The [un]common stuff that lives between strategy and execution, that teams don’t talk about.
Your first read every Wednesday morning, meant to be applied and forwarded.
Years ago, we had a director in one of our cohorts who barely spoke during sessions. He was completely present, prepared and engaged, just...quiet.
In a one-on-one, he told me: I feel like I'm only using 10% of what I'm able to do here.
He'd known for a while his skills were underutilized, but it appeared that nobody around him did.
Daniel Kahneman (Researcher, Author, and ultimately, Founding Father of Behavioural Economics) gave this a name:
WYSIATI: what you see is all there is. Your brain takes whatever evidence is in front of it, builds a complete and confident story out of it, and never once flags what's missing. That confidence comes from how neatly the story holds together. It has nothing to do with how much you actually know.
So a room builds a full picture of someone from the sliver that surfaces in meetings, but it never feels like a sliver. It feels like truly knowing them.
Going back to our director, nobody in that room had done anything wrong; they were simply existing together as peers, direct reports and leaders. That's the part that should bother you.
Through our program sessions together, we started carving out space for his reasoning to be showcased and gave him tools to bring more of it into the room.
In the next session with his peers, he spoke up, and I watched everyone lean in with an intensity I hadn't seen from that group before. 'Wow...!!' someone said with a follow-up about how helpful the comment was, which was the sliver of validation this director needed to begin sharing more with his team.
How to make this happen for your team
Asking someone, "Do you feel we're using your strengths enough?" gets you a polite yes from almost everyone (sometimes they don't even know the answer themselves). Now your WYSIATI story has a witness.
Go looking for the evidence you don't have:
- Send the hard question 24 hours before the meeting. You'll find out who was thinking all along.
- Try a different way of sourcing information: "Send it to me in writing if that's easier. I'd rather have your real thinking than your fastest thinking."
- Track whose ideas get acknowledged and then quietly passed over. Watch it for a month before you draw any conclusions - recognizing patterns is important.
- Ask better questions in the room. We run FIKA questions with teams (yes, one of them is "if you were a breed of dog"), and they surface more than most competency reviews I've sat through. I put the full set together for you to steal here → FIKA Questions, free download
You likely already have a conclusion about everyone on your team. The only question worth asking is how much of the story you still have left to uncover.
Where this gets expensive
When a team is running on knowing only 10% of each other:
- Decisions climb to desks that are 'more familiar or known'.
- Hard conversations sit for three weeks.
- Solid solutions to real problems sit uncovered in someone's head.
- Most costly, you start hiring for capability that's already on payroll.
Our S.P.A.R.K. Leadership Program is a cohort-based enablement program which gives your Sr. Managers, Directors and VPs a shared language, shared expectations and a world of resources in each other.
We only have a few days left between October and November for teams wanting to start leadership development before year-end or kick off the new year strong. Book a discovery call.
As always, see you next week,
Kendra
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