DBTH - Most People Can Talk (10 of 12)
10 of 12
There is a skill that organizations select for that has almost nothing to do with the work. It is the ability to discuss the work, fluently, confidently, in the right language, with the right affect, in ways that are indistinguishable from actually doing it well. Many organizations have spent decades perfecting the conditions under which this skill outcompetes every other.
I want to be careful here. Communication matters. Clarity matters. The ability to articulate what you're doing and why is a legitimate part of most professional work. I'm not arguing against it. I'm arguing against what happens when organizations can no longer tell the difference between someone who communicates about results and someone who produces them.
When you can't tell the difference, you optimize for the signal you can measure. And talk is measurable in ways that work often isn't.
You can hear a meeting. You can watch someone present. You can read a well-constructed email and feel like something happened. The quarter's actual outcome is abstract, distributed, delayed. It arrives with too many explanations attached to be assigned cleanly to any single person. The meeting though? That was right there. That person was sharp. That person knows how to frame things.
Thirty-four years in, I have watched people get promoted primarily because they were good in the room. I have watched people stall or leave because they were quiet, or blunt, or bad at the performance that surrounds the work. Not bad at the work. Bad at the performance.
On that, I want to say plainly, most of the quiet ones were right more often. The ones who said less tended to see more clearly. The ones who weren't sure what to say in a meeting tended to be unsure for good reasons because the problem was actually complicated, because the answer wasn't obvious, because intellectual honesty doesn't always have a confident tone.
The ones who always had something to say were something else entirely.
Here is what gets produced when organizations reward talk as a proxy for performance. First, you get populations of people who are trained to narrate everything. They develop elaborate languages for what they're doing, what they've done, what they're about to do. The narration isn't dishonest, exactly. It just starts to drive the car. The story about the work becomes inseparable from the work, and eventually more important.
Second, you get cultures where silence reads as incompetence. Where not having an answer in real time marks you as someone who doesn't have answers. Where being seen thinking is worse than saying something confidently wrong, because at least confident and wrong shows presence, shows initiative, shows engagement.
Third, and this is the one that does the most damage, you lose the people who won't learn to perform. Not because they couldn't. Some could, but they read the exchange being proposed and found it dishonest, and opted out. Or they tried, and they were bad at it, and they paid a price for a deficiency that had no bearing on what they actually produced. Either way, they leave, and what they knew goes with them.
What's left gets more articulate with every passing year.
I don't believe anyone designed this. I believe it's what happens when accountability is too expensive to locate precisely, so organizations unconsciously agree to measure confidence instead. It isn't conspiracy. It's physics. Systems route around hard measurement toward easy measurement whenever they can. Talk is easy to measure. Talk is always happening. Talk can be assessed in real time, in the room, without waiting for evidence.
Results require patience. Patience is in short supply in organizations that have quarterly conversations about whether people are victors or victims.
I've spent a lot of time in this series describing architectures that serve the institution at the expense of the people inside it. This one is different, and the difference matters because this architecture often doesn't even serve the institution. It hollows it out. It fills the walls with people who are very good at explaining why things are going well right up until they're not. It produces leadership populations who are eloquent about strategy and unclear on execution. It mistakes a well-run meeting for a well-run organization.
The counter-move is harder than it sounds, because it requires organizations to tolerate the ambiguity that comes with actually measuring things. You have to decide what results matter. You have to wait for them. You have to protect the people who produce them even when those people make everyone uncomfortable in meetings. You have to occasionally say out loud that a very articulate explanation of failure is still a failure.
These are not comfortable positions. They require a different kind of organizational courage than the kind that gets celebrated. Not the courage to commit boldly to a strategy, that's easy and it comes with applause. The courage to sit with someone who does the work without performing it, and figure out how to keep them.
Most organizations won't do it. The incentives run the other way too hard, but some will. The ones that do tend to look different. They’re quieter, less confident at the surface, more effective underneath. They're recognizable once you know what you're looking for. They're harder to explain in a pitch deck. They don't present as well.
They tend to produce better work.
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I have more pieces in this series and will post them up here as I get to it. Enjoy.