When I was 18 and not long past my driving test and I used to race minis. The old classic minis. Not the ones that BMW now make under the and call them minis. I used to grass track race them. Every other weekend through the season, we used to load the car up on a trailer, hitch it to the back of the van, and tow it to that meet. Me and my mate. And he was also a mechanic, so that helped too. Welcome to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I'm John Manning, and if you've ever asked someone on your team how things are going, been told everything's fine, and then being blindsided a fortnight later, you're in exactly the right place. You see, we used to take alternate weeks. He'd race one weekend and I'd race another. And every time I would come off the track and he'd always ask me the same question. Well, if it the same type of question anyway, if it wasn't exactly the same question. Yeah, is there anything wrong? And I'd always give him the same answer. I'd always say yeah. It's running fine. And then the next race meeting, or even sometimes if we were at meetings where there was more races, he'd take it out. Sometimes you had a mechanics race, so he'd take it out in the mechanics race that week. And well, something always went wrong. Something always seemed to go wrong. But it seemed fine. You see, this car, as I say, it was the original minis. So either the mini city or the mini clubman, we used to strip them totally out. Used to just take literally everything out, all the chairs and everything out, and you used to the windows out, um, all the headlights, everything, anything that could get broken or damaged. We used to weld up the doors and we used to build a metal frame inside as a roll cage, and that was our mini, and that was our racer, and we used to put a number on on the side, depending which club we were on, depending on what number we put on. And then we used to load this car on the back of a caravan chassis, an old caravan that we got hold of that would knock the caravan off, so we just had metal frame, put planks on it, and then ramped up the car onto the back and tied it all down. And we had an old van that we used to tow this trailer with to each of the race meetings. Luckily, we never actually travelled that far for meetings, so they were you know within half hour, 45 minutes of where we lived. And it wasn't just the racing weekend. You see, the two weeks in between we'd be working on this car, whether it was just to clean all the mud off of it, give it a good wash, looked as best as it possibly could, but it always involved more than that. Often we would have had a bump or two, so there'd be a bit of bodywork that needed pulling out, reshaping, bashing about. We'd try and see if we could make it just a little bit lighter, get it to go a little bit faster, just eke out a bit more quickness. You see, we put a lot of time into this old little mini. It would always take up the whole weekend in between the two race meetings. It wasn't a sort of hobby that you just turned up to on a Sunday morning and then you did a bit of racing and went back home and forgot about it for a fortnight. It involved you doing something all the time. So by the time we get to the next race meeting, that car had had a fortnight of attention from him. So just so you get this picture of what it's like, so we race around Ogfield at the beginning of the season, it's beautiful lush green grass. After about two races, it's a mud pit, old tyres in the middle showing where the track is, and some barriers to keep people back from the edges, and the noise. Well, the noise is just um tremendously loud. You can just imagine, you know, 10 to 20 cars each race, and they don't have to have exhausts that comply to your MOT or anything, so they were loud, and then the bigger cars. Well, the minis were loud, but the bigger cars were even louder as they all shot round the circuit. So at the end of this, you can imagine your adrenaline is just pumping, right? So it's really exciting, even though I was always near the back. I don't think I ever got near the front, and I certainly don't think I ever won. But you did it because you got this buzz and going round, and I'd come off, and as I say, my mate would always say to me, How's it gone? How's it running? Is anything wrong? Oh that question, is anything wrong? Well, I used to honestly answer him. Uh no, it's all fine. I remember I'm pumped up on a general in here as well, but it just all seemed fine to me. So then he'd go out and it always seemed to fell. He'd come back in and he'd say, Did you not hear that? Could you not feel that? Could you not see that? And I honestly I just couldn't. So over the season his frustration would build up, even though he tried to be patient with me. And in the end, the second season, the third season, we used to have our own cars because his frustration I think secretly just got too much. But he could hear things that I couldn't because he was trained to do it, he had experience to do it. It's what he did Monday to Friday. And he'd say to me, John, can't you hear that? That flatness. You see, to me it just sounded like a lot of noise. We didn't need MOTs on these cars, they weren't road legal in any way, and so the exhausts were loud. They were really loud, and you'd have this whole smell of petrol fumes and noise, and that was part of it. When there was ten to twenty cars rushing around, that was the noise you heard. Out of all that massive amount of noise, he was listening for a certain sound. A sound a noise within the big sound. He could tell whether it was running okay or not. I couldn't separate it, it was just loud. But he was listening for one particular thing in all of that and I just kept hearing noise. You see, I genuinely never lied to him about it. If I'd thought there was something wrong, I would have told him there was something wrong, and sometimes I did, and sometimes I could tell there was something wrong, but not very often. You see, the thing I had or didn't have more to the point, I had no reference. I didn't know what wrong sounded like. He'd been fiddling with cars for years, you know. That's why he became a mechanic. I mean we've both only just, you know, passed our tests which seemed five minutes ago, but certainly we hadn't been driving for that long on the road. I guess the honest truth is the question that he asked me he was the only one that could really answer it. When you ask questions like everything's alright, any issues? How's it going? And you get the answer back, yeah it's fine. You see, what tends to happen in management managers hear one of two things. They think either everything is fine and they leave it alone and they get on with their busy day, or they think ah I'm being flopped off here. And my experience is actually it's probably neither of those two things. You see, I call it something called the confidence competence gap. A right mouthful. The confidence competence gap. You see, you can be confident but not necessarily have the right competence, or you can be competent but not necessarily be confident with it. You see, when you ask them if everything's going okay, maybe with the project or the job that you've given them, they can't detect it yet. They don't necessarily know and have anything to do with. Because you'll ask them to hear something that took you ten years to learn to hear, and the frustration makes it worse because then they'll stop volunteering that information freely. You see, my main never explained to me what I was meant to be listening for, he just kept asking me, was everything okay? And I've done exactly the same thing as a manager. I used to work for a company that was service-based, and we would regularly go to people's houses, and I was in charge of various offices across England, and I used to talk to one particular manager that was in charge of one of the depots, and I'd ask if everything was okay, and I'd be told, yeah, everything's good. And this one particular time I was due to visit, and I arrived, asked how everything was going and how things were, and then just started to look at the properties that had been visited. To me, it quite quickly became quite obvious that within that time window they weren't going to get to all the houses. So I asked the manager, what's going on? And you see, the weather had a big effect for this particular company, and when it rained, they couldn't go to certain properties on certain days, and it had been wet. But I'd asked, was everything okay? Just to discover that now mathematically it was impossible to get to all those places, to get to all those homes, to get to all those customers and deliver the service that they were paying us to do. I asked the manager, how come you haven't flagged this? And they were, oh, but it's rained, so we haven't been able to get out. But we've done as much as we can. And you see, that was the difference there for me. I could see that we wouldn't complete. So we would need to think a different way, we'd need to think differently, we'd need to try and think up different ways to get around this. Could we get staff from a different depot to come and help? Could we get caught back up in time? And if not, how are we going to communicate this to our customers? All of this went through in my head thinking, why? Why haven't they thought this through? And to be quite honest, I was a bit annoyed. And then I just had to stand back and think, hang on, I was asking the wrong question. I'd been asking the wrong questions from their point of view, everything was going okay. They hadn't completed previously, and that seemed to be okay. But we were trying to move the company forward, we were trying to improve the service we were offering, we were trying to keep our attention of our customers, and I'd just been asking the wrong question. You see, they weren't hiding anything from me, they were answering the question. You see, they hadn't learned yet what wrong or risk looked like. Yeah, and I'd asked the question that didn't really get the answer that I needed. Because I was just presuming they had my experience and my knowledge, but of course they didn't. And that's the bit I'd do differently now. And if I go back to my management days, you see, sometimes I did this, you do that check-in, you just check that everything was okay, and you got a yes, it's fine, and you carry on with your own busy day, but you need to stop asking those types of questions. Those questions that only you can answer because it's only you that's got that amount of experience to know. Any issues is a question that needs your ears to hear that sound because they won't have the experience to do that yet. So start swapping it for something that's more specific enough that they do know the answer. It might be a long time this week. Did you have to redo anything this week? Did you have to spend more time on something than you were expecting? Did you have to ask someone else to help to resolve any of this? Did you have to guess at anything this week? You see, none of them are about you trying to catch them out. It's about you understanding where they are and how far through the project, the job or the task they are to stop you being surprised at the end of the day. You see, by asking questions like that, none of this needs a massive amount of experience. All it needs is their memory from those couple of days or for that week. And secondly, it then starts telling them what wrong sounds like. See if you can name three things you'd want to know about in that project before it was starting to be a problem. And once you know what those three things are, make sure your team know what they are, and then they'll start to know what they're looking for, what they're listing out for, and what it sounds like. So think about the last time you asked someone how things were going and they told you everything is fine, and then ask yourself honestly whether they'd have known whether it was or wasn't. Because there's a big difference between someone hiding a problem from you and someone who simply hasn't learnt what the problem sounds like. My mate spent a whole season frustrated with me for not hearing it. And he was right that something was wrong. He was just asking the wrong person the wrong question. In the show notes below you can get hold of my free guide. It's why your conversations keep going sideways, and the one shift that can fix it. So thanks for listening this week to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode and subscribe so you don't miss next week's. And as always, I'm rooting for you.