Uncork the Crew

Spray Foam Magazine – Fall 2026 – This summer I facilitated two roundtable discussions at the Spray Foam World Wide Carnival and Knowledge Fair. Different rooms, different owners, thirty minutes apart. Both landed in the same place.

The question underneath was always the same. What makes a team member do more, do it better, and stop needing you over their shoulder?

Money was the first answer every time. A raise that stopped mattering by month three. Cash bonuses, because fifty bucks in a hand beats two dollars an hour on a cheque. Gift cards weighed against wages. Every one of those treats a symptom. Not one of them is anywhere near a cure.

Dig past money and better answers show up—a career path, a title, room to make a call without phoning the boss. Any room of owners can come up with that list.

Then ask one of the owners to apply it to a specific person on their own crew. The list goes away. What comes back is this—my crew just wants a paycheck, nobody wants to work anymore, they’ve been here ten years, they won’t change.

Same sentence in both rooms.

That belief is expensive, and somebody measured it. Researchers call it the Pygmalion effect. A 2000 review in the Journal of Applied Psychology looked at seventeen workplace studies. What a boss expects of a worker changes how that worker actually performs. The effect was strongest on the people their bosses expected the least from.

The people you have already written off are the ones your opinion is affecting the most.

I believed it once. It is a comfortable thing to believe. It explains why the business needs you and why the phone rings all day. It makes you the hero of your own operation.

For years I got my validation from being the answer guy. Somebody would walk in with a problem; I would hand them the fix and feel like I was playing chess. I wasn’t leading. I was a bottleneck with my name on the door.

Getting to the root

The first answer is never the problem. It is the symptom. Symptoms are cheap to fix, which is why we keep fixing the same one every ninety days.

Three habits get you underneath it:

Ask what else it could be and keep asking. Your first answer will be attitude. It always is. Don’t take it. Ask what else, then ask again, then a fourth time. Somewhere in there you stop describing the person and start hearing unclear expectations, no training, I never told them what good looks like. Do the same when your team brings you a problem. The easy answers run out, and the real one shows up.

Say it forward. We describe what we want by describing what we hate. I want to stop babysitting. I want the phone to stop ringing. You cannot build toward that. Say it in the positive and you get something real. Read a work order, complete the work. That is a standard you can train to.

Ask the person, not about the person. We build whole theories about why somebody is failing and never ask them. What is in the way? What could I be doing differently? Sometimes the answer is nothing, and the silence after that does more than a write-up.

The tool that changed my company

One problem. Three options. One recommendation. (1-3-1)

Nobody brings me a problem anymore. They bring a problem, three ways to solve it, and the one they’d pick.

One of the three can be terrible. Call your grandma counts. The point is they looked before they came to me. Then I ask which one they would choose. Nine times out of ten, they already know, and it is what I would have said.

Here is what it costs. Repetition. More than you think. Never one conversation with one person. Dozens with the same person. Somewhere around week two you will be tired and just answer the phone, undoing a month of work in nine seconds. Keep going anyway.

Here is what it buys. I took weeks off this summer and the company ran.

Those rooms were not short on people with something in them. They were short on questions. So was I, for a long time.

Our job is to eliminate frustration and build trust. You don’t do that with better answers. You do it by asking a better question and then having the discipline to shut up.  

Curt Janzen is CEO of TUSK Corporate Anthropology, Digging into your life and your Business, a part of the Beyond Group of Companies

For any questions or more information regarding this article, visit www.gotusk.com.

Source: McNatt, D.B. (2000). Ancient Pygmalion Joins Contemporary Management: A Meta-Analysis of the Result. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(2), 314-322.