What I inherited
Not proactive.
Struggles with ambiguity.
Risk-averse.
When he transferred to my cargo team in November, the read from his previous manager was clear: not proactive, struggles with ambiguity, risk-averse. His PM said he'd surface an opportunity and he'd sit on it. When requirements weren't defined, he'd freeze.
I listened. I wrote it down. And then I went to see what I actually thought.
What I found was more specific: he'd come from a team dynamic that had gradually worn down his confidence. He had the skills. He was reading the room to decide if using them was worth it. Before I could ask him to take more risk, he needed evidence this environment responded differently.
The sequence that mattered
Make a deposit
before you ask
for behavior.
Six weeks in, before he'd done anything to earn my advocacy, I was in a 1:1 with our VP calling out what product was doing wrong. They'd put him on ULD domain work before he'd been onboarded into the domain and were wondering why he wasn't driving. I raised it directly. He found out about that conversation later.
Before I asked for different behavior, I made a deposit. The coaching doesn't start with the behavior you're trying to change. It starts with the environment.
From there: frequent predictable 1:1s (not check-ins — access). One concrete target at a time. Supervised field visits to SeaTac cargo ops, then independent ones. When he was supposed to own a room, I stopped contributing and sent coaching notes after — because once I take the floor back, there's no clean way to return it in the same meeting.
Where he landed — March 31, executive review
Solo. Executive room.
5 months.
5 mo.
November to
executive presentation
Solo
Presented to MD of
product & design
3
Designers he now
coordinates as IROPS lead
He presented to Alaska's managing director of product and design — field observations, process maps, design decisions, error handling, agent testing, Q2 roadmap. The MD asked precise process-level questions throughout. His overall read: "This is great." Six months earlier, this was a designer who was nervous presenting to his own PM.
What I'd do differently
Name the gap
sooner.
The observation period ran two months before I named a concrete goal — and that had a cost. Product was bypassing him, the passivity was calcifying, and I was still reading the situation. Three or four weeks of signal is enough to name a gap and give someone one thing to practice. That timeline cost him. I also didn't pull his PM into the coaching loop early enough. She was seeing the same patterns, and a short conversation in November would have given him consistent signals from two directions at once.
