Jim and Broken Glasses

Jim reports to you and knows that he needs to send in a weekly progress report by close of business every Thursday. It’s Friday, 11:03 am and the report is not there.Your deadline is  less than 30 minutes away.

What is the first question that comes to mind?  I’m willing to bet on it that it is a “why”, a “how come” or another question for the reason or cause of the report being late. You will probably ask that question to Jim. Familiar situation? Personally, I’ve been there, done that and had a saddening success rate doing that. Meaning: Jim’s reports kept coming in late.

Doing what doesn’t work, doesn’t…. well, euurhm…. work, so I opened my mental box to find something else. I tried to be a bit more assertive, that didn’t work. I discussed it in a meeting without directly addressing Jim and after it turned out that there was no change, I explicitly stated who’s reports were consistently late (not only Jim’s, by the way). I moved deadlines from Thursday afternoon to as early as Wednesday lunch time in agreement with Jim and guess what…. after a while (three weeks) Jim’s reports were not in on Friday.

My box of tricks for this situation was about empty. You see, by asking what happened I oriented not only Jim’s attention, but also my thoughts to facts that can not be changed. With all the emotion attached to this situation and never getting an answer that solved the issue, I simply became blind for what I wanted to achieve: never a late report again. This is something that lies in the future and I dragged the both of us to the past.

Another approach of such situations jumped in my face in a completely different context. I have two great sons of 12 and 13.5. One of them broke a glass out of….. who cares if it was clumsiness, distraction, excitment about the coming up weekend trip, anxiety about an upcoming test? What I wanted was simply that no glass would be broken again. I asked him how we could make sure that the glasses remained whole. After a few dozens seconds of silence, the suggestions were pouring out of my son’s mouth. Things like: let’s use plastic cups, putting the glass further on the table, behave more calmly at the table …. . The point is that he was being creative instead of feeling blamed and powerless to do anything about the situation (and he was right!).

The next day, a friday, I stepped up to Jim and took him apart. “Jim,” I asked “how can we make sure that all the progress reports are available by Thursday evening?”. “Excuse, me” he said “but…” and then he started thinking. After half a minute or so, his suggestions were pouring out. Some of them were pretty original and even funny. We laughed about some of them and rejected a few. The point is that the question had started a creative process and it was a plaisant one.

Why did this work? Well, with asking the mentioned question in the way I did, I turned away from something that could not be changed anyway (the late report, the broken glass) and focused on achieving something (not on avoiding  the undesired event) together (“we”).

Carry this question with you and fill in the bits between < and >:

“, how can we make sure that ?”

Ask the question, and give time to think. knows best what both of you can do to make sure that . will remember his suggestions a lot better than he will remember yours.