INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Michael Watkins, Professor and Author
to speak and you gave them no space. Count how many times you asked a question and then answered it yourself.”
He watched the recording that evening and it was painful. He had talked at his team rather than with them, filling every silence with his own voice.
What made the intervention work was that Dean refused to stop at the general assessment. He told Juan Carlos he was a good communicator who had to learn to manage meetings much better, and then he named the specific thing: create space for others, bring people to you instead of pushing content at them. He gave three components to practise. Ask more questions before offering answers. When you speak, pause and wait, even when the silence is uncomfortable. And when someone does speak, don’ t judge immediately, but say something like“ tell me more” or“ I hadn’ t thought of that.”
The first meeting where Juan Carlos practised this felt strange, because everything in him wanted to keep talking through the silence. He waited anyway, and eventually someone filled the space, and what they said was more useful than what he would have said himself.
A CONSTRAINT HAS TO BE A SPECIFIC BEHAVIOUR INSIDE A SPECIFIC PROCESS, SO THE PROCESS HAS TO BE BROKEN DOWN FIRST.
Within four or five meetings the difference was visible in the recordings. The team contributed more, and the decisions improved because they now incorporated perspectives that had previously been talked over.
This is the opposite of how most leadership development works, and we think it’ s the central reason so little of it produces change.
Look beyond development areas
The instrument isn’ t the problem, because comprehensive assessment is exactly what a 360 is designed to deliver. But the problem comes next, when a comprehensive picture gets treated as an improvement plan.
Applied to a leader’ s own capability, constraint thinking replaces the familiar question with a harder one. Not“ what should I work on?” but“ what single element is most limiting my effectiveness right now?” The answer is one thing, it is frequently not on the assessment list and everything else should wait.
This is where constraint theory does work and the deliberate practice literature does not. Anders Ericsson established that expertise comes from how you practise, not how long, and his conditions are well known: work at the edge of your ability, on specific goals, with focused attention and immediate feedback. But that tells you how to practise once you know what to practise on. For a violinist the question is rarely ambiguous, because the passage falling apart is audible. For a leader facing nine plausible development areas, it is the entire difficulty.
Break it down
There is a step before diagnosis, and skipping it is why the question usually produces nothing usable. Asked what limits their effectiveness, most leaders answer at the level of a competency: communication, executive presence, decisiveness. Nothing at that altitude can be practised. A constraint has to be a specific behaviour inside a specific process, so the process has to be broken down first.
Running a meeting decomposes into roughly eight elements: preparing with a defined outcome, opening with purpose in the first 60 seconds, establishing enough context to let people contribute and no more, drawing out perspectives from the quieter people, managing airtime, anchoring the discussion when it drifts, driving to an actual decision and closing by confirming what was decided and who owns what.
A senior leader completes a 360-degree assessment, which returns seven or eight development areas ranked by gap size or importance to the role, and the leader conscientiously selects two or three and builds a plan around them. Six months later that plan has produced modest movement across several dimensions and no visible change in effectiveness.
Juan Carlos’ s constraint was the fourth element, and he was strong on the first three, which is precisely why his own diagnosis would have been wrong. He was failing to draw out perspectives, so every other strength was being spent on a discussion that contained only his own thinking.
You will need a breakdown like this for whichever process matters most in your own role. We have
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