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  somebody who says he's really there to help. Yeah, that was
• 12:43
  me. Nothing worked, and I mean nothing worked. I doubled down
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  on that. I want to be honest with you about that. This very
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  first episode, I did not fix this, y'all. Couldn't. I didn't
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  really know how. See, what happened instead is that I
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  stopped. I stopped bringing him things. I started just talking
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  to him, you know, regularly, just regular conversations for a
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  long time about work, and then about things that wasn't work,
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  and he got out of that. He didn't get a development plan at
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  all. What he got was somebody he could say a true thing to in a
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  building when nobody was saying true things. And I'll tell you
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  plainly, that was uncomfortable for me. I'm an introvert, you
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  know. I felt like giving up. I felt like I wasn't doing my job.
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  See, I'm very proud of the work that I do. Every instinct said
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  to do something, and the honest answer in sometimes for me was
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  just was nothing I could do. I have to. I had to feel better,
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  really about making him feel better, and that's selfish. Let
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  me not put you in suspense. Ultimately, he retired. It took
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  him longer than he expected, a few more years, but that was
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  everybody, and it was due to the recession. But he got out of
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  there, and he got out more or less on his own terms, which is
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  more than most people can say, you know, I still think about
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  him to this day, and I remember his name clearly. I remember
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  talking to him on afternoons in one of the buildings. I won't
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  name what building, and I remember that he wasn't a bad
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  guy. He wasn't a bad employee. He was quite pleasurable, had a
• 15:02
  lot of great sage advice for me, because I was younger and you
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  know just really bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Now, you could
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  listen to all of that and file that under that was the
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  recession, a bad decade, but that's over, it doesn't apply
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  right now. So let me give you two numbers about right now
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  where we are. There are more than 7 million open jobs in this
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  country at this moment. You heard me, 7 million. That is not
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  a room with no door in it. That is a building with doors
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  standing wide open, and people are leaving their jobs at almost
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  exactly the rate they left back when there was nowhere to go.
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  Hmm. Read those two things together, because I don't think
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  most leaders have. See, in 2010, nobody moved because there was
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  nothing to move to. That was a locked door. Everybody could see
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  it, and he was honest about it. Right now, the door is open, and
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  people are still not walking through it. I'm not going to
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  stand here and you know tell you why that is. I have ideas. We'll
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  talk about that on Thursday, maybe. I'd rather be careful
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  about that and not move so fast.
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  What I'll tell you though is what it means for you, and it's
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  this: you cannot look at a door anymore and know anything
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  whatsoever. See, in 2010, you could. Nobody was leaving, and
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  the reason was no visible space. Today, somebody in your team can
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  be stuck. They can be flat, done. Far from the last time
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  anybody invested in them, in a market where on paper they have
• 17:18
  options, which makes the whole thing quieter, a lot harder to
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  see. See, back then a frozen team looked frozen. If you
• 17:28
  bothered to look, now a frozen team looks like a team that you
• 17:35
  have chosen. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. A
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  verdict is a judgment about what somebody is. It comes with a
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  sentence attached to it, and it's finished. Complacent is a
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  verdict. Checked out — verdict. Not a change agent — verdict. You
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  can't do anything useful with a verdict except carry it. That's
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  it. A position is a location. You got to it by some route, and
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  the route can be retraced, which means a position can
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  change, and the person standing in it doesn't have to become
• 18:21
  somebody else first in order to do that. See, he was never
• 18:27
  complacent. He was four hours from home in a market with six
• 18:33
  people waiting for every one job, seven years out from last
• 18:38
  time he trained or spent dollars on himself. That's a position.
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  Every part of it coordinates, and here's what it costs to call
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  it the other thing. In all those years, nobody ever asked him a
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  question that would have found any of that out. No one,
• 19:00
  including me, because you don't investigate a verdict. A verdict
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  is the answer. One more thing before I let you go. This show
• 19:17
  is about teams that are behind, and let me be honest. 10 days
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  before it launched this show, it didn't have a trailer in any
• 19:31
  form whatsoever. The web address that I'm going to say at the end
• 19:35
  of this episode didn't exist. It was due three weeks ago. There
• 19:44
  were two people on the email list, and one of them was me.
• 19:51
  I'm not telling you that to be charming. I'm telling you that
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  so you know exactly what I mean when I say the one thing I'm
• 19:59
  going to keep saying: I wasn't lazy, I wasn't unqualified, I
• 20:08
  was behind. Those are two different things, and the
• 20:14
  difference is the whole show. So here's the one thing that I want
• 20:20
  you to do with this sometime this week. Look at your team and
• 20:28
  ask yourself one question, and be, you know, really honest. Who
• 20:37
  here cannot leave? Not who won't, who can't, and I know how
• 20:48
  that sounds with 7 million jobs open. That's exactly why it's
• 20:54
  worth asking. In 2010, the question answered itself. Today,
• 21:01
  you have to actually go find out. Don't do anything with the
• 21:06
  answer yet. Just name it. If you want to talk more about what
• 21:11
  things look like for your team, go to thelaggingteam.com. That's
• 21:17
  thelaggingteam.com. You will find in the feed already the
• 21:22
  sidebar that is associated with this episode, and in it I take
• 21:27
  back something I said in the last 10 minutes. That's it.
• 21:33
  We're gonna take it apart really soon. Enjoy, and thank you.
• 21:40
  Thank you for joining us. Where every Tuesday and Thursday we
• 21:45
  work toward bridging the gap for teams that are behind.