3Q Check-Ins: How To Pay Attention To The People You Can’t Afford To Lose

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my longtime friend, Dr. Jim Henderson. Jim is the creator and head coach of the 3Q Check-In System, which we're here to talk about today. And he's also one of the most interesting people I know. You may have heard him on This American Life with Ira Glass, or you may have seen one of his live stage events with William Paul Young, author of The Shack, or seen his other various projects around the country and around the internet. But I'm delighted to welcome to the show my friend Jim Henderson.

[00:46] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:48] SPEAKER_01:

Jim, thanks so much for joining me.

[00:49] SPEAKER_02:

My pleasure, Justin. Thank you.

[00:51] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jim, we're kind of in different worlds, but when I saw what you are currently up to with the 3Q check-in system, I thought, this has a ton of overlap with what we try to encourage people to do at the Principal Center, and that is... talk with the people in your organization. And our listeners will be familiar with my book, Now We're Talking, 21 Days to High Performance Instructional Leadership, which is all about classroom walkthroughs. But in the broader world of organizations, including churches, nonprofits, businesses, it turns out that talking with people, especially the people who work there, is also an important thing to do.

[01:29]

So, Jim, first of all, welcome. And I wonder if you could give us kind of a backstory or an origin story for where the 3Q check-in system came from and then what those three questions are.

[01:39] SPEAKER_02:

So I was a pastor for about 25 years, mostly in the Northwest. I was what was called a church planter, which is similar to starting a pizza shop from the ground up and seeing if it works. Anyway, as I did that, I pastored near the end of my pastoring career. I was fortunate enough to be brought on staff at a megachurch. This was a church with 7,000 attendees, 400 volunteers, $9 million budget, 48-acre campus, and 100 people on staff. And I was brought in as a leadership development person.

[02:10]

In that role, I was asked to help take these 100 people, principally about 25 of the lead pastors involved. and directors and help them become better leaders. So it just occurred to me that I should talk with these people personally and find out what had been happening before I got there. Because I assumed when you go from a small church like I was always in to a megachurch, like everything must be working, right? It must just be unbelievable. And because if we had these resources, we would make it unbelievable in our minds.

[02:39]

So it turned out that there were a lot of people who I discovered that their bosses, in other words, in an organizational talk, the people that they reported to were very inconsistent in checking in with them. And some of these people were responsible to make decisions that involved thousands and thousands of dollars. And I would say, well, why don't you consult with your boss? Well, I'll wait till they come by. And when was the last time you saw them? Oh, a couple of weeks ago.

[03:04]

And very inconsistent, very uneven. I just thought that was a poor way to run an organization if you were given the privilege to have that kind of control. So. I started thinking about that. And as time went on, I left there. Somewhere along the line, I'm a person that comes up with ideas.

[03:19]

I'm creative. I'm a musician. And I hang around people with big ideas and the ideas intoxicating and people that have them together intoxicate each other. I realized the and this was actually influenced by a book I read by James Theodore. And what he studied was how change occurs. And artists tend to think like An idea people think, well, if I have an idea, it'll change the world if everybody gets their hands on it.

[03:42]

But that isn't how change occurs. Change occurs when you have an idea and then somebody from the top down decides to take it public. And so it turns out that bad ideas get to market every day because they got distribution. So I became fascinated with distribution and have now become basically sort of a completely pragmatic person on this that Ideas are awesome, but distribution's better. So I say salt is a great idea, salt shakers are better. So I was looking for a system And so 3Q principally grew out of my desire to create a system.

[04:17] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jim, I think that obvious power of connection and just checking in with the people that we work with, it seems so self-evident. And yet, when we ask around, it is rare. It is rare to find that people are actually talking, not just chit-chat over the water cooler or in the office in the morning, but really checking in on substantive issues. If we are leaders...

[04:40]

you'd think we would prioritize that a little bit better than we actually do. But I've found with administrators, often our first or our surface challenge is making time. But once we make time and kind of figure out, okay, when in my day am I going to get into classrooms and talk with teachers, there's a deeper challenge of, okay, what do I actually do when I get What do we actually talk about? Because if I do what I think I'm supposed to, according to professional norms, I must have some sort of evaluation tool or some sort of checklist that I run through when I talk with people. And this is what I was really struck by when I read your three questions that you encourage leaders and managers to ask. because they're not evaluative questions.

[05:22]

They're not, you know, what are your quarterly targets? What are your annual goals? You know, how are you stacking up according to our performance management system? They're very human questions. So what are those questions? And tell us what's behind those questions.

[05:34] SPEAKER_02:

Justin, when we join an organization, it's something like an arranged marriage. We find ourselves thrown into relationships with people that we didn't know with whom we have to work now. And we don't have a choice. So then all sorts of emotional things ensue as a result of that. I call those organizational relationships. And 3Q is designed to cultivate and strengthen organizational relationships.

[05:59]

So the three questions are, how are you? How are we? How can I help? What's important to understand is that the person that's in the one-up position, what I call in terms of the hierarchy of the organization, is the one that has to ask the questions. This doesn't work laterally. Like you and I, you know, we would be friends.

[06:16]

How are you? How are we? But at this particular point, neither of us are bossing each other. You know, I'm not responsible to report to you, vice versa. But if we were, then it would be appropriate for one of us to ask the other question. How are you?

[06:26]

How are we? How can I help? I want to make it simple. I want to make it sticky. Essentially, people don't forget these after they hear them one time. And I wanted to make it seem sort of over the top obvious.

[06:39]

I basically like inventing things that nobody can say no to. Right. I just want to take away completely disarm you from being able to. You can say I don't want to, but you can't say I don't know how. you know i call it bearing the high bar so low that you need a metal detector to find it and so human beings need to be able to do things that they already know how to do everybody's asked the question how are you even if it's canned at times sometimes you ask how are we you know which is a question that gets to our relationship or our relationship inside the organization okay or your relationship as an employee with the larger organization as in like a school district or the particular school, or the United States, whatever it may be. You want to inquire about that.

[07:20]

And how can I help is a practical question that I'm in the one-up position. And oftentimes people are asking for things like, can I get a printer on my desk? Can I get a new computer? Could you get me out of this cubicle? Just stuff that people think about when they're stuck somewhere all day. Right.

[07:36]

And a lot of times the answer is, no, I can't. Right. You have to ask somebody else to do that. So the training that we do helps people understand how to answer those questions honestly and realistically. And we provide for each of those questions a series of 15 backup questions so that when people initially begin saying, how are you? How are we?

[07:56]

They say, I'm fine. We're good. Then you ask another question. Well, if you ran things around here, what would you change immediately? Nobody ever asked people like that. Here's another question.

[08:04]

How can I be a better leader? Can you imagine actually saying that to someone that reports to you? You know, we just don't ask that question.

[08:12] SPEAKER_01:

So you said the questions are, how are you? How are we? And how can I help? And it seems like those questions have the potential to not be as task related as we might feel that they're supposed to be if we're having a work supervisory conversation. Is that intentional that the door is open to talk about things that are not exactly the task at hand?

[08:33] SPEAKER_02:

Yes, because when you read the script, we provide everyone a script so that No one has to be talented or charismatic or insightful or intuitive to lead a 3Q. You don't have to be a psychologist or a counselor. And we basically provide a script that people read. And part of it is they state at the beginning, this is not a review. This is not counseling. I'm not a therapist.

[08:56]

Let's get started. And so it is a check-in solely to listen to the employee or the volunteer or whoever it is that you're managing to give them time to talk. And you frame it by the fact that you're at work and the nature of relationship is bounded by work principally. You talk about work. you know, how are you at work? Now, sometimes people talk about their families.

[09:21]

All that's a leader, and we coach people on this. You bring back people into the context of like, how are you at work? Obviously, if people's lives are falling apart, you listen to them. So this is not an evaluation or a review. I will say that what we're discovering, though, is that if 3Q is done consistently, by that I mean a half an hour once a month consistently, by the time you get to an evaluation, You basically have removed the need for an evaluation because you've done it all year long, which I think is a more human and humane. You know, I say we don't need human resources.

[09:57]

We need humane resources. And this is what we're trying to provide. I think we could do away with the whole end of year, which is a very non-human way of evaluating people and all of that. It's not absent of task. A lot of times tasks come up, but it's mostly leans into anything that the person wants to talk about. We just simply put a mic on them and say, tell me how you are, how we are, how can I help?

[10:25]

Honestly, Justin, when people get into the habit of this, these meetings typically run 15 to 20 minutes. That then is linked on to an operational meeting, either with a group or them individually. That's where they talk about the task and so on. This is an animal unto itself. It's unique and it's meant to listen, to give people. Simone Weil said, attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

[10:51]

And so the act of paying attention, and think of that as like pulling out your debit card and not your credit card, paying attention to someone so that the person with power is giving away power to the other person that lacks it. And they're inquiring. And people tell you when power is small, they tell you about it then rather than waiting to let it build up and they won't. wandering into your office and not that a big business or something, you know. So we're trying to lower the anxiety for supervisors and increase the attention for the people that they're working with and leading.

[11:26] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think that makes so much sense because if you think about in any organization, there are people who do have that relationship with their supervisor who feel comfortable coming and saying, hey, I've noticed this, or I'm feeling that, or I need this, or could you do that? And those are the people that tend to be seen as high performers that have opportunities presented to them. But I think the tragedy in most organizations is that most people don't get the opportunity to have those conversations because they don't have that kind of relationship and they're not asked. And as a result, their manager, their supervisor, their leader, their boss doesn't know what they know. And if you multiply that by how many people work in the organization, that's an enormous amount of information that the organization knows that the leader does not.

[12:17]

So it just kind of sits in separate rooms with the person who knows it and doesn't benefit the whole organization.

[12:24] SPEAKER_02:

So think of this as radar, you know, a radar screen. And two things, you can consistent scope on your organization and it's running throughout your system. you can spot two key issues. One is you can spot problems when they're blips instead of bombs. You can see them coming. You have time to prepare.

[12:42]

You have time to intervene. You can treat people respectfully. You don't have to be as emotionally invested. You can send in other people. There's a lot of things you can do if you can see things on the horizon rather than And the same thing is true with potential. You can spot people.

[12:56]

I was talking with a young man the other day who works in a nonprofit organization and he supervises five other leaders during the year on basketball teams. And he's going to start leading three cues with the five people. And two of them he's going to hire. So I said, you know, within 90 days, you know, which two of the five you're going to hire for this fall. So just start doing 3Q with them and you're going to know that and you're going to see where the potential is. And he went for it.

[13:23]

And I told his boss, who's further up the food chain, and she didn't even know who he was. Right. I said, well, keep your eye on this. And likewise with problems, 3Q operates like a screening device, whereas in the first six months of a person's employment, particularly at the higher levels, you're going to know whether they are going to adapt to your system or not. And we've had people actually, during the probation period, Let people go because they discovered partially through 3Q that the person was simply going to be very problematic in their system. And as a result of that, it saved this organizational lawsuit that they may have encountered if they had let it go longer.

[14:01]

So it works in problems, spotting problems and spotting potential. And like you said, there's a ton of information out there. in organizations and untapped talent. And in organizations that work with volunteers, there's a ton of untapped talent because we only call volunteers when we need them or want to feed them pizza once every three months.

[14:19] SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, and that gets at the question of who is this for on the receiving end. So obviously as a principal, I'm most concerned about teachers because teaching is kind of what we're here to do at a school. But it occurs to me that no matter how much I get into classrooms, there are lots of other people that I should probably be talking with and checking in with and using those three questions with. So just to make some specific application here for school administrators, I'm thinking about the importance of talking with office staff. And for me in my school, obviously the secretaries in every school are hugely important, but our school nurse had a way of kind of reading the rest of the staff and knowing what was up beneath the surface. Yeah, you might wanna check in with so-and-so just to kind of see how that's going.

[15:09]

Stuff that nobody would ever bring to me. If I checked in with her, she knew things that I needed to know about. And I think, you know, in every organization, we have people who know things we need to know about who are not going to seek us out, who are never going to complain and bang on the door and say, you know, I demand to speak with you. But We need to. And it's, you know, it's the relationship. It's the information.

[15:32]

It's the decision making. It's kind of the organizational intelligence. Another couple more. Obviously, custodians are hugely important in a school. And classroom aides, if you have teacher's assistants, you know, who tend to kind of run between classes at all different times and see a totally different side of the school that's a lot closer to what students see than to what teachers see. Hugely, hugely valuable to have those check-ins.

[15:55] SPEAKER_02:

So most of us are directly supervising three schools. upwards to 10 people. We basically max out at about five. Most people at an executive level are supervising around 10 people on a consistent basis. And so one of the organizational people I work with now meets us 10 check-ins a month with people. And so what happens is you would basically then decide who are the three to five people that I need to check in at least once a month with And you begin to do that.

[16:27]

And then 3Q is a self-replicating system that people are learning without knowing they're learning it. So when they go through 3Q anywhere for six months, they basically know how to lead 3Q. And so part of the thing is you turn to people who want to work with classroom needs or have that or the custodians and those people and you begin asking them to lead 3Q with those people in your system. So you don't have to get to everybody. You have to get to the right people and then they have to get to the right people. It sort of filters out.

[16:55]

There's org charts and there's relational charts. And so things can move down the org chart level, but it can also move relationally. Like someone like your nurse could be three curing people. And so those are the people you want to, you have to decide who are the people that I want to check in with. And for the sake of the organization, Justin, let me just make clear, because I think people tend to see these things as kind of a bonus, like, oh, this is extra. This is if you want to be a super sensitive organization.

[17:21]

And I view this as part of people's salary, not as a bonus. This is something that our job as leaders is to figure out. It's on us to decide who are we going to, quote, unquote, pay, unquote, attention to. We have to decide it's a limited resource and it's up to us to decide who's going to get it and why. That's why we're leaders. And everybody who's managing, we have to train them on how to make those kinds of decisions.

[17:46]

So this is not just trying to be nice people. This is strategic and responsible. And then this is not just so that people feel heard. This is so the organization, you can begin to align people with the organizational mission. So what we're talking about largely in 3Q is the organization's mission, how people are aligning with it or not aligning with it. But it always comes back to that.

[18:11]

So as a leader of an organization, I want to know if there's some coherent strategy for people to be coming along with the larger picture. And that's our job. So 3Q is designed to address both of those issues. things, the personal one and then the organizational mission as well.

[18:28] SPEAKER_01:

And it makes total sense that, you know, the alignment between knowing what's going on with people and knowing how to get the organization to get the results that we need to get. You know, that's that's the work of leadership. You know, it's that's why we need leaders, because everyone individually can do their job. But we've also got to to make things work as an organization. And that means bridging those levels.

[18:48] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let me just say we join organizations either because of the mission or the money, some combination thereof. And so we, by virtue of doing that, have obligated ourselves to the mission of that organization. If we lose interest in it or we don't want to do it anymore, we can leave. But as long as we're there, we shouldn't be surprised that the organization is asking us to try and achieve some goals. So this is not a hand-holding. 3Q is not just a hand-holding type of thing to make people feel better about themselves.

[19:17]

This is to kind of cut through a lot of the clutter that messes with the system so that we can actually talk to each other about the work we're trying to get done.

[19:25] SPEAKER_01:

And I would actually encourage people to read the FAQ that you have on your website because I think you've really done a lot of the work. kind of thinking through how this works and thinking through some of the challenges and pitfalls. And I know that you coach leaders as well on how to use these questions and follow up and how to make effective use of this process. If people want to find you online and learn more about the 3Q check-in system, where's the best place for them to go, Jim?

[19:52] SPEAKER_02:

3Qcheckin.com. And they can email me at jimhenderson at 3Qcheckin.com. And I'd be happy to talk to them.

[19:59] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Jim, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

[20:03] SPEAKER_02:

I appreciate the time, Justin.

[20:05] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.