An engineering manager I mentor had put out the new levelling expectations for his team; what the company now wanted to see before somebody moved up a grade. I asked how it had gone down. He said he had posted it in Slack. He was not dodging the question. He thought he had answered it.
The message did go out, and some people read it properly. Others skimmed it on a phone between meetings. At least one person came back from leave to a channel with ninety unread messages and never reached it at all. Nothing else was going to catch them. Nothing in the system tells you the bar for promotion has moved. Miss the post and you have missed the thing.
In an office a fair amount of that would have repaired itself without him lifting a finger. Somebody mentions it over lunch, somebody else overhears two people speculating and comes to ask him directly, and by Thursday the thing has been said out loud four or five times to different people in different words. The room did his follow-up for him. It did it invisibly, so he never counted it as work, and did not notice when it stopped.
The excuse, and why I don’t accept it
The reflex is to say that it is harder to read people remotely. It is not, particularly. It’s just different. And you need to be more intentional about it.
Some people have always been poor at reading a room. Every one of us has worked for at least one of them. In an office they got away with it, because the office produced so much redundant signal that you could miss most of it and still end up roughly correct. Somebody’s whole posture changes when a project is mentioned, they go quiet in a meeting they would normally run, they stop coming to the Friday thing. Miss those and something else would reach you anyway, because there were a dozen more channels running all day whether you attended to them or not. Distributed work turned most of those off, and a lot of leaders discovered they had been coasting.
What reading people actually involves
What annoys me about the way this gets discussed is the implication that it is a gift. Some people are just good with people, the story goes, and the rest of us should stick to the systems diagrams. I’ve definitely learned a lot in this area over the years.
What I do is much more boring than intuition. I have a rough sense of how each person I work with normally shows up — how they write in Slack, how much they say on a call, how quickly they come back to things, what they are like when they disagree with me. That is the baseline. Then I notice when somebody has moved off it, and I go and find out why. Somebody who writes in paragraphs starts sending one-liners. Somebody who is never late to a one-to-one moves it twice.
None of that is mystical. It is observation, and observation improves with practice.
I might be the wrong person to be telling you it is learnable. Observation, even if not people skills, comes easily to me, and people are not reliable judges of how hard the things they find easy really are. What I am confident about is the mechanism, because I can describe it, and I can watch someone else get better at it. And I had to improve the people part of it for sure.
The word “intuition” is doing a lot of damage here. When I have a feeling about somebody before I could tell you why, that is the same knowing arriving faster, because I have watched that person for two years and the comparison happens before I am conscious of making it. Speed is what practice buys you. Someone three weeks into a new team has no baseline yet and will have to do it deliberately and slowly. That is not a character flaw, it is being new.
The method only sees change, which leaves a hole in it. Somebody who has been at a low ebb since the day they joined has a baseline with the problem already built in, and no deviation is ever going to show up. It works best, too, on the people who are easiest to read: visible, talkative, in your timezone, broadly like you. The person twelve hours away who writes little is the hardest to build a baseline for and the most likely to need one.
What I can mentor, and what I can’t
The teachable part is what you do once you have noticed, and it is where most people stall. The deviation on its own tells you nothing about the cause.
Somebody going quiet might be bored, overloaded, interviewing elsewhere, or dealing with something at home that has nothing to do with you. The move is to ask, politely and without a theory, and then to ask again past the first answer — not interrogating, just not settling for “yeah, all fine” when you have a reason to think it is not. The second question is where the information lives. Most people I mentor ask the first one and leave it there, because the first answer gives them permission to, and asking again feels like calling someone a liar. It isn’t. It’s the job. How you ask also matters; show up for the person in a supportive and helpful way and you’ll get a lot further.
There is a version of this that goes wrong. You are the person who decides their pay and their promotion, so asking again is not a neutral act, and somebody who holds the line at “all fine” may have judged perfectly correctly that telling you is not safe. Take the second no. If you are getting it repeatedly from the same person, the thing to look at is why you are not somebody they will tell.
The other half is not assuming your own signal landed. Praise you implied was not received, and concern you hinted at was not heard. If you thought your body language in that review made your reservations obvious, I promise you it did not. So say it, write it down, and put it where people can find it later — not because anyone is fragile, but because you do not know who received what, and the people most likely to have missed it are the least likely to tell you they did.
When it isn’t a skill problem
Underneath all of this sits something I cannot teach: being genuinely interested in the people you work with. The observation is only worth anything if you care what the answer is. You can drill the questions, and people can tell quite quickly whether you want to know or are working through a list.
That is not the gift theory returning under another name. Perceptiveness is a skill and it improves with practice. Interest is a motivation, and the two behave differently: I can teach you to notice, and I cannot make you want to know the answer. It matters because the two failures look nothing alike. Some leaders are blind to all of this and have no idea that they are, and those people can be shown. Others know exactly what they are not doing and have no intention of starting, because they are near the top and feel untouchable.
If you are a senior leader and you are not interested in your people, I think that is a serious problem. But it is a problem about the job you have taken, not about your worth as a person, and there are respectable places to go where it is not a requirement.
You could hire people beneath you who do carry it, which is legitimate and common. You can delegate the noticing; you cannot delegate acting on what comes back. A leader who staffs around the gap and then does nothing with what their leaders bring back has not solved anything, they have added a layer and a delay. Or you could stay technical and sidestep it. The architect track and the deeply technical CTO are proper senior careers with people doing them brilliantly.
The obvious objection is that most people cannot walk through any of those doors. They are in the role, the org promoted them for delivery rather than for people, and the mortgage does not care either way. That is true and I do not have a tidy answer to it. But knowing that you are in a job which wants something you have not got is more useful than believing you are bad at Slack.
For everyone else — the ones who do care and are not practised — start with the baseline. Pick three people and write down, honestly, how each of them normally turns up. You will find out quite quickly whether you have been paying attention.