The breakfast club

Back when I was still building and developing sailing yachts, one habit stuck longer than any other. Every Friday, before the workday even began, everyone would meet at a small restaurant around the corner from the shipyard for breakfast, literally everyone. Bocadillos, coffee, a proper table instead of the workbench, before a single tool had been picked up that day. Nobody was forced to come, it was completely open. Some people showed up every single week. Others came once a month, whenever they felt like it. Either way, the door was there.

Nothing about it was structured. People talked, laughed, shared things that had nothing to do with work at all. And somewhere in the same conversation, just as naturally, a smart idea about production would surface, or someone would mention a working condition that could genuinely be better, or a shortcut nobody had thought to try yet. It was never one or the other. The personal and the practical moved through the same easy conversation, and that flow, more than anything else, is what made the work itself more pleasant, and because of that, better.

Empathy gets talked about like a skill, something you can pick up from a book or learn in a workshop with the right list of questions. I don't think that's true. I think some environments will simply never produce it, no matter how many training sessions get run, and other environments end up looking completely different, without anyone being able to point to exactly why.

I saw the difference clearly building yachts in Spain. There's a joke people love to make about that, lazy Spanish workers, always ready for a siesta, nothing gets done before three in the afternoon. That workshop outperformed every other one I've ever been part of. Not the people. The way the work was set up around them.

Everyone was part of one goal, from whoever swept the floor to whoever ordered the material to whoever ran quality control. Nobody sat outside that circle. People were involved from the very first napkin sketch of a design through to the finished yacht sailing out the door, the render, the production plan, the actual build, all of it. Being part of that whole arc, not just one station on the line, does something to a team that nothing else quite manages. It puts everyone on the same compass heading. And the mechanism that kept it alive week to week was simple, communication, taken seriously rather than treated as a box to tick.

The Friday breakfast wasn't the only door that was open. If someone walked into my office just to talk, that was never an interruption, that was the job working exactly as intended. If a bowsprit that normally took two and a half hours to produce suddenly took four, I knew the two and a half hours were still possible, so something else had to be going on. The instinct most managers reach for is to point at the gap, you used to do this faster, get back to two and a half hours. I never did that. I'd ask, what's up. Just that. Because the four hours were rarely about the bowsprit at all. Sometimes it was something happening at home that had nothing to do with work, and asking took the sting out of it before it could become something bigger.

People who feel valued, appreciated, actually needed, work differently than people who feel watched. That's not a management theory I read somewhere. That's just what happened, week after week, long before I had any language for why it worked.

I still catch myself doing it now, in a completely different industry, with a completely different team. The instinct to measure the gap is still there sometimes. So is the other instinct, the one I picked up on those Friday mornings in Spain, to ask what's up before I ask why something is slower than it used to be. Most weeks, the second one still wins.

I still wonder, though, how many gaps I measured before I learned to ask instead. And I wonder the same about you. The last time something took longer than it should have, what did you actually ask?