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Confirming willingness is a key to ownership and accountability.
We have to invite the employee to participate, so
that when they make agreements of what they're going to do moving forward,
it is because they agreed to participate, right?
And hopefully you saw this in the videos that we provided.
The coach offered or asked, you know, would you like some coaching on this,
would you like to talk further about this?
And when the employee says yes, now we have a mutual agreement of
what we're doing, and what our expectations are moving forward.
It's not just the manager talking at the employee telling them what to do.
And, conversely, it's not just the employee sitting there complaining, or
venting, which I think happens to a lot of managers.
When we invite an employee to brainstorm, get coached,
look at new ideas, we're inviting them to participate in the solution, okay?
And so what we want to do always is say, hey, I can tell you're having a hard time.
Hey, I can see this is a problem.
Hey, we're not getting the results that we're looking for.
Would you like to explore another way to get new results?
Would you like to talk about this?
I think it’s essential that people say yes.
Yes I would, I would like to talk about it.
Because if you don't ask you haven't gotten agreement.
If you ask and they say, no I don't really want to talk about it,
that’s also extremely good insight as a manager, right?
And that sort of invokes the employee continuum, right?
We want to coach people who want to do better, who want to continue to do well.
People who are done and don't have any interest in improving,
then we approach that issue from more of that direct management style, right?
We don't really get involved in coaching.
And I know that often times you want very much to help someone and so
that notion of asking them if they want help and they say no.
That sort of might make you feel uncomfortable,
because as a manager you think it's your job to fix and make things better.
But I'll tell you what, if someone doesn't have any interest in improving,
it doesn't matter what you do, because their priority of saying no and
not investing in themselves will trump your interest in helping them.
You can't want it more than they do, okay?
So when we're meeting with someone and we present to them, and say, okay,
we've identified this as a problem in your performance.
Would you like to address it?
Would you like to brainstorm it?
Would you like to talk about potential solutions moving forward?
Would you like some coaching?
Any one of those kinds of question is relevant, right?
What we're looking for here is agreement.
We're looking for, yes, I would like to participate in solving my own problem.
This isn't about you finding their solution.
This is about the two of you working together to find a solution.
All right?
So agreement is extremely important on one end.
On the back end of that conversation, if we're talking about ownership and
accountability, the back end of this is follow up and follow through.
It's not enough to say, is it okay if we talk about this?
Would you like some coaching on this?
That's not enough.
So theoretically, you could have this brilliant coaching conversation, but
there is no tie down with follow up.
And if the goal here always is to improve performance we
have to have an established way to check back in to see how well they did.
And you saw that also in the videos, right?
In the good examples.
There were discussions on follow up.
We'll talk next week.
We'll regroup on this in your next one on one.
We have to let people know we're not just going to have a conversation and
never talk about it again.
We're going to have a conversation, we're going to agree that we're going to look
for solutions, we're going to determine what those solutions are, and
then we're going to schedule time to revisit progress.
It means that then the time you spend in that conversation certainly isn't wasted.
And it also means that you start to set the expectation with your employees
that you will revisit the conversation.
It's not like it's over, right?
They don't have to just sit there and deal with it.
And then you're never going to bring it up again.
Which unfortunately happens in a lot of places.
People really do just know that all they have to really do is sit and
listen to their boss for 20 minutes, and then it will be over.
And that's not effective.
That's not going to get you what you want as a manager, and
it certainly isn't going to help people improve their performance.
So, we want to always request engagement in coaching.
We want to ask for agreement.
Then we always want to schedule how we're going to follow up and
follow through with people on whatever resolutions,
whatever solutions we've come up with in the coaching conversation.