Breaking the Circle for Leaders is the podcast for frustrated middle managers who feel stuck in the same patterns, working harder but getting the same results, as stress builds. In each episode, Jon Manning, author of Emotional Intelligence Unleashed, draws on 25 years of operational management experience at McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Greggs, among others, to explore why conversations spiral, why teams resist change, and why the pressure never seems to let up. Not theory. Not corporate training. Real stories, practical tools, and small shifts in thinking that make Monday mornings feel different.
I was new in the role, mid shop visit, when someone came and found me to say there was a manager on the phone. A customer had come in saying they'd eaten one of our products and it had broken their tooth. I told them to take the details, fill a complaint form in, offer a replacement or a refund as a gesture of goodwill. Then I left them to it and got on with my week. As far as I knew, that was the job done properly.
A few days later I mentioned it in passing to my line manager, almost as a side thought. She asked whether I'd reported it to head office. To crisis management. I hadn't, and I could feel my face going red a full beat before I'd even understood what I'd done wrong.
The reason sounds obvious once someone says it out loud. If that customer goes to the local paper, or these days puts it online, it can pick up a head of steam, and head office need to be ready for it. But in my head crisis management meant someone seriously hurt, or a fire. Not a tooth and a complaint form. Nobody had ever told me otherwise.
It was a good bit of learning. It isn't the learning that kept me up at night.
Everyone knows the saying, you don't know what you don't know. And it's true, I couldn't have known. But at three in the morning that saying isn't in the room. There's just "I should have known," on a loop, for days. And then a second layer underneath it, which is worse: I should have been able to let myself off about it, and I couldn't.
In this episode I talk about the gap between knowing a thing and it being any help to you, why the comfortable saying doesn't do the job people think it does, and the sentence that comes out of you twenty-five years later when it's one of your own reports on the other end of it.
New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.
Jon Manning is the author of Emotional Intelligence Unleashed. Thirty years on the shop floor, not a textbook.
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Are you tired of being stuck in the middle? Feeling trapped in an escort readdown. It's time to break free. Welcome to Breaking the Circle for Leaders.
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Hello and welcome back to Breaking the Circle for Leaders, the podcast for managers who feel stuck, frustrated, and like they're the only ones that haven't been given the manual. I'm John Manning. And just a quick note before we start. From now on, it's a new episode every fortnight rather than every week. Same episode, same me. It just gives me a bit more room to get them in front of more people who really need to know. Going back a good number of years now, I was in a shop and I was doing a usual shop visit, and I was having a look around the shop and uh just checking what the product looked like, you know, how the shop was laid out, how the service was, how the staff were being, etc. And sort of midway through that visit, um, someone came and got me. So this is going back in the days that we didn't all have mobile phones. So another shop had phoned that shop knowing that that's where I was and wanted to speak to me. So I went and picked the phone up and was talking to the manager, and they were explaining to me a customer had come in and said that they'd bought one of our products and that when they'd taken a bite into it, that their tooth had broken. Bearing in mind, I was new to this company at the time, and my honest first thought was how do you prove this? How do you show whether it was our product, someone else's product broke at home? So I was thinking about this, and I was thinking, wow, you know, I can't prove anything, and they obviously can't, but I was even surprised that they'd come back in and said, But anyway, put my manager head back on, and I was like, Oh, that's fine, just take their details, fill out a complaint form, and um offer them a replacement product or a refund if that's what they want, and just you know, say it's a gesture of goodwill, and I sort of left it at that. The manager of that shop dealt with it, and uh in my mind I sort of thought it's it's handled, it's all now been dealt with, and then nothing happened. You see, there were days between that phone call and then a conversation that I had with my line manager. I just got on with my week. I had other shop visits to do, other shops to see, other problems to solve. I wasn't worried about it because as far as I knew there was nothing to be worried about. I'd dealt with it. I'd done the job properly. That's what made this one sting later. I didn't walk away from the phone call with a nagging feeling. A nagging feeling that I'd missed something. I walked away pleased that I'd sorted it. So a few days later, I can't really remember how much longer, but I was having regular check-ins, as I say, because this was a new role for me. So my line manager I was having a conversation with, and she was asking how things had been going. So I'd gone I was going through the week and any questions I had for her, and just you know, any problems I might have had, and it was almost a side issue, a side thought that I said, Oh a shop had a customer complaint, and uh they said it broke their tooth. And well, I got them to fill out a customer form and just explained what I'd said. And so she said to me, Um, Did you report it? Did you phone head office? Did you report it to crisis management? And I thought, no. And you know that moment when you your body reacts a fraction before your brain can catch up, and I could feel myself going red and just almost freezing. I just thought to myself, I've really mucked up, and then suddenly your brain catches up with you, and you're thinking, I just need to understand what have I done wrong here, and then that second wave of thought of uh what is my line manager gonna think of me? How incompetent do they think I am? You see, obviously now she'd said it and started to explain the risk. Well, yes, there is a risk. If that customer went to the local paper and nowadays posted on social media, actually what could potentially happen? So there was a risk to the reputation of that company and I'd not seen it. I was new, I hadn't been doing the role for long, but I just should have seen it. You see, the thing with crisis management before that point in my business life, in my working life, was that well a crisis, a crisis is like someone's seriously hurt or a file or something really big has happened, and so I hadn't put in my head at that time crisis management could be a broken tooth, not because of the tooth, but because potentially what that could represent and what that could escalate into. So it was a good bit of learning, but it's not actually the learning that kept me up at night. I'm sure you've heard this saying, you don't know what you don't know, and it's very true. I generally couldn't have known that I needed to have contacted crisis management because I hadn't come across that before, and nobody had told me, but here's the thing nobody says about it, it didn't help me, not at that time, I was new in the role, and you know it's like you're just conscious of how you're being perceived. It always feels like lots of people are watching you, and I guess at times it feels like you're being judged, and certainly being measured, and they're all looking, you know, whether you're actually any good at what you're doing, what you said you can do, whether you're good at it or not. So on a good day, you're already feeling like you're not doing a good job. So when something goes wrong, actually goes wrong, it doesn't land just as what it is, it lands on top of that whole feeling that you're being watched, judged and not doing a good job. You see, it wasn't just one night. We've talked about before how you can drive home and you can just be replaying your day and just churning and churning it over and just thinking that if only you'd done it slightly differently. It was that except it didn't stop, it just kept going. You see, days of it in those quiet moments, whether that was driving home when you got in and sat down when you're in the middle of the night and you wake up just the replay. You see normally I slept fine through the night. I still do in my fifties, you know. I sleep practically right through the night. But not then, not when this was going on, not when you had these things playing on your mind that whole waking up in the middle of the night, the churn the same things over and over. That whole sentence that you just keep hearing I should have known. I should have known. You wake up in the morning, it's still there When you when you get just that quiet moment in your head, it pops back in I should have known. And here's the bit the saying was no use to me at all at that time because that saying wasn't in the room when it was churning. At that time I would never have said it to myself. You see you only get to say you don't know what you don't know weeks later once it stopped hurting and then there's a second layer which is is worse It's not that I should have known it's that I should have been able to let myself off about it all but I couldn't So now there's two things beating in in your head that you're beating yourself up about instead of just one A few years before before I was even working for this particular company when I was sort of seventeen, eighteen, I told you the other week that I used to race minis and before our very first race meeting before either me or my mate had been out on the track and raced, a different story had happened that I didn't tell you. We were we had this old van, it was a Mark II escort van, so I'm dating the age of this story, and we'd got this trailer which was an old caravan, and we'd knocked the caravan off, if you remember me saying, and we'd put the mini on. We'd used ramps that were just you know scaffold panks, and we'd pushed the mini on, and it was quite short. The mini sorry the trailer was quite short, and and the mini's quite small, but so it was easier to put it on backwards. So we roped it all down and we had a few ratchets that we tightened up and we really checked it. You know, we really made sure that the mini was securely tied down on the trailer. We probably put an extra ratchet on or an extra bit of rope on just to be sure, and we connected it up, and we started off. And where we kept the mini was was like in the countryside, so it was like we were going around these little lanes, and that was fine, and we were just slowly going around, and we stopped soon after and just checked everything, was still okay, and everything was still on, and it was all tight and good, and that was good, so we carried on heading early Sunday morning towards where we used to race them. There wasn't much dual carriageway we went on, but there was a piece that just bypassed one of the villages, and I'm driving along, and suddenly the trailer started to move from side to side, just gently at first, and as we went down this hill, it wasn't a long hill, but as we went down it the trailer started to rock more, and before I knew it, this trailer was snaking. Not that I knew it was called snaking or what snaking was at the time, but the trailer started to snake, and before we knew it it had spun us around in the middle of this dual carriageway and put us up the bank facing the wrong way, and I sat there. I wasn't hurt, the trailer wasn't in great shape, and that was another moment where someone could have explained to me what to do when a trailer snakes, and I didn't know what I didn't know at the time and didn't know that actually you accelerate you don't break. But still we never made it to the very first race meeting we were meant to. And again, I'd wake up at night going if only, if only I had, if only I knew. So moving on and years have gone by for me from that tooth and from that trailer. I was standing in different shoes as the manager and plenty of times the reverse has happened to me. So did I give those people the grace that I couldn't give myself at three o'clock in the morning? I guess the honest truth is a bit of both. There's definitely times when I did. Times when I remembered how that felt that not knowing and the reaction of your line manager. And I could stand there and say, yes, I found the coaching point, and I took it as a learning opportunity for them and explained it all and went through it step by step, and hopefully they've gone on to remember that and it made a difference. But can I honestly say I did that every time? No. There was times when I was under pressure, when the stakes were high, and perhaps my frustration, my lack of willingness to understand their position and where they are could well have caused me to be less understanding than perhaps I should have been, and probably had forgotten at that moment in time how it did feel that moment for them realizing that actually if they'd known what they knew it would have helped. And saying to them, Oh, it'd be fine, you don't know what you don't know. I'm not sure whether it would have been any comfort for them either. You're buried in your own day, you're buried in your own thoughts, and your own busyness, your own pile of work, and you find out that one of your reports hasn't done something that to you is obvious, and you find yourself saying, Why didn't they just know that? That's what comes out of you, which is the exact same sentence that was done to you, but this time it's pointed the other way, and you only hear yourself a beat later. Same as when your face went red, a beat before you understood that you'd done wrong. Knowing better isn't the same as being better when you're under it. You see, twenty five years on and I can still catch myself doing it. If there's a thing to do with it, when it's you, the saying won't help, so stop waiting for it. In the show notes below you can get hold of my free guide while your conversations keep going sideways and the one shift that fixes it. Thank you for listening to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, and subscribe to make sure you don't miss the next one in a fortnight's time. And as always, I'm rooting for you.
