6 Questions to Ask When Someone Lets You Down
Clarifying expectations, seeking to understand, and developing systems to prevent future failure...
A project submitted past a deadline.
A team member misses a meeting.
A colleague doesn’t complete their part of a project.
A child doesn’t complete their chores the way you want.
As a leader (at work or home), do you ever feel like things come up short?
How do you handle it?
Below are six questions that will shift your thinking around who’s to blame and what to do in those moments of disappointment.
Were the expectations clear? (quality, budget, deadlines, etc.)
One Sunday night, just as the kids were getting into bed, my fourth-grader said, “I need to do my homework now.”
Are you serious? You’ve been playing all weekend and now, just as we’re wrapping things up, you tell me you have homework due tomorrow morning?
My initial reaction was to say, “that’s tough, you can do it tomorrow morning just before school or you can just turn it in blank and tell your teacher you chose to play all weekend.”
(I’m all about natural consequences)
My wife, who is always more thoughtful in these situations, asked me if I had laid out clear expectations at the start of the weekend. “Did she know that homework had to be completed by a certain time or before certain activities?”
Ugh.
This was my fault.
To my daughter, the expectation set by her teacher was that the homework was complete before stepping back in the classroom.
My expectation had not been clearly established before Sunday night at bedtime.
People are not trying to disappoint you. They’re often simply working to the quality of the expectations set. And those expectations are set by us as the leader, whether that is at work or at home with our children.
You may not even need the rest of the questions if you clearly articulate the expectations beforehand.
Did they have the resources necessary to complete the task?
Our team manages all of the communication for a 10,000 person international school community. We do a wide range of print, multimedia, branding, and digital projects.
If my videographer doesn’t have enough storage space, how can I expect him to find footage from several years ago?
If my designer doesn’t have Adobe InDesign installed, how I can expect her to lay out the magazine?
It’s such a simple thing but have you ever asked someone to do something only to realize later they didn’t have the tools they needed to complete the job to the specifications laid out?
Make sure the toolbox is complete.
Was the failure due to a lack of skill or will?
Did this person fail because they lack the skill to complete the task as expected?
Did this person fail because they lack the will to complete the task as expected?
If it’s a matter of skill, you need to consider what type of investment is needed to upskill them to the level required. In many cases it’s as simple as one morning pouring over every YouTube video possible on the topic and then allowing some time for practice and skill development.
But there are some skills that require a more intensive process—is it worth it?
If they have the skill, then you’ve got to wonder if their heart just isn’t in it anymore or maybe something else is happening that requires more of their attention at this time—which leads me to the next question.
What part of the story am I missing?
Sometimes, we have amazing team members who possess the skills, understand the expectations, want to succeed, and yet there is something happening behind the scenes that we as the leader know nothing about.
There are the big things—someone is battling a sickness that you learn about later or lost a loved one and never shared the news. These are heavy issues and if you knew about them you would likely offer grace and understanding immediately.
But even smaller things can make a difference. I have a five month old and there have been a couple of days where I just didn’t get enough sleep and was “off” the next day. I never really talked about it so no one would have known, they may have just wondered why something seemed off.
If one of your team members has dropped the ball and you’ve already gone through the questions above, it’s worth digging deeper because they might need more than just forgiveness for a professional mistake.
Is this a pattern?
Sometimes, people fail. That’s ok.
We should all be allowed a mulligan from time to time.
As a leader, you should consider this data point in the context of all of the data points. Mistakes happen, we make them ourselves and so do others. This is part of life.
The question for you to consider as the leader is where this mistake sits in relation to the entire body of work.
Does the same mistake keep happening?
Is it a new type of mistake?
Have the old mistakes been corrected?
Is there improvement?
You’re looking for trajectory.
What system can be put in place to avoid this same failure in the future?
One of the things I love about my supervisor is that when I make a mistake one of his first questions is—what type of system can be put in place to prevent this mistake from happening again?
This approach does not focus the attention on me as the point of failure but does focus my attention on the system that allowed the failure to take place.
Instead of feeling bad, I’m empowered. I have permission to adjust the approach.
You want the people you lead to feel like they can make mistakes and then be given the power to fix the mistake and more importantly, to build the system necessary to prevent the same mistake from happening again.
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These six questions can help you very quickly pinpoint your next steps as a leader when someone on your team (or at home) has dropped the ball or a project has come up short.
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