---
title: "What are you going to do about it?"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it.html"
published: "2011-02-03T13:16:22+00:00"
updated: "2011-04-04T22:45:19.793000+00:00"
tags: ["Learning Phase"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "A Lead Better course attendee's email showing how asking a teammate what are you going to do about it, and by when, got a problem solved within hours."
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/"
---

# What are you going to do about it?

A couple of Days ago I finished the first [“Lead Better” course for software team leaders](http://www.programutvikling.no/kurskalenderoversikt.aspx?id=938475) in Oslo. It was the first time I had done this course out of Israel.

It was a great feeling to get the following email today from Michal, one of the participants of that course. In the email he also refers to [an Integrity and commitment based technique I wrote about](https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.html) before, and that we covered deeply during the course.

> Hi Roy,
>  
> I participated in the course “Lead better” 2 days ago in Oslo.
>  
> I committed to you that I would ask at least one time the magical phrase “What are you gonna do about it” to my teammates and let you know about results.
> It happened sooner than I would expect. More, the problem was solved very quickly.
>  
> On a standup meeting one of my teammates said:
> \-          “we need to test the new configuration somehow”.
>
> \-          So I immediately asked “What are you gonna do about it?”
>
> \-          ... seconds of consternation... “eeehhhmmmm, I will figure out something”
>
> \-          “By When?”
>
> \-          “Today, an hour after scrum meeting, I will reconfigure the platform and let you know about the results.”
>
> \-          “Great” :)
>
>  
> And it worked! In an hour I got him with a rest of a team discussing details and in another hour, the platform was reconfigured and fully tested! It would never happen so fast if he had not commited to do so :)
> Thanks.
>  
> Michał Wikliński

## Read next

- [Video: How to manage a person who is always late to a standup meeting](https://www.5whys.com/articles/video-how-to-manage-a-person-who-is-always-late-to-a-standup.html): A YouTube video answering how to handle a team member who is always late to the daily standup, with a different approach for each team maturity stage.
- [4 ways to discover a stuck team member, and what you can do about it](https://www.5whys.com/articles/4-ways-to-discover-a-stuck-team-member-and-what-you-can-do-a.html): Roy Osherove recalls being fired as a stuck developer and shows how standups, code reviews, test reviews and pairing help a lead spot and unblock people.
- [Chapter four - commitment language - is online](https://www.5whys.com/articles/chapter-four-commitment-language-is-online.html): Chapter four of Notes to a Software Team Leader is out on Leanpub, about commitment language as a first step in the learning stage and integrity thinking.


---

## 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/