EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Once you’ve hired your team members, it takes great managers to keep them happy and engaged. Failing to develop these managers throughout the organization can become a major growth barrier. We identify five critical activities that distinguish great managers and the routines they use to educate their people — and we suggest that the term “manager” be replaced with the word “coach,” which more accurately describes the role. We’ll also share hard evidence that investments in training and coaching (vs. R&D and capital expenditures) provide you with the best returns available to your business.
People join companies. They leave managers. Therefore, to keep your team happy and engaged, you need one thing above all else: great managers — not free lunches or yoga classes! As Gallup notes, “Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores.” And great managers are not just born; they are continually advancing their skills and those of their employees.
As the business scales to more than 100 employees, reaching a critical point at which everyone doesn’t know everyone else’s name, it becomes crucial for the leadership team to build a capable team of middle managers (coaches). As mentioned earlier in the book, failure to develop sufficient leadership is one of the three biggest barriers to growth.
So what does a great manager do to keep a company’s team happy and engaged? To answer this question, Google applied its data analytics capability, led by a “people analytics team,” to bring the same level of rigor to People-decisions that it does to engineering challenges. What the data showed is that periodic one-on-one coaching (rather than superior technical knowledge) ranked as the #1 key to being a successful leader.
From our experience, great managers must focus those coaching sessions with their “direct supports” (a better term than “direct reports”) on five topics representing the five main activities of successful managers. In reverse order of importance:
5. Hire fewer people, but pay them more.
4. Give recognition, and show appreciation.
3. Set clear expectations, and give employees a clear line of sight.
2. Don’t demotivate; “dehassle.”
1. Help people play to their strengths.
Let’s look at each of these activities in detail.
Daniel H. Pink, in his best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, shows why compensation is a lot less effective as a motivational tool than we thought. Extrinsic motivators (“carrots and sticks”) have been overrated and become less effective in a world that needs more and more well-educated, right-brain knowledge workers. And people will sacrifice certain perks to work with a firm with a worthy Purpose that’s making a difference.
Does that make compensation irrelevant? Of course not! If companies aren’t competitive, it becomes challenging for them to attract and keep the best talent. When MOM’s finds great people, at every level, it pays them more than the industry average. For instance, the company’s minimum wage is $11 an hour, higher than that in its home state of Maryland, which was $7.25 an hour as this book went to press.
The key to affording higher wages (we’re talking frontline employees, not senior leadership) is a lower total wage cost as a percent of revenue. You have to remain competitive, and the best companies know that one great person can replace three good ones. Through rigorous selection (i.e., Topgrading), they get the absolute best talent in the door, pay employees above-market rates, and then invest heavily in training and development to make them more productive.
Take storage-product retailer The Container Store, which has been named to the Fortune list of Best Companies to Work For 14 years in a row (and counting!). Its Foundational Principle #1 is “1 Equals 3” — one great person equals three good people in terms of business productivity. “We have to be selective when interviewing potential employees because of the Brand Promise we’ve made to our customers to provide exceptional customer service,” notes the company’s website. As a result, the Texas-based chain hires only about 3% of all who apply. In turn, the company says, it pays salespeople as much as 50% to 100% more than the retail industry average, and provides 263 hours of training to all first-year full-time employees, compared to an industry average of seven hours. To paraphrase what the co-founders said when they launched their innovative retail concept, “Do we want a whole bunch of low-paid dumb folk; or would we rather have a whole lot fewer, better-paid smart folk?”
Costco pays its employees roughly 70% more per hour than Sam’s Club, yet needs almost 40% fewer employees per dollar of revenue. And with a 6% employee turnover after one year vs. 21% for Sam’s, Costco saves a tremendous amount on recruiting, training, and development. In general, competing on low labor and training costs is a slippery road and usually not sustainable.
And if you think this pattern holds only for low-wage jobs: Goldman Sachs pays its employees an average compensation package almost twice as big as the competition’s, yet it has fewer than half the number of employees on a per-revenue basis and almost three times the profit per employee. Again, fewer people, paid more, with higher productivity.
How you structure the compensation — variable vs. fixed — should fit your culture. If your culture emphasizes rugged individualism, like Nordstrom, you might want to have a high-commission/bonus-based compensation plan driven by internal competition among employees. Given the culture of teamwork at The Container Store and its emphasis on customer service, paying store employees a straight (and high) hourly wage without commissions makes sense. Look to your Core Values, your business model, and your Brand Promise, and let them instruct you in the design of your compensation plan. Don’t copy somebody else’s system.
“Don’t copy somebody else’s compensation system.”
Last, when it comes to the key people who absolutely drive performance, great managers simply do whatever it takes to keep them on board, including offering a customized compensation package. If one person wants less base and more incentive-based pay, so be it. If another wants more time off, let it happen. “Fairness” does not mean “sameness.” You need to be creative and flexible in order to keep your top talent happy, from a compensation-package perspective.
Wages are one of your biggest expenses and should be used strategically to differentiate your firm from the competition, as in the examples above (and the Outback Steakhouse “X-Factor” example in “The 7 Strata of Strategy” chapter). Purchasing a compensation comparison study and paying people the same as everyone else will relegate the company to the heap of average firms.
“The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated,” wrote William James, the father of American psychology. It is impossible to be motivated and do great work if you don’t feel that somebody cares and appreciates what you do.
Studies have shown that for people to be happy and productive at work, they need to experience positive interactions (appreciation, praise) vs. negative (reprimands, criticism) with their manager in a ratio of at least 3:1. (Watch out: For a marriage to work, you actually need a 5:1 ratio!!) So make it a simple habit to thank people each and every day — and that includes using the word generously in emails to your team.
The way people want to receive recognition varies greatly: public vs. private, material vs. immaterial, from peers vs. from superiors, etc. Great managers test different approaches and observe reactions until they find the triggers that work best with each of their people. At MOM’s Organic Market, managers will sometimes publicly recognize employees who have performed well, but CEO Scott Nash has often found that one-on-one comments are most effective.
To get ideas on how to create a culture of recognition and appreciation, see Chip Conley’s excellent book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, Chapter 5.
Great managers explain how their people’s work contributes to the greater objectives of the company and then help them align their individual priorities with those of the firm. This is what Jack Stack, author of the book The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, calls “line of sight,” an important concept to create engagement and a sense of purpose. Can your employees explain how what they’re doing helps deliver on your company’s purpose, strategy, and Brand Promise?
Once people understand their role and contribution, great managers set clear and consistent expectations about the outcomes of their team’s work. By defining the what and not the how, great managers give employees the autonomy to find their own way of achieving these goals. Feeling the liberty to figure things out for themselves and apply their own style is very important for people, since autonomy is one of three main drivers of human motivation, as Dan Pink explains in Drive.
Many managers struggle with defining adequate and measurable targets for their people. Gazelles’ execution planning methodology and the One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), detailed in the “Strategy” and “Execution” sections of the book, will help. Specifically, column 7 of the OPSP provides space to define for each quarter:
1. KPIs — Two to three key performance indicators that objectively signal people on whether they had a productive day or week. At MOM’s, says Nash, the company will explain what these measures are — for instance, there might be a particular sales goal for a section of the store — and then tell a manager: “Here’s the goal. You have to figure out how to get there, either on your own or with others’ help.” Nash adds, “If they don’t meet KPIs, we sit down with them right away and get a plan.”
2. Priorities — A handful for the next quarter needed to achieve the Critical Number and improve on a KPI.
3. Critical Number — The main bottleneck that each employee or team must fix during the quarter.
Defining these individual outcomes in the context of the OPSP assures alignment with the company’s strategy and its long- and short-term goals.
The best managers are less concerned about motivating their people and more concerned about NOT demotivating them. They consider it their job to prevent the hassles that block their team’s performance. Such demotivators are usually related to issues with people or processes.
The #1 demotivator for talented people is having to put up with bozos, as Steve Jobs would call them. Nothing is more frustrating for A Players than having to work with B and C Players who slow them down and suck their energy. In that sense, “The best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only ‘A’ players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else,” explains Patty McCord, former chief talent officer at Netflix, in a recent Harvard Business Review article.
Fixing people issues for your team can also mean “firing” a client. Unreasonable clients who mistreat your employees and disrupt your business can become an important energy drain. Firing such clients can gain the manager huge respect internally. The negative financial impact is usually counteracted by the immediate rise in the spirits and productivity of your team.
On the process side, do your people have the appropriate tools and resources they need to get the job accomplished? Are there lame policies and procedures frustrating your team? Do you need to bring in a Lean expert to help your people design new processes or streamline existing ones? Where might they be spinning their wheels because of unnecessary delays? Focus on ways to make your team’s job(s) easier — a great definition of an effective manager.
To reinforce this servant leadership approach, Fathom, a digital marketing agency from Cleveland and an exemplary Rockefeller Habits practitioner, started using “direct supports” (as in: the manager supports his people) instead of “direct reports” (as in: the people report to the manager) when referencing a manager’s team. We like this twist and hope it spreads.
What ultimately sets great managers apart from the merely good ones is that they help their people play to their strengths. To understand how to do this requires a refined definition of what constitutes a strength. A strength isn’t just something you’re good at; it’s only a strength if it literally gives you strength, gives you energy (think about the fitness fanatics whom The City Bin Co. is hiring to work on the back of its garbage trucks!). In turn, a weakness, is something that, though you may be good at it, drains the life out of you.
Thus, a key function of great managers is helping individual employees refocus and prune their jobs over time so they focus more on activities that give them strength and less on activities that make them weak. Though there will always be parts of anyone’s job that are draining, the companies that do better at minimizing these will have a more energized team.
Coming back to the chess vs. checkers analogy used earlier, Bobby Fischer, the great chess champion, once said, “Winning in this game is all a matter of understanding how to capitalize on the strengths of each piece and timing their moves just right.”
Lois Melbourne, CEO of Texas-based Aquire (a subsidiary of PeopleFluent), has taken a page from strengths guru Marcus Buckingham. Instead of hiring more (and extremely difficult-to-find) programmers to keep up with the rapid growth of her HR software firm, she’s focused on making her existing programmers happier and more energized.
To do this, Buckingham suggests taking a couple of weeks and documenting all those activities you either love or loathe. This is precisely what Melbourne has her programmers do regularly, noting all of the activities that drain their energy and keep these techies away from their primary strength: programming. She then eliminates those activities no one should have to do (they creep into every job) and then uses the remaining list to create a Job Scorecard for a new position — to be filled by a new chess piece that loves to do what others hate. Result: happier, more productive, and loyal programmers.
Whenever you have a department scream for more help, rather than throw more of the same people at the situation, try Buckingham’s approach. And before starting the “love and loathe” exercise, have your team take the inexpensive online StrengthsFinder assessment offered by Gallup (gallupstrengthscenter.com). You will get insightful reports that will serve as conversation-starters and will help your people achieve self-awareness about their strengths.
Facebook’s celebrity COO Sheryl Sandberg recently called Buckingham’s follow-up book with Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths, the most important book she had read in recent years. In her view, Facebook is already a strengths-based organization. If you want to follow Facebook’s example, go to tmbc.com and get Buckingham’s six-DVD series titled Trombone Player Wanted. Then organize a learning session with your team and discuss how to become a strengths-based organization. These remarkably produced mini-movies will have a profound impact on everyone in your company.
Finding employees’ strengths and focusing workers on those assets is the most powerful people-management tool we can suggest. And it goes hand in hand with dehassling a person’s job. Embracing strengths-based management practices will bring you more fulfilled, happier, and engaged employees who will lift themselves and your organization to new levels of energy and performance.
CRITICAL: Don’t forget to apply this to yourself. Focus on eliminating or delegating tasks that drain you. In Verne’s case, he found someone who loves to build PowerPoint presentations, something that wears him out; and he continues to partner with various CEOs to run the Gazelles family of companies. This gives him more time to teach, which truly energizes him.
Are You a Manager or a Leader?
Ask a good manager about his team and he will speak in generalities, saying that they are hardworking, responsible, fun, etc. Ask a great manager the same question and she will describe each of her team members with specific details about their personality, strengths, and achievements. Again, think about the “A-Team” action television analogy from the last chapter.
If you struggle with appreciating the differences in your team, you might be more of a leader than a manager. Managing is about differences; leading is about sameness. Great managers discover what is different about people and capitalize on it. Great leaders discover what is universal, build a common vision for a better future around it, and then rally people behind it. (Marcus Buckingham, this time in his book The One Thing You Need to Know … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, explains this difference between managing and leading.)
Companies can cope with a charismatic leader (who struggles with managing) until they get to about 50 employees. But as soon as you approach 100 or more people, you have to put in place a team of managers capable of adopting the five habits outlined above. Scaling up a business requires both visionary leadership and great managers.
In 2012, Gene Browne, co-founder and CEO of The City Bin Co. in Galway, Ireland, decided to invest heavily in executive education. The company set up an internal learning academy named “Garbage University.” It provides three hours of training every two weeks from September to May, in sync with the academic year. Each year, Garbage University has a particular focus that shapes the topics that the executive team discusses. For instance, 2013 was about growth during a time when the company grew nearly 100%, from 70 to 120 employees.
At MOM’s Organic Market, in addition to executive education, produce managers will typically read four to five books together every year. Recent titles on their list include business books such as Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Other titles help them absorb knowledge that’s specific to their field. One typical pick: Maria Rodale’s Organic Manifesto. “We’ve read a lot of books on the organic industry,” says Jon Croft, training director at the metro Washington-based company.
In order to keep your company competitive and your people loyal, you must grow them through education and coaching. And this investment in people is the biggest single predictor of a company’s ability to beat its direct competitors and the overall market, based on exhaustive research done by Laurie Bassi, co-author of Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, couldn’t agree more. He declared that the ROI of GE’s famous internal business school, Crotonville, was “infinite.”
One of the biggest opportunities to grow and align your people is when they first start working for you. Their initial weeks on the job represent a unique chance to create connection and deeply ingrain a company’s DNA into new people. Yet few companies make proper use of this opportunity. Instead, the first days on the job often feel more like waterboarding than onboarding: no desk, no computer, no phone, the new boss is traveling, and the first assignment is shadowing an unenthusiastic colleague for two weeks.
Famous sales coach and dear friend Jack Daly suggests, “Why don’t you throw people a party when they start, instead of when they leave?” Sydney-based software firm Atlassian sends each new employee, whatever his or her position, to a resort spa the weekend before the start date as a way to celebrate the new job. The spouse or a guest gets to go along — making both new employees and their spouses raving Atlassian fans.
Why not have balloons suspended from her chair (Appletree Answers has a Herman Miller Aeron chair for each call center worker); a signed welcome card; and a celebration lunch with cake? Or, as Daly did for every new employee he hired, send a gift basket to his house/spouse, timed to be awaiting his arrival home after the first day on the job. Onboarding needs to be a celebration, not paperwork. It should create emotional connections between the new recruit and a maximum number of team members.
To inculcate a new employee (bring her into the culture) properly, structure a formal orientation process. It’s most effective when organized around doing real work while emphasizing the company’s Values and Purpose. Zappos’ four-week orientation has all new recruits work the call center phones as a way to understand the intense focus that the Las Vegas-based online apparel retailer places on customer service from the ground up.
Boston-based global services company Sapient had one of our favorite orientation processes, launched back when co-founder J. Stuart Moore was running the company. It was a five-day “boot camp” designed by a former second-grade schoolteacher working at the company. She approached Moore when the organization passed the 70-employee mark and warned that the culture was starting to “leak” (this always happens when a company reaches about this number of employees). She designed the boot camp so all new recruits would spend a week working on a list of nagging internal projects that no one else wanted to tackle (good to have newbies!). And as they worked on these projects, one Core Value was reinforced each day, so by the end of the week, everyone understood in a real way the cultural and strategic approach Sapient preferred on all projects.
Teams at this rapidly growing firm had been screaming that they needed more people in the field immediately. But they found that new recruits who went through the boot camp could hit the ground running at near 100% field-ready alignment, whereas before the orientation process was introduced, they had normally needed a frustrating six-month ramp-up period. Everyone became huge fans of the process as Sapient scaled up to 2,500 people.
At Blinds.com, a Houston-based online retailer of window blinds and shades with 250 employees, orientation includes a scavenger hunt — an excuse to meet and greet the new colleagues and answer their questions about the company and its culture. Founder and CEO Jay Steinfeld then personally drives new recruits to a run-down alleyway in Houston where the company had its first office back in 1996. There, he shares the history and Core Values of the company (which was acquired by The Home Depot in January 2014). The involvement of senior management in the onboarding process is critical.
As Harvard professor Frances Frei and organization builder Anne Morriss remind leaders in their breakthrough strategy book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, onboarding is like the imprinting that happens to birds immediately after hatching. (Remember the mother hen vs. the farmer’s boot?) People are exceptionally positive, receptive, and willing to learn in this phase, and they experience deep attachment to whatever you expose them to. So be careful about the kind of induction program you put in front of your “hatchlings.” Dumping a 200-page binder of company policies on their desks is probably not sending the right message.
At its 20th anniversary celebration, Poland-based AmRest Holdings’ co-founder and chairman, Henry McGovern, looked back at how the restaurant holding company grew from its first Pizza Hut in Wroclaw to more than 18,000 employees with restaurant locations throughout Eastern Europe, Russia, the US, and China. “We’re more a training company than a restaurant company!” he said. In 2013, AmRest invested 20,000 hours of training in Russia alone as it ramped up from two to 80 restaurants.
The only way to grow a company is to grow the people first. Whether Jack Welch is committing $50 million to Crotonville, The Container Store is providing first-year associates with 263 hours of formal training, or CJ Advertising in Nashville is paying employees to read industry-related materials from its library, the best growth firms are, first and foremost, training companies.
Most professions and trades understand this. Commercial pilots, thankfully, are required to hone their skills 60 hours per year in continuing education; doctors need to put in 45 to 60; embalmers and truck drivers must complete more than a dozen hours annually. Yet business professionals piloting their companies aren’t required to obtain a single hour. We’re hoping to change this. We require our Gazelles International Certified Coaches to commit to 45 hours of annual professional education to keep their certification. And our more progressive clients, monitored by their CFOs, are starting to require a specific number of hours of ongoing education at all levels of the organization (we suggest 12 hours for the frontline; 25 hours for middle management; and 45 to 60 hours for senior leaders as a starting point).
Worried about spending all that money on training only to watch your people go elsewhere? The research definitively shows that training and development increases loyalty. Besides, what’s the alternative? Do you really want your people not to be the best-trained for the jobs they have to do?
And how much should you spend on training? It obviously depends, but 2% to 3% of your payroll is a good benchmark. Who should you spend it on? Senior leaders, middle managers, frontline employees? They all need training, but focus first on your middle management. In most growth companies, they have the hardest jobs and are critical to employee engagement and retention, yet get the least preparation for it.
At The City Bin Co., Browne, who had been a business school lecturer early in his career, facilitates Garbage University, creating a formal syllabus, complete with homework assignments. Sometimes, his leadership team reviews case studies from Harvard Business Review together. Other times, they watch an on-demand video from Gazelles or review chapters of a business book together, looking for valuable takeaways to grow the firm. “We have a discussion around what we can learn and apply to our business,” Browne says.
Browne prepares a syllabus to keep the program well-focused and on track. To give you an example of how it works, one item on the syllabus in 2012 was “Social Media for Business.” The executive team looked at David Meerman Scott’s lessons from the book The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly and watched several short YouTube videos that exemplified Scott’s teachings. The following week, City Bin’s execs focused on improving their writing skills and did a refresher on common mistakes in punctuation.
Other discussions have covered topics such as leadership, strategy, customer service, sales, scenario planning, and Tony Schwartz’s principles of energy management.
This isn’t just a feel-good exercise. In its new partnership with Dubai-based Averda, where Browne sits on the Executive Committee, City Bin is laser-focused on expanding into emerging markets and needs its team to stay primed for new opportunities to expand, whether that is by licensing its software, franchising, or winning contracts with distant municipalities. “We don’t necessarily have to collect waste from a million homes,” says Browne. “We can be inside a million homes through our software.” Having a team that is primed to tap into such opportunities will be crucial to City Bin’s growth — and Browne knows they need to be prepared.
Longstanding clients like AmRest and City Bin are taking advantage of online education as well. MOM’s Organic Market frequently convenes members of its leadership team to watch webcasts on topics that will help them develop professionally and personally. It shows the videos every six to eight weeks in operations or other meetings. “It is a learning event incorporated into a meeting that has already been planned,” says Croft, the training director.
The company watches the 45- to 75-minute online seminars as a group and then has a regional general manager lead a 30- to 60-minute “reflective dialogue” on the program, says Croft. At one meeting in March 2014, managers in the produce area and a group of employees interested in becoming managers watched Malcolm Gladwell’s video seminar Outliers: Why People Are Successful, available on demand at scalingup.com.
“The general idea is to expose these emerging leaders, if you will, to different thoughts about how we grow ourselves and how we grow a business, and how we grow a unit within the business,” explains Croft.
MOM’s actively encourages employees to apply what they have learned to their work. At the end of each discussion, employees are asked, “What is the one takeaway that you are going to commit yourself to working on?” Very recently, MOM’s expanded its program to hourly workers; it has been airing an online video on The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor for hourly workers at some of its stores on Sunday nights.
“Scott felt very passionately that we should figure out a way to incorporate more of our staff into these opportunities,” says Croft. The training director, who has been leading the sessions with the hourly team, says the discussions have been “as good as — if not better and more energizing, passionate, and exciting than — any of the ones I’ve led in the past year.”
Beyond providing a learning opportunity, The Happiness Advantage video has helped reinforce the company’s values. “As a company, we care deeply about being whole people,” Croft says. “We care deeply about having a wellness in our lives that includes our work lives, but also every other aspect of our lives. We would like for all of us to figure out how to use The Happiness Advantage in our work, but it’s really so much more than that. It’s the ripple effect we can have on others.”
As mentioned in the beginning of this section, MOM’s also strongly encourages employees to set aside time for professional reading and has organized a vetting committee to find intriguing books for its leadership team to discuss. To make sure employees truly learn from each book, Croft might prepare a sheet asking managers to focus on takeaways on which they plan to act, and the five key points they want everyone at MOM’s to know.
With some books, the company will ask a member of the team to make a formal presentation on a specific chapter. “For Multipliers, we did some of the exercises Liz suggested in the book,” Croft says. “The managers got a lot out of that book. I think the process really helped solidify that.”
One book that has been a hit among Croft’s team is The Weekly Coaching Conversation: A Business Fable About Taking Your Game and Your Team to the Next Level by Brian Souza.
“Managers absolutely love that book and the conversations around that book,” Croft says.
Another that sparked passionate feedback was Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. A discussion among the leadership team that Croft expected would last two hours stretched to four, with the head of HR at MOM’s furiously taking notes on potential changes to make the company more family-friendly. As a result, CFO Kelly Moler decided to form a committee to work on such initiatives. “We are going to take a good look at our policies and procedures,” says Croft.
Meanwhile, Croft has planned another discussion of Lean In, including both women and men on the staff at the store level. “I believe there is a need to have that conversation not just with one gender or another,” he says.
All this learning is obviously paying off: MOM’s continues its rapid growth while achieving four times industry average profitability in an industry not known for spending a lot on training and development.
As Google’s people analytics team discovered, one-on-one coaching is the #1 factor linked to great management. Again, this is why we’ve been quietly lobbying to get rid of the term “manager” and replace it with “coach” (e.g., sales coach vs. sales manager).
The best framework for coaching is Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s concept of Situational Leadership. It guides leaders in how to mix the right amount of direction and support, depending on the competency and confidence of the person being coached.
Based on this model, managers can move employees through a development cycle that reduces step by step the need for direction and support until a task can be fully delegated. The style chosen in each phase needs to be based on the task at hand. While one task might require specific how-to instructions, another might call for only some encouragement or nothing at all. Read the short management fable Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi, to gain more insight into this powerful coaching framework.
But as with any tool, this model requires a rhythm of use to make it effective. This is where regularly scheduled one-on-one coaching conversations are helpful and can replace the dreaded quarterly or annual performance reviews (which are too far removed from the behaviors and results that need changing). Set a specific day each week or month, depending on the competence and maturity of the employee, and stick to it. Frequent canceling sends a message that it’s not important. If it is monthly, an hour is appropriate; if it’s weekly, then budget 20 to 30 minutes.
Use these conversations to review individual KPIs, Priorities, and Critical Numbers from column 7 of the OPSP at each meeting. Recognize good performance, analyze underperformance, and discuss activities needed to get back on track. Ask questions to put the focus on the process, rather than lamenting results. Also give feedback on adherence to Core Values and, if necessary, develop strategies to correct behavior. Don’t hold back. Timely feedback is the most effective. It is easier to digest and prevents the formation of bad habits.
Last, in order to grow people, you must expose them to different experiences (10 years of work experience is not the same as one year, repeated 10 times). Regularly modify an employee’s tasks and responsibilities to present new challenges. That is where experience learning happens, especially when these challenges allow people to play to their strengths. Regularly question each employee’s task list in your coaching conversations (e.g., do the “love and loathe” exercise) and search for opportunities to refocus activities on areas that the person is naturally drawn to but that at the same time represent a challenge.
Frame these development conversations by sharing your view about where the markets, the industry, and the company are heading and how your employee’s plans, aspirations, and dreams fit into this bigger picture. Also, when designing the next learning experience for your people, explain to them that in today’s flat organizations, development is no longer about climbing the proverbial career ladder. Modern careers now resemble the process of rock-climbing, where the top does not have to be the goal. Getting across the rock face or reaching another specific spot can be much more exciting and rewarding.
And above all, make your coaching situational throughout the process. Again, read Blanchard’s book on Situational Leadership. We also recommend Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni’s book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want. It is a great resource with many practical tips and hands-on guidelines on how to structure your one-on-one conversations. Add Brian Souza’s book The Weekly Coaching Conversation to help get your managers into the mindset required for great coaching. And last, read Chapters 5 and 6 in Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently to learn more about strengths-based management and coaching.
“Great coaches consistently get the most out of their people, because they consistently put the most into their people,” writes Souza. Managing people is difficult because people are complex. In today’s high-pressure environments, it is very easy to get caught up in the fight for results and to forget about the complex human beings who are needed to produce them. That’s why it is good to remind ourselves that in business and in life, the journey, not the destination, is the reward. Or, to quote Souza as he beautifully describes the deeper purpose of coaching: “When all is said and done and we’ve completed this journey we call life, what will matter most is not what we have achieved — but rather who we have become.”
With this in mind, we finish this chapter with a plea: People are not resources that you consume. So rethink the name of the department that takes care of them. Call it Talent Development, Human Relations, People Support, or Head of People Experiences — whatever term fits your culture — choose to call this function anything but Human Resources.