They Hid the Chocolate

Written By Bart Berkey | Founder of Most People Don't

THEY HID THE CHOCOLATE

The chocolate was back.

We walked into the airport lounge this week for the first time since its five-month renovation had finally wrapped up. Sitting on the counter, right where they used to be, were the little chocolate bars we hadn't seen since the construction walls first went up.

For those five months, that lounge did something I've watched a lot of businesses struggle with. They kept taking great care of people while half of their space was missing. There was almost nowhere to sit, and rather than let that become the story, they packed larger portions to go so you could carry a real meal onto the plane with you.

The coffee was still fantastic, the food was still restaurant quality, and on some mornings there was even a juice barista making fresh juice to order. That turned a cramped corner of the terminal into one of the better parts of the trip.

So when we saw the chocolate, we told one of the team members how much we'd missed it, partly as a compliment to the whole team and partly because it really is very good chocolate.

The team member smiled and accidentally told us they'd been instructed not to put the chocolate out during the renovation.

I assumed it had something to do with space or supply, or with nobody wanting chocolate melting in a carry-out bag, but the real reason was printed on the back of every wrapper.

WHAT WAS ON THE WRAPPER

Each bar carried a small QR code inviting guests to share feedback about their experience, and somewhere above the people serving us, someone had decided that a lounge under construction wasn't a lounge they wanted reviewed. They were worried, as best we could tell, that the comments wouldn't be good, so for five months the question quietly disappeared along with the chocolate.

I understand the instinct, and I suspect most of us have felt it, because nobody wants to hand out the survey on the day the air conditioning breaks or ask how the meeting went when they already know it went sideways.

The only thing actually missing from that lounge was a place to sit down and enjoy what they were serving. Very little else had changed, because the coffee, the food, the people, and the care all stayed exactly where they'd always been.

If they had asked, I believe most guests would have said something close to what we were saying at that counter, which is that the team had handled a hard stretch beautifully. The guests who had something critical to say would have handed them something even more useful: a list of what to fix before the walls came down.

That was five months of feedback from the very people walking through the door every single day, and nobody collected a word of it.

FAIR-WEATHER FEEDBACK

I've started calling this fair-weather feedback, which is the habit of asking only when you're confident you'll like the answer. It feels safe and it produces lovely scores, and it teaches you almost nothing. The moments you're most nervous to ask about are usually the moments when people have the most to tell you.

Hard seasons also tend to be when people are most forgiving. A guest who sees you working around a construction zone with larger portions and a juice barista is already rooting for you, and that's exactly the person you want to hear from.

LEADERS HIDE THE CHOCOLATE, TOO

This isn't really a story about an airport lounge, because leaders put the chocolate away all the time, and we tend to do it in two directions.

The first is the question we stop asking. During the reorganization, the lost client, or the quarter that went badly, we quietly stop asking our teams how we're doing as their leader, because we're fairly sure we won't enjoy the answer. So we wait for things to reopen before we invite anyone to tell us the truth.

The second is the feedback we stop giving. When a team is stretched thin and morale feels fragile, a lot of leaders decide that this is no time for hard conversations, and they save the coaching for when things are back to normal. That feels like kindness, and it's usually the opposite. The person struggling through the hard season is the one who needs the coaching most, and the one with the most time left to use it.

Think about it from the other side of the desk. If you were the one working through a difficult stretch, would you rather your leader waited until the grand reopening to tell you what you could have done better, or told you while you still had five months to do something about it?

Honest coaching in a hard season tells people that you believe they can still get better while the pressure is on, and silence in that same season tells them that you've decided to wait them out.

Three Things to Try This Week:

1. Put the chocolate back out. Name the one area of your work where you stopped asking for feedback because things are messy right now, whether that's a rollout, a staffing gap, or a project running behind. Then ask one simple question this week: what's one thing we could be doing better right now?
2. Coach during the renovation. Pick one person on your team who's working through a hard stretch and give them one specific, useful piece of coaching this week, rather than saving it for when things calm down. The best time to help someone improve is while they still have time to use it.
3. Name what never changed. In the middle of a hard season, tell your team or your customers exactly what's still excellent, the way that lounge kept the coffee great and the food restaurant quality. People protect what they know you've noticed, and they'll tell you more once they trust that you're listening for the good as well as the bad.

The chocolate was never the real risk in that lounge. The cost was five months of silence that nobody thought to count.

Somewhere in your work right now there's a renovation going on, and there's probably a question you've quietly put away along with the chocolate.

What have you stopped asking about because you were afraid of the answer, and what might you already know if you'd simply asked?

Most People Don't... But YOU Do!

Bart