I spent most of this week on the phone with people, asking them about someone they know.
It's part of how I work with a leader. Before we get into any of it, I talk to the people around him. Colleagues. People he used to work for. Sometimes people who know him outside of work entirely. Thirty minutes each. I ask real questions and then I mostly listen.
These conversations are private, so I'm not going to hand you anybody's words. But I can tell you the shape of what came back about one leader this week.
That he's the same person in every room. With the people who run things and with the people nobody's paying attention to. No gear change.
That going back two decades, across jobs and cities and life, he has never once been too busy for somebody who needed him. And that the help is never a token gesture. It's always the whole thing.
That he holds a vision the way almost nobody manages to. Not the having of one. Everybody has one of those. The keeping of it, for twenty years, with what he actually does lined up behind it.
That when he talks about his work, he mostly ends up talking about his people.
And under all of it, the same note over and over, from people who had no idea what the others were saying. He isn't performing any of it. It's just who he is.
And here's the thing I keep chewing on.
He will probably never hear any of it. Not like that. Not all at once, from those people.
Because we don't say it. We think it, we feel it, we'd defend the person in a room. But we assume they already know. Or it feels a little awkward. Or there's no occasion for it, and so we save it up for a toast, a retirement lunch, or worse.
I've now sat through a lot of these conversations, and the pattern is the same every time. People are carrying a fully formed paragraph about somebody. It's specific, it's true, and they have never once said it to the person's face.
Last week I wrote about the two things you can't see about yourself. Here's the other side of that, and it might be the more useful one.
If there are things about you that you can't see, then there are things about the people around you that they can't see either. And you can see them.
You're holding information that belongs to somebody else.
The reason it lands so hard when it finally gets said is that real ones are specific. Not "you're great, man." That bounces off. It's "you're the person I call when something's on fire, because you've never once made me feel stupid for calling." That kind of thing sticks to a person for twenty years.
Most of us have gotten one or two of those in a lifetime. I can tell you exactly who gave me mine and roughly what year it was.
So here's the one thing for this week. It's not homework and it has nothing to do with improving yourself.
Pick one person. Somebody you'd say something extraordinary about if a coach called you out of the blue and asked.
Then tell them. Not the polished version. The specific one. What they do, what it does for you, and why it matters.
Don't wait for a birthday or a review or a reason. A text is completely fine. Two sentences is plenty. The awkwardness lasts about four seconds and the thing you hand them lasts a lot longer than that.
I'll be honest about why this is on my mind. I get to do this for a living now, and the part that gets me isn't the assessments or the frameworks. It's that I get to sit in the middle and carry these things from one person to another. I said out loud on three separate calls this week that I'm pinching myself.
But you don't need a coach in the middle. That's my whole point. You already have the paragraph.
Somebody in your life is going the whole week without knowing what you think of them. Go fix that.
Until next week!
Jon