Patio Pondering: When a Good Battery Is Actually Bad

Another bright, sunny morning here on the Patio, sipping my coffee as I look over our snow-covered backyard. This morning my thoughts drift back to a simple “honey do” task I thought I finished yesterday and how it unexpectedly connects to the workplace.

Yesterday I replaced the battery in the garage door remote. We keep a battery cache with everything from tiny wafer batteries up to big D cells, so I grabbed a replacement 2032, put it in the remote, and went on with my evening.

This morning, when I left to take my son to school, the garage door did not budge. None of the buttons on the remote worked. My first thought was that I must not have reconnected the remote to the opener. No big deal. I planned to fix that after the school run.

When I returned home I tried to reconnect the remote to the opener, but after several attempts it still failed to connect. The Learn light kept flashing, a little reminder in my face that it was not working. After a few more tries, I headed into the house, grabbed the battery tester, and found the problem. The battery was dead. Caput. No juice.

The part that stuck with me was not that I used the wrong tool. It was that I trusted a bad one. That battery came from the “good battery” drawer, the place where the working ones are supposed to live, so I never thought to question it. I assumed I had what I needed, and that assumption sent me troubleshooting the wrong problem. I could have spent all morning trying different fixes with no hope of success.

It struck me how often this same pattern shows up in our teams. We assume the people around us have what they need, the skills, the clarity, the support, the bandwidth, simply because they are in the role or because they have managed before. We assume everything is charged and ready to go. But just like that battery in the good drawer, not everything that looks prepared actually is. And when someone on the team is running on empty, the whole system ends up troubleshooting the wrong problems.

Over my career I have been asked many times if I had the right tools to do my job and to support sales and my customers. Most of the time I did, but the ‘tool’ I needed most was a leader who had the charge, clarity, and capacity to guide the team forward, especially when our teams carried so many dotted-line responsibilities to essential parts of the business.

As we approach the start of a new calendar year, it is a good time to reflect on your teams. Rarely does a team fail because people do not care. More often they falter because someone was running on empty while everyone else assumed they had a full charge. Before the next project stalls, ask yourself: are you sure your people have what they need?

Another bright, sunny morning here on the Patio, sipping my coffee as I look over our snow-covered backyard. This morning my thoughts drift back to a simple “honey do” task I thought I finished yesterday and how it unexpectedly connects to the workplace.

Yesterday I replaced the battery in the garage door remote. We keep a battery cache with everything from tiny wafer batteries up to big D cells, so I grabbed a replacement 2032, put it in the remote, and went on with my evening.

This morning, when I left to take my son to school, the garage door did not budge. None of the buttons on the remote worked. My first thought was that I must not have reconnected the remote to the opener. No big deal. I planned to fix that after the school run.

When I returned home I tried to reconnect the remote to the opener, but after several attempts it still failed to connect. The Learn light kept flashing, a little reminder in my face that it was not working. After a few more tries, I headed into the house, grabbed the battery tester, and found the problem. The battery was dead. Caput. No juice.

The part that stuck with me was not that I used the wrong tool. It was that I trusted a bad one. That battery came from the “good battery” drawer, the place where the working ones are supposed to live, so I never thought to question it. I assumed I had what I needed, and that assumption sent me troubleshooting the wrong problem. I could have spent all morning trying different fixes with no hope of success.

It struck me how often this same pattern shows up in our teams. We assume the people around us have what they need, the skills, the clarity, the support, the bandwidth, simply because they are in the role or because they have managed before. We assume everything is charged and ready to go. But just like that battery in the good drawer, not everything that looks prepared actually is. And when someone on the team is running on empty, the whole system ends up troubleshooting the wrong problems.

Over my career I have been asked many times if I had the right tools to do my job and to support sales and my customers. Most of the time I did, but the ‘tool’ I needed most was a leader who had the charge, clarity, and capacity to guide the team forward, especially when our teams carried so many dotted-line responsibilities to essential parts of the business.

As we approach the start of a new calendar year, it is a good time to reflect on your teams. Rarely does a team fail because people do not care. More often they falter because someone was running on empty while everyone else assumed they had a full charge. Before the next project stalls, ask yourself: are you sure your people have what they need?