On Monday I wrote about hidden distance, the relationships you are sure are fine, but perhaps, it is possible this is where the truth has quietly stopped reaching you. If you did the reflection, you have a hypothesis about how someone really experiences you.
A hypothesis is a start. Now you have to do something with it and let's be real, this is where it gets uncomfortable.
Let's be real again - Most people did not take the job to manage people. You were good at the work and the people came with to the promotion. So it is fair to ask, "do I really have to do all this?"
Simply, yes. You cannot hit your KPIs/OKRs alone. Your results sit in other people's hands, in whether they give you their best or just enough to not get caught. That is not soft. End of the day, it is your performance metrics.
The key point - A relationship that feels easy is often easy because the other person has adjusted to you. They have learned what you want to hear and they give you that, which means you are getting a managed version, not the real one.
So you are losing twice. You miss the upside, the honest pushback, the early warning, the idea they did not think you wanted. And you carry the downside, the risk no one flagged, the resignation that lands out of nowhere.
And before you tell me this is just a manager problem, it is not. Even with no one reporting to you, you have a boss, peers, the person in the other team you need something from by Friday. The distance builds there too.
You do not have to love managing people. You do have to do the few things that make it work.
I worked with a leader who already got it. He could see the person reporting to him was handling too much, stuck in the middle of every hard dynamic. He even saw what the relationship needed, that the two of them relied on each other more than either let on.
He understood all of it and, wonderfully & vulnerably, admitted he was completely stuck.
When I asked "how might you take the first step?", he replied, "what does that even mean?"
That is the gap. Seeing the problem is the easy part. Doing something about it, is where we all tend to freeze. Remember though, you can only choose what you do and so the first step is yours.
So I provided two reflection questions:
That is the whole move. Not an intense heart-to-heart (yet). No big gesture needed. One real thing they need, that you can give, and you go give it.
You might remember the leader I once wrote about, the one who I silently was dissatisfied with for 2 years, until we had an intense heart-to-heart. He positively surprised me by pulling out a notebook and actually wrote down what I said. This wasn't about my tasks. It was my lived experiences: what was hard, what I cared about, what I wished were different, what would enable me do my best work for the organization.
That was one conversation, and I ask you to imagine it as a habit. You use the time to understand the person, you write down what you learn, and, woah - radical idea, you read it back before the next one. Do that for a few months and the themes will organically appear. What they keep raising, what is shifting - all the stuff you would otherwise forget by Friday.
Most 1on1s are a status update with extra steps. This is the opposite.
Pick one person you depend on. Ask yourself:
What do they want from me, and what is one thing I could do about it?
Then do that thing. Watch what happens.
The deeper version is a short exercise I use in coaching. About fifteen minutes, and genuinely hard to do alone, because we are all a little too sure we already understand the people around us. For the first time, I am happy to walk a few people through it, no agenda. If you want to try it, reach out.
You do not have to love this part of the job. You just have to do it. It is how the rest of the job actually succeeds.
If this has sparked some curiosity, I would love to continue the conversation at diane@ptminsights.com.
