10 Capacity Conversations Your Team Isn’t Having

One page each: the situation, the opener, what to listen for, and the trap to avoid

Every one of these ten situations shows up in a shared capacity picture before it shows up anywhere else — before a resignation letter, before a missed deadline, before a performance review nobody saw coming. Each conversation below follows the same shape: a situation you’ve probably already seen, a question that opens it without presupposing the answer, what to actually listen for in the response, and the specific trap — almost always a verdict dressed up as a question — to avoid.

The ten conversations

1. Your strongest performer never says no
2. A new client just landed on an already-full plate
3. Someone’s workload dropped and stayed there
4. A team member says “I’m fine” but the numbers disagree
5. Someone’s been ready for the next level for months
6. A teammate keeps getting pulled onto other people’s fires
7. Someone just joined and you don’t know their real capacity yet
8. A high performer starts missing deadlines
9. Someone seems to have quietly checked out
10. A team member is the only one who touches a critical client