Luke Murray explains "getting Luke'd": when a senior leader casually suggests an improvement to someone who isn't their direct report, it creates confusion and anxiety about who should act. He learned three fixes: start with reassurance, route suggestions through their manager, and ask questions instead of offering solutions.
So there's this phrase in my company called getting Luke'd, uh, and it's when I try to help and I end up making things worse. And if you have more than one layer of kind of folks below you, then it's almost certainly something that you're doing. So I'm going to tell you exactly what it is, uh, what it's not, and when it's okay to help. Um, and then how to fix it, basically. So first, let me tell you a story of a perfect example of how not to do it. So we have a service where we, we serve people coffee. We're not a coffee shop, but we, we pour about 50 cups of coffee all at once every day around noon for our clients. And I came down to the front line and folks were pouring coffee and they were doing it. They were giving them a ton of sugar. A ton of cream, and they were doing it with like those diner coffee pot pours. So like we have a whole bunch of them, so it's taken forever. So it's pretty, pretty quick and easy, at least from my perspective, to notice like, hey guys, maybe we should get one of those large coffee makers and just use it as a dispenser. And maybe we don't give them 100 pounds of sugar. That's not only not healthy, it's also not efficient. Way to spend our time and our money. So I say this to whoever's working the front line that day, and I just turn and I'm like, "Have a good day." And I hear later that that was not a helpful suggestion, that it confused the person. They didn't know, are they supposed to do it? Is someone else supposed to do it? Are they supposed to tell their boss? Are they supposed to follow up with me? So here's the more specific definition. Of getting looped. It's when someone with authority casually points out a problem or suggests an improvement to someone that is not their direct report. So again, when you do that, that person suddenly feels like they have a brand new top priority. And the reason is because authority, the fact that you are their boss's boss's boss, brings with it gravity and importance regardless of the significance of the actual request in terms of the company's priorities. And when you're talking to someone on the frontline, it's not their job to figure out what the top priorities are of the entire company or of even one level above them. They just know that they're supposed to make the coffee, take care of the clients, get the clients home on time. That's their level of prioritization. And so, um, What I need to do, or what I've learned to do, I actually went down and talked to some of my employees and I said, what should I do differently? I said, well, the first bit of feedback I got is when you show up, Luke, you are 3-ish, 3 or 4 levels above us. So when the big boss is here, the first thing that happens is we get scared. And so you eventually reassure us and say that we're not in trouble, but you need to lead with that, bro. You need to say, "Hi, how's it going, guys? No one's in trouble. I'm not mad at anybody. I'm not here to get anybody in trouble." And you're going to need to say that a lot. You're going to need to give that particular reassurance quite a bit, because when you suggest something being done differently than the way it's currently being done, a way that someone could interpret that is, "I must be doing this wrong." So you're going to have to reassure on the front end. In the middle and on the backend. The second piece of advice I got from an employee of mine about getting looped is she said, well, I need to know who my boss is. And so when you come down and give me a suggestion, I don't know if I'm supposed to listen to my direct boss or to you. And so what I wish you would do, Luke, is go to my direct boss and tell him about it or her about it. So then I just have one person that I'm trying to make happy. And then the last kind of bit of advice is like, ask us questions. So when you come down to the frontline and see how things are going, ask, hey guys, what's the process? Why is the process this way? What do you like about this process? What problems does it cause? And offer no suggestions. Because if you don't make any suggestions then about how to do it differently or better, then no one can think that they were doing it wrong in the first place, which is exactly what you want. Again, give us reassurance, go through the right channels, and just ask questions so that we don't feel like we're screwing things up. Now I want to give an example of a frontline bit of advice that actually can work. So I went to one of our locations and sat in, we teach classes in one of our companies, and I sat in on the class and I gave feedback to the teacher of that class. And I even really didn't do it super directly. I said, what feedback would you give yourself? And then I agreed or disagreed with the feedback they would give themselves. And the reason that didn't cause any problems was because it was about his particular teaching style. How we make coffee is something that everyone would be doing. It'd be a process that the entire organization would be operating under. But his particular teaching style, his particular strengths and weaknesses aren't an example of an opportunity for system-wide change. So if I'm telling him something, and it just applies to him, then it's not going to cause problems or it won't cause problems the way that, uh, Luke-ing someone would otherwise. So that's it. What getting Luke'd is, some examples, 3 ways to not do it, reassure, go through their actual boss if you're going to give suggestions, and ask questions. So the goal is not to stop having ideas. The goal is to stop spreading ideas into parts of the company or to people in the company that cannot process and prioritize them. Good ideas have to have a clean path, and without that path, they just become confusion. So sometimes the best leadership is to not share any ideas. Sometimes it's just to ask better questions. Sometimes it's to find the right owner, and sometimes it is just letting coffee be stupid because something more important is on fire. So yeah, let me know, is this something that you've seen? Have you had your boss's boss suggest something and you be confused? Or have you been a boss that has suggested something and been like, man, I really helped and found out that it was a problem? Thanks for listening and have a great day.
