"I’m Not Gonna Get Any Work Out of That Guy Today..."

I was a third-year apprentice working downtown Los Angeles.

My foreman was Bill Rae.

Bill was one of those people I paid attention to because I was still learning not only how to do electrical work, but how experienced people handled other people.

Another guy on the job was Jim DeYoung.

Jim was not somebody I thought of as weak or incapable.

Quite the opposite.

One of the images that has stuck with me for decades is watching Jim easily bend 1¼-inch EMT with a hand bender.

That is not little pipe.

And I remember him bending the pipe with the bender upside down on a wood scaffold that was actually moving underneath him.

Any electricians out there knows the strength needed to do that, which I certainly never had.

He was a big, physically capable guy who knew how to work.

That matters to this story.

Because one day Jim came over to the gang box and started asking Bill questions.

I don’t remember the exact questions, and I don’t want to invent them now.

What I remember is the interaction.

Jim clearly wasn’t firing on all cylinders that day.

Bill answered him.

He didn’t ridicule him.

He didn’t make a spectacle out of it.

He didn’t use the moment to establish how much smarter the foreman was than the journeyman.

He just answered the questions.

I was a third-year apprentice watching this.

I did not have the vocabulary for it yet, but I was watching Bill make a series of choices about how to treat another person.

He could have:

• rolled his eyes;
• made some crack loud enough for the crew to hear;
• pulled Jim aside and given him a lecture about focus and professionalism;
• sent him home;
• taken the questions as an opportunity to remind everyone within earshot who was in charge.

He did none of that.

He answered a guy who was clearly struggling.

He let the questions be questions.

And he let Jim walk away with his dignity intact.

Jim eventually walked away.

Bill watched him go.

Then he shook his head and said it.

Not:

• “That guy’s useless.”
• “Jim doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
• “What the hell is wrong with him?”
• “I need to straighten that guy out.”

Just:

I’m not gonna get any work out of that guy today.

Today.

That last word is the one that stayed with me.

A Bad Day Is Not Necessarily a Bad Person

People are often much too quick to take a snapshot and turn it into an identity.

• Somebody has a bad day. They’re lazy.
• Somebody asks a question they should probably know. They’re incompetent.
• Someone gets overwhelmed. They’re weak.
• Someone screws something up. They’re careless.

Maybe.

Sometimes those judgments are accurate.

Patterns matter.

Standards matter.

Accountability matters.

I’ve spent my life in environments where mistakes can have serious consequences.

I am not arguing that leaders should shrug at bad performance.

But there is another possibility.

Sometimes a capable person is simply having a bad day.

They might be:

• tired;
• distracted;
• dealing with something at home;
• sick;
• overloaded;
• or, for reasons you may never know, simply unable to access their normal capacity right now.

Bill seemed to recognize that distinction.

He knew Jim.

He knew what Jim was normally capable of.

So one off day did not erase the larger body of evidence.

That is a very different way of looking at people.

Capacity Is Not Character

There are several questions hiding inside that distinction, and they are not the same question.

Can this person normally do the work?

That is a capacity and skill question.

Are they able to do it today?

That is a current-state question.

Are they willing to do it?

That is an effort and attitude question.

Do they care whether they do it well?

That is getting closer to character.

These are not subtle academic distinctions.

They require entirely different responses.

• If someone does not know how, they need training.
• If they normally can but cannot access that capacity today, they might need rest, a lighter assignment, or simply a leader patient enough to wait for the next shift.
• If they know how and can, but are not trying, that needs a different conversation entirely.
• And if it is a pattern of indifference that persists over time, you are no longer looking at a bad day. You are looking at something closer to character.

Conflating these categories does real damage.

If you treat a capacity problem as an attitude problem, you end up disciplining someone who needed instruction.

If you treat a temporary state as a character verdict, you may damage a relationship with somebody who has given you years of evidence to the contrary.

If you treat a genuine character or effort problem as “just a bad day” over and over, you protect the wrong person at everyone else’s expense.

The art is learning to diagnose before you label.

Today Is Not Forever

One thing I like about Bill’s sentence is that it was naturally bounded.

He was not ignoring what he saw.

His observation was actually pretty blunt: he expected Jim was not going to be very productive.

But he did not turn that observation into a permanent verdict.

That is disciplined judgment.

You can tell the truth about what is happening right now without pretending you know what it means forever.

This is useful far beyond a construction site.

• Your kid has a bad practice.
• Your student struggles with something they have done before.
• Your spouse is short-tempered one evening.
• Your employee has a terrible meeting.
• Your training partner looks completely lost.
• You have a lousy day yourself.

The temptation is to say:

This is who they are.

Or:

This is who I am.

Maybe not.

Maybe this is simply what is happening today.

A bad Tuesday does not automatically deserve that much authority.

I’ve Needed That Grace Too

It is easy to appreciate this lesson when you are the leader judging somebody else.

It matters just as much when you are judging yourself.

There have been days when I was not at my best:

• days when I was tired;
• days when my head was not where I wanted it;
• days on the mat when I felt like I had forgotten everything I have learned;
• days in business where something that should have been simple seemed unnecessarily difficult.

If every one of those days becomes evidence for some permanent story about yourself, you are going to create a pretty distorted self-image.

• “I suck at this.”
• “I’m getting too old.”
• “I’m not cut out for business.”
• “I’ll never understand jiu-jitsu.”
• “This isn’t working.”

One bad roll becomes:

“I don’t belong in this gym.”

One difficult conversation becomes:

“I’m terrible at this whole leadership thing.”

One week where nothing seems to land becomes:

“The business is never going to work.”

And here is the thing.

Those stories feel true in the moment because the evidence is right in front of you.

You did get submitted three times in a row.

The conversation did go sideways.

The week was legitimately bad.

You are not making anything up.

You are interpreting real data.

The question is whether you are interpreting it fairly.

There is a difference between:

“I got submitted three times today.”

and:

“I am bad at jiu-jitsu.”

The first is an observation about one training session.

The second is a verdict about your permanent identity.

One is bounded. The other is not.

One leaves room for tomorrow. The other forecloses it.

Maybe.

But sometimes the most accurate diagnosis is:

I’m probably not getting much work out of this guy today.

And sometimes the guy is you.

Dignity and Standards Can Coexist

What impressed me about Bill’s interaction was not that he lowered the standard.

It was that he did not need to humiliate Jim in order to maintain it.

I have seen both good and bad leaders struggle with this.

Some people think accountability requires embarrassment.

They:

• want to make an example out of someone;
• use sarcasm;
• demonstrate their superior knowledge;
• correct the person in the most public way possible.

Maybe it makes the boss feel powerful.

It does not necessarily make the worker better.

Bill answered the questions.

He preserved Jim’s dignity.

And privately, he adjusted his expectations for the day.

There is a lot of leadership compressed into that:

• See reality clearly.
• Do not pretend poor performance is good performance.
• Do not turn temporary weakness into permanent identity.
• Preserve dignity where you can.
• Adjust to the capacity actually available.

Then look again tomorrow.

Patterns Still Matter

There is an important guardrail here.

One day is one day.

Repeated days become a pattern.

And patterns deserve attention.

There are two ways to get this wrong, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is turning one bad day from a proven person into a character indictment.

Somebody has years of solid work behind them, and one off afternoon gets treated like the truth about who they really are.

That is unfair.

It is also bad leadership, because it teaches people that past evidence does not count when the current moment looks bad.

It teaches them to hide struggles rather than work through them.

The second mistake is watching the same behavior repeat indefinitely and continuing to excuse it as “just a bad day.”

Compassion without evidence eventually becomes naïveté.

And naïveté from a leader eventually becomes negligent.

The people who show up ready to work every day notice when someone who never pulls their weight keeps getting the benefit of the doubt.

They notice when the standard applies to them but not to the person who always has an excuse.

Both mistakes come from the same failure: diagnosing from a snapshot instead of from history.

If Bill had said that about Jim every day for six months, this would be a completely different story.

Eventually leadership requires asking why.

Is there:

• a training problem?
• a role-fit problem?
• an attitude problem?
• a health problem?
• a personal issue?
• a standards problem?
• a character problem?
• a leadership problem?

You do not know automatically.

But repeated evidence earns deeper investigation.

The mistake is making a permanent diagnosis from insufficient evidence.

One incident can tell you what happened.

A pattern starts telling you what may be going on.

Character judgments should require more evidence than one lousy afternoon.

⚔ The Dojo Drill: Separate the Day From the Person

Think of somebody who disappointed you recently.

Maybe:

• an employee;
• a coworker;
• a student;
• a family member;
• a training partner;
• or yourself.

Then work through four questions.

1. What actually happened?

Describe the behavior without turning it into an identity.

2. Is this an incident or a pattern?

What does the larger body of evidence say about this person?

3. Is this a skill problem, a capacity problem, an effort problem, or a character problem?

Do not lump them together.

4. What does this situation actually require today?

Maybe:

• correction;
• training;
• a clearer standard;
• rest;
• a conversation;
• accountability;
• or simply recognizing that they are not at their best today.

You do not need to ignore reality.

You just need to avoid pretending one moment tells you everything about a human being.

One Word Stayed With Me

I don’t know whether Bill ever thought much about that conversation afterward.

He may not even have remembered saying the line.

I did.

Decades later, I still remember it.

“I’m not gonna get any work out of that guy today.”

The more I have thought about it, the more important that last word has become.

Today.

Jim was still Jim.

The guy I remembered doing difficult physical work from a moving scaffold.

The guy with years of accumulated ability and experience.

The fact that he did not have much to give that particular day did not erase any of that.

A good leader has to see the person standing in front of him today.

But he also has to remember the person he has seen over time.

Don’t confuse one bad day with a bad person.

Don’t confuse temporary capacity with permanent character.

And don’t abandon standards in the name of compassion either.

Look at the evidence.

Look at the pattern.

Preserve dignity.

Deal with what is true today.

Then give tomorrow a chance to provide more evidence.

📚 Leader’s Library

​James P. Carse — Finite and Infinite Games​

Why?

Carse offers a useful way to understand why two people can participate in the same activity while pursuing completely different goals.

Some games are finite: there is a winner, a rank, a score, a promotion, or some other defined outcome.

Others are more infinite: the purpose is to keep learning, participating, adapting, and continuing the game.

That distinction applies far beyond sports. It can help you understand coworkers, training partners, competitors, leaders, relationships—and yourself. Before assuming someone is playing badly, it is worth asking whether they are even playing the same game you are.

A strong addition to the library for anyone interested in leadership, perspective, relationships, lifelong learning, and becoming better at understanding what other people are actually trying to accomplish.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck