“Who I am?” Ruben asked, furrowing his brow.

“Yes, who are you?” I insisted. “What is your role?”

“Well, I’m the manager,” he explained. “My role is to manage. It’s my team that actually does the work. I just manage.”

“If all you do is manage, then I have limited use for you,” I pressed. “If all you do is manage, I can get by with a supervisor. What is your work?”

“Well, when my team gets stuck, I help them get unstuck,” Ruben replied, grabbing for any kind of traction.

“And when you get your team unstuck, what do you do, to keep them from getting stuck in the same way again?”

Ruben hesitated, then thoughtfully arrived at a meaningful conclusion. “I look at what we are doing, how we are doing it, the sequence we do it in and think, is this the best way? We might create our own problems simply by the order of the steps we work in. It’s my job to think about that stuff.”

“What tools do you use to think with?” I prompted.

“I don’t know,” Ruben pondered. “I mean, sometimes, I will draw out a flow chart, so I can see things more clearly, you know, boxes and circles and arrows.”

“And when you finish that flow chart, what is that a picture of?”

“Well, it’s the system that we work in, with all the steps and relationships of those steps.”

“And so, what is your work?” I asked, again.

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
I was in your workshop, about Time Span. Almost overwhelming. I say, almost, because it is grabby stuff. I don’t know if I will see my company the same way, when I go back to work tomorrow. But where do I start?

Response:
The starting place is with yourself, the only person in the world where you have control and authority.

Time Span is grabby, because it resonates with what you feel, as a leader. Time Span is the scientific explanation for what you intuitive observe in the workplace, as a manager. Anthony De Mello calls it Awareness. And this is where you start.

Before you can take action, any form of implementation, take an inventory of where you are. What is your role? Inside your organization, what are your accountabilities?

Before you can effectively evaluate the roles of those around you, you must first discover who you are.

I am in San Diego, working with a group on the Time Span research of Elliott Jaques.

“So, what do we do next? How do we implement this stuff?” came the question at a break.

“Calm down,” I replied. “For starters, don’t do anything.”

This was definitely NOT the anticipated response. I smiled. “Look, during the past three hours, I have described a new way of looking at your organization, a new way of looking at work, how roles are created, how accountabilities are designed into those roles. So, stop. Don’t do anything.

“Sit, and watch. Observe. See things with new eyes. Describe what you see, first to yourself, then to someone else. That is the first step.

“So, tell me, with your new eyes, what do you see in your organization? What is going on?”

“When you were putting this team together, why did you overlook this role on the team?” I asked.

Susan looked at me sideways. “What do you mean?”

“You put this team together, and yet you are dissatisfied with the problem solving capability of the team. They keep running into the same problem over and over, yet always have to go back to square one to solve it.”

“Aw, come on, you know I have a budget. I got the best people I could afford,” she replied.

“This is not a matter of budget, this is a matter of design. I have talked with your team and you have a great bunch of people. But you are missing a role. When you designed your team, you missed a role.”

“What do you mean, designed my team?” Susan asked.

“You thought about the people you needed to do the production, but you never thought about building in one role to make sure production got done. Someone to watch the schedules, create your checklists and see patterns in problems. That is the capability you are missing on your team.”

“Yes, but I can’t afford another person on the team, and besides, I would have to pay more for someone with that capability,” she defended.

“You are going to pay for this role anyway. Without this role, you will have problems that stop the line, re-work on elements that have to be done twice and overtime. You are paying for this role anyway.”

Susan was beside herself, “I don’t understand. This is the same problem we had last week with another customer. I got a phone call and two text messages. You would think my team would figure this out. It’s the same problem, all over again.”

“Why don’t they see the problem?” I asked.

“Oh, they see the problem, they just don’t connect it up. They don’t see it’s the same problem as last week.”

“What do you think they should do about it?” I pressed.

“They can’t do anything about it, if they can’t see it’s the same problem. It’s like they have to start all over, back to square one.”

“Like Groundhog Day?”

“Yes, like Groundhog Day,” she replied. “I just wish I could find someone on the team, who could step up and see the pattern, connect the dots together.”

“So, who put this team together?” I smiled.

Susan became very quiet, then finally spoke, “I guess I should quit complaining and find that person.”

“So, if it’s not experience and it’s not skill, what is it?” came the question from the corner.

We had been discussing how you compare the “size” of the role to the “size” of the person.

“Elliott called it capability,” I replied. “One of the largest determining factors (not the ONLY, but the largest) for success in any role is a person’s capability.”

“Aren’t we talking semantics here. Of course, a person has to be capable. Duh!”

“It would be semantics, if capability were just some vague notion. But Elliott found a way to measure it. And it’s not experience, skill, personality or passion. Capability is something measurable, something different inside of each person, something that matures over our lifetime.

“Each of us is born with an innate capability to handle a certain level of complexity in the world. The measure of capability is Time Span. How long into the future are we thinking and executing?

“Two team members, side by side. One can handle a project, as long as its completion date is within the week. The other team member, with higher capability, can plan and execute a project that takes two months to complete. Any competent manager, thinking about their team, can immediately put names to the person with one week capability and the person with two month capability.”

“How big is the role, and how big is the person filling the role?” I repeated.

“That’s why training is so important,” came a reply from across the table.

I nodded. “Yes, having the proper skill and being competent in that skill is important. And skills can be trained. And how many of you have sent two people to training, one gets it, the other doesn’t?”

The chuckles confirmed the answer.

“So, what’s the difference between the two people. It’s not experience. It’s not training?

“How big is the role, and how big is the person filling that role?” I asked the group. “Elliott calls this the size of can. How big is the can and how big is the person filling the can?”

“Well, certainly, experience is something we look at,” came a retort from the far corner of the table. “The more experience someone has, the larger role they can fill.”

“Experience is certainly something most managers look at,” I replied. “And how often does experience lead us astray. In fact, does someone have ten years’ experience or one year’s experience ten times? How many of you have placed someone, with experience, in a role, only to find them failing after a few short weeks? What did we miss by relying on experience as our determining factor?”

“Who was Elliott Jaques, and what was his research all about?” There were six of us seated around the table and the question floated like a pass from Drew Brees.

My usual response to that question takes 3 hours, but it was late and I had to be up early. I struggle with that question, because any response is the first step in a long and important journey for any manager. But still, it was late and I had to be up early.

“Elliott Jaques was the most profound management scientist on the planet,” I began. “His study of organizations spanned more than 50 years, generated 23 books and left a legacy for every manager to follow. Elliott observed that each person has, within themselves, an innate ability to deal with a certain level of complexity in the world. Some people are quite comfortable working on projects that will not be completed for one year or more; some cannot manage to get beyond next week.

“Each of us is different. And that difference is measurable.

“As managers, we look at the individuals on our team, and we make running intuitive judgments about what tasks we can assign to which person. It is that judgment — about who can do what, by when? — that was the focus of Elliott’s research.

“How big is the role, and how big is the person filling that role? This is not about personality or a skill set. This judgment is about capability.”

But it was late and I had to be up early.