Tag: coaching

Right Action, Right Results

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of year. Employees and their managers are digging into reviews, reflecting on what happened last year: wins, misses, growth, reflection.

I’ve written before about how to write good annual goals. The short version is:

  1. Write them for yourself first, not for your boss. This way you’re unconstrained, and you can be honest about what success would look like, while asking important questions like “what set of accomplishments would make me proud?”
  2. Write SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. Most people struggle with this, focusing on activities rather than results. Don’t fall into that trap.
  3. Think of your goals as an intention you are setting, both for what you can accomplish and how you can grow.

One question to reflect on is: does my supervisor only know what’s in my written goals, or does she also have insight into how I go about my work?

This is a helpful question because how she, and you, respond to areas of meeting and missing goals will be quite different depending on the “how,” namely:

Whether she says it or not, your boss is unconsciously filtering this performance conversation through this 2×2.

  1. In the areas where you both engaged in the right actions and got the right results—hooray! Everyone wins. Celebrate! And keep it up!
  2. In the areas you engaged in seemingly right actions but did not get results—let’s really get under the hood here, because you’re trying your best, but something didn’t line up. We are teed up to partner!!
  3. If you got results despite not doing the right things—we can both agree that you got lucky, and that’s not the foundation for long term success
  4. And, if you didn’t engage in the right actions and didn’t get the right results—well, this one is obvious.

Assuming that all makes sense, now consider something different.

What if the way you engage with your boss doesn’t allow them to create this 2×2? What if they have little to no visibility into your “how”?

Meaning she knows less than she could about:

  • Your week-to-week priorities
  • Where and how you’re spending your time and getting pulled down rabbit holes
  • Where you’re most productive
  • Where you’re getting stuck
  • What hypotheses of yours were right and wrong
  • …

What she’s left with, then, are the results themselves, with little to no information about what led to those results and, therefore, limited ability to really be helpful.

As employees, we often want space and freedom. But to have a productive manager/coach relationship with our boss, we have to give them the information they need to help us diagnose, intervene, and grow…at annual review time and all year round.

Otherwise, the sum total of what they know is: which goals did you hit, which goals you not hit? Check, check, X, X, check.

Without a consistent conversation about “how,” it’s difficult to get underneath goals and into the “why.” And without “why” we cannot learn and grow.

Can Can’t Will Won’t and 3-D Management

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

In Danny Meyer’s interview on the Tim Ferris podcast, Danny shares the world’s simplest 2×2 for how to think about who on your team to invest in, and how much of your time and energy to give them.

The CAN / CAN’T describes the person’s skill. The WILL / WON’T describes their will.

This gives us a shortcut to understand the people on our teams, those who:

  • CAN and WILL: highly skilled and highly motivated. Your top performers today.
  • CAN’T and WILL: people who don’t have the skills but are highly motivated to learn them.
  • CAN and WON’T: people who have the skills but are unmotivated / have a bad attitude.
  • CAN’T and WON’T: people who have neither the skills nor the will.

How to Spend Your Time?

The first question Danny poses is: how should you spend your time as a supervisor? His answer (which I agree with) is that he has the most time for the people on the top half of the chart, those who:

  • CAN’T but WILL: people who are super-motivated to learn, but just don’t have the specific skills today. It’s hard to teach motivation, dedication, professionalism and pride; it’s much easier to teach skills.
  • CAN and WILL. In some ways it’s easy to just “leave these people alone” because they’re crushing their jobs, but this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Give them attention, praise them, nurture them, both for the impact this has on them directly and because of the positive multiplier effects this will have on your culture.

Then we get to the bottom part of the chart. This is where moving decisively is important, around those who:

  • CAN and WON’T: folks who have the skills but are unwilling or unmotivated. These individuals are likely a drain on your culture, though it’s easy to get tricked into thinking you need to keep them, because they are so skilled. This is a trap.
  • CAN’T and WON’T: a simple category, and where you need to move fastest. These people drag down any organization.

From 2-D to 3-D

Now, there’s the 3-D chess version of this, which is where things get really interesting.

This is another way to illustrate the concept of situational leadership, which is one of the most useful approaches to managing others with the world’s worst diagram.

Here’s my take on how to illustrate this:

The idea is that each person cannot accurately be plotted on a 2D graph of skill and will.

Instead, each job requires a collection of attributes, and each person will plot to a different point for each attribute. For example, a member of your team might show:

  • High will and skill doing analytical tasks
  • High will but low skill in drawing cross-cutting insights from those analytical tasks
  • High skill but low will in checking others’ work for errors
  • Low skill and low will in client relations

How to Manage in Each of the Four Quadrants

In my version of the chart, above, you would mentally plot each of these four skills—analytical tasks, insight generation, checking others’ work, and client relations—on one of the graphs, and, as a supervisor, you’d work with your team member differently on each of the tasks. The supervisor’s job is to be:

  • DIRECTIVE for low skill, low will tasks
  • COACHING for low skill, high will tasks
  • SUPPORTING for high skill, low will tasks
  • DELEGATING for high skill, high will tasks

This is what’s explained in the terrible (but useful) standard illustration of situational leadership. Each quadrant describes three things: the employees’ skill, her will, and her bosses’ desired behavior when working with her on a task in each of the four quadrants.

Pulling it All Together

Our job, then, is to have a mental model of how we think about the skill and will of our employees and use that to determine, in the broadest sense, who to invest in and how much time to give them. This is what Danny Meyer is talking about, starting in minute 50 of the podcast.

And, at a more granular level, both employees and their supervisors have a nuanced job to do as they show up to work each day:  diagnosing different requirements of the job across skill and will; communicating this diagnosis to one another; and then using that mapping to partner differently in support of the execution of tasks and the development of these various skills.

It becomes clear pretty quickly—especially as we think about this over time—what a gross simplification it is to talk about “good” and “bad” employees; or to talk about whether it’s better to be a “hands on” supervisor or one who “gives lots of freedom.”

The reality is that people are a collection of attitudes and abilities for different things: we might love sitting in front of a spreadsheet and hate managing teams; love building relationships and hate writing a budget. Our skills, our willingness to deploy these skills, and the collection of skills that make up our jobs is constantly evolving.

The one constant that bridges people through all of this evolution—from one role to the next and to the next; from one set of skills to the next and to the next—is the willingness to keep on doing one’s best and to continually learn.

And the best bosses are the ones who realize that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to management, just as there’s no team member who has mastered all the skills she could possibly learn.

Expertise Paralysis

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It’s such a treat to find the right person to help us on a tough job.

Someone who has been there and has done that, who understands our context with all its nuances, who can insert herself seamlessly into this tricky situation and move us forward while making us better.

This expert might be a designer, a professional coach, or a mentor. She might be a software developer, a systems architect or a professor.

She accelerates our work, teaches us things, and moves us down our path.

And, if she’s good (and it sounds like she is), we grow by being in her presence. We learn more about what questions to ask, about how to see the whole playing field, about what’s is and isn’t important in making these kinds of decisions.

But let’s NOT let her excellence slow us down or, worse, stop us completely.

She’s here, right now, but she will be gone, sooner or later. And we can’t let her presence, and our understanding of her excellence (and the gap between what she knows and what we know), erode our confidence that we know enough to decide.

Not because we’re as skilled or experienced or as wise as she is. But because, after all, these are our decisions to make.

If we don’t make this decision and the next one and the one after that, no one will.

How Might This be True?

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What do we do when we encounter an opinion or advice we find hard to digest or understand?

A proposal that doesn’t quite add up, yet.

A perspective that is hard for us to embrace.

A suggested course of action that feels unfamiliar.

To start, let’s ignore how these questions play out low trust environments, and instead imagine what we do when the counterintuitive advice comes someone we trust and respect deeply.

For example, I’m reminded the professional coach I worked with for many years.

I was completely convinced she had my back, and similarly convinced that I had a lot to learn from her.

What to do, then, when she would propose a set of things for me to do that felt whacky? A course of action to do that seemed just plain wrong?

In my head, I would kick and scream, convince myself this couldn’t quite be right.

In conversation with her, I would put on a brave face, ask a bunch of questions, and try to figure out why she was giving this crazy advice.

And, in action, I would take a deep breath and do what she suggested.

And, yes, sometimes things went sideways or blew up in my face.

But more often than not, and way more than I expected, things worked out swimmingly.

And, through these surprising outcomes, I’d learn a lot about my incorrect assumptions; the too-narrow field of options I thought were available to me; my many blind spots; my ladders of inference; the huge swaths of the playing field I wasn’t seeing.

Over time, as this cycle repeated itself, it broadened my skills and, eventually, my perspective.

Of course, not all relationships have this particular combination of extreme (trust + competence + benevolence) on the part of the advice-giver.

But surely many of our relationships have some appealing mix of trust / competence / benevolence, one that affords us the opportunity to react differently in the face of surprising advice.

Perhaps, in these cases, we have an option other than to dig in, retrench, fight back, argue our point of view, and cling to our limitations.

Instead, we might ask ourselves:

How might this (crazy idea) be true?

What am I not seeing that they see?

Where are my old patterns not serving me? 

Is this a situation in which, if I act as I always have, I’ll get the result I’ve always gotten?

Our opportunity is to embrace the strength of our relationship over our conviction in our own point of view. If the advice-giver is the person we know them to be, then there must be truth, goodness and insight in this surprising thing they’ve just shared.

We embrace these seemingly opposing forces—what our head wants us to do, what our heart is telling us to do—and then act accordingly.

Time is On Your Side

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Making a good loaf of sourdough bread takes about 24 hours. There’s no way to rush it, but the good news is most of the work happens by itself.

The ingredients couldn’t be simpler: flour, water, sourdough starter, and salt. You make it like this:

At about 8am, you feed your starter with 75g of flour and 75g of water. This takes about a minute, maybe two.

At noon, you mix together your flour (1kg) and water (770g) by hand. This might take five minutes.

An hour after that, you add starter (150g) and salt (30g) and mix again. Another 3-5 minutes.

Then, every half an hour for the next three hours, you stretch and fold the dough a few times. Call that two minutes each half hour plus an extra minute each time to wash your hands.

Then you let the dough rest for five hours (rest = do nothing), and then you shape the dough. Shaping takes 10 to 15 minutes assuming you want a clean counter at the end.

Finally, you put it in your refrigerator to proof overnight.

The next morning, at around 8am again, you bake the bread. This requires 10 total minutes of activity and a bit of hovering (500 degree oven preheating for 45 minutes, then 20 minutes baking covered and 25 more uncovered).

At the end, you have hot, delicious, fresh bread. I always make two loaves and the first one is gone, every time, within an hour.

The point, besides demystifying sourdough, is this.

So much of the important work we do with people involves a bit of effort and attention up front and then letting the things we’ve set in motion—ideas, suggestions, words of support, challenges—evolve over time. Our job is to remain present and available, but we don’t have to do all the work.

The two mistakes to avoid are:

  1. Putting off having that first, foundational conversation, because then we lose the power of time being on our side.
  2. Thinking that the entire problem needs to be solved, today, by us, right now. More often than not, for important things, we can’t force it. Ideas need to take on a life of their own. People need time to work through their reactions, emotions and fears. Important things take time to process. Plans have dependencies and interconnections.

Great outcomes happen when we set things in motion early, remain available and present when needed, and let things run their course (with a few adjustments, based on our care and our experience, by us when needed). Nature, and time, are on our side.

And, for those who are just here for the sourdough, all I did to learn how to make amazing bread was to follow every instruction in this one video, 15 Mistakes Most Beginner Sourdough Bakers Make, from Mike Greenfield at Pro Home Cooks.

 

Maybe You Should Focus on This

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I notice this all the time with my kids.

I can’t solve problems for them.

Often, as they get older, they don’t even want my help any more.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I can say, “I think focusing on this part will make a big difference.”

And it does.

Because they have the skills. That’s not the problem.

Some of the time I can help them with diagnosis: how to apply their skills to this problem.

But most of the time it’s not even that. They have all the tools, it’s just that it feels uncomfortable–to them, to to anyone–to stick with and prioritize the hard bits.

As bosses and colleagues, as coaches and spouses and friends, we don’t need to have all the answers. Even if we had them, that wouldn’t matter, because they’d be our answers, not someone else’s.

What we do need to do is to listen attentively, to pay close attention, and, occasionally, by reflecting on our own experience, context and perspective, suggest a slightly different focus: a new lens through which to see a situation, a rejiggering of what could be at the very top of the list.

We shouldn’t be in the solutions-giving business. The answers we can provide are rarely just right, and, even if they were, it’s disempowering when an answer comes from someone other than the person facing the challenge.

But helping people channel their energy in the right way—that’s a great way to partner.

That’s Right!

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

A classmate of mind in graduate school earned himself the nickname, “Yes, but…” He could disagree with anything, and he would happily voice that disagreement.

It’s easy to fall into this trap, to only verbalize when you have a critique to make.

No stranger to this mistake, for many years I was most comfortable speaking up when I saw a fault in someone’s logic, a gap in a plan, or when I had a new idea that I thought was a better solution.

I thought I was helping. I thought I was moving the group towards a better outcome, and that it made sense to speak up with my ‘yes, buts’ and to otherwise keep quiet.

Not surprisingly, I was part of the problem.

To build great teams that come up with great solutions, we should spend most of our time verbalizing specific, heartfelt positive comments. In fact, on the best-performing teams, the ratio of positive to negative comments is a whopping 5.6 to 1. (Incidentally, the same goes for marriages: the ones most likely to stay together have the same 5 to 1 positive-to-negative comment ratio). For the worst-performing teams, the ratio is an abysmal 0.36 to 1.

Why is expressing positivity so important for team performance?

First, because it cultivates an environment of trust and motivation. Let’s remember that most of us, most of the time, are our own worst critics: we barrage ourselves with the echoes of our negative internal narrative. So, each external critique serves to amplify this narrative, while each compliment is muffled by it.

This is why what looks like an environment full of “helpful suggestions” is really one in which the dial on criticism – of ourselves, of each other – is turned up all the way. In this sort of space, people stop taking risks and being willing to do things that might not work.

But wait, there’s more.

The ‘yes, but’ approach does more than undermine trust and chip away at bravery and confidence. It ends up hacking away at the roots of what people need when trying something new.

In areas in which we are not yet skilled, we literally do not know the difference between good and bad. It doesn’t matter if we’re trying to write an email in a new way, practice a new technique for closing a sale or learning to play the violin, at the beginning of steep learning curves (and all new micro-skills have their own steep learning curves), right and wrong action are, to the novice, nearly indistinguishable.

That’s what makes it so invaluable to say, “Yes! That! Do more of that, it was great!!” It both identifies the right, new behavior, making it much more likely to be repeated; and it reinforces that new right action will be rewarded, both intrinsically and extrinsically.

The good news is that there’s a monumentally easy fix for the ‘Yes, but’ rut.

Just say ‘Yes, and…’

Try saying that five times a day and you’re off to a good start.

How to give and get better advice

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

The problem with most advice is that it’s delivered as “here’s what I think you should do.”

Yet it typically reflects, “here’s what I did in a similar situation.”

That old situation and this new one are never the same: different time, different place, different people.

Plus, upon receiving that kind of advice, we end up stuck again: we’ve turned to someone we trust who has more experience with this type of thing than we have. Hearing their advice, we face a new dilemma: is their wisdom, experience and fresh perspective more valid than what we (closer to the texture and nuance of the situation) see and know?

There’s a better way to approach this conversation, both as advice-seeker and the advice-giver.

If we are asked to give advice, we start by advising less.

Instead, we take a position of inquiry. Our job is to tease out what is going on beneath the surface, the questions that are being balanced, the decision that’s lurking but afraid to show its face. As this picture starts to emerge, we can, gently, begin to engage with what’s been offered up. We can re-frame the options that have been presented and share some new ones. We can question the weight being given to this or that risk (or opportunity). We can inquire about some strongly-held assumptions to see if the could be held more loosely, revealing both their truths and their limitations.

Ultimately, through this engagement, the person who felt stuck doesn’t get a take-it-or-leave-it answer, instead she ends up armed with new criteria, a few better assumptions, and a bit more confidence in her own choice-making ability. So equipped, she’s ready to get herself unstuck and find the path she will choose to walk.

Similarly, as the person seeking advice, we can remind ourselves that a much better opening question than “what do you think I should do?” is “can I talk this through with you?  I’d love your input on whether I’m thinking about this in the right way.”

Trying right

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

It might be my long-ago past as a wrestler, but I’m a big believer in effort. The willingness and ability to try hard for a sustained period of time makes a huge difference in what we can accomplish.

But sometimes it’s not enough. Yes, people care about the effort, but if it doesn’t deliver what they need then they can end up frustrated.

For example, in terms of working with teams, I find the Situational Leadership framework, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, hugely helpful.  It serves as a simple but powerful framing for how different team members need different things depending on the task they are doing and their skill at executing against that task. (Ian does a nice job explaining situational leadership in some detail, and if you want to go deep, go here or here.)

SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Situational leadership_two graphicsThe framework describes the different roles you can play in interacting with a colleague (or a team) – from Directing to Coaching to Supporting to Delegating – depending on how committed to and competent they are at completing a given task.  (The graphic on the right is the classic visual for Situational Leadership; the one on the left focuses particularly on how willingness and ability map to different intervention styles).

It’s a simple framework but it takes a lot to apply it: you’ve got to diagnose the elements that make up a task; map your diagnosis onto an assessment of another person’s skills and motivation for accomplishing the elements of that task; intervene successfully to provide support based on that diagnosis; and adjust along the way for both how well/poorly you diagnosed both the task and your colleague, and how well/poorly you succeeded in your intervention.

My point isn’t about the situational leadership framework (though if you’ve never used it I recommend it highly), it’s about the leverage comes from the right diagnosis of each situation. This is the continual work of figuring out what’s needed at this moment in this situation with this person.

Yes, we should try hard, but the question becomes: where to direct that effort? More often than not, the right starting point is to listen, think about, and reflect on what another person needs to succeed in a given situation.

There’s a selflessness to this orientation, as we move from an internal focus (“I’m thinking about how I am going to act”) to an external one (“what is this situation, who is this person relative to this situation, what do I know about their wants and needs in this type of situation?”).

In this reorientation, we start the work of shifting from trying hard to trying right.

Hard skills, soft skills, real skills

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

There’s a whole set of things that feel concrete and objective and are easiest to talk about: writing, financial modeling skills, project management, writing a decent PowerPoint deck, etc.

And then there a whole set of “softer” skills – skill in building relationships, how well you manage a meeting, whether or not you successfully deal with uncertainty.

And then the real biggies: Are you a great judge of talent? Do you consistently build trust?  Are you courageous?  Does your presence and do your actions make people better at their jobs?  Do you inspire people?

The challenge is that there’s an inverse relationship between how important a skill is for long-term success and how easy it feels to talk about it.

“You’re still not where you need to be in building a cash flow statement” feels safe.

“I’ve not seen you show consistent success in gaining a sense of shared ownership around your good ideas,” feels like emotional thin ice, so we don’t go there enough.

On some level we know that the second conversation is orders of magnitude more important than the first, but since it feels (inter)personal, less objective and harder to talk about, we avoid having it and stay in the safe (today) but dangerous (in the long-term) space of “stuff that you can learn in a textbook.”

Sooner or later, we have to learn how to talk about the real stuff.