---
title: "Be more approachable in five minutes"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/be-more-approachable-in-five-minutes.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/be-more-approachable-in-five-minutes.html"
published: "2009-10-28T14:28:22+00:00"
updated: "2009-10-28T14:38:10.343000+00:00"
tags: ["Self Improvement", "people patterns"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "I found this blog post interesting because it starts out with a simple premise: you are not as \"approachable\" as you think. It also introduces the concept of \" Daily Five Minutes \". That article is pretty long, but this post sums it up…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Be more approachable in five minutes

I found [this blog post](http://talkingstory.org/2009/10/so-you-think-you-are-approachable/) interesting because it starts out with a simple premise: you are not as "approachable" as you think.

It also introduces the concept of "[Daily Five Minutes](http://joyfuljubilantlearning.com/2009/07/learning-to-listen-with-d5m/)". That article is pretty long, but [this post sums it up](http://www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/mwacoaching/2008/02/whats-the-skinn.html) rather nicely:

> Very briefly, **the D5M is a simple habit**. Each day, without fail, managers are to give five minutes of no-agenda time to at least one of their employees.
>
> Your time is one of the most precious resources you have, and to give it as a gift to someone in the form of the _Daily Five Minutes®_ just may be one of the best work-expressions of [_unconditional aloha_](http://www.managingwithaloha.com/2006/02/articulating_al.html) there is.

There are also several sets of questions that can be involved (read "[Daily Five Minutes](http://joyfuljubilantlearning.com/2009/07/learning-to-listen-with-d5m/)" for the full thing) but the idea is simple and powerful. I intend to give it a try.

Do you already do this?


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/