I Was Wrong. Seeing Isn't Enough.
On Friday, I spent the day at one of our schools because a couple of people from our operations team would be out. The team assured me it would be an easy day and that I was just there as backup.
They definitely tricked me!
When I arrived at the school, I told the team to treat me like an intern — an honest request, because I knew I didn't know how to do most of what would be required of me. I quickly realized, for example, that I hadn’t answered a desk phone in at least fifteen years. When I picked it up and said hello, I froze because I had nothing to offer unless a colleague was standing right next to me to teach me how to transfer the call or respond to the request.
The other problem was that, despite my request to be treated like an intern, many members of the team instead treated me like the big boss—bringing me questions and decisions that I, as someone new to the organization and centered at headquarters, was ill-equipped to answer.
The experience made me realize that I’ve been wrong about something I’ve always advocated to leaders: the importance of seeing things firsthand. I was often channeling perspectives such as Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, who wrote in Uncommon Service, “Don’t consume your customers’ frustration in sanitized slides delivered by direct reports with little incentive to deliver bad news. Pick up the phone, and confront the truth.”
That advice was also grounded in my own experience as a product manager. I learned that I couldn’t make good design decisions without customers’ voices imprinted in my brain. For example, it’s one thing to have an abstract sense that we should try to make the product easy to use. It’s another to sit right next to a customer as they try to use the product and hear directly that features your team thinks are 100% clear make no sense to her.
But I realized on Friday that going to see firsthand isn’t enough. Instead, it’s critical to do firsthand.
When I actually had to do the work of the front desk team, I could more readily appreciate how the standard operating procedures we create can be easily violated, even if nobody is being careless. I want it to be this: I could more readily understand how quickly things could shift from “totally normal” to “all hands on deck.” And I could see how the events that interrupt normal also require intense focus. After all, you can’t really pay full attention to the parent calling on the phone, the email from your boss with new requirements, and the five-year-old student in front of you crying or asking for a hug—all of which can happen simultaneously.
Of course, I knew all of those things intellectually from my previous visits to see the team. The difference is that when my backside was in the hot seat, I gained a much stronger emotional connection to their challenges.
I left feeling humbled.
The experience was a reminder that one shouldn’t have confidence in plans meant to control an inherently chaotic and varied environment. The only confidence should come from anticipating all the ways a plan could go wrong and in empowering the people on the ground to be agile when it does. (Because it always does.)
But the bigger lesson was this: even when I think I understand something well enough to make a decision, it’s almost always worth engaging the experts — those who actually do the work — to ground those decisions in what the work actually demands.