Who is still here
The person nobody has worked with yet
An empty row on the grid is the most actionable thing on it and the hardest to notice, because the person in it is usually doing fine.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerTwo of this person's five working pairs
- 02The senior engineerOn the team from the first day
- 03The second engineer
- 04The product managerThe third person in this role in fourteen months
four people · 6 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 1 has only been in the same meeting · 2 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
A fair pilot starts with a written purpose and shared baseline; managers can open the capabilities page before comparing what changes after a new working practice.
The broader organisational question can also be checked against resources from Lucid Meetings.
One of the eight has worked with nobody. They joined in March, they have been at every meeting since, they deliver what they are given on time, and nobody has had a concern about them.
They are the most important finding on the grid and the one least likely to be acted on, because nothing is going wrong.
Why they are invisible
The signals a manager watches for are performance signals, and this person has none. Their work arrives. They answer messages. They say sensible things in meetings. There is no complaint from anybody, because nobody is close enough to have one.
Isolation on a distributed team does not look like isolation. It looks like self-sufficiency, which is a quality, and in somebody competent it is read as a good sign. The person who gets noticed is the one who asks for help constantly, and they are usually the better connected of the two.
It is also not visible to the person themselves, or not as a problem. They are getting their work done. If they have a view at all it is that the team is a bit distant, which they attribute to remote work, which everybody says is like this.
Why it compounds
An empty row gets harder to fill over time, for three reasons that reinforce each other.
The window closes. In the first month, needing help is expected and asking is free. At six months the same question carries an implication that you should already know, so it goes unasked, and the occasions that would have produced a pair stop occurring.
The work adapts. Somebody who works alone gets given work that can be done alone, because that is what they have demonstrated. Within two quarters their assignment pattern has hardened around their isolation.
And the team's model of them sets. They become the person who handles that thing, which is both a compliment and a wall. Nobody thinks to put them on anything joint, because they have their area.
What it predicts
Two things, neither of them immediate.
- They are the likeliest to leave, and the departure will be a surprise, because every visible signal was fine. Nobody will be able to say why, and the explanation given will usually be about compensation or opportunity, which are the explanations available when the real one has no vocabulary.
- And their knowledge is unrecoverable. Somebody with no working pairs has never explained their work to anybody in a way that required the other person to understand it. Everything they know about their area is in one head and in whatever documentation they wrote for themselves.
What to do, concretely
One task, one named colleague, one date, inside the next month.
Not a mentor. Mentoring is a relationship about the person, and it adds a second one-to-one to somebody who already has one. Not an introduction, which produces a conversation and no occasion. Not a buddy system, which is an introduction with a label.
A piece of work that needs two people, where one of them is this person and the other is somebody they currently have no pair with, with a deadline close enough that they have to speak this week.
The deadline is the part people leave out and it is what makes it work. Without it, two busy people with a vague instruction to collaborate will exchange two messages and let it drift, and both will privately conclude that the pairing was artificial.
What not to do about it
Three responses that feel helpful and make it worse.
Telling them they should get to know the team more. This relocates a structural problem into their personality and gives them nothing to act on, since the occasions they would need do not exist.
Putting them in more meetings. The most common response, and the one with the clearest evidence against it: they have attended everything for six months and have no pair to show for it.
Pairing them with the manager on something. This produces a hub pair, which the team already has plenty of, and leaves them exactly as isolated from the other six as they were.
What works is one task, one colleague who is not the manager, and a date.
And checking afterwards
Six weeks later, ask both of them whether they would go to the other with a question now. That is the real outcome, and it is a better test than whether the task went well.
If the answer is yes from both, the row is filled and the person is on the team. If it is no, the task was too small, too separable, or not genuinely needed, and the next one should be less of each.