They rated my day a 6.9. It was the most honest number I got all year.
Two men on this team have not told each other the truth in eleven months.
In a real room, they would sit as far apart as the table allows. One speaks, the other looks at his laptop. Neither one ever says the other’s name.
I knew that going in. I knew this needed to be a room in the physical world.
They wanted virtual. The usual cost-cutting math. I let them talk me into it against my better judgment.
Virtual works when you are moving pieces on the chessboard. Goals, rocks, IDS, to-dos, next. Virtual does not work when the real issue is trust. Map it to Patrick Lencioni and this team is all bottom of the pyramid.
A webcam hides everything I need. The arms crossing. The jaw setting. Who leans in when the hard thing gets named and who goes still. On Zoom, a team member can mute himself and disappear from a conversation nobody can prove he left.
We went into the interpsychic shitstorm anyway. Eight hours. Gray light through my window, third cup of coffee gone cold. Things got said. Nothing got a tidy bow on it.
6.9 out of 10.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter has a law for this. “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.”
There is a fallacy in my profession that a low score is a report card on the EOS Implementer. It is not. It is signal.
Noise says they did not like you.
Signal says the anesthesia wore off.
Pain is progress. It just does not feel like progress on the day.
My mistake was not the 6.9. My mistake was agreeing to do trust work through a webcam.
Stay curious,
JBS