The Problem: Working For, Not With
Ren had done everything right. She checked in with employees. She advocated for better processes. She pushed managers to be more attentive. And yet when the pandemic hit, she watched her organization fragment in ways none of her efforts had prevented.
The conversations were still happening. The structure was still there. But something was missing from the exchange itself.
What she eventually recognized was that her team's one-on-ones were built entirely around the manager's agenda — what the manager needed to know, fix, and report upward. Employees were showing up to perform for someone else's evaluation. They were working for the organization, not with each other.
The influence those employees were already having on their colleagues, on the work, on the culture — was invisible. No one was asking about it. Which meant no one knew it existed.
“I relieved myself of the need to be of immediate value and it really put me much more squarely in where I serve the world the best — as a facilitator versus a problem solver.”
What Changed: Making Hidden Influence Visible
Ren restructured the 1:1 from the ground up. Instead of the manager arriving with an agenda, employees arrived with documentation of their own — answers to three questions drawn from the Finding Good Success Map: What did you do well? How did you do it? What changed because of it?
When employees sat down with their manager already holding evidence of what they had created, the conversation moved from evaluation to recognition. Managers stopped being judges and started being witnesses. What gets witnessed gets believed.
Over time, those documented moments became the foundation for performance evaluations. Instead of managers writing assessments about employees, employees identified their own patterns of contribution — and managers helped them see what they could not see alone.
“They had never looked at their work in that way before.” — Employees stopping by her office after their first restructured 1:1
What the Numbers Actually Show
These results came during a year when the organization went through multiple rounds of layoffs and leadership changes. The attrition number is the headline. But what it points to is something more precise: when people can articulate the influence they are already having, they stop scanning for something outside to answer the question of whether their work matters.
Ren did not motivate her employees. She asked better questions. In asking, she made their hidden influence impossible to ignore.
What Shifted for Ren
She came into this work as a problem-solver — someone who measured her value by the quality of her solutions. She left it as a facilitator — someone who understood that her greatest influence was not in the answers she gave but in the questions she made possible.
That is the mechanism working in both directions. Both people grew. The attrition rate fell not because Ren fixed something, but because she and her team started working with each other.