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Chapter 4

The Five Checks

Second edition · new chapter · the instrument, before the inventory

In all my years in business, nobody has ever come to me and said that a particular character trait was the problem.

It does not happen that way. What happens instead is that somebody stops you in the hallway and tells you the work did not get done again. That sentence gives you a result and nothing more. It does not give you the cause of that result, and it never will.

That is the difficulty this chapter is written to solve. You will always be handed the result, and you will have to find the cause of it yourself.

The delay makes the job harder still. The result normally reaches you months after the trouble started, and it reaches you without any of the story that would have explained it.

So the twelve traits are only worth having if you can work backwards from a result to a cause. That is the skill this chapter teaches.

Working backwards turns out to be a short process. You ask five questions in order, and those five questions narrow twelve possible traits down to two or three. I call those questions the five checks.

The book runs one way and your week runs the other

Each of the twelve chapters that follow contains a list of actions and the naturally occurring consequences that come from those actions. Those lists run forwards, from a character trait to a consequence. Running forwards is the right way to learn the material.

Out in the building, you never get to start with the character trait. You start with the consequence, which is usually something late or quiet or sloppy or expensive. Then you have to work your way back down to the trait that caused it.

The diagnostic is the same list, read from right to left.

Reading those lists backwards would be an easy job if every consequence had a single cause. You could simply look the consequence up and be done with it. The reason this takes a whole chapter is that one consequence can come from several different traits.

One complaint, five different people

Take the most common complaint I have heard in any organization I have ever worked in. Somebody tells you that the work did not get done again.

Here are five people that one complaint could be describing. You have met all five of these people, and every one of them needs a different conversation from the other four.

The first person set the deadline herself. She picked Friday because Thursday was tight and Monday would be too late to be useful to anybody. Then, most weeks, the work actually arrives on Monday or Tuesday. The work does get done and it gets done well. She has never once thought of herself as breaking her word. If you told her that she was breaking it, she would be genuinely hurt.

The second person believes in the task completely. He has argued for the task in meetings and he can explain why the task matters better than you can. He also has a phone that rings all day long. His task is the only thing on his list that nobody is waiting on, so his task is the one that yields.

The third person agreed to the task in the last minute of a long meeting. Nobody in that meeting asked how long the task actually takes, and the third person did not ask either. The task takes about ninety minutes a day and his morning does not contain ninety spare minutes. He found that out in his first week. He has been doing about half of the task ever since. Doing half of it feels to him like helping out.

The fourth person supervises a team that does the task only when she is watching. Her team is not lazy about the task. Nobody on that shift has ever seen what happens to the task downstream, so the task ranks last against every job with a visible purpose. Her team complains every week about a problem that this very task is causing, and not one of them has connected the two things together.

The fifth person knew about the delay three weeks ago. He did the arithmetic, did not like the answer, and decided to pull the schedule back on his own. Pulling the schedule back was not an unreasonable thing to try, and it partly worked. Then the conversation got more expensive every week that he put it off. In the end he never had the conversation at all, because the deadline arrived first.

One complaint and five people. Now notice the uncomfortable part of this. Most of the responses available to you will do real damage if you use one of them on the wrong person.

Tell the second person that he needs to care more about the task and you have insulted a man who cares about that task more than you do. Tell the fifth person that he is unreliable and he will decide that you have no idea what his month was actually like. The next piece of bad news will then reach you even later than this one did.

This is the reason the diagnostic comes before the inventory. A leader who cannot tell those five people apart is not being neutral about them. That leader is confidently misreading his own staff several times a month, with the very best of intentions.

Do not start with the trait

Now that you have twelve traits in your head, your instinct will be to reach for one of them right away. I would ask you to wait about a minute before you do that.

Choosing one trait out of twelve is not a diagnosis. Choosing one trait out of twelve is a guess. A guess that you feel certain about is more dangerous than no guess at all, because you will go ahead and act on it.

Start one level up instead, where the job is a great deal easier. At that level you are only choosing between the five regions. Each region has a sentence that people say out loud when that region is the one causing trouble. You have heard all five of those sentences this year.

One more thing before the list. Use the words that the person actually said, rather than your tidied-up professional version of those words. The moment you translate a hallway complaint into business language, you throw away most of the information the complaint contained.

The five checks

Run those five questions and you will land on a region in about a minute. Now go back to the five people and see what those questions produce.

The first person lands on Foundational, because the thing that fails is her stated deadline rather than her work. The second, third and fourth people all land on Achievement. In all three of those cases the intention is genuine and the finished result never arrives. The fifth person lands on Motivational, because he had the information and did not raise it.

You have learned something useful already, and you have not named a single trait yet. The first person and the fifth person need completely different conversations from the other three, and from each other.

One more instruction about the regions. If the Foundational region lights up alongside any other region, treat the Foundational region first, for the reason chapter three gave you.

Then narrow down to the trait

You have a region now, so your list of possible traits is down to two or three instead of twelve. That is a much smaller problem than the one you started with.

The next step is to look for a single detail. Most people go looking for a detail that fits their first guess, and that is the wrong detail to go looking for. A detail that fits your guess only tells you that your guess is possible. What you want instead is the detail that the other answers cannot explain. That detail is the one that actually settles the question.

There is nearly always a detail like this somewhere in the situation. It is usually a small one, and it is usually the kind of thing you would read straight past on the first pass.

Here is what one of those details actually looks like in practice.

Go back to the first person, the woman whose work keeps arriving on Monday. Her region is Foundational, so the traits in play are the four foundational ones: Honesty and Integrity, Trustworthy, Faithfulness, and Justice and Mercy. There is one fact sitting in her story that is very easy to read straight past. She picked that deadline herself.

Nobody handed that deadline to her and nobody asked her to choose it. She chose Friday out loud in a meeting, after weighing Friday against Thursday and Monday. That fact matters, because a commitment you chose for yourself is the exact thing faithfulness is made of. She did not fail to keep a rule that another person imposed on her. She made that agreement of her own free will. Then she began quietly changing that agreement on her own, week after week.

Now watch that one small fact rule out the other three foundational traits.

It is not Honesty and Integrity. She is not concealing the change and she is not misrepresenting anything. If you asked her on Thursday when the work would land, she would tell you Monday without hesitating. There is no gap here between what she knows and what she says.

It is not Justice and Mercy. Nobody in this situation is being treated unfairly and nobody is being let off. Her deadline has nothing to do with how she treats the people around her.

It is not Trustworthy, and this is the guess most people make. Trustworthiness is a perfectly reasonable answer to reach for here. But a leader who cannot be trusted always shows up in other people's behavior. Their people quietly start checking behind them on anything that matters. Their people begin padding every promise with a little extra time. None of that is happening anywhere around this woman, and nobody has stopped believing what she says. The trust she has built with her team is still completely intact.

What is left is Faithfulness. She entered into an agreement freely, and she has been renegotiating that agreement privately ever since. The work gets done, so nothing about the situation looks broken. But one of the two people inside that agreement has been changing the terms alone.

Now look at what those two facts did differently, because the difference is the whole skill.

The fact that nobody checks behind her was useful, but that fact only told you something negative. It told you her problem is not trustworthiness. It did not tell you what her problem actually is.

The fact that she chose the deadline herself is the one that names the trait. A commitment you chose for yourself and then stopped keeping is faithfulness. None of the other three foundational traits fit her at all.

Notice also what you did not do. You did not recognize faithfulness on sight. You ruled out three other traits that were each individually plausible, and faithfulness was what remained. That is a skill you can practice, rather than an instinct you either have or do not have.

Two rules that keep you honest

I have gotten this wrong often enough to know where it goes wrong. These two rules are what I have left over from those mistakes.

The first rule

The first rule can be stated in a single sentence. When everybody behaves the same way, look at the situation instead of the people.

Here is what that rule looks like in practice. Suppose a director holds a call every Monday morning. Eleven managers report to him and each one of them gets three minutes to speak. He has not heard a single piece of bad news on that call in a year.

The easy conclusion is that he has eleven managers who are all short on courage. That conclusion is almost certainly the wrong one to draw. Eleven people out of eleven behaving the same way is not eleven separate character problems.

Look instead at the way that Monday call is actually built. Three minutes is enough time for a manager to say that a project is on track. Three minutes is not enough time for a manager to raise a problem and talk it through properly. The director has built a call with room for good news and no room for anything else. His managers are behaving sensibly, given the way that call is built.

That is the reason this first rule is worth carrying around. When the same behavior turns up in everybody, the cause is usually something all of those people share. The cause is usually not the character of those eleven managers.

This rule also protects you from the worst thing these twelve traits could ever become. The traits have to be able to tell you that nobody's character is the problem here. Sometimes the honest answer is that the schedule is wrong. Sometimes the bonus plan pays people for the opposite of what you are asking them to do. Sometimes nobody ever built a place where a problem could be raised out loud. A tool that blames character every single time is not a diagnostic tool at all. It is a hammer, and every problem in the building starts to look like a nail.

The second rule

The second rule is also one sentence. You have to be able to say out loud what would change your mind.

You now have twelve words for what is wrong with people. By Friday you will have used three of those words about a colleague, silently, and you will have been roughly sixty percent right. Sixty percent is the worst accuracy there is. It is right often enough to make you feel certain and wrong often enough to make you act badly.

So here is the test for whether you are holding a diagnosis correctly. Name one thing you could observe that would prove your own diagnosis wrong.

Here is what that test looks like in practice. Suppose you have decided that one of your supervisors is short on courage, because he has never once disagreed with you in a meeting. Before you act on that conclusion, finish this sentence out loud. I would know I was wrong about him if…

Suppose you finish the sentence this way. You would know you were wrong if that supervisor had raised a hard problem somewhere other than a meeting. That is something you can go and look for, so you go and look for it. You find four emails he wrote over the last eighteen months, each one raising a real problem, and not one of those emails was ever answered.

That supervisor is not short on courage at all. What he is short on is any evidence that speaking up accomplishes anything. The test did not confirm your diagnosis. The test destroyed it, which is exactly what the test is for.

If you can name that one observable thing, then what you are holding is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis sends you off to find out more. If you cannot name anything at all, then you are not diagnosing that person. You have reached a verdict about that person, and a verdict stops the looking.

One last thing, and it is not optional

A trait is a description of how somebody behaved in a situation. A trait is not a name for a human being.

The woman in my example is not a faithfulness problem. She is a person who has been quietly re-deciding one agreement, and she would be genuinely surprised to hear herself described any other way. The moment these twelve words turn into labels that you hang on people, this stops being a diagnostic and becomes a way of dismissing your colleagues with a straight face. You will have made yourself worse rather than better.

So keep the instrument pointed where it actually works. It works on behavior you have seen yourself, in situations you were part of. It is not for diagnosing people you have only heard about, and it is not for explaining anybody's marriage. The narrower you keep the instrument, the more often the instrument will be right.

You now have the map and you have the instrument to read it with. The next chapter explains how the twelve trait chapters are built. Then we start at the bottom of the triangle, where everything else is standing.