From Hard Work to Heart Work — June Edition

This month's conversations with managers kept circling back to the same place: signals that were already there before the departure, before the crisis, before the team stopped moving.

Small ones. A meeting that went too smoothly. A top performer who stopped asking questions. A leader who did everything himself because it was faster that way.

In this edition, I share what I observed, and what it might mean for your team right now.

Expert Advice

The meeting ran perfectly.

Everyone agreed. Nobody raised a hand. The point passed in five minutes.

Most managers experience that as a good sign. It is often the opposite.

When teams stop raising issues, they do not stop having them. They stop believing it is worth the effort. The silence that feels like calm is often something much more expensive: resignation.

In Swiss SMEs, this pattern is common. The team is polite. Discussions are smooth. And somewhere, someone is accumulating what they will never tell you directly.

The day it surfaces, it will not surface well.

👉 Read the original post here

Client Success Story

A few months ago, I worked with Marc, an R&D director in a pharmaceutical group.

Marc was exceptional. He knew exactly who to call in regulatory, how to reframe in pre-clinical, where the project lead would get stuck. Every crisis, he handled it.

Then he took three weeks off.

By day 4, his project lead had written: waiting for your return on file X. By day 7, the formulation team had stalled. By day 11, six decisions had piled up that should have been made without him.

Marc came back, resolved everything in two days, and concluded he was indispensable.

He missed the real diagnosis.

Every time Marc stepped in, his team registered that this type of decision belonged to Marc. His competence was quietly consuming theirs.

We worked on one thing: once a week, he refused visibly to decide something he would normally handle. He let the team resolve it, even when the result was not as good as his would have been.

It took six weeks before the team stopped waiting.

👉 Read the original post here

Practical Tips

Two signs that your team is less autonomous than you think.

1. You delegate, then verify everything

You give the task. You explain. You check in. You adjust. You review before it goes out. And if it is not what you would have done, you rework it.

The person you delegated to knows this. So they invest at the level it is worth investing: not much. You have never actually given them the responsibility.

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2. You know exactly what is wrong with someone, and you have never said it

You have redistributed tasks in silence. You work around them in meetings. You manage without them rather than with them.

The day it comes out, they will be surprised. And they will have every right to be.

In both cases, the issue is not a lack of skill or goodwill. It is a conversation that has not happened.

👉 Read the original post here

Industry Insights

Two management practices are widely used and rarely questioned. Both may be making things worse.

The first: team building days. They signal good intention. But a day outside the office does not repair what builds and breaks in the small moments of the rest of the year. Tensions that have existed for months do not disappear over lunch and a communication workshop. Sometimes they get worse: people spend the day pretending everything is fine, and come back the next morning more exhausted from having played the game.

👉 Read the original post here

The second: permanent urgency. When a team has been in emergency mode for six months, at some point it is no longer an emergency. It is the operating mode. And in that mode, certain things quietly disappear: the time to think before acting, the capacity to anticipate rather than react, the willingness to try something new.

Teams adapt. They become good in emergency mode. And progressively unable to work any other way.

👉 Read the original post here

Personal Reflections

Fifteen years ago, I was that employee.

Motivated. Solid. Then, without explanation, my manager stopped including me in meetings. No more copy on decisions. No more place in the room.

That moment made me look elsewhere. Once I started looking, it was over. He could have changed his approach the next day. The decision was already made, in my head, in silence. All it needed was an opportunity.

Today, when I enter a team, I look for that person.

The one who is still answering emails, still delivering, but whose expression has changed. Who no longer asks questions. Who does exactly what is asked, nothing more.

They are still delivering. They have been gone for a while.

Most managers I work with sense it. They wait for it to pass.

It does not pass.

👉 Read the original post here

Book and Resource Recommendations

This month, I recommend the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman.

The book identifies two types of leaders: Multipliers, who draw out the intelligence and capability of the people around them, and Diminishers, who, despite often being highly competent, unintentionally suppress their teams' ability to think and act independently.

What makes it worth reading is its central, uncomfortable observation: most Diminishers do not know they are Diminishers. They believe they are helping. They believe their involvement is necessary. They are often the most technically capable person in the room.

It is a useful read for any manager who wonders why their team never seems to fully step up.

Q&A

Q: My team seems engaged, and everything looks fine on the surface. But something feels off. Where do I start?

Start with what is not being said.

Look at your last five team meetings. Count the number of times someone raised a problem you were not already aware of. If that number is zero or close to it, your team has learned to filter.

Then pick one person: the most senior, or the one who used to push back and has stopped. Ask them one question directly: What do we currently avoid talking about as a team?

Then listen. Without defending. Without explaining.

The answer will be more useful than any survey or engagement report.

Conclusion

The signals are rarely dramatic.

A meeting that goes too well. A top performer who goes quiet. A leader who handles everything because it is faster that way. A team that agrees to everything.

Each of these, alone, is easy to dismiss.

Together, they describe a team that has quietly stopped working at its full potential.

None of it requires a reorganisation or a new tool. It requires a conversation that has not happened yet.

One thing you can try this week

In your next 1:1 with a direct report, ask only this: What do you think I think of your work?

Then hold the silence. Do not rescue them. Do not add context.

Wait for the real answer.

It will tell you more about the health of that relationship than the past year of performance reviews combined.

If you want to identify what might be holding your team back, feel free to reply to this email or check out my upcoming events on this topic: ericfingerhut.ch/insights