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- [00:00]
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Welcome to Manage Tools.
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This is Mike and this is Kate.
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Today's Manage Tools coaching model updated part two of three.
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The questions this cast answers are how do I coach my directs? What do I do when feedback is not enough? How can I help save an employee who is failing? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening.
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Is your fiscal year ending on 30 September? As many of the organizations to whom we deliver training are, well, there's still time to plan your organizational training with any of our standard core trainings. The effective manager, the effective communicator, and the effective hiring manager. Whether on site or virtually. Most likely, we can get to you before this window closes. If you're interested, send an email to Maggie. Her email address is customerserviceanager-tools.com okay, let's.
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Get to the meat of things. Right? We're going to talk about the actual four steps of coaching the manager Tools Coaching model Step one Collaborate to set a goal. Really simple. Once we decided what our director is going to get better at and we'll talk about more in a second, we we sit down with our directs and we set a goal. Okay, I want to highlight we sit down with our directs and set a goal. If you noted it, good for you. First three steps, I made it pretty obvious at the beginning. The first three steps go. Let me change that.
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If you weren't listening, if you weren't.
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Listening or you didn't note it, then shame on you because I made it pretty clear we try not to shame on Manage Tools.
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But well, maybe, yeah, you know, it was pretty obvious.
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It's pretty obvious, right? The first three steps of the model start with the word collaborate. We sit down with our direct and set goals and brainstorm resources and create a set of action steps we call a coaching plan.
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Only in step four, when the direct actions the plan while we monitor their actions do the paths diverge. And really then it's only slightly, frankly, because we're still in the one on one every single week. Coaching is really most effective when it's collaborative. Managers know where the most likely opportunities are, but the direct is the one that is doing the learning and growing. And the manager can't do the learning for them. They can't do the growing for them. You can't shove the information into their head any more than the director can always be right in choosing the topic or knowing the resources right. It's a bit like two treasure hunters. Each of you have half of the map and then at some point you're going to give them most of the map. Like you're going to kind of like shift it over towards them. And it's meant to be done together. And I will say this, a lot of organizations that I spend time supporting with training, they have these core values. That's what a lot of places call them. And one of them is often collaboration. So if you're looking for opportunities to support the core values of your organization, one on ones and also coaching will do. So I believe that it requires a lot of collaboration to go through this process together. And the first step is really simple. Once we've decided what our director is going to get better at, we sit down with the direct and set a goal. Here are some examples. By 1st December, you will attain CNE status. Optionally 2, there's some other ones here. By 30th October, you, you will run the staff meeting successfully. By January 1st, you will submit the capital plan without errors. These are all options. Examples of goals.
- [03:53]
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Yeah. Before we go on, I want to just say one thing and then we can talk about it. I think there's obviously a pattern in those right there that we need to talk about. But on the collaboration piece, right, just to be really clear, because some people might be asking, well, what's the collaboration? Well, look at the collaboration is one. What do you need as a manager? What would you like to see them get better at? Because you know there's. And maybe your directs don't. There's an organizational change coming up and maybe you're going to have to replace yourself and you want the person you're talking to to be ready to take your job when you leave. You have things that you'd like to see them get better at. And certainly they have things they'd like to get better at. They have goals and objectives. For example, in this particular case, maybe that person wants to become a manager and there's certain skills they need to know. So if you understand your people, which you would do if you were doing one on ones, you would know the things that they're excited about. And in all that mix of what you want, what you need, what they want, what they need, and they may not be aware of that somewhere in there there is an intersection for both you and them. That's the collaboration right there. That's the collaboration of what you're going to coach them on.
- [05:12]
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It's also important to just consider sometimes you will come up with something that your team needs and you might ask a direct to engage with that learning Sometimes they will come up with something that they would like. It could be one or the other. And it doesn't have to be just things that you could imagine the team needs or that they need right now. It can be that collaboration that's really, it's important and it could be part of your core values, or it could just be something that you and your director agree will help support them in their really satisfaction in the role and being retained. That part of being retained in an organization is also fulfilling the need that most people have for room for growth. And this could be the way that we do that, even if there isn't necessarily because there's a lot of flat organizations or matrix organizations, there might not necessarily be the ability to move up the ladder very quickly. However, there's still room for growth. So it's one thing that we can do. Okay, let's go back to the goal piece. I have a particular bone to pick with goal setting in most professional areas. And if you've probably. People who have been to public conference with me are probably thinking, oh, here she goes again, this whole goal setting.
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Thing, she goes again.
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I. I get pretty spun up about it because I think there's a lot of bad goal setting guidance out there, like a lot about it. And so you'll notice that our coaching model here uses a goal structure that we call dbq. That's deadline behavior quality standards. The quality standards are small on the ones that I verbalized, run the staff meeting successfully, capital plan without errors. But I want to highlight deadlines, drive behavior. So we start there, we say the word buy and then a date. That's what a deadline is. So you think to yourself, how long is this going to take? Now, I will say this. I would suggest that you just default start with six months for most coaching engagements that managers, like frontline managers especially, are going to start with. Okay. Because it's gonna be helpful. So that's my pro tip there. Six months and we'll come back to this. But deadlines drive behaviors. We start with deadline, then coaching, because it's a more powerful tool, remember, than feedback. We don't set deadlines less than four months. Okay. So keep that in mind. And that's why I say six months, y'.
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All.
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Because humans are really bad at predicting how long something's gonna take. Yes. And you should just give yourself a buffer because if somebody comes in early, that's a win. But if they come in late because you said four months from now and you' guessing because you don't know yet, how long this is going to take, how the learning is going to go. Maybe for example, you pick a resource that doesn't work out, things like that. So I would suggest, unless there's a hard and fast time when you need it, just give it six months. It needs to be more than four months from now. If you think that they could improve their skills in this area or they can change their behavior in less than 4 months, honestly I would delegate something that would increase their repetition around the behavior and, and give them a lot of feedback about it rather than coaching them. So that's the threshold. You can think of it too, like there's two learning mechanisms in this trinity which has four parts, one of which is delegation, one of which is coaching. Delegation is the one for shorter term items and it's great because it also takes some work off the manager's plate, thus increasing our ability to be productive. Whereas coaching adds something to the manager's plate, therefore giving us a slight decrease in productivity, which, which might be worth it given what we're learning and what we're teaching in the end. Right? However, let's not lose sight of the fact that you have this other option.
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Yeah, I think people, when they first hear the coaching model, they do get confused about difference between coaching, feedback, where does delegation play in there?
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So yeah, and that's how I, I think of it is that one is shorter and increases repetition. If something you can learn through repetition, you, you can learn that in a shorter term and you can just delegate. So, okay, we set the date again, shorter than four months, delegation longer than four months, coaching. So it's got to be four months or longer. I would set six months. That's what I've used my whole managerial career. It's worked for me. Pick a date six months out and put the word buy in front of it.
- [09:39]
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Also folks, I think some people are thinking, well by first December, so that means that we're going to carve out three hours of time from their schedule. We're going to remove responsibilities such that they can get this done. That's not true. Nope, folks, that's not the way coaching works. Right? So they still have their normal stuff they need to do. As we go more through the coaching model, you'll see this is not a big deal. It's not going to take them a ton of time, but it is in addition to what they're doing. And because of that, it's even more important that they have a deadline. Because coaching is one of those things that, look, we all know that if we've been around for a while, we know that coaching often isn't done at all. And when it's done, it's done poorly. And like Kate said earlier, dates, deadlines, drive behavior. Don't skip that step. Just don't think we're just going to meander through this and eventually we'll get there. And we don't need a date now you need a date, the chance of success goes up dramatically. I would say the difference between success and not success, one of them is, do you have a deadline? Otherwise you don't have a deadline, it will not be successful. Take it for somebody who's been around a while. I don't know if that's a physical law, like one of Newton's laws, but, yeah, it's pretty close.
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Yeah. I think the value is that if you want it done, there's a reason and there's other things that would be associated with it being valued. Right. And so you would set a deadline to be associated with the fact that there's a timeframe after which not having this would be unacceptable. So there's that. And when we talk about this, to Mike's point, you're gonna be, as the manager, setting a tone when we set deliverables later on about how much work this is gonna be each week. And in that case, you can kind of set some parameters around this, is how many hours a week the direct is going to spend. If that's the case, then your direct will know that this isn't going to take too much time. And if they say, well, still, that's some time off my week, you know, we're not suggesting they work extra hours. So when they say, what am I supposed to take off their plate? To Mike's point, what we say is nothing. I want you to do 100% of the work that you're doing with 100% of the quality you're currently achieving in 99 or 95% less time to eke out those two extra hours a week that this might take up.
- [12:15]
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So deadline and balance, the whole thing is a collaboration. So this part is a collaboration. You may think six months, and they may come back and say, look, I really. Given this and my other responsibilities, I need eight months. All right, make it eight months. That's not hard, right? If you could live without it for six months, eight months is fine.
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Not going to kill anybody. Especially if two of those months or some of those months include December. My experience is not a lot of stuff gets done around December.
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Yeah, exactly.
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- [13:36]
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So deadline, behavior and quality. We've covered deadline. The behavior portion is what we want the direct to master the behavior we want to improve. And I would even go a step further and and say that the behavior needs to be something that you can say yes we did it or no we didn't. So for example, I wouldn't say learn about project management because you could read one book and have learned about project management. There's a scale of different levels of achievement in that word. If though you want someone to read six books about project management that is metricized, there is a target that's yes I read six or no I didn't. If you want them to just read one book about project management, just assign that as a deliverable. But let's make the behavior portions crisp. Let's make them behavioral as opposed to soft. And here's why this may sound like a really good goal. It was in my performance review at one of my previous roles. One of my performance reviews the goal for the next year, which has a deadline inherent because I have a performance review coming up at the end of the next year, was to get more technical.
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And that's it.
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That's it. Now there was a deadline. Obviously that's awesome.
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Awesomely bad.
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If you don't know about goal setting. If you're not thinking about goal setting, you might feel like that's okay. Problem, y', all, there's no direction there. So here's what happened. I spent about three years trying to get that off my performance review. Because the first year what I did was because I'll do the big reveal at the end, but my job was pretty technical so I thought maybe they meant learn a different niche technical area. So I read a bunch of books and I bought the books, I put them on my shelf and I brought them to my review. They said, nope, that wasn't it. Now bear in mind, by the time the next review came around, the person who had written the goal was no longer there, so he could not say what he had meant by it. And that is one of the things that I would suggest you run your behavior and your quality standards through is another person ask them, if you were going to measure this, what would you measure? And if what they say doesn't match what you say, it doesn't work. You need something else. You need to be more crisp. So at the end of the first year, I had read, like, 10 books, because I love to read. I had read all these books, and I brought them the books, and they were like, no, that's not what we were thinking. Which is interesting because it wasn't the same guy, but okay, so it stays on the review. Second year, I take class at the place where I'm working. I take a class. It's after hours. It's like a couple hours after work. There's homework. And it was called. I'm not even gonna say what it's called because I don't want to give it away. But anyway, I thought it was going to be something really cool about my industry. But it was basically like, here is why rockets are pointy. I mean, it was basic stuff. And at the end, they gave me, like, a printout, like a watercolor printout saying that I had passed this class. I want to be really clear. I have a printout, and it is not watercolor. And it was not free. And I didn't earn it after work hours either. And this printout does say that I know why rockets are pointy. It also says I have a degree in it. It didn't take four weeks. It took four years. So there's that. By the way, at the end of the year, it didn't come off my review. The class didn't do it. So the third year, I did all of the calculations for the parachute design for our vehicle by hand in one of those black and white composition notebooks. Because the science of parachutes hasn't really changed since the 80s. Also, everybody's using old parachutes. A lot of people are. So it doesn't really change. The diameters are pretty standard, too. And when I brought them the notebook, they said, why would you do this? We have a computer that does this. Oh, Mike almost lost my little mind. And I said, because my review says get more technical, nobody can tell me what that means. I keep doing stuff, they keep telling me. And they took it off my review. And it has been, I don't know, 15 years. And I'm still chapped because I still don't feel like I did it, I still feel like I didn't do it. And here's the tr. Here's the best part. During that time, my job was to design parachute systems for air launch missile defense systems. Where you take the rocket, you put it in a C17, you drop it out of the back of the C17 on parachutes, then you cut the parachutes and shoot that missile at another missile. So I am trying to figure out, still figure out 15 years later what is more technical.
- [18:19]
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Yeah, that sounds pretty technical. It's amusing only in sense. Like a car crash in which nobody gets killed or injured is humorous.
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Some bad goal setting stuff out there.
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The time and it is just a complete waste of time and energy on everybody's part. Right. So.
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And money. They paid me an astronomical amount of money to. To read books and go to class and write things down in notebooks. And y', all, if you're looking for goal setting guidance outside of this, which I find really useful, the other goal setting guidance I've seen in the last 10 years that's really good is Measure what Matters by John Doerr. It's about, you know, OKRs and KPIs and that kind of stuff. And frankly, when we did okrs a couple years ago, Mike here at Managers Rules, I used this goal setting guidance as my starting point for that dbq. So I don't know, I just wanna encourage everyone to set good goals that are crisp and that other people would measure the same way you would. And that are metricized not just in the behavior, but in the quality portion. Cause that's how we're gonna measure the behavior. And we can't just say we're gonna have a direct run a meeting if that's what we're working on. Under that criteria, they could run the meeting. That was disastrous. We have to define the measure of success for the behavior. So for the meeting you would say something like starts on time, ends on time, has an agenda, that kind of thing.
- [19:45]
A
Yeah. And note folks, that in the goal examples that she gave are like, it's not. You will learn about staff meetings or how to run a successful staff meeting. You will run the staff meeting successfully and then quality standards coming on, what that means, right? You will submit the capital plan. It's not. You will learn capital planning. You will submit the capital plan without errors. Right. This ensures that you guys are both on the same sheet of music. And they'll actually be performing the skills they learned, knowledge they gained during the coaching. Right. It's actually the doing that's the important.
- [20:29]
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Yeah. One more thing about that, Mike, that I think would be helpful for people is it doesn't need to be repetitive. We don't need to say run the staff meeting every week for a month or submit the capital plan three times without errors. You can just ask of them to do it one time. And what we're suggesting is if they can do it once, they can do it again. So you only need to measure for the one time. You don't need to lock yourself into four times for the staff meeting or three times for the capital plan. It's fine to have them do it once, measure once and say, okay, the skills have been established. And we do recommend that you write this coaching goal and everything about coaching down on your one on one form, either on the back of last week's blank page or in another sheet that you kind of insert in there. Honestly, you might want to keep it a little bit separate because this is probably the biggest thing that will go into their performance review. I would suggest. I always think of one on one notes as fodder for performance review content. And if they got coached this year and it goes well, it's definitely going to be in there. So do write it down. And maybe we should to be useful maybe, or to be helpful, maybe we should go through an example.
- [21:37]
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That'd be great. And folks, writing on your one on one form. And a lot of us, what we do is we record the coaching stuff on the back so it's really easy to identify where they are. As you go back over time, you can see progress on coaching. Since it is an ongoing thing, it's going to be six months. So it's very likely it's not all that often other than review time, Kate, where I go back through 03s every once in a while I say, okay, what did Alex say at a particular time? Or whatever? But I don't go back that often. But when I do, it's really nice that it's there. But coaching, I go back many, many, many times. And so having it in a different portion of the one on one form is really, really helpful to me.
- [22:19]
B
Absolutely. Okay, so let's do an example. And I wanna do one that people would be kind of surprised by. So I wanna talk about coaching a direct who has a problem interrupting people. This is the kind of example a lot of managers don't think can be done because you can't coach. Interpersonal skills, et cetera. In fact, that's not true. So since interpersonal skills are just behaviors get excited. We can coach on them.
- [22:46]
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Once you realize that, folks, it is so liberating. It is so liberating because a lot of managers think you can't coach interpersonal skills. And it is absolutely not true. This shift to thinking about behaviors, it's one of those fundamental shifts in your managerial life and executive life that once you make it, you'll never see the world again. You'll just see the world as a bunch of people behaving and you're going to see those behaviors and anything that you can observe, you can coach on.
- [23:15]
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Let's also talk about the nature of the measurable goal. When we're setting goals for coaching, one of the things that we talk a lot about is goals being measurable and essentially kind of behavioral, Right. A key part of this goal setting in coaching, and as we've mentioned before in this guidance, you may be breaking this into smaller chunks. You may be using the goal setting piece in other areas of your managerial life. You may be, you may be using the deliverable piece in other areas of your managerial life. So when you're thinking about goals in general, a key part of this is that it describes behavior or results that demonstrate the skill being coached.
- [23:58]
A
Yeah, that's absolutely key. I've seen it many times where a manager, say, will be coaching somebody on a particular goal and the measurement, the goal is to read a book, say, running meetings, right? And reading a book, I mean, that is a behavior. I guess you can be literal and say that is a behavior. But reading a book on running meetings without having run meetings and demonstrating the skills necessary to run a meeting, that's not going to be great. Coaching engagement.
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One of the things I sometimes say when we're talking about this in public events and at client events too, although we talk about it less often, there is, I say to people, both the behavior and the goal, like the B part of the DBQ and the quality standards is to ask yourself, if I measured this and somebody else measured it, would we measure the same thing? So if you were going to send somebody else to audit the running of the meeting, for example, you wouldn't set a quality standard as. Don't use any filler words because what you define as filler words and what I define as filler words might be different. It needs to be crisp enough that another person would measure or count or assess it the same way.
- [25:12]
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Yeah, makes sense.
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Yeah, that's one of the things I try to ask people like, because that.
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Happened to me, Tell me what happened.
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B
Somebody at a previous organization that Where I worked, set a goal for me, a previous organization.
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Is that what you said? Yeah, you said. Oh, you did say that. Okay. Previous organization. Yeah. Okay, just checking.
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B
Making sure they set a goal for me on my performance review that said get more technical. And then by the time the performance review cycle had come around the next year, because it's a matrix organization, I had been kind of assigned to another manager. And I did what I thought the manager who set the goal wanted me to do. And the new manager said, I don't think that means get more technical.
- [25:53]
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Well, what did you do? I'm just curious. Did you, like, read Rocket manual? What does a rocket engineer do? Do we get more technical?
- [26:02]
B
Thank you. I actually, I took. The first year, I read a bunch of books. The second year, I took a class, like, outside of work. The third year, they took it off my review because I did all the parachute calculations for our design by hand in, like, a composition notebook. And the thing was, they said, we're taking this off the review because you're spending too much time trying to fill it. They didn't say, we're taking this off the review because you've done it. So I'm still, to this day, chapped about it because I still feel that I did not accomplish it. And that's the same thing. The one guy said, get more technical. I'm sure in his mind that meant something really crisp. It didn't mean the same thing to the other guy. So the second guy said, oh, that doesn't fulfill the goal.
- [26:45]
A
Yeah, it's funny. We had a coaching client way back at the beginning of. No, I shouldn't say coaching client. We had a client organization, and one of the marketing vice president had a problem with one of the project managers. They were making a transition. That was very significant. This individual was responsible and not doing well. And she had said to this project manager that he had to be more communicative. He wasn't communicating enough. And that's it. Be more technical. Be more communicative. And six months had gone by, and he was not making progress. And it was bad enough that she was thinking about firing him. That was kind of the conversation we're having. And so during this, I asked her, now, she's very bright. I think she's a CEO somewhere else right now. I asked her, so, well, if he had been communicative, what would he have done? What behaviors would he have engaged in? She said, and she listed like, 12 things. Like, I would have got an update every. Every day. He would have been calling Me giving me a verbal update. I would have had weekly written updates. There would be section in the status reporting talking about, specifically about this. And she listed 12 very clear specific things that he would be doing, behaviors he'd be engaging in that would say to her that he was being communicative. So I simply asked her like, have you told him that? And she looked at me like ah, darn. Said yeah, okay, I get it. I mean she did, you know, she's like, oh my God. So yeah, so just, just talk to him, just share those with them. And then six months later, he had done all of those things every single time and she was thinking about firing him and now she was just over the moon with what he had done. I mean that was the first time I saw so clearly the ability, willingness to communicate, behaviors that failure to do so almost resulted in this person losing a job. And I guarantee it's happened probably a million times out there, but this was so clear.
- [28:59]
B
So yeah, clarity, clarity is good. So don't say read a book, don't say learn about running meetings, for example, because it's not a goal to know the information. To have learned the information and not executed on it is to not know the information well enough to utilize it. And book learning, for example, isn't really valuable in business without behavior. So preparing a report for the meeting, going to a class on meetings, not coaching goals, those are action steps, things that you would do in order to increase your abilities prior to actually demonstrating your ability. So action steps go into step four. Action steps and final coaching goals look identical to most people because they include an activity and a deadline. But the coaching goal should be the actual behavior being improved in use demonstration of the behavior that is meant to be improved upon. Run an effective meeting, raise a million dollars, give a 30 minute presentation. Those are behaviors we're going to iterate. In the end though, we're measuring the final behavior demonstration. And okay, you might be thinking, okay fine, but I have no idea how to get from here, where they don't know how to do it at all to there where they can actually run the meeting effectively. Don't we need a plan?
- [30:24]
A
Like a detailed plan? You're talking about a plan. Here's the 10 steps, here's who's doing them. Here's the date we're going to start. Here's the date we're going to end the dependencies. I'm over exaggerating a little bit, but you're talking about a sequence, a long sequence of events.
- [30:38]
B
And I'm suggesting We don't need that right now. We want this to be an agile process. We want it to be adaptable. We want it to be able to adjust if things come up. If every manager has to have a detailed coaching plan lasting for six months, we'd never do it. We never coach anyone. So for now, we're just defining the end state. Remember, we're at the very beginning here. We don't know a ton. We're just setting the finish line. How we get there, we'll figure out later. That's all today, y'. All. We'll see you back here next week. With the continuation of this topic, SA.