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Author: Josh

RIGGS! 2 — A numerical review of the Lethal Weapon films

Published by Josh on September 4, 2023

Part 2: Lethal Weapon 2 (Peri-Peri style)

Welcome back to my public hyperfixation, folks! Today we’re diving into the second installment in the Lethal Weapon series, the last written by Shane Black, with a running counter for Danny Glover’s utterances of “Riggs”, among other things. Off we go!

Lethal Weapon 2 continues a pattern for Lethal Weapon films, kicking off with a cold open before stepping into our main plot line, with themes and B stories foreshadowed in the offing.

In our opening car chase, we join Riggs and Murtaugh driving Trish’s station wagon, screaming through a tunnel in hot pursuit of a suspect in a BMW. Trish’s poor car is in for a rough existence and finishes the film barely functional and completely uninsurable.

Screaming out of the tunnel, we intersect with one of our new supporting characters for the film, Detective Tim Cavanaugh (Dean Norris, who had a notable supporting role in Total Recall, but is more recently renowned for his role as Breaking Bad’s Hank Schrader).

We catch our first of many Riggs’s as the suspects they’re after sit up out the window of their car and fire off two shotgun rounds, taking out the station wagon’s windshield. 

After some rough maneuvering through a hotel roundabout, Riggs takes off on foot after a car once again, having learned no lessons from the previous movie. As Murtaugh catches up, he fires off four Riggs’s in quick succession, our first indicator that the rate of Riggsing is set to skyrocket compared to the first film.

Turning to Norris’s chase, the suspects in the second car are cornered at the top of an overpass, where, after some indiscriminate automatic weapons fire, have somehow managed to bring in a helicopter to facilitate their escape. There’s either a surplus of affordable helicopters in Los Angeles or some very lax licensing requirements, as so far, every organization seems to have their mitts on one or more.

Meanwhile, Riggs and Murtaugh corner the suspect in the BMW, who flips his car into a storefront. After a quick Riggs to scold him for his driving, the pair introduce a new trope, disagreeing about whether “On 3” means on 3 or after 3.

Their quarry escaping, they search the area for him, including his trunk, and find a pile of krugerrands. That, combined with a bit of Afrikaans over the radio, is our introduction to a South African flavor to the installment.

Back at the station, Murtaugh and the Captain have a quick walk and gripe before cutting to Riggs showing off his straight jacket escape trick to the Detective pool. As Riggs flails about, we get a quick look at a whole host of character actors as supporting cast, including Meagan Shapiro (Jenette Goldstein, Aliens’ Private Vasquez) and Eddie Esteban (Nestor Serrano, who is a certified “Hey, it’s that guy” actor, with 128 roles in everything from 24 to The Day After Tomorrow to The Money Pit), They think they’re about to collect on a bet that he can’t escape within 5 minutes, before Riggs shows his stupid human trick: That he can dislocate his shoulder at will. I’m sure that won’t come up again later.

After popping his shoulder sickeningly back into the socket, we get a quick visit from series regular (the still unnamed) Stephanie Woods.

Afterwards, we catch a Riggs as reproval, as he spills to the detective pool that Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne will be starring in a commercial. He arrives home to show off the new addition on the house (that surely won’t end up in a shambles later) and chit chat with his carpenter (literally, he just gets “Carpenter” in the billing) (Jack McKee, another veteran character actor with 222 roles from Basic Instinct to Moneyball to episode parts in all three CSIs). He fires off a nailgun, making the detectives jump and ensuring that we see it being placed on the proverbial mantle for later.

Some quick banter indoors before Rianne’s big break, reminding us that in the late 80s we were very concerned with dolphin-safe tuna, and then we see the main event: Seems she’s the new face of Ramses Extra condoms. Roger is…nonplussed.

Off we go to a very turn of the 90s office, in sharp grays with a giant fish tank, before meeting the two villains of this installment, Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland, who, after a long career in Europe, came to prominence in the US with this role, followed by The Mighty Ducks, The Hunt for Red October, and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, where he catches one hell of a melvin.) and Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O’Connor, for whom this was his largest role, but who also had parts in Brazil, Alias, and the Daredevil movie). 

The subject of our earlier chase scene, Hans (Mark Rolston, who might be most recognized as Andy Dufresne’s nemesis in The Shawshank Redemption), steps over some very conspicuous plastic sheeting on the floor. His reward for losing the million dollars in krugerrands is a bullet to the head and an epitaph from Pieter making a pun about drop cloths.

As Pieter wraps up the body, they discuss their plans to handle an overbearing police presence, specifically our lead detective, Sgt. Murtaugh.

We cut to Riggs and Trish Murtaugh, him making dinner, her parcelling out various plastic bags of medication, and telling us the backstory of how Riggs’ wife died, in a car accident, and its tie-in with a gold pen Trish found in the laundry. It’s a bit of backstory we’ll come back to later. 

Afterwards, Riggs is at home, drinking with Sam the dog, and watching the Three Stooges, which Sam seems to enjoy as much as Riggs does.

Meanwhile, Roger tosses and turns in bed, then wakes to find four balaclavaed men duct-taping he and Trish. Pieter and his crew hover over them, delivering a clear threat to back off the investigation, with some rather racist invective.

Back at the station, after Roger fills his partner in and a fateful detectives’ poker game is organized, they’re assigned to watch an informant waiting on behalf of the FBI. One Leo Getz.

Welcome Joe Pesci to the series! (I’ll not do you the disservice of assuming you don’t know Joe Pesci’s other work, including his album Little Joe Sure Can Sing.)

Leo’s a fixer, a money launderer, and later a real estate agent, and then a private detective. For now, he’s a state’s witness with a nervous tick for the word “Ok”. No, I will not count the Oks, ok? Ok.

“Room service” arrives to deliver the wrong meal and a bullet for desert, before Riggs rushes him and sends them both, plus Leo, out what might be the most easily broken hotel window in history, down somewhere around 7 stories, and into the hotel pool. Shane Black really loves a pool gag.1Later, another detective takes a dive into a pool from the roof of a hotel in a Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys. At least Martin doesn’t have a vision of Richard Nixon.

A little mixup in the water has Riggs punching out Leo’s nose as the assailant makes a getaway. While they catch their breath poolside and Murtaugh catches up, Leo explains just why someone is trying to kill him: he laundered half a billion dollars in drug money. Which, yeah, that’d probably do it.

A quick clip of Rudd and Vorstedt complaining they missed their shot and we head to the Murtaugh residence to watch Riggs and Murtaugh eat cold spaghetti straight from a the container while Leo explains how money laundering works. 

While the modern television viewer has been well informed about money laundering via Breaking Bad, Ozark, and many other crime dramas, viewers in this era might not be clear on the workings. Unfortunately, Leo’s explanation seems a bit muddled and doesn’t cover how any of this avoids KYC laws or deposit limits or whatnot. It is, however, a rather stock method for laundering funds utilizing a lack of knowledge around who the beneficial owner is of the dummy corporation doing the switcheroo. 

Leo explains that he keeps a 2% fee for his trouble, which means he pulled in $10M or so from the standard laundry setup before he skimmed his extra piece off the top. Which, considering how prosperous the work already was, makes one wonder why an extra 10-20 thousand here and there was worth it in the end. I suppose that’s an unfamiliarity with the criminal mindset for you.

Anyhow, Leo shrinks Riggs’ shirt and then recalls the one connection he had to the dealers directly: a house up in the Hollywood Hills and a man named Hans. Hans might be tricky to track down, given we watched him rolled up in a plastic drop cloth fifteen minutes ago, but the house is still standing. For now.

Arriving at the home built into a hillside, Riggs sneaks in pretending to be a pool cleaner (Shane LOVES a pool gag) and finds two besuited men in the middle of counting out bills. They’re interrupted by a third, our fake hotel waiter, who runs off in a tow truck, with Riggs, as always, chasing after on foot.

One more Riggs out of Danny Glover, plus one from Pesci that doesn’t count here, and they’re off in pursuit in Trish’s station wagon once again.

A high-speed chase through the Hollywood Hills has Riggs lose his gun, and then Leo and Murtaugh inexplicably stopping to pick it up from the side of the road. Their vision here is absolutely incredible. They’re speeding down the road, in pursuit of Riggs and the “waiter”, and yet not only see the gun on the side of the road, they stop in time for Leo to run out and retrieve it, before picking up the chase. I can only assume this was thrown in to fix some continuity error later.

Off we go down the road before the wackiest bit of hijinks yet finds the tow-truck at a complete stop, Murtaugh running into the car it’s towing, shooting it up over the lowered flatbed, then THAT car impacting with a truck carrying a surfboard, which flies off back in the opposite direction and kills our “bellhop”. The physics and circumstance here are incredible, for both senses of the word.2Thankfully, Mythbusters took the time to really dive into things in Episode 154, which, as expected, was busted to hell: https://mythresults.com/reverse-engineering

Back at the house on stilts, the entire detective core rushes the house, finding the earlier money men, plus Arjen and Pieter, where Arjen introduces himself to the detectives as the Minister of Diplomatic Affairs for the South African consulate, and explains that everyone there works for the consulate as well. A quick Riggs out of Glover produces a reaction of recognition in Pieter, who confirms he has The Martin Riggs in his presence.

Arjen goes on to explain that “under the Diplomatic Relations Act, no diplomatic agent may be detained or arrested once his identity has been established.” He goes on to threaten to talk with the State Department, and claim that the house is owned by the South African government, and so is South African territory.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to get deep into the weeds on how this isn’t actually how diplomatic immunity works (for more, go listen to Stuff You Should Know (https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-diplomatic-immunity) or read any of the other explainers on the internet about it). This being a movie, we’re just gonna go with it for the sake of enjoying things. Plus, why ruin the climax?

Upstairs, Riggs literally bumps into another member of the consulate, Rika Van Den Haas (Patsy Kensit, who got her start in The Great Gatsby at 4 years old, per IMDB) for a little meet cute.

A little more exposition at the station and then at Miss Van Den Haas’s apartment, and we get to Arjen making clear more needs to be done about the police issue.

A quick trip to Subway and we get the first of a series of Leo Getz rants about places they fuck you. In this instance, they fuck you at the drive-through. Later installments let us know we also get fucked with the cellphones.

The next day, Martin does some very conspicuous tailing of Rudd, following him back to the consulate where a crowd of protesters is gathered outside, to rally for an end to Apartheid and the freeing of Nelson Mandela.3Interestingly, the movie was released in July of 1989, right around when P.W. Botha, president of South Africa, was meeting with Nelson Mandela directly. Six weeks later, the new South African president, F. W. de Klerk would take power and would, in February of 1990, release Mandela from prison. Upstairs, Rika seems rather charmed by Martin’s antics on the CC TV.

Arriving back at home, Riggs finds Leo cleaning his beach trailer, where he gets a call that Murtaugh hasn’t checked in for the day. Over at the Murtaugh residence, Riggs hears Roger yelling from inside and, upstairs, finds him sitting on the toilet, in what might be the most classic bit from the film.

Riggs explains the situation: that he sat down on the commode the night before for some quiet time, reading about marlin fishing, and found a note on the toilet paper saying “Boom! You’re dead!” 

A little fun wordplay about scaring the shit out of him, then Riggs leans down to find a stack of explosives running to a wire at the back of the toilet.

One quick “Riggs” as Roger begs him to keep it quiet, before we get every emergency service organization in LA out on the front lawn.

Jarvis Becker from the bomb squad (Kenneth Tigar, who has a long career of TV work and will reunite with Donner and Gibson in Conspiracy Theory) explains how they’ll look to freeze the bomb with liquid nitrogen while Roger dives into the cast iron tub, and here we have our second Mythbusters plot of the movie4Covered in Episode 178: https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb, this one confirmed! Not only could Riggs have pulled Murtaugh off the toilet in time, but the liquid nitrogen would have stalled the explosion long enough to have worked, as well as the cast iron tub protecting from lethal concussive force from 1 kg of C-4. As outlandish as the situation is, it’s apparently incredibly accurately rendered.

It turns out Murtaugh isn’t too old for this shit (🥁). After some quick clarification this time on whether On 3 means on 3 or ON 3, they share a brief moment between men, then dive for the tub.

The station wagon suffers once again as the toilet is thrown onto its hood, but the boys come through mostly unscathed.

Afterwards, we cut to the Consulate where Leo and Roger kick off a little gag about emigrating to South Africa, as a distraction, while Riggs sneaks upstairs for some snooping.

Up in the fancy 80’s office, Riggs does some light diplomatic threatening before a quick “Hey Moe!” and some violence against the fish tank.5Fish tank abuse comes up again in The Nice Guys. Shane loves a trope!

Downstairs, he runs into Rika again before meeting up with Murtaugh and Getz in the car, showing them a note reading “Alba Varden, Thursday.” But who is Alba Varden?

A quick cut back to the office for us to be sure Rudd and Vorstedt noticed Riggs took the note and we’re off to the supermarket, where Riggs runs into Rika yet again, to give her some advice about grocery shopping in America after a little light stalking. Martin insists on Rika coming to his place for dinner, throws in another Stooges bit, then drags her off to the beach.

Rika and Martin have a conversation about how Arjen is using his credentials to commit crimes, before we see some more of those crimes play out.

Pieter executes one detective in their home, then Shapiro blows up on the diving board of her pool in what must have been a fun day for the stuntwoman. (LOVES a pool gag.)

Martin and Rika start to get friendly, before we see another explosion, this time at Cavanaugh’s house during the planned poker game.

The Captain puts calls out to find the officers who haven’t been killed, and we see Riggs and Rika continuing their fun evening in, then find Murtaugh and Getz holed up at a hotel. Roger realizes where he’d seen Alba Varden before and drags Leo back to his house to review a video he took from his boat to confirm his suspicion (though not before Leo lets us know he’s really enjoying Rianne’s commercial work).

Meanwhile outside, Leo is taken away by some “consulate employees” and Murtaugh fends off an attack from a third, then a fourth, before putting the nail gun to a use almost certainly forbidden in the user manual. “Nailed ‘em both.” is our reward. He stumbles back outside to realize Leo, and the poor, poor station wagon, are gone.

Back at the beach, amid a roll in the sheets, two helicopters come storming in over the ocean and light up the trailer with automatic weapons fire. Under a rain of bullets, Martin and Rika escape out Sam’s door in the floor, then Rika makes a run for the truck as the helicopters land nearby.

Martin, meanwhile, throws in another “Hey Moe!” while taking out two of the South Africans on the beach, then kills three more while spraying bullets from the roof of the trailer.

Martin takes out one more in the other helicopter while they collect Sam and head back to Rika’s apartment. After an extended goodbye, Riggs is ambushed while Rika is collected offscreen.

Down at the dock we find Pieter and a burlap-sacked Riggs having a conversation about their previously untold history together. Pieter explains that Riggs was investigating their organization 4 years prior and they put out a contract on him. Pieter, it turns out, is the one that ran Mrs. Riggs off the road to her death, thinking he was killing Martin. Why we needed to write in more motivation for Riggs is beyond me, but that’s why I don’t make the Shane Black money.

Pieter takes off and his flunkies throw Riggs into the ocean, where he pulls a repeat of his straight-jacket escape. Down at the bottom of the pier, Riggs finds Rika, tied up and drowned.

His vengeance upon coming back to the surface is swift and fierce.

Back on the move, Riggs calls in to the station and gets Murtaugh on the line. He explains that the South Africans came after him, and that they killed both Rika and his wife. Murtaugh tries to explain that there’s more going on. Riggs makes clear that tonight is not about justice, it’s about vengeance. Oh, and we get 10 Riggs’ out of Roger in a 50 second span. Martin tells him he’s heading back to the stilt house. Roger tosses his badge in the desk, then follows after.

Down at the house in the Hills, we find Leo being tortured by Pieter and his men. After a quick discussion outside, Roger and Martin initiate a plan to go in and rescue Leo while getting some revenge against the South Africans.

Riggs has roped his truck around one of the house’s stilts and proceeds to pull the house off the hillside, as Murtaugh runs in, kills two more, and drags Leo outside.

After some quick reminiscing and a fateful “Give the little fellow a hug, you’ll be lucky if you see him again.”, Riggs and Murtaugh head off for the Alba Varden.

Down below the ship, they get out and investigate a container being guarded by three men. They drag the men off and no gunfire is shown, so I’m going to assume they just got “knocked out”. Inside the container, they realize they’re staring at a car and pallets full of plastic-wrapped stacks of US currency.

Amid a discussion about the ethics of Murtaugh pocketing a stack of thousand dollar bills, Rudd and his men close them up in the container and lift it to put it onboard the Varden.

Apparently they left the keys inside, as the detectives make an escape by throwing the car through the pallets of cash, the container’s door, and into the waters of the port. While the South Africans fire wildly after the car and what they think are our heroes, Murtaugh drops an “I’m too old for this shit” and they repel down from the midair container to the deck below, taking out two of the guards on the way down.

Martin eliminates four more guards down in the storage area, done with enough rolling and shooting to make Police Constable Danny Butterman gaze in awe.

In comes a knife! Riggs takes a dagger to the calf as Pieter emerges from the shadows and starts a series of kicks to Riggs. While upstairs Roger kills a guard, Riggs and Pieter go at it below, in some brutal hand to foot to knife combat, before Riggs overpowers his foe and knifes him in the guts. Then, a knife wound being too easy a way out, he hobbles over and drops the freight container on his head.

Roger, meanwhile, finds Riggs from the deck above, shouts for him, then dives for cover as Arjen starts firing at him with a thematically appropriate Luger.

After Murtaugh draws down on him, Arjen holds up his credentials, leading to this climactic moment:

Three more Riggs’s as Roger runs to his partner, a little Bob Dylan musical fake out with a soundtrack cue of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, then two more Riggs’s as Roger explains that Riggs isn’t allowed to die until he tells him to.

Riggs asks for his cigarettes, then asks Roger to throw them away, as “those things’ll kill ya” (a callback for our next adventure in Lethal Weapon 3), as we pull away to the credits.

Our scores!

And, with two datapoints to work with, some graphs!

Our overall Riggs! count is nearly quintupled, while Body Count is up slightly, I’m Too Old For This Shits are down considerably, and we have four times the Stooges references.

Murtaugh sees a more significant percentage of the body count here (including one via physics-defying surfboard decapitation.) while Riggs levels off slightly.

Join us next time for Lethal Weapon 3, where Joe Pesci returns with a truly 90’s blonde dye job, we’re introduced to Rene Russo as new series regular Lorna, and we tackle some internecine conflict within the LAPD and the gang violence epidemic.

Notes:

  • 1
    Later, another detective takes a dive into a pool from the roof of a hotel in a Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys. At least Martin doesn’t have a vision of Richard Nixon. ↩︎
  • 2
    Thankfully, Mythbusters took the time to really dive into things in Episode 154, which, as expected, was busted to hell: https://mythresults.com/reverse-engineering ↩︎
  • 3
    Interestingly, the movie was released in July of 1989, right around when P.W. Botha, president of South Africa, was meeting with Nelson Mandela directly. Six weeks later, the new South African president, F. W. de Klerk would take power and would, in February of 1990, release Mandela from prison. ↩︎
  • 4
  • 5
    Fish tank abuse comes up again in The Nice Guys. Shane loves a trope! ↩︎

Manager, Manage Thyself: Setting Goal

Published by Josh on August 31, 2023

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
– Ron Swanson

There’s a question I typically ask when I start a conversation about setting goals. It’s the lead in to a metaphor, but it’s the sort of thing that only makes sense if there’s a common frame of reference. That question is: “Have you ever seen Charles Barkley swing a golf club?”

Assuming you haven’t, this is what it looked like:

Now, you may not play golf. You may not watch golf. I don’t do a lot of either. But you can probably tell that’s not what that is supposed to look like.

Charles Barkley is a world-class athlete, an NBA Hall of Fame player, and, by all accounts shot in the 70s before his swing turned into, well, that.

What the hell happened?

In the public disaster that is Barkley’s game, there is no definitive black box recording — no single piece of evidence that indicates exactly when all things went to hell.

What there is instead is constant chatter, much of it echoing in Barkley’s head.

“My brain’s got so many voices in it,” Barkley acknowledged earlier this year on GOLF’s Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.

In his own telling, Barkley’s woes began when he moved to Phoenix, and found that every functioning adult, from the barber to the banker, was either a Tour pro or a Tour pro-wannabe. He felt pressure to improve.

“I started taking lessons from every Tom, Dick and Harry,” Barkley told the Subpar hosts.

https://golf.com/news/features/charles-barkley-golf-swing-where-why-it-went-wrong/

Charles got in his own head. You can see it if you watch closely. The little hitches, adjustments, changes in the middle of what should be a smooth motion. Every piece of advice, every lesson or tip, all consciously or subconsciously being attended to and attempted, as he’s doing something that used to come fairly naturally to him. He’s trying to accomplish ten different things and, in doing so, failing at the one thing he’s trying to do more than anything: hit the ball off the tee.

So, why do I bring this up? Because, whether they realize it or not, this is what many managers do to their people.

Typically, a manager will stare at a dashboard or run through some series of KPIs (or more conspicuously, be run through these stats in some form of review with their boss) and find an outlier. They’ve got an employee that isn’t measuring up the same way everyone else is, or is significantly below means or medians in several areas. In some flavors of organization, it might be a stack rank that ranks well below the stack.

“How are we going to fix this?” They’re asked, or ask themselves.

“We’re going to set some goals!” the manager replies, eager to be seen to be doing something to fix it.1We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.

Out come the directives. Raise this, lower that. Hopefully tied to some form of “Why” and “How” as well, though far too often not. (These are a topic we’ll cover next, in discussing what makes a good goal.)

When the employee leaves their 1×1 (and for all that is holy, I hope they’re getting these goals via an individual discussion during a 1×1 meeting and not from an email or a memo or worse), they’ve got three or four or ten new things they’re being asked to do, starting right now, with the implied or outrightly stated add-on of “or else.”

This person, who has been doing their work the same way for months or years, suddenly learns that everything they’re doing has to change, because of some unfavorable columns on a spreadsheet.

How do you think that affects your people? Well, this is what it did to Charles:

A sane person would quit, and Barkley basically did. He went from playing 200 rounds a year to maybe five, all at charity events around Phoenix. “People wanted to pay their money to come see my swing up close. It was miserable,” he says. “It just sucks playing bad golf and constantly getting made fun of. I just got tired of getting my ass kicked.”

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it

Charles loved to golf. He was good at it. He was doing everything in his power to try and get better at it. And it made him want to quit.

Do your people love their work as much as he loved golf? What do you think their response will be?

Here’s my take: One goal. Assign at most one goal per month to your people, track their progress on that goal, determine if they’ve implemented it, then move on to the next.

Here’s why:

When you’re giving people a goal, you’re asking them to break a habit or build a new habit. Either stop doing things they way they’ve done them hundreds or thousands of times before, or start doing something brand new to them that upsets a pattern of behavior they’ve settled comfortably into.

Trying to do one of these changes is hard. Trying to do three of them, or five of them, or more, is asking something impossible. You’re setting your people up to fail. And that failure isn’t their fault, it’s yours.

Additionally, psychological research related to habit forming has shown that to reliably create a new habit or break an old one can take between 20-70 days, depending on frequency and attention to the habit. If you’re setting a goal for call center employees, who will be implementing the goal on a dozen or two calls per day, we can probably figure it’ll take around a month to implement and iterate to the point it feels natural.

This gives you time to do the work to reinforce that one goal you’ve set together. You can review their customer interactions to inspect what you expect. You can have a mid-month check-in or two and discuss their progress, listening to calls or reading transcripts together, and making any minor adjustments you might need to implement.

Afterwards, measure the effectiveness of the goal. Did the change have the effect you were hoping for? With that change made, did it make a new opportunity more obvious, or more possible to implement? Take next month and work on that.

Overcorrection and superfluous effort are common issues that come up in many areas. One example I like to point to is canoeing.

If you’ve never been canoeing, there’s a phenomenon that overwhelms new people when they first start to paddle. It happened to me. They become obsessed with going straight.

Canoes, as you can imagine, are not cars. Rather than static roadways, they float through a river of complicated flows, eddies, and currents. Rivers don’t run straight, they don’t flow at the same speeds, and sometimes that means you veer a bit. Additionally, canoes are powered by paddling, which is done on one side of the boat or the other, and due to physical forces, result in the boat turning slightly with each stroke.

Inexperienced paddlers can get a bit distraught at this. They erratically switch sides back and forth every stroke or two, lifting the paddle out, carrying it over the boat, then plunging it back in the other side, all in an effort to keep going straight ahead, to attempt to perfectly correct for these turns and currents. They waste a lot of physical and mental energy on it, all to go slower and get wet.

Instead, all they really need to do is turn the paddle a little at the end of the stroke. It’s called a J-stroke, and it corrects for the little flare out the boat’s nose does with each stroke. It’s easy to implement, a small adjustment to the natural motion of paddling, and has an immediate effect without superfluous effort.

One small change, calmly implemented, repeated consistently, that fixes the problem.

As a manager, implementing this “One Goal” practice takes intent and trust between you and your employee.2And often you and your own manager as well! It requires you to chart a larger path to better results and have the follow-through and patience to make each small change that will culminate in improved performance. Rather than trying to walk the entire trail at once, you’re picking a landmark and walking to that. Then picking another.

Ultimately, the intent is to get from one state of working to another state of working, through the application of small changes, the reaching of visible landmarks, over a period of time. The whole time it will feel like a person being themselves, with one small change they implement until fully absorbed, rather than trying to completely revolutionize what they do in an instant.

Changing someone’s entire structure at once isn’t possible. If it were, everyone would just, y’know, do that. It is, however, entirely possible to change one thing at a time, over time, until what results no longer resembles what it started as.

You can evolve a person’s work towards a better version of what it can be. With patience, partnership, reassurance, and recognition of the effort, you can work with your employee to implement lasting change and achieve the outcomes for which you’ve been working. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

They’ll come out the other side not only improved, but more enthused to work alongside you to continue achieving their goals and improving their performance, because you demonstrated trust, patience, and commitment to working towards a common goal.

So, how did Barkley fix his swing? He changed one thing.

Stan Utley, who had previously worked with former Masters Champion Sergio Garcia on a similar issue, had Charles show him what he was doing privately, in a 1×1 coaching session. He identified one specific coaching point, then had him make a single change to how he moved his hands relative to his swing motion. Charles wouldn’t work on anything additional with Utley for a year.

One change. For a year.

Barkley didn’t see Utley again until a year later, and when they reunited, the hitch had retreated 

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it

Remember how he looked up top? Here’s how Charles looks now:

Charles went on to explain that all those other points, all the clutter that was in his mind every time at the tee, went away. He was able to simplify, focus, and work on that one thing.

“He kind of unclutters my mind,” Barkley said of Utley. “I’ve had like 100 teachers, and all of them are talking to me at the same time. Now, I only listen to one teacher. Golf is a lot more fun when you listen to one teacher instead of a hundred.”

https://clubhouse.swingu.com/lifestyle/meet-the-teacher-who-fixed-charles-barkleys-golf-swing-stan-utley/

One change, and the patience to make it stick.

Notes:

  • 1
    We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time. ↩︎
  • 2
    And often you and your own manager as well! ↩︎

Manager, Manage Thyself: Empathy

Published by Josh on August 23, 2023

“Have you tried giving a shit?” – Me

Kurt Vonnegut, via the National Endowment for the Humanities

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I’ve been a pretty good manager. The Midwesterner in me inwardly screams at having typed that, even as outwardly he will continue to stoically soldier on. Luckily, I can point to some outward confirmations of such, like annual reviews and statements from bosses and awards and other things, to ease the psychic pain of having said that I was good at something. “It’s not me, it’s these other fools that said it about me.”

As such, I’ve been asked to train and mentor others in managing people, both existing managers and those who are on a managerial track. I’ve spoken at conferences on the subject, and at staff meetings. These folks often ask if there’s any sort of key to being a good manager, or some method I use that others can learn from.

In all honesty, I think it boils down to one main thing, that everything else seems to stem from: “Try giving a shit.”

Truly give a shit. You have to care about other people more than you care about yourself, or your own success, or metrics, or any other way of measuring your own accomplishments. If you can manage that, to actually care and not just try to look like you care, people don’t just see that, they feel it, and they respond to it.

Alright, that’s it, lesson over! Now get out there and manage!

…

…

Ok, fine, I’ll elaborate a little more.

Most businesses (and for our purposes, all the businesses I’ll be talking about) have, at the other end of their operating space, a customer. It might be a retail user of the product, it might be a corporate representative using a SaaS implementation. It doesn’t really make that much of a difference, in the grand scheme of things. It boils down to your person on one end and their person on the other.

There’s a long-standing adage in business that is, in my opinion, often misunderstood. That saying is “The customer is always right.” This doesn’t mean that the customer is always correct. What it means, in my view at least, is that the customer always has a sincerely held belief, that they come in with. Whether that’s what they think they’re looking for or what their problem is, it is vital to meet them with that piece in mind. That they sincerely believe they are correct.

Relating to someone else’s viewpoint is the essence of empathy. I’ll point to the Brené Brown classic for a deeper dive on empathy and how it is distinct from sympathy:

What is important to understand is that you’re not acknowledging right nor wrong, you’re acknowledging how the person on the other side of the conversation feels and relating to their feeling this way. You’re demonstrating that you really, truly care about them, and that your ultimate goal is to improve that state of being via your intervention or capacity or capability or otherwise.

They way I often describe this to front-line customer service people is to explain that whenever someone calls in for help, they have two problems. The first is the one they tell us about: that their phone stopped working, or that they can’t access their account, or so on. The second problem is often either alluded to or completely unstated, but is the actual issue that drove someone, even knowing how they generally feel about calling customer service, to decide to spend what could be hours of their life on the phone.

That problem is that they’ve lost trust in the institution behind that product or service. It caused them emotional or, in even more tragic circumstances, physical pain. Their trust has been violated and they feel angry or upset or aggrieved.

Just about everyone has a story about a time they’ve had a problem and had to contact some Customer Service team for help, and had a terrible experience. If you listen to enough of these stories (and if you hope to get better at coaching people to be better at customer service, bad customer service stories are very enlightening, so I highly encourage you to listen to a LOT of them, if you can), there’s a piece that ties every one of them together. It might be stated, or implied, or grumbled about, but what you’ll hear, in one form or another, is “They didn’t care.”

If you think back to your own customer service horror stories, I’d bet a considerable sum that the reason it was terrible, and not just a forgettably poor experience, comes down to feeling like someone didn’t care, did everything they could to get you off the phone or handed off to someone else, and refused to hear to you, if they even bothered to listen you.

So, two problems: the technical problem and the emotional problem. The way to fix the emotional problem, which is nearly impossible to solve in isolation, is to marry it to the technical problem. The essence of it is: You have a problem. I care about you, and so I care about the problem you’re having. Let’s work together to solve the technical problem, and by doing so, work to restore the emotional problem we’ve now tied to it.

Now, I’m clearly simplifying here, and the real work goes into teaching people how to respond constructively and empathetically, and to not just sound like they care, but truly care about other people. However, whenever I’ve taught this theory to front-line advisors, they’ve instantly improved in their interpersonal efforts with customers. We’ve done nothing at all to improve the quality of their issue recognition, isolation, or instructive ability, and yet their overall customer satisfaction increases.

All because they’ve learned how to care, and to show the people they’re working with that they truly give a shit.

“Cool,” you, my imagined reader, might be saying, “that’s how to teach customer service people about fixing customer satisfaction issues. But you said you were going to tell me how to be better at managing people.”

Except I did. This all translates. As a manager, you serve your people. They are your customers, and you work for them. And the work you’re looking to do together is to improve their performance (their technical problem) by connecting with them as people first. Connect with what drives them, what their goals are, not your goals for them or the goals the company has set. Hear them and listen to them.

Don’t be like Billy, kids.

In short, give a shit about them as people, not as collections of statistics or lines in some scoreboard. Care more. Care conspicuously.

Employees, just like customers, all have stories about bad bosses. They come in many flavors, many anecdotes and stories. But just as before, I can tell you the common factor all those experiences have in common. “They didn’t care about me.”

If your people know you care, that you’re there for them as people and are working for their benefit, they develop trust with you. Trust that you have their best interests, not just the company’s, at heart. And when they trust you, they’ll walk through walls with you. As long as they know they’re doing so alongside you.

(The topic of Trust being the core value that’s broken in most relationships isn’t my novel insight. Patrick Lencioni points to it as the core disfunction of relationships, especially power relationships, in his The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

I’m not a big business book guy, but this is one I feel comfortable recommending. Also, if you use my link to buy it, I might be able to get a fancy cup of coffee.)

Demonstrate that you care, that you have empathy for them, and with them, and that the goal in improving their capacity to do their jobs is to improve their overall lived experience. That you’re invested in them as people. That you care.

Give a shit, and they will too.