Previously: Newly promoted to lead a struggling HVAC division, Kate gave her team one clear purpose. Then she realized she still had no idea why they’d been losing.
Kate already had a theory.
She’d diagnosed a thousand failing systems, and this looked like one more. Lost contracts meant sloppy work. Sloppy work meant a skills gap. She had a training plan half-written before she finished her coffee.
Then she caught herself. She’d been sure of things her first week, too.
So she started asking a different question: What am I not seeing?
On Monday, she climbed into Ray’s truck. Twenty-six years with the company. He’d expected her job, and everyone knew it.
For most of the morning, he said almost nothing.
Somewhere around the third stop, between a rooftop unit and a drive-through lunch, he finally spoke. “Work’s fine. Problem is, it’s never the same tech twice. Customer has to explain the building every time.”
On Wednesday, she sat down with the facilities director at the hospital, their largest customer, and asked what they’d been getting wrong.
He never mentioned the quality of their work.
“I never know who’s showing up,” he said. “And when something goes down at two in the morning, I never know if anyone will call me back.”
Kate drove back to the office with her training plan on the passenger seat. She left it unopened.
Her team didn’t have a skills problem. They had a reliability problem. Her own sentence had said it all along: so they never have to worry about us. The hospital worried about them constantly.
For the first time, Kate knew what was wrong.
Now she had to figure out a fix that would hold every day, not just once.
Kate isn’t real. Everything she faces is.
Curiosity finds the real problem. Consistency is what fixes it.
Who could tell you what you’re not seeing, if you asked?
Coming Next | Episode 3: Consistency
Tempus Maximize!
