You Think You’re in Agreement. You’re in Assumption.

 

Trish Kendall and I are giving the full keynote on a free Vistage CEO Climb Event on June 30. Details at the bottom.

April 22, 1994. Trish Kendall was twenty years old, a meth addict squatting in a bathroom in Tacoma, a moment away from her last shot. The phone rang. It was her sister Maria.

She picked up. Within 48 hours she was living on an army base in Killeen, Texas, in her sister’s spare room.

Here is the part that stops the room every time Trish tells it. The phone call isn’t what got her sober. A contract did.

Trish spoke to three of my Vistage groups, and she told the same story to each one. When she moved in, Maria didn’t say “be part of the family.” She wrote it down and they both signed it. Family meals three times a day. A family meeting once a week. Church on Sundays. And one line Trish negotiated for herself: nobody comes into my room before noon. Maria countered. Nine. And you’re at the breakfast table at 9:05.

Not nine. 9:05.

When Trish missed breakfast, there was no yelling and no lecture. She just didn’t eat until the next meal. That was the agreement. Her sister never lowered it, and never broke her own side of it. “I have to be at the table” slowly turned into “I want to be.” Six months in, Maria and David asked Trish to babysit their two little kids. A former addict, a former thief, handed two children for an afternoon. Trish calls that the day she knew she was living an ordinary life.

She tells the whole story in her TEDx talk.

The clarity is what saved her. That is giving love. The clarity.

The problem you’ve misdiagnosed

Trish has spent the last seven years working with sales teams and leaders, and she’ll tell you the place where it all breaks down isn’t strategy. It’s the handoff between two people. “We think we’re in agreement,” she said in one of my rooms, “but we’re really in assumption.”

Sit with that. Most of the friction you’re carrying right now with a key employee, a partner, or a vendor, you’ve probably filed under a trust problem or an alignment problem. It’s usually neither. It’s a clarity problem wearing a costume.

Here’s the tell. You ask someone to “communicate better with the client.” They nod. You both walk away believing you have an agreement. You don’t. You have two different definitions of “better” and a handshake. Better how? More often? Faster turnaround? Matching the client’s tone instead of your own? Looping you in before things go sideways? “Communicate better” means as many things as there are people in the room. So does “be more strategic,” “own it,” and “take initiative,” and every other phrase we hand people and then resent them for misreading.

Trish draws a line between the should and the good. The should is the task: run the clinic, hit the number, finish the project. The good is what it actually looks like when it’s done right, described in enough detail that you’d both recognize it standing in the room. Most leaders are sharp on the should and silent on the good. Then they’re surprised by the result.

The example every CEO in the room was living

The work-from-home fight came up in all three groups, because every founder is in it. The instinct is to make it a rule. In or out. But the real agreement was never about location.

One scenario Trish kept using: a leader wants his senior people in the office to rebuild the apprenticeship model, so the younger ones learn by watching. Reasonable. Two days a week in the office. Except a senior associate can sit in that office all day behind a closed door on video calls, and the apprenticeship model still dies. “In the office” was the should. “Door open, available, bringing a junior person into a client meeting and debriefing them after” was the good. Until you say the second part out loud, you don’t have an agreement. You have an assumption with a parking spot.

The structure I’d put to work this week

Trish uses six moving parts. Here are the four that matter most for a CEO running fast:

1. Shared purpose. You don’t both need to want the same thing. You need to want things that point the same direction. Maria wanted Trish healthy. Trish wanted to feel safe. Different wants, same direction. Your senior associate wants autonomy. You want the next generation trained. Name both out loud.
2. Make it clear: the should and the good. State the task, then describe what “done right” actually looks and sounds like. If you can’t describe the good, you’re not ready to ask for it.
3. Name the impact. Not threats. Consequences in both directions. What happens for the client, the team, the person, and the business if this holds, and if it doesn’t.
4. Stay connected. Book the next check-in before the current conversation ends. Fifteen minutes. “What’s working, what isn’t.” Not nagging, not a status report. A short, scheduled look at the agreement while it’s still small enough to fix.

You can run that in a hallway in five minutes or in a sit-down with your leadership team. Trish’s rule of thumb: if the something, or the someone, matters enough, you schedule the conversation instead of assuming it happened by osmosis.

Why this lands in the room

The founder-CEOs in my groups, running $3M to $350M companies, spend their week making fast, high-stakes agreements with people who can’t read their minds, and then living with the gap. A peer advisory group is where you slow down and say the quiet part: I thought we agreed, we didn’t, and now I’m three months behind and angry about it. A dozen other founders in the room have made the identical mistake, and they’ll tell you exactly where the clarity leaked out.

Clarity isn’t cold. Trish put it plainly in one of the rooms: clarity is kindness. The kindest thing you can do for the people you lead is to stop making them guess.

Pick one relationship this week that’s running on assumption. You already know which one. Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding, and trade the assumption for an agreement.

That’s the work.

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