Rescuing vs. Developing

Nadia had sent three reminders to Eli in two weeks. She filed it in her mind under the work of managing someone through a transition.

She had been promoted to a senior VP role eight months earlier. She'd inherited the team, the product development function, and Eli, who had been her peer the year before. They ate many lunches together, tackled tough problems together, and talked about where they wanted their careers to go. That history made this new accountability structure feel personal.

Her predecessor had managed Eli with a light touch, which had been possible because Nadia was on the team to absorb what he missed. When she moved into the new role, she used new methods to keep covering for him: reminders before deadlines, making quiet corrections to what arrived incomplete, and cleanup of what he'd dropped before anyone upstream noticed. For months, it felt like management.

When we met, she described the latest reminder she’d written to Eli, then she said, almost in passing, "I guess this is just part of my job as a manager."

I mirrored, "Your job as a manager?"

She started to answer, stopped, then spoke more honestly this time.

She said she'd been protecting a relationship she didn't want to complicate and avoiding delivering difficult news to someone who was once her peer and friend. The reminders weren't management. They were a way of evading what accountability between them would actually require.

She stopped sending reminders and instead asked to meet with Eli.

She didn't start with what she needed from him. She named what she'd observed: the pattern of missed deadlines and the downstream effect on the team, including the gap that others had been absorbing. She looked at the pattern with him. "If we're both seeing this," she said, "others are too. What do you think it's costing you?"

Eli already knew; it was costing him trust, and holding him back from reaching those career goals he shared with Nadia.

This was his first conversation with a supervisor who treated him as someone capable of changing rather than someone to be managed around.

He rose to the challenge Nadia presented him. Not quickly, and not without some more friction, but the difference was soon noticeable.

A leader in rescuing mode protects someone from what they need to face. A leader in developing mode stands beside them while they face it.

The Question

Where have you been managing someone's performance in a way that's kept hard conversations at a comfortable distance?

"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — James Baldwin