Hear, Help, Handle

About ten years ago I sat in a new manager training and walked out with three words I've used ever since. They weren't part of the curriculum. They came from another participant, a manager like me, describing how she framed requests with her own team.

Hear, Help, Handle.

I wish I could remember her name. I've been using her framework for a decade and have never been able to credit her properly. Part of why it stuck, I suspect, is where it came from: the most useful thing I took out of that training was something the person sitting next to me was already doing.
It's how I ask people to frame a request when they bring me something. I introduce it in the first 1:1 with every new direct report, because it shapes how we work together from then on.

Hear means no action needed: a status update, or something they need to say out loud to someone with the context to understand it. Sometimes they want to complain, and that's a legitimate use of the time. I'm listening, not solving.

Help means thought partnership. This is where I coach: open-ended questions meant to guide them toward their own answer rather than hand them mine. They still own the problem, and they leave with a path they chose.

Handle means they've reached the end of their rope and need it off their plate. Sometimes that's the right call, and I take it.

What I didn't expect is how often the level gets renegotiated in the conversation, in both directions.

Someone asks me to Handle something and I'll steer us back toward Help, because working it through is what grows them, and taking it off their plate would cost them that. Other times someone brings me a Hear, and because I have context they don't, I know it needs to be a Help, or that it's already been Handled somewhere above us.

The label isn't a contract. It's a starting position that makes the real conversation possible.

It works upward too. I use the same three words with my own managers, and it saves everyone the guessing. It scales past 1:1s as well: a cross-functional team briefing their various leaders together can say which one they're asking for, and the whole room calibrates at once.

Not everything falls neatly into one of the three, and it isn't meant to. It's the foundation you fall back on when you aren't sure what someone needs from you, which is most of the time.