The Trip and Fall

 

"Trip And Fall” is used here in my case to mean accidental or unforeseen happenstance. Other similar phrases might be “clumsy” “bumbling” or “fat fingering it” implying that someone has made a mistake with no harmful intent and yet, they’ve arrived at that place or set of circumstances. In remote team environments, this would be dialing someone’s phone number by accident or messaging the wrong person. I would use this remote team leadership method in a very specific set of circumstances.

There are times as a leader when you know something is going on with a direct report that is pulling down their productivity but you are not at liberty to share the information nor it is really not at the threshold point of some sort of company intervention. You might know your employee needs help, but your options are limited because in this set of circumstances, stepping in would be highly inappropriate. Here are some examples of situations to use a Trip and Fall:

Employee Adam’s uncle has died. Adam has disclosed this to you, his boss, and says that while he was not raised by his uncle, he’s taking the loss hard and it’s hard for him to concentrate on his work at hand. By this disclosure, you know you cannot grant bereavement leave to Adam, but this also seems like information that you’ll leave up to Adam to disclose to his workmates; it is not your information to share.You are detecting that Adam is struggling at work.

Employee Betty recently sat in a company-wide meeting and heard an announcement that she took very hard; she yelled in the hallway outside the meeting afterwards, stating how badly this was going to go for everyone. Betty seems frustrated and disillusioned. You depend on Betty for some of your toughest work problems and you start to detect that if Betty doesn’t find a way through her frustration, she will contemplate leaving this job.

In both of these scenarios, I’ve shown that you have detected an impact on the employee’s performance and a heartless boss would simply calculate the productivity has dropped. A thoughtful boss would realize that the situation has impacted the employee BUT it has not reached the level-- at all- of a negative mark on a performance evaluation. Said another way, the employee has done nothing wrong. The employee is just having a bad moment.

So there are things you can do as a boss covertly that will not bring attention to this employee, like shuffle easier duties in their direction, give them an afternoon off with no pull on their vacation hours (I phrase that as “Take the afternoon off. Go get a cup of coffee...2 hours away.” Hence, I’m showing that I want them REALLY out of the office, not thinking about work under the guise of being off) or stop any really bad work situations from rolling their way for a little while.

But the key characteristic of the situation where you would use a Trip And Fall is that it is a situation where it would be INAPPROPRIATE for a boss to step in and directly try to fix something. Said another way, the boss is not the fix.

Here is an example of that:

Let’s say there is a terrible boss. He’s demanding, micromanaging, and threatening. Friday at the end of work, a small group of employees walk out and the boss overhears the Happy Hour at Smokies Bar phrase. So the terrible boss decides that in order to do some back slapping, joke-telling, ha-yuck type of encouragement of his team, he’ll drop at the Bar. He does. What happens next? The employees are immediately uncomfortable-- they went there to vent--in this case, specifically about him-- and their privacy is invaded. It’s weird. So they try their best to finish their drinks and get out of there. Happy Hour was ruined and the boss was way out of line.

So let’s go back to Employee Adam and his grieving. You know it is impacting Adam and you are doing what you can for a few days to shuffle hard work away from him. But to do a Trip And Fall, you find someone at Adam’s same power level. You do not want Adam’s Best Friend At Work, but you still want a Friend.

Same power level is very important. A Trip And Fall won’t work if there is any power discrepancy. Remember that power level does not necessarily mean the same team or same job title. It just means someone who has NO direct power tie to Adam, it is a true co-worker (or equal worker) to Adam.

So you call Dave. You need to make this request BRIEF and NON-Qualifying. That means, don’t “infect” Dave with what you specifically want to happen, just set up the conditions.

“Hi Dave, I need a Trip and Fall with Adam. A family member passed away 2 days ago and Adam’s having a hard time. Could you call him and just be his friend for a few minutes? Yes? OK. Thanks. Oh, and no need to tell me how it goes. Thank you.”

See that was VERY quick and I already preloaded this much-- to "be his friend.” But the point is that Adam needs to ---at least initially--- think that Dave has honestly just tripped and fell into contacting Adam so while he’s there...they might as well chat.

Now, now. I can hear you accusers saying right here “I knew it! This is a method of deception! You are asking your employees to lie! You are asking them to “pretend” to reach out to Adam by a “pretend mistake” and then “buddy up” with them. You are doing this to get more information or worse, to simply increase productivity!!”

OK, yup, I am doing this to increase productivity. But it’s Adam’s welfare that I’m worried about and his productivity WILL increase when he feels better at work. And much larger than that, these little problems can stack up and become bigger problems--that lead to things like Adam not having a job and Adam not working on my team. These are “bigger” than the problem of how I got Dave to call Adam.

Besides, my team started to learn that I would call for “Trip And Falls” so much that they knew I did it. I never hid the fact that engineered interactions around my team. So it’s not deception if it’s wide open to see.

What happens next is that a same-power-level employee like Dave can give Adam the space he needs to talk about whatever he wants--indeed, they might not talk about the uncle at all and that’s fine. The point is that Adam needs a friend and Dave is there for him with NO STRINGS ATTACHED. Nothing is on the line.

It’s the digital equivalent of taking a coworker out for a beer. It’s a safe space where they can talk, free of judgment from someone who has the power of a job or no-job over them. That’s why bosses cannot do this. They have too much power. And all the time, bosses use employee weak spots to manipulate employees into joblessness.

So when you want to keep your team and when you want to help them recover, try a Trip And Fall.