250: Avoiding Handover Headaches. Gregg Popovich. Finding the right moment
Good morning good people
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/strategy
If you work in an organisation of more than two people, you’ll inevitably encounter handover problems – the inadvertent gaps when a process passes from one person to another.
When you start a new role, you will also encounter them. Even with the best intentions, your outgoing colleague may overlook valuable details, especially if they’ve been in the role for a long time. Much of their knowledge has become tacit, making it easy to forget what they had to learn at their start.
Handover problems exist, for the most part, not because of ill-intent or incompetence but because the complexity of communication and pressures of time. As Budd and Rothstein remind us, “Coordinating action in life is like dancing in language.”
Accepting that truth is a powerful first step. Then, you can intentionally create a deeper understanding of the situation at hand, explore the available possibilities, and align on the required actions.
In The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao advise
“One rule is ‘never hand over a fire in the heat of the day. Firefighters learned this lesson from the Dude Fire in Payson, Arizona, in 1990. Six firefighters were burned to death after a botched handoff, which occurred at ‘1:00 P.M. on a hot, windy day with temperatures in the high nineties while the fire was making spectacular runs.’ Crews now do handoffs at night, when it is easier to see fires and ‘low winds, high humidity, and cool temperatures stabilize the fire’”.
What is the low wind, cool temperature equivalent in your business? Do your handovers then. Handovers in the heat of argument or deadlines have higher risk.
It is not only when, but how.
Sutton and Rao tell us that the outgoing fire crews focus on five steps:
- Here’s what I think we face.
- Here’s what I think we should do.
- Here’s why.
- Here’s what I think we should keep an eye on.
- Now talk to me (i.e., tell me if you (a) don’t understand, (b) cannot do it, (c) see something that I do not).
We frequently skip the last step in the busyness of corporate life, but it is the most valuable, especially if the handover is from leader to subordinate.
I would tweak that last question to be more open-ended — “What don’t you understand?” rather than “Do you understand?” That shift signals that you expect uncertainty, which is a healthy default in complex environments. (Learn more about this approach in Magic Words).
Either way, taking the time to ensure that your message has been received and understood will save you time.
If all you do is end every meeting with Step 5, your work life will be easier.
If your leader does not do it, do it yourself.
Be clear where you haven’t understood, explain what you think they might have missed. Your attention to the details and your commitment to getting it right will build your power. Concrete conversations create credibility.
(Here are five of my favourite quotations on leadership and psychological safety).
//self
In May, Gregg Popovich, Hall of Famer, five-time NBA champion and league’s all-time winningest coach, retired. He had coached the San Antonio Spurs for 29 years, leading them to unprecedented twenty-two straight playoff appearances.
Any of my clients who has taken over running a new business or team, will have read Baxter Holmes’ brilliant piece Inside the secret team dinners that have built the Spurs’ dynasty, describing how Popovich uses post-match games to build culture (This is my take on the subject).
Last week, I wrote about how South African tech billionaire Koos Bekker used cash buffers to build his personal success. Popovich created a different kind of buffer: space for rest and recovery.
Holmes’ tribute to Popovich’s unparalleled NBA legacy includes an anecdote about how, in 2012, the league fined Spurs $250,000 for sending their starters home ahead of a nationally televised game in Miami.
Popovich was unmoved. His players needed rest.
Five years later he explained,
“It’s a trade-off: Do you want to see this guy in this one game, or do you want to see them for three more years of his career? And do you want to see him through the playoffs because he didn’t get hurt?”
(You might enjoy Time and Cash: Navigating Life and Business)
///soul
I swim in The Atlantic Ocean most days. I also swam in every race in every school gala. I was always last. More than once I delayed the start of the next race. Sometimes, even the one after that. These days, my preferred spot is a small bay sheltered by large granite boulders and fenced by a dense bed of kelp. I like this bay. It matches my swimming superpowers.
Two summers ago, I chose not to swim there. A large swell surged into the bay. It would have smeared me, guano-like, across the rocks. I drove to a nearby beach, one more open to the ocean, thinking it may be safer but made the same choice. Too big for me. But, some fifty meters offshore, two souls were having fun.
The swell was an easy three, four metres. Steel grey, it spoke of the coming storm. The two swam, propelled by its power, then would slow, letting tons of water rush by as they floated back over the crest, out to where the swells started to grow. Graceful. Easy. Exhilarating.
Then, it became hard. They were tiring and wanted shore. Fifteen metres out the ocean floor rose to meet the swell and hundreds of bone-crushing, skin abrading, lung-filling, potentially life-ending, kilograms of water came crashing down in a chaotic swirling washing machine, impossible to navigate.
They needed to find a gap and couldn’t. Several times they swam into open water, but the sets were too close together. The waves caught them, forcing them to abandon their sprint for shore.
On the ninth or tenth attempt, they started to flip onto their backs floating back over the waves. Anyone watching then would have seen two people seemingly lazing seal-like.
There, just where the swell gathered height, they rested and recovered, drifting up and down with the ocean’s surge. Safe from crushing, but with hypothermia starting to nibble at their core. Rest was important, and equally they knew they needed to act soon.
After a few minutes, they slowly turned back onto their stomachs, swimming steadily with the swell, cautiously testing cadence, feeling the waves, staying clear of the washing machine, and then as the last wave of the set came past, they tried again, allowing its momentum to pull them, but holding back from the break zone, and then, as the tumult subsided they surged through the white water and staggered onto shore. They turned and looked back. Laughed and wearily high fived each other.
They waited, rested and then chose the right moment to move from water to land. If you’d seen them on their backs, you might have labelled them lazy. If you’d watched as long as I had, you’d have admired their calm courage.
I wish you a good week.
Karl
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