Come with me into a coaching session with Penny.
She runs a division where nothing can go wrong. She’s built her team carefully, and she expects the managers who report to her to do the same.
She came to our session frustrated because one of the managers reporting to her, Jeff, had mentally checked out on a member of his team, and she could feel it. Sharon (Jeff’s direct report) had been with the company long enough to know the work, and Jeff had stopped investing in her. Penny wasn’t having it.
“He’s already written her off,” she told me. “You can just tell. He doesn’t think she can handle it.”
I asked what that looked like.
“He just… you can tell he’s checked out. He goes through the motions.”
“Keep going.”
“He’s disengaged. He doesn’t advocate for her. He’s just not invested.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“It’s just a feeling you get. When you’ve managed people as long as I have, you know.”
I stayed with that for a moment.
Penny’s feelings were valid, especially considering how close she was to her team. She was highly attentive, which makes sense when the margin for error is zero.
But I’ve learned to get curious when someone’s case is built entirely on it.
“Tell me about a recent moment with Jeff,” I said. “Something specific.”
“He just… you can tell he’s checked out. He goes through the motions.”
Penny meant everything she said, but she was spinning in her interpretations and not making any actual observations. So I tried again to help her see it.
“What would a video camera see?”
She started to speak, but held back. The pause stretched a little longer than the others.
“It’s always been a feeling,” she said finally. “Or just… yeah.”
She caught herself. Tried again.
“Okay. He didn’t include her in the briefing last Tuesday.”
“Good. What else?”
“He’s always… short with her. Dismissive. You can tell he’s annoyed.”
I let that last one sit. “Can you tell? Or can you see it?”
Penny frowned slightly. “What’s the difference?”
“Let me try something,” I said. “Imagine one of your direct reports comes to you and says: ‘I don’t want to work with this vendor anymore. They’re driving me crazy. They act like the world revolves around them. It’s just beyond, and I’m done.'”
Penny nodded slowly.
“Now imagine they come to you and say, instead, ‘I don’t want to work with this vendor anymore. Their CEO called me on my cell at 9:30 on a Tuesday night expecting me to fix an invoice even though payment isn’t due for two more weeks. And yesterday their sales manager kept me on the phone for forty minutes to complain about our procurement process.'”
Penny was quiet for a second.
“Same conclusion,” I said. “Very different conversation.”
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yeah, okay. I see it.”
She looked up. “I’ve been making the first argument about Jeff this whole time.”
Yes.
Neither of us said it in that session, but I’ve thought about it many times since: Jeff had a story about Sharon. Penny had a story about Steve. Both stories had the same problem. Built on impression and conclusion, not on what a camera would have captured.
The thing Penny needed Jeff to do for Sharon, she hadn’t done for Jeff.
She shifted gears and started over with what she had actually seen. Specific moments. Things she could bring into a conversation and say: this happened.
Climbing Down The Ladder of Inference
Researcher Chris Argyris spent decades studying how smart people get stuck in unproductive conflict, and one of the things he mapped was this exact process. He called it the Ladder of Inference. Peter Senge brought it to a wider audience in The Fifth Discipline back in 1990, and it’s been one of the most useful tools in my coaching practice ever since.
We notice things in our surroundings and miss other things. We interpret what we see and assign meaning to it (“He’s checked out”) without realizing we’re doing that. We draw conclusions (“He’s already written her off”) and form beliefs (“He doesn’t think she can handle it”). Most of it happens out of sight, unconsciously.
The conclusions feel like facts because we’ve been living with them long enough that they stopped feeling like conclusions.
What Penny had to do before she could help Sharon was surface her own process: Make it visible, slow it down, then ask herself honestly which parts of her case were things she had seen and which were things she had decided. Hard work. It requires accepting the uncomfortable possibility that your read of a situation (even a caring, well-intentioned, carefully formed read) might be running ahead of your evidence by a wider margin than you’d like to admit.
Bottom Line
Real advocacy starts from the bottom of that ladder. Once you’re working from what you can actually point to, you’re not asking anyone to trust your instincts. You’re giving them evidence: something they can see for themselves.
Try it with whatever situation you’re currently in. Pick the person you have the strongest feelings about. Write down only what a video camera would have captured in a recent interaction: the things you could describe to someone who wasn’t in the room. Then notice the gap between that description and the conclusions you’ve been working from.
Seeing a wide gap? That’s where your rethinking needs to start.
What would it change for you, in a situation you’re currently in (or avoiding), to ask yourself what the camera would actually see?
