Category Performance Management

“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” – Norman Schwarzkopf

 Most of us have the tendency to rush in giving advice to other people but what is it that prevents most leaders to be ‘coach-like’ to their team?

In this post, Steve explains why by just being like a coach, great work can happen – to the person being coached, to the organization, to the leader himself and to the world.

It’s not a question of knowledge because there are tons of books and podcasts where we can learn and gain knowledge from, but if you really want to shift the way you show up to the world, you have to understand what it takes to change your behaviour and habits.

“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.” – Zig Ziglar

Learn Why You Might need Coaching

To answer the question above as to why leaders can’t or refuse to coach are that the word ‘coaching’ carries a lot of baggage for most people and they feel they don’t have time for this airy-fairy stuff.

But what they don’t realize is, being more coach-like doesn’t only help others but also themselves because it allows them to free up time to focus on big-picture and strategic issues.

There are 3 principles of coaching:

– be lazy,

– be curious, and

– be often.

 

Six questions

And to implement the coaching principals here are six questions that actually help others grow by enabling them to become more competent, more confident, have more impact and have more autonomy.

Read more about how to ask questions

1. What’s on your mind? – the kickstart question that lets the other person choose what he wants to talk about which helps to get into the real conversation right away

2. And what else? – this is the best coaching question in the world because it’s powerful. Usually, the first answer somebody gives you is never the only answer and it’s rarely the best answer. What it does is it deepens and adds more value from any other question and it also serves as a self-management tool for the leader to slow down the rush to action and advice-giving

3. What’s the real challenge here for you? – this is a focus question and the key here is that the first challenge that shows up is almost never the real challenge. This question digs deeper into what really needs to be figured out.

4. What do you want? – this is a foundation question. Interestingly, most people actually don’t know what they really want. If they get clear on that, so many things fall away as they get laser-focused on the things that matter.

5. How can I help? – the lazy question. It helps you calibrate how much you know and how much you don’t know. This question slows down people to rush into action and it’s a way to make sure that leaders understand them before jumping into action.

6. If you’re going to say ‘yes’ to this what must you say ‘no’ to? – this is a strategic question that makes the opportunity cost more obvious

 

Final Thoughts

When leaders act more coach-like it can actually make us more influential to other people and to the world. Having the answers is not the outcome that we want but it’s allowing others to find the answer.

 

Learn More About Using Steve As A Coach

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The author, Douglas Adams once said … “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

According to a 2018 PMI (Project Management Institute) report, roughly 48% of projects don’t finish on schedule.  

Imagine, nearly half of all project deadlines are missed, resulting in increased costs, unhappy customers and ruins reputations and careers.  

What to do?

Here are three reasons deadlines are missed and what you can do to keep things or track:

1. Optimistic Planning Creates Unachievable Timelines

It is very human to be overly optimistic about how long it will take to complete a task.

This is called “planning fallacy.” (A theory developed in 1977 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky)

Imagine your last project took 16 months to complete. It’s natural to assume you can do it in less time, because now you have more knowledge and experience.

But that optimism can quickly lead to missed deadlines.

Other causes of optimistic timelines are:

• • • Assuming the project will go as planned, with no issues.
    • Not understanding how long it’s taken to complete similar projects.
    • Failure to realize constraints on resource.

How to Create Realistic Timelines

The key to a more realistic schedule is to rely on analysis and data.

If you’ve completed similar projects in the past, use that data as the basis for realistic estimates. The more data you have, the more confident you can be in your estimates.

If you don’t have enough past project data to guide you, then you can use the following methods:

Method 1: Use a multi-point estimation technique

Take multiple estimates and combine them to arrive at a more realistic timeline. For example, average:

1. 1. 1. The most optimistic amount of time you think it will take.
      2. The most pessimistic amount of time you think it will take.
      3. The amount of time you believe it’s most likely to take.

Method 2: Engage your team to create ‘bottom-up’ estimates

A bottom-up approach to estimating requires that you build your timeline by having team members estimating each individual task and then combining them to arrive at an overall project estimate.

This ensures tasks they may understand but you may not be aware of are not over-looked.

And, you increase employee buy-in and confidence in the schedule.

Method 3: Build in Contingencies

By building contingencies into your schedule, you can help account for known and unknown risks, which will result in a more achievable timeline. It’s typically a flat 5–10% of the project cost and/or timeline added to the schedule baseline in case something unforeseen occurs.

2. Unclear Expectations Result in Missed Deadlines

If your team is unclear on when a deadline is, how can they meet it?

Communication problems can lead to you thinking your team understood their deadline when they didn’t.

Imagine the following conversation:

You: “Can you get this back to me by Thursday, at the latest?”

Team member: “Well, I don’t know. There are may be defects, if I have to correct errors, then I doubt I’ll be able to complete this before Monday.”

You: “Look, unless they’re critical, just leave the bugs and focus on this. I really need it no later than Friday.”

Team member: “Alright, I’ll try my best.”

Based on this conversation, the boss expects the task to be completed Thursday unless there are critical defects.

The team member believes they have till Friday, unless there are critical bugs, then Monday is the drop-dead deadline.

How to Communicate Expectations Clearly

Here are three ways you can ensure your team understands their deadlines.

Method 1: Use your project management systems

If you assign work informally or inconsistently, it can be easily misunderstood, forgotten, or considered unimportant.

When you hand out assignments verbally, people can easily forget about what was discussed or misconstrue your words. For instance, if you say, “I’d like to see this by the end of the week,” a team member may see that as a request and not a hard deadline.

When their name is assigned to a task in project the end date in the system allows for no question as to when their deadline is.

Method 2: Implement feedback loops

A feedback loop, or communication loop, is a simple process for ensuring what you’ve communicated has been heard and understood.

You ask them to repeat back to you what their deadlines are. In our hypothetical conversation, imagine if the team member was asked what the agreed-upon deadline was and replied: “Friday, unless there are critical defects, then Monday.”

You would have the opportunity to clarify expectations before missed deadlines.

Method 3: Conduct check-ins

The last thing you want is to discover after the deadline was missed that there was a misunderstanding as to when it was.

By incorporating periodic check-ins into your schedule, you’re achieving three things:

1. 1. Creating opportunities to remind employees of a deadline.
   2. Re-communicating the importance of that deadline.
   3. Creating opportunities for team members to give you feedback to so you better understand what is going on and identify potential problems and warning signs, without having to micromanage your team.

3. Poor Time Management

If you asked people how many hours a day they spend doing productive, project-related work, what answer would they give? Assuming an 8-hour work day, they may guess 7–8 hours.

But, research shows that this is a huge overestimate.

There are coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, smoke breaks and visiting.

In an average 8-hour work day, most people only accomplish 5 hours of productive work. Much of which is multi-tasking and constant interruptions.

In reality, your team is achieving less than 50% of their time doing uninterrupted productive work each week.

If you are assuming a 35–40-hour work week, but only achieving 12.5–25 hours of work, there is no wonder there are missed deadlines!

How to Improve Employee Time Management

Here are three ways you can help your team better manage their time and become more productive:

Method 1: Reduce time wasters

Have your employees record what and how they spent their time.

By tracking their own time for a few days, your team can discover time wasters and discover bottlenecks in the process, such as the time they’re forced to sit idle while waiting for reviews or approvals.

Or time spent in unproductive or unnecessary meetings. Consider giving your employees permission to attend only the meetings they are directly impacted by and allow them to excuse themselves from the unnecessary ones.  

Method 2: Eliminate distractions and interruptions

While being connected and accessible can boost collaboration and communication among the team, it can also detract from productivity.

Every time we’re interrupted, it destroys our focus, time that could otherwise be used to meet project deadlines.   

Here are three ways you can help your team eliminate distractions and interruptions:

1. 1. Encourage blocking time for specific tasks.
   2. Recommend employees only check email and messages at designated times.
   3. Provide a quiet, isolated space such as an empty office for employees working on anything complex or high-priority.  

Method 3: Avoid overloading your team

You may find that your team is still over-allocated, after all you can’t completely remove emails, meetings, and other interruptions.

Even if you can help your employees achieve 30 hours of productive work a week, you’re still overloading them by assuming a 35-40-hour work week in your schedule.

When people cannot get everything done in the time allotted to them deadlines will slip.

If your team members have too much on their plates, you will need to either increase the size of the team or push out the timelines.

If some of their workload is for another project or manager, ensure everyone is aligned on what is prioritized, and work together to agree to an attainable schedule.

Conclusion

Missed deadlines are all too common across all industries and businesses.

If your team is one of the nearly half of project teams with missed deadlines, it’s due to one of three problems: overly optimistic estimates, unclear deadline expectations, or poor time management.

Fortunately, all three of these are avoidable.

By following the advice above, you can ensure that your team doesn’t miss another deadline from here on out.

*Based on the average Canadian salary of $51,000

Intuitively we know that having a poor performer on your team will cost money in lower production, inter-personal conflict, extra supervision.

Shockingly, a poor performer who is enthusiastic and is personally likable stays employed on average 18-months longer than if they were not liked.

Imagine taking $76,500* and lighting it on fire just because you enjoy the enthusiastic warmth it gives off.

That is what you are doing by paying someone for 18-months just because you like them.

What do you do?

You can follow the Servant Leadership model or the Netflix model.

The Servant Leader Model

Recently Ken Blanchard of the Greenleaf Centre addressed the problems leaders face when employees “won’t do” what is expected of them.

Blanchard defines a “won’t do” problem as one when, despite being given the tools, the person doesn’t have the desire to change his or her behaviour and that there is a cost to your organization.

Read my thoughts on servant leadership

In the Servant Leader model, you give your poor performer every opportunity to improve, and when you know that they understand what you expect but still won’t do it, it may be time to “share them with the competition.”

The implications of the Servant Leader approach to the ‘won’t do’ employee means taking time to assess a person’s mindset and skill set correctly, develop performance management plans and manage the risk in letting someone go.

All of this cost money, time and the opportunity costs when you are focused on the poor performer when your time could be better spent with you higher potential employees.

The Netflix Model

When Netflix has someone who cannot or will not do their jobs as they expected, they choose to limit the cost quickly.

Like pulling a Band-Aid off.

In a recent podcast interview with Alex Blumberg and Patty McCord Netflix’s past Chief HR Officer she explained: Once they recognized there wasn’t a fit, they would knock on the door and say, “I think you’ve gotten kind of the vibe that I’m not particularly happy about the way things are going.”

If the employee disagrees or isn’t expecting the conversation, they say “Okay, so I haven’t been very clear about that. So here’s the team that I’m trying to build. And I need to have people that understand the technical people and understand what they’re. And unfortunately, you are not a fit.

Read about having tough conversations

The Netflix approach is to let you have three months of severance already in your pocket, instead of wasting that three months of time for you, the person and the rest of the team.

McCord recommends that instead of developing a 90-day performance improvement plan where once a week, she is going to sit down with the poor performer and prove that they are incompetent in writing. So not only is the employee and the supervisor miserable, because we both know it’s a farce. 

Conclusion

When dealing with poor performers, you need to do what is right for you and your organization.

And I understand that you may face HR policies or collective agreements that may trip you up.

Read about spending the right time in the right place

But do you want to waste your time, the employee’s life and all that money when you already know the right thing to do?

Just because every organization uses these management practices, does not make them effective:

• To achieve management excellence, you need to avoid faulty management practices
• Managing individual behavior is the answer but it requires an understanding of the basic behavior-based principles that drive good performance

Here are 13 of the most commonly used and misguided management practices and what to do instead.

#1 Employee Of the Month:

What’s wrong?

A program meant to motivate all employees to deliver superior performance can only have one monthly winner. The others are left with performances that go unrecognized — violating every known principle of effective positive reinforcement.

What to do instead!

Understand what you want to achieve as a result of this kind of program, and then establish an initiative based on criteria that recognizes all employees who deliver outstanding performance.

#2 Stretch goals

What’s wrong?

It is proven that people fail to reach stretch goals 90% of the time. The primary reason: stretch goals are typically set too high.

What to do instead!

Set many, mini-goals. To get the kind of improvement an organization needs, in both people and production, managers need to ensure that positive reinforcement is delivered for the many small achievements along the way to reaching the larger, desired goal.

#3 Performance appraisals

What’s wrong?

Any system that doesn’t recognize performance as it’s happening misses the opportunity to get the most and best from employees.

What to do instead!

Set up an environment in which each employee knows how well he or she has done at the end of every working day. Evaluate each performer against what he or she is expected to do, not in relation to others.

#4 Ranking

What’s wrong?

Your competition is outside your organization, not inside. Publicly displaying how employees rank based on objective measures breeds unhealthy competition and inhibits sharing and teamwork.

What to do instead!

Evaluate individuals and units in terms of what they need to accomplish, rather than comparing their performance to others’. When the conditions are right, people will not only achieve at high rates but also assist others in doing the same.

#5 “you did a good job, but…”

What’s wrong?

It has become commonplace to provide positive and constructive feedback. While it seems efficient to do both at once, the positive statement rarely has the intended effect and employees end up focusing only on the negative.

What to do instead!

Be clear to separate the good and the bad. Give the good first, and at a later time deliver the corrective feedback. That way the good will be valued, and the employee will be more responsive to the corrective feedback.

#6 the sandwich

What goes wrong?

The sandwich practice is a cousin of the “you did a good job, but…” And creates a “waiting for the other shoe to drop” environment where attempts at social reinforcement are received with suspicion.

What to do instead!

Be direct. If behavior needs correcting, pinpoint the behavior to be stopped: tell the person the consequences of continuing the Undesirable behavior. Then discuss the behavior you want to see in its place and positively reinforce all instances of the new behavior.

#7 overvaluing smart, talented people

What’s wrong!

Smart, talented people are not in short supply. Thinking that some employees are smarter than others is harmful to all.

What to do instead!

Most of what we call talent is nothing more than unrecognized practice. Given the right environment, most people can become “smart and talented.” Create a culture where managers are rewarded for the number of “smart, talented people” they produce — not hire.

 #8 promoting people no one likes

What’s wrong?

There is a perception in leadership that managers who are well- liked are not effective at producing results. There is a correlation between ineffective managers and other operational costs: high turnover, grievances, absenteeism, training, and recruitment.

What to do instead!

Look for managers and leaders who get results the right way: those who understand behavior from a scientific perspective and can design systems, policies, and procedures that bring out the best in people every day. These folks are always well-liked.

#9 all forms of reorganizing

What’s wrong?

Financial considerations almost always trump human ones in any form of reorganization. None will be successful without the energetic, enthusiastic behavior of all employees. Yet plans for creating such behavior are usually a mere afterthought.

What to do instead!

Make decisions quickly. Incorporate the best practices of both organizations into the work of the new organization. Integrate policies, management practices, and mangers. Make sure that all managers know how to build positive reinforcement into all of the work of the new organization on the first day so that employees will see that it is and can trust that all will be okay.

I often use the phrase “poor leadership costs a lot of money and is a terrible waste of human potential.”

I was recently asked by one of my clients to prove it.

So, I put together some statistics on the cost of bad leadership and the upside of excellent leadership.

My Client needed this information so that he could help support making the investment in hiring me to do a leadership training workshop for his organization.

Most people understand that subpar leaders/managers have a negative impact on the organization. However, when you look at how big the cost of poor leadership really is, then you begin to re-examine the importance of leadership development within the company.

In order to review the high cost of poor leadership, I am sharing the information I sent to my client:

Poor leadership practices cost companies millions of dollars each year by negatively impacting employee retention, customer satisfaction, and overall employee productivity.

 Evidence of the High Cost of Poor Leadership

 According to research from the Blanchard Company:

• Less-than-optimal leadership practices cost the typical organization an amount equal to as much as 7% of their total annual sales.
• At least 9% and possibly as much as 32% of an organization’s staff turnover can be avoided through better leadership skills.
• Better leadership can generate a 3-4% improvement in customer satisfaction scores and a corresponding 1.5% increase in revenue growth.

• Most organizations are operating with a 5-10% productivity drag that better leadership practices could eliminate.

According to Gallup:

• It’s a sad truth about the workplace: just 30% of employees are actively committed to doing a good job.
• Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report indicates that 50% of employees merely put their time in, while the remaining 20% act out their discontent in counterproductive ways, negatively influencing their coworkers, missing days on the job, and driving customers away through poor service.
• Gallup estimates that the 20% group alone costs the U.S. economy around half a trillion dollars each year.
• The single greatest cause for employee disengagement? Poor leadership.

According to Harvard:

• Quite simply, the better the leader, the more engaged the staff. Take the results from a recent study on the effectiveness of 2,865 leaders in a large financial services company.

There was a straight-line correlation here between levels of employee engagement and our measure of the overall effectiveness of their supervisors.

The best leaders (those in the 90^th percentile) were supervising the happiest, most engaged, and most committed employees — those happier than more than 92% of their colleagues.

Get your free E-Book to learn more and get tips on fixing this drag on your bottom line.