Absence Blindness is a cognitive bias that prevents us from identifying what we can’t observe. It seems pretty obvious — if we can’t observe something, of course we’ll be blind to it. That shouldn’t always be the case, though, and absence Blindness can lead to two problems.

First is the lack of ability to “do nothing”, even if that’s the right move. I shared last year about a number of situations where the urge to “do something” was absolutely not the right move.

Second is the problem of efficient workers often being overlooked. Suppose you have two employees doing the same job:

• One of them is quiet, doesn’t say much, and gets their job done.
• The other is more chaotic, causes a variety of problems, but then works hard to fix the problems they’ve created.

In most cases, the second one will be more noticed and more likely to be promoted. Josh Kaufman put it this way when it comes to management:

Great management is boring—and often unrewarding. The hallmark of an effective manager is anticipating likely issues and resolving them in advance, before they become an issue. Some of the best managers in the world look like they’re not doing much, but everything gets done on time and under budget.

I’m not suggesting you create additional problems in order to solve them (like firefighter arsonists), but for those at higher levels of management to pay close attention to what people are really doing.

Some of the best people I’ve ever worked with have been quiet, unassuming, and simply get things done. They’re fantastic! I work hard to make sure people like that don’t slip under the radar, and I hope others can do the same for them as well.

We’re big fans of the EOS (“Entrepreneurial Operating System”) model of business at GreenMellen, and it’s served us well over the years. We don’t follow it precisely, but some aspects of it (like meeting cadences and clarity breaks) have been astoundingly helpful for us.

EOS founder Gino Wickman has a variety of books on leadership, and his book “How to Be a Great Boss” had a concept in it that I found to be very interesting: Delegate and Elevate.

The idea is pretty simple. First, write down every single business-related activity that you do throughout the course of a day. Take a week or two and make sure you have everything included.

Then, take a piece of paper and split it into four quadrants:

• “Love/Great” activities are those that you’ve mastered and that you love doing — they give you energy and a sense of fulfillment.
• “Like/Good” activities are those that you can do with minimal effort and that give you enjoyment and satisfaction.
• “Don’t Like/Good” activities are those that you are good at doing — you have learned to do them well through repetition and necessity, but they don’t give you real satisfaction or a sense of fulfillment.
• “Don’t Like/Not Good” activities are most likely outside your area of expertise that leave you feeling inadequate and frustrated.

It should look something like this:

Next, take every item from your list and put it into one of the boxes. Over time, and this can take years, you should work to remove yourself from items in the bottom boxes and delegate those out, so that you can focus more time on the things that matter and elevate your work in those boxes.

I only recently discovered this exercise, but Ali and I have somewhat been doing this over the years. Things that we’re not good at (or we really don’t like) we’ve slowly removed ourselves from by building a small team. Taking the time to think through it and do it properly will only help solidify what your future plans might look like.

I encourage you to check out Gino’s book, but they also have a free PDF download with some worksheets in it, including more details about how they recommend you tackle this exercise.

Over the years, we’ve fired perhaps a half-dozen clients at GreenMellen. Most of those were for a wonderful reason — they grew too large for us to adequately support, so we passed them along to other local agencies that were much larger than us and could serve their needs.

A few times, though, we let clients go for less than wonderful reasons, and a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast helped me define exactly what it is:

If you have to be a human shield between your team and your client, you need to fire the client.

Ali and I have found ourselves having to become that shield a few times in the past, and we’ve ultimately let those clients go due to continued bad behavior, and this one action turns out to be a great way to measure it. If we’re worried that a client is being rude or demeaning to our team, and we decide we need to step in and be the middle man to help protect the team, that’s pretty much all we need to know.

Granted, unless the client is being overtly awful we’ll generally help offboard them gracefully. Even in a bad client relationship, there is no need to burn bridges and an abrupt firing won’t do either party any good.

We don’t like to fire clients, and having only let a handful go (out of hundreds in the past 12 years) seems about right. Our team always comes first and we know what to look for, so when we find ourselves ever becoming that shield we know our time with them is ending soon.

A common leadership adage is to say to staff “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. At first glance, it’s a wise thing to request. Digging deeper, though, I’m not so sure. I see two ways this thinking doesn’t always work.

Solve It Together

First is the issue of trying to have one person come up with a solution, when bringing the problem to others may be of more value. To paraphrase Adam Grant, you can create a situation “where each person comes into the situation locked into their way of solving the problem and lobbies hard for that particular solution rather than considering multiple perspectives“. Bringing the problem to others may result in much better solution.

Go Do It

The other side is asking why people would come to me with solutions in most cases anyhow. If your team is adequately empowered, and they come across a solution to a problem they were facing, they should just go implement the solution. Don’t bring me the solution – just go do it.

This is often a problem in larger organizations, particularly with customer-facing staff, and I try to remember that when working with customer service folks as a customer. The solution to my frustration might be obvious to both of us, but the customer service rep simply isn’t allowed to think outside the box. Avoiding that trap is how companies like Zappos grew so quickly, as this NPR article from a few years ago showcases nicely — employees can do whatever it takes to serve their customers.

There are certainly times when I need some help and a solution is greatly appreciated, but treating that approach as the best way to go about your business is often not the best move.