MANY years ago I interviewed a guy for CTO who interviewed like a top-1% executive. He was confident, sharp, drew diagrams on the whiteboard, told me exactly what he'd fix about our tech debt. He had worked at the FANCIEST of fancy places, graduated from the fanciest of fancy schools.

I hired him and gave him three VERY CLEAR goals and four months.

Six months later, at our quarterly review, his MITs were all red - each slide read Incomplete… Incomplete… Incomplete and he still had a reasonable explanation for every line.

"We made the call to slow down and get it right."

"Building product is like herding cats."

“Leila, you really don’t know how hard this is.”

I pulled him aside after and asked one question: "What's done? Not what's close. What's ACTUALLY done?" He didn't have an answer. Just more reasons as to why it’s so hard to get anything done.

So I stopped asking him and started asking his team instead. Six months, twenty new hires, and the business had moved nowhere. I'd been told every week it was almost there.

It was there that I learned we were NOT almost close, there were a million ‘bugs under the rug’ he had decided not to tell me about that put our entire business strategy at risk.

Had I not investigated on my own, I would have never known.

This is the takeaway I want for all of you, because "trust actions not words" is something people say but seldom apply to how they lead and manage. Everyone already agrees with it. Nobody does anything different in the moment because of it.

So then WHY do smart people keep falling for it, me included, and what actually breaks the habit?

This is not a lying problem. Most people giving you a bad update or one that leaves you with more questions than you had to begin with aren't lying to you, they're lying to themselves first and then repeating it out loud with total conviction. Which means you can't out-argue it. You can only get curious enough to check and investigate further yourself.

Here's the reframe that actually changed how I manage: stop thinking about it as an honesty problem and start thinking about it as a ratio problem. Every person has some ratio between what they say they'll do and what they actually do. Some people run close to 1:1. Most run below it.

I assumed his ratio was close to 1:1 because he was SOOO confident telling me about it. That was my mistake, not his. Confidence and ratio are basically uncorrelated - if anything, the people with the weakest ratio often have the BEST most explanatory updates, because they've had the most practice explaining gaps and it’s probably worked in past roles. Whereas others are too busy doing the work to learn to speak that well.

Many managers will believe talk over ‘walk’ because it requires less work from them.

Three things I do now after learning this:

1. Ask for the ARTIFACT, not the EXPLANATION. A summary explains a result after the fact. An artifact IS the result. "We're close on the migration" is a summary. A working login screen is an artifact. If someone can only hand you a summary two check-ins in a row, you already have your answer, it doesn't matter how good the summary sounded.

2. Grade the plan against the plan, not against how it sounds. Most of us grade an update on how well written or spoken it is. Grade it against what they actually committed to last time instead. What did they say they would do? What did they DO? You are looking for evidence. That one habit does more than any amount of gut-level skepticism, because it takes YOUR judgment (which can be charmed) out of it and replaces it with evidence (which can't).

3. Go one layer below the person you're managing. Not to go around them, to calibrate. The story gets more honest the closer you get to the actual work. A VP's update is filtered through what they think you want to hear. An engineer answering "what did you actually finish this week" usually isn't filtering anything. This isn't a betrayal of your direct report. This is the same reason you'd check a second source on anything that actually matters. I have done this and will continue to with every person I ever manage, it’s the only way you get a 360 degree POV.

So here's what I want you to actually do this week, not just nod along to an update that sounds like BS or confuses you.

Pick the one person on your team whose updates you've been taking at face value, the one you haven't asked to show you anything in a while. Go back to what they committed to last time, in writing if you have it. Then ask for the artifact, not the summary. Not because you distrust them, because you owe it to yourself and to them to know the difference between what's happening and what you're being told is happening.

Lead with your eyes. What people say doesn't matter nearly as much as we want it to. What they do is what matters.

— Leila

P.S. If the work culture falls apart when you leave the room or you’re having a hard time letting go of what only you used to handle, I want to hear about it. Send me your questions for my new call-in show, Dear Leila on YouTube. Ask me here.

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