Brent took his time creating the list. Seven people he ranked, longest Time Span capability at the top of the list, down to the shortest Time Span capability. It took him about 45 seconds. His decisions were deliberate, twice, he changed his mind, pushing someone ahead of another. He looked up, with a question on his face.

“What do you think?” I asked. “You did that pretty quickly.”

“I thought it would be hard,” he replied. “But, it really wasn’t that difficult.”

“Look at your list,” I directed. “What do you think? How accurate do you think you are, in your ranking?”

Brent took another look, moving his eyes from top to bottom. His head nodded to the left, then looked up. “I’m good. I think this pretty well says it, don’t think I would make a change. This is the way I see it.”

“Excellent. But why are you so confident that your assessment of your team is accurate. We have only been talking about Time Span for a short while, and you spent less than a minute ranking your team. Why, so confident?”

“It wasn’t really that hard. I don’t know. When I was thinking about this person or that person, it’s like I already knew, didn’t have to think about it all that much.”

“The reason you are so confident, and the reason it took you less than a minute to rank this list, is that you have been thinking about this exercise ever since you became a manager. Every manager constantly keeps a running assessment of the Time Span capability of each team member from their very first task assignment. You just didn’t have a language to talk about it, or a way to measure it. Until now.”