Imagine this. You're walking up to a beautiful building, a building that you've never been to before, for an early meeting. You're juggling your coffee, your work briefcase, bag, backpack, whatever it is, and a handful of other things. And you walk up to this beautiful glass door with a long, vertical, polished metal handle. It runs most of the length of the door. Your hands are full again, coffee sloshing around, and you push on the door and nothing happens. You push harder and still nothing. Except for now, you've got coffee scalding your hand.

And then you realize you were supposed to pull on that door handle. Now you're doing that tiny half laugh, half panic move where you're hoping that nobody noticed, even though a bunch of people did. And you're hoping you didn't spill the coffee on your cloth close as well. Now, here's the thing. That moment, it's not about your personal failure. It's about something called affordances. In good design, an affordance makes the intended use absolutely obvious. A flat plate on a door says push.

A handle says pull. When the signal is missing or unclear, that's when people make mistakes because the design doesn't make it obvious. And leaders do this all the time. We design work, meetings, priorities, and access to us in ways that make people guess. And then we're surprised when they hesitate, when they get it wrong, or when they slow down or don't get it right. Now, today, I want to explore how the design concept of affordances applies to leadership and why making the next right action obvious is one of the most underrated skills of great leaders. Now, affordances are the qualities of the environment, the object, the system that make it obvious about how it should be used without any instructions. So it's a signal that tells you what to do without anyone having to explain it.

So affordances are about making it totally obvious about what to do in a given situation. There's no ambiguity or uncertainty. You just simply know how this is going to work. Like the door that is designed with the proper affordance. So push has a plate that you push on. Pull. A pull door has a handle that you pull on. And it doesn't need to say the word pull or the word push.

So that flat metal plate doesn't need a label next to it. We know what to do with that. It's obvious. Again, the handle that we're going to pull does not need the word pull next to us. And it's obvious what to do. Now, let me give you a couple of. I mean, doors are one of my favorite. But let me give you a couple examples of other places in your day to day life where affordances were designed into things that you regularly use.

Now, a lot of affordances were invented or derived in the name of accessibility for making something accessible for somebody who it wouldn't ordinarily be accessible to, but it extends far, far beyond that. But that's where some of the initial ones came from. In the first one I want to mention in this category is the curb cut. It's known as the curb cutaway effect. So you know when you go to the edge of a curb where you're going to cross the street and the curb is cut away so that it's a smooth ride down, whether you're on your bike or you're just walking, maybe you are pushing a baby stroller or a cart of some sort. Again, maybe you're on a bike or a scooter or something with wheels. Now, the curb cutaway effect was designed for people who have accessibility needs and would be, for example, in a wheelchair. But the curb cutaway isn't just for the people who are in the wheelchair.

The curb cutaway is a benefit to all of us because if you've ever, you know, taken your bike or a scooter down a curb and felt that bump, and perhaps, you know, you know, it's not the best thing for your vehicle or whether that's, whether that's a bicycle or a scooter, but it's also like hard on your bum when you land on your, on your bike seat. Okay? So the curb cutaway effect has a lot of benefits for the rest of us. Okay. Another one is captions. So you might be actually watching this on YouTube, watching the captions of it scroll by on the screen. So captions were initially designed for accessibility. Closed captioning for people who are hearing impaired. But the rest of us use them all the time.

We use them in places where it's going to enhance our understanding of something because we're seeing the words and hearing the words. It's also really helpful if you're in a, a place where maybe you're watching even this video on YouTube, the video of this podcast episode, and you're in a place where you really shouldn't be having audio playing. So you could be watching the captions scroll by on the screen instead of actually listening to it. Another great example is audiobooks. Now, audiobooks again were made initially for people who were sight impaired who couldn't read books unless they were written in braille. And so they could listen to the books. So audiobooks were invented for people who, who couldn't see. But I mean, seriously, how many of us have listened to an audiobook lately? I listen to them almost daily.

Okay, here's another one. This one comes from the kitchen. So the brand oxo, oxo, their Good Grips vegetable peeler, was designed for somebody who had arthritis and was having a really hard time holding the traditional skinny vegetable peeler and wanted to peel carrots. And so somebody on that OXO design team designed that particular vegetable peeler for somebody who wasn't able to grip in the same way because of their arthritis. And then that led to a redesign of a whole line of kitchen tools by OXO that make it easier for everyone to use them. Okay, so you get the idea. And, and, and you don't look at the vegetable peeler and go like, oh, well, if I had arthritis, I would hold it this way. No, it's just designed for anybody to hold in a comfortable fashion to get the job done efficiently and effectively.

And it's obvious you don't pick up a vegetable peeler and wonder how you should hold it. The design is built right into it. Likewise, you don't go up to a curb and wonder if you should step over the curb or if you should go to the curb cutaway. No, it's obvious. Of course you're going to go to the curb cutaway. Okay, so you get the idea of affordances. They make it obvious what to do next. So let's take a look at how this applies to leadership.

So good affordances remove the guesswork from practical objects and tools that we use all the time. And also in leadership. And bad affordances from force people to guess, like that door. And guessing is where hesitation, mistakes, and frustration show up, both in design and in leadership. Affordances answer the same question, what am I supposed to do here? And again, if the affordance is designed into the product, the system, you as a leader, it's going to be absolutely obvious how to interact with the system or how to use that, um, whatever it is, whether it's you as a leader or an object or a tool, anything like that. Okay, so I'm going to explore three different ways in which leaders can maximize affordances or make what's supposed to happen next totally obvious to the user. The user presumably being your follower, maybe your customer, but probably somebody who reports directly to you. Now, for those of you who lead from the side, this would be for your peers, for your coworkers even, think about this as managing up and and out to your customers as well, whether they be internal customers or your external facing customers.

Now, these three that I'm going to talk about are by no means an exhaustive list at all. It's really meant to be a springboard for your own thinking about how affordances and leadership work and how you can design them into how you lead. Now, that being said, if you like these three, by all means take these pages straight out of my book and put these into your leadership practice. All right, the first one I want to talk about is visibility. So we can think about visibility and cut into this from a couple of different ways. One is, where is my manager right now? So if you are returned to office or if you're hybrid, or if you are still working remotely, you may want to know, where is my manager right now? Are they available? And really it's about more about availability than actual visibility. But we often need to see that visibility in order to discern access. And are they available right now? Okay, So a leader might think if somebody needs me, they'll reach out.

But that's low visibility and that is not making it absolutely obvious how to reach you or when to reach you. Now this goes both ways. This is not just about visibility of the leader in the formal management role. This is also about how people lead one another, whether that's leading their boss, leading their peers, or. Or their customers. So I wanted to share a brief interaction that just really drives this home. Recently a friend of mine was complaining and this friend works remotely and is in one of those situations where there was a call of return to office. And this friend is supposed to be in the office three days a week.

But here's the thing, he says there's no point in being in the office because it's like the hotel style desking where you got to get there and squat in a spot. You don't have your same spot to go to every day. And he doesn't really like that. And a lot of the business partners that he works with are not located in the same building or even the same city that he's in. And so he just says, what the heck, I'll just work from home. I don't think anybody really notices. Okay, now you know where I'm going with this. This is a very low visibility strategy.

Okay? So he also says, well, my manager, it doesn't even really matter that I'm not there because my manager, she, when she gets to the office, she's got this one spot she always goes to. She finds this small Little office space with a ton door that closes and she camps out in that office space all day long. And she's not accessible to anybody except for she's on teams all day long taking her meetings. And he says, that's what I would be doing if I was in the office as well. I'd find some little hovel to hang out in and be on teams all day. Now here's where this becomes a problem. His chief complaint to me the other day was that his boss doesn't know what city he offices out of. They're physically located in the same city and his boss does not know that.

Now granted, she has not been his boss for a very long time. She just got they. There was some organizational reshuffling and she was sort of adjacent to him and they knew each other definitely, but they had not necessarily worked together in this reporting relationship until the past few months. But it has been a few months and she does not know what city he resides in. She does not know that they are both in the same metropolitan area. He's frustrated that she doesn't know where he lives. As he was telling me this the other day, I was like, all right. And you know, I try to keep my executive coaching hat to my reserved for my executive coaching clients and not necessarily for my friends because it does not necessarily make for the best friendship conversations if I am inadvertently executive coaching somebody.

But so I said, permission to move forward with some unsolicited advice. And he thought about it for a moment and he was like, okay, permission granted. I said a big piece of her. Not knowing where you live is on you because you do not go into the office and you are supposed to. Okay, so here visibility is clearly a two way street. But visibility as an affordance means that people can quickly see where, whether someone is available or unavailable, whether they are interruptible or uninterruptible. So something in the environment should make it absolutely obvious how, when and whether this leader is reachable. So let me just give you a handful of like really clear and obvious things that help discern whether somebody is available to have a conversation with you at work.

Open door or closed door. If they have an office with a door that closes and that door is closed, we read that to mean this person is not available right now. Now, if we have an emergency, we might knock on that door. But still that door is a visible barrier between us and their availability. Now another common place that we look for that availability is whether you're using Slack or Teams or some other online tool. Or we're looking to see, is the person green, meaning available? Are they red, meaning they're unavailable, Are they yellow, meaning maybe some transitional sort of state? So we look to those cues as well for them to mean available, unavailable, reachable, unreachable, interruptible, not interruptible. Okay. Shared calendars would be another great example of ways that we have access into that visibility into somebody else's reachability.

Now, there are normative behaviors that occur across organizations and certainly within teams that, that, that just, you know, help us discern what does a closed door really mean? What does somebody with their headset on mean? Because sometimes people with their headset on as an indication of, I don't want to be interrupted, especially if they're in a cubicle environment where they don't have a door that will close. But again, normative behaviors across the team, I usually stemming from the manager, sometimes corporate leadership as well, but will indicate what these things mean if those normative behaviors have been cultivated. Now, sometimes it's like, well, this person, if they have their headset on, it means one thing, and another person has the headset on, it means a different thing. This person's door closed, it means this. That person's door closed. It means that this person's read on teams all day long every day. But they know. But I know that I can still ping them and they will answer me, okay, so if we have a lack of normative behavior, then any visibility that we have whatsoever just really isn't going to be working in service of an affordance, making it absolutely obvious what the next action could be concerning your visibility or your availability or reachability, if you will.

Okay, so that is your first one. And again, these are ones for you to think about and to use as a springboard for your building your own affordances into how you present to others. All right, now, the next one is what matters right now. So what should be obvious is what the team should be prioritizing not only this week, but today. And what leaders often miss is that leaders will assume that priorities are well understood across the team because they were discussed once or because it's obvious to the leader. Or maybe it's because it's what the leader's thinking about all day, every day. But if they're not verbalizing it to others, then other people aren't necessarily going to know that that is what matters most right now. So, you know, and of course, affordance failure here is when everything seems important, then nothing is important.

Now, you've heard, I'm sure you've heard that before. But we need to make what is most important absolutely obvious. That is going to be the affordance of what matters right now. So good design is going to make this obvious. The top one or two outcomes that matter the most compared with what can safely wait and what won't be rewarded if we do it right now. Maybe we want to do it right now, but that's not going to be what gets rewarded. And we these things need to be explicit. So when what matters most is completely obvious, well then people know exactly what to work on first.

When you have discretionary time or when one part of a project is done, you know exactly what to do next. The trade offs become easier. Oh, somebody's asking you for this right now. But you know that this is of paramount importance and it needs to be get done by the end of the day. Then it's easy to say no to that other person or that other request or to say, you know, to give them a deferred time by which you could get it done for them. So those trade offs become infinitely easier.

Decision making speeds up because everybody's making decisions in light of the one most important thing that's supposed to get done. And then this guilt driven multitasking, like, oh, I'm supposed to be doing this, but I gotta empty my inbox. All of that just settles and decreases. Now when what matters most is not obvious to people, people feel like they're running around with their hair on fire. Everything feels equally urgent. People hedge by doing a little bit of everything and trying to multitask. And you know, if you've heard my episode on multitasking, which we'll link it up in the show notes because it is one of the most downloaded episodes of this podcast and ever. And it was like literally years ago that I did that episode on multitasking. But when we are trying to multitask by doing a little bit of everything, it is not in service of getting that one big thing done. And progress slows while effort is increasing, which is really paradoxical.

We're working harder and we're getting less done. So we don't want to fall into that situation where the one most important thing is not obvious. We need for it to be absolutely obvious so that we can avoid any sort of failure of this affordance. So let me go all Grammar Girl on you for just a minute. Historically, the word priority, when it first entered the English language was a singular term. Singular, it means one single priority. Now, the plural of that word, priorities, came later when Complexity in our lives had really exploded. The language kind of drifted to now we can make a plural of this word.

But what that word really means didn't actually change. Priority is singular. So if a leader says, here are our top five priorities for the quarter, well, that's rather meaningless. There should be a single priority. Now, there might be some other things that are also important, but this one singular priority needs to stand out. Humans perform best when one thing clearly comes first and everything else is secondary. So again, when leaders say, here are our top priorities, what they're really saying is, I haven't taken the time to determine what is really most important for our team, for our organization, for our customers. Now, I do want to make an important distinction here, because there is the team priority.

There could also be the organizational priority. Again, you hear me say priority singular. And there could be your individual work priority, which may be different than the team priority. Now, what it is, it might be a fraction or a sliver of that team priority, which is your main priority, in which case there's alignment and you're working on a piece of it. Now, there's also other times where this is the team priority and your work is adjacent to that, or maybe even not that related to what the rest of the team or some members of the team are working on, because that is the team's top priority. And so in essence, then we're going to have kind of collective priorities. So you have one, maybe your co worker has a different one, and these either lead into the team priority or there is a separate team priority because your work is adjacent to that. And really, as you think about this, it's answering the question, what are we trying to move forward together right now? And again, there may be some separate pieces and then there's the together piece of what our team is looking at.

So when we look at that individual level, what that helps afford for the individual contributor or even a manager is it gives you autonomy, it gives you ownership, it reduces role confusion, because you know that this is your priority and you might have five or six people on the team, they each have their own priorities that are all feeding into a larger project or a larger priority that you're all working on. And again, sometimes it's a subset of the team is working on that main team priority and other people on that same team, their roles are just different and they have their own priority that they are working on. So altogether, this just answers the question of what is my most important contribution, whether it is to that shared goal that the whole team is working on or whether it is to something adjacent to that that I am working on on right now. And yes, those. Ideally, those two priorities are related, the one that you're working on and the one that the team is working on. But I'm the first to say I have in the past been in a role where I was strategically misaligned with the rest of the team. I've talked about that on previous podcast episodes as well. But I think even if in episode one, where I chart my career story and you sort of go with me on the journey of my career, you will hear me talk about how I would my role was strategically, strategically misaligned for some number of years and how that came in kind of handy.

But what I was working on and my priority was not the same as what my peers, the other managers in the group, were working on because they were managing software developers. I was managing user experience people, but they weren't even managing software developers who were working on the user interface layer. They weren't managing people who were working on the mid tier layers and even the base operating system of what we were working on. So they had nothing to do with the user interface. So it was a colossal mismatch, which I actually used to my advantage, but still singular priority there. So, and that's good design when you know the single priority and it is obvious where you should be spending your time and effort. So again, where leaders often miss the obviousness of this, they think they've made the priorities clear because they talked about them once. Or maybe they wrote them in into a slide deck that they shared in a line of sight meeting at the beginning of the year or the beginning of the quarter.

And then they assume that alignment is going to cascade throughout the organization automatically. But obviousness requires visibility and it requires repetition. And it's not a priority if it's not repeated, if it's not referenced, if it's not reinforced, if it's not used as a decision filter. So if you're not using the priority for doing those things, it quickly stops functioning as an affordance. Okay, so there is your second affordance, and that is the whole notion of what is most important. And again, when that is obvious, everything just lines up behind it. All right, and then the third affordance that I want to give you today is the affordance of one on one meetings. So with your one on one meetings, again, if you are in the manager role, your one on ones should conform to a structure.

It should be obvious to the employee what's going to Happen. In that one on one there should be a format. It should ideally be on the same time of day and same day of week, the same length. I know that sometimes schedules vary and you need to shuffle things around. I get that. So that's not a hard and fast rule. But there should always be a consistent format and the manager should be 100% focused on that one on one meeting in that one on one meeting with the person that they're meeting with. So if you don't already have a consistent framework for your one on ones, I want to give you a three part framework to, to use on them.

Now, if you are listening to this through the lens of leading from the side and you're not somebody who manages People and runs 1:1 meetings with your direct reports, you could use this, you could take this to your manager to say, hey, I just listened to this podcast episode and the host of the podcast was talking about having a consistent format to one on ones. And I thought maybe we could try this in my one on ones with you. And if it works with me, maybe you just want to use it with the rest of the team. Okay. So that would be a, an opportunity to manage up and share this content across your organization. Okay. But I want to give you this three part framework for your one on ones. The first part is focus.

So again, this goes right back to that what matters most right now. But this is what matters most for you right now and the for you goes both ways. So it is what matters most for your employee. If you're leading that one on one right now. And you're going to listen to that and find out about that. And then you're also going to answer the question for yourself what matters most to you, the manager right now? Because that's where you're going to create that alignment. Because, because you might discover in the what matters most that focus part of the conversation that what you're focused on and what your employee is focused on are not the same thing. So that focus question is going to drive alignment.

It might also bring to the surface a lack of alignment. And then you have some, you know, some discernment decisions to make like, oh, should they continue working on this? This is important. And I didn't necessarily know they were that deeply invested in it or working on it or whatever. And so sometimes it's just education for you as the, the manager, and sometimes that education goes the other way and education for the employee and they need to shift their priority and get back in alignment so that that priority is A singular point again and in alignment. Um, so again, this is going to try some of the questions that you asked to get at that focus is what are you working on? What's most important to you this week? What's getting in your way? Okay, again, but what we're looking for is focus. We don't want the meeting to be a laundry list of things. And in fact, I remember early in my corporate days. Well, this would be early in my, in my earliest corporate days, there were no one on ones.

I worked at a startup company and we were just doing everything on the fly, making software and visiting our customers and I was training the customers and everything. And there were no formal one on ones. It happened occasionally, but it was not a formal process. Now fast forward through my master's degree, a bunch of consulting and my PhD work later, then a college professor, and then eventually re-entering corporate life. Then there were regular one on ones, but even then there was not a formal structure. I often just went to my boss, to our one on one with a laundry list of bullet points and if I had sufficient time, I would send them to him in advance, but we would just go down that list of bullet points. Again, not the best way to run a one on one. Okay, so the first part is focus.

What are you working on right now? The second part is friction. Where's the work harder than it should be? And this is where we're going to uncover confusion, dependencies, bottlenecks, delays, decisions that need to be made. And you're really designing into the meeting a way to surface friction early before it turns into absolute frustration, disengagement and so on. And again, it's like the, you could like your agenda for your one on one could literally be, number one, focus. We're going to find out what's most important on both sides of the table. Number two, friction. Where are things harder than they should be? And then, and really, as the manager, the question you're asking yourself is how can I help? How can I help remove some of this friction? What can I do to reduce the bottlenecks, to reduce the dependencies, the delays, the things that are getting in the way so that this person can do their best work. In fact, my mantra or motto, if you will, when I manage people in a large corporation was my job is to give my staff the resources that they need to get the work done and then to get out of their way so that they could get their great work done.

I've got their back when things go wrong and I'm Going to give them all the credit when things go right. And that was the mantra that I lived by. But again, you want to uncover one of those points of friction so that you can help. I mean, that's the goal here is you find those points of friction so that you can help reduce those points of friction. And then number three, forward motion or forward momentum. So what, what do you need from me in order to move forward? Do you need me to provide some software, some support, some additional resources? What do you need from me to help you move forward? And this makes that support explicit and not implied because I think most managers think like, well, I know my staff would come to me if they had a problem. Well, this creates the opportunity for you to give that forward motion in the one on one. So again, it makes things explicit like decisions and resources, alignment, access to people or to you or to whatever it is they need.

It also reinforces your visibility, the thing that we were talking about earlier and the affordances to you, access to you. All right, so that is the third, the third one I wanted to talk about, which is the affordance of one on one meeting that has a standard format. And again, the standard format. And I like alliteration. So I designed this for you with alliteration. So it's three Fs. Focus, friction and forward momentum. Focus, friction and forward momentum.

And that can just simply be your meeting agenda with all of your direct reports in your one on ones. Now, when an employee knows that all three of those things are going to happen in a meeting and that it's obvious that all three of those things are going to happen in a meeting, in every single one on one, it becomes a much more efficient and effective use of everyone's time. No long bullet lists of every. You know, here's everything I'm thinking about, which is how I did one on ones. When I was the employee, I would go to my poor vice president, I would go to my vice president, who I directly reported to, and I would just be like, here is everything I'm thinking about. And that was just really not the best use of our time. As I reflect back on it now, again, it would have served both of us to have had this very simple agenda of the three Fs, Focus, Friction, Forward momentum. All right, now if something comes up, a specific issue, whatever, that's not directly tied to one of those three things, focus, friction, forward momentum, and it can't wait until.

Well, first of all, let's just say if something comes up that's outside of one of Those things, then that's not necessarily something for a one on one. It's not something that should wait around until next week when you have your one on one. This is when you call a special meeting to talk about that specific issue. Like let's say somebody was complaining about your. Like a customer complained about how that staff member treated them up, okay? That should not wait till next week on their one on one. That should be an immediate meeting that we're going to give some direct and targeted feedback and some coaching around right there in that moment. Okay? So when something comes up, a specific issue that doesn't really fit the framework, then that's the time to have a specific meeting on that one issue. Because then we're going to keep to the formula of our one on ones.

We're going to keep it, we're going to keep the affordance there because it's going to be absolutely obvious what happened in that meeting. So if there's critical feedback to be shared, you know it's not happening in your one on one. That's going to be in a different meeting. Okay? So again, affordances are these characteristics that make it absolutely obvious what is supposed to happen, okay? And I want you to have those in your, in your one on ones. Your staff are going to appreciate it so much and it's just going to make your job much easier too. Okay? So again, affordances make it absolutely obvious how something works. Doors, curb cutaways, captions on videos, audiobooks, kitchen utensils, all those things we talked about early on in the podcast. And then the three things I talked about specifically for leadership visibility, what matters most and how those one on ones work.

So affordances are about making it obvious what to do in a given situation. There's no ambiguity, there's no uncertainty. You just simply know how to use the thing like a door. You push if it's a flat plate, you pull if it's got a handle. Okay? We want to make it obvious the best leaders make the right next action absolutely obvious. Now, as we wrap this episode, I want to leave you with this question. Where can you improve affordances in your leadership behavior? Pick just one thing to work on this week to make it absolutely more obvious how some aspect of your leadership operates. Now, maybe you'll take one of the three things that I talked about in this episode, or maybe something else comes to mind for you.

But I want you to pick one thing and make it absolutely obvious. And this might take some work on your own first, because sometimes we have to sort through and do that discernment first before we determine what is the thing that we want to make sure is most obvious or absolutely obvious to others about our how our leadership operates. Okay. So again, my throwdown challenge for you this week is where can you improve the affordances in your leadership behavior? Pick just one thing. It can be a small thing. It could be a big thing to work on this week to make it absolutely more obvious how your leadership operates. All right, my friends, until next week, be well.