Dear Madeleine,

I work in a company that directly supports several industries that have been affected by the changes that are being made in Washington—financial services, supply chain, manufacturing, etc. Many of our contracts have been put on hold, which is clear at least. In some cases, though, when we try to contact our partners to find out what is going on, we get no return calls or emails. We aren’t sure if people have been laid off or what services they are still expecting. The bills we sent them months ago are going unpaid.

My team is in chaos. Everyone is in a state of dread, expecting our entire business to fail. This seems even worse than COVID; I can’t put my finger on why, exactly. Some of my people’s spouses have been laid off from their jobs. One person lost her parents in that awful plane crash on the Potomac, which I know has nothing to do with the changes at work but it casts a pall. I do get how some people feel like the world is ending.

Thankfully, we still have plenty of work, but I can’t seem to get people to stay focused. How do I stop this spiral and help everyone get back on an even keel?

Negative Spiral

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Negative Spiral,

I am so, so sorry for the distress you and your people are going through. You are not alone—I have heard similar anguish from many people in many sectors. Big change is always destabilizing and scary. Our brains are not built to respond rationally to uncertainty.

I have a few ideas that may help, but first I will caution you to adjust your goal to “get people back on an even keel.” My Spidey sense tells me things are going to get more tumultuous before they settle, and whatever was an even keel (a.k.a. normal life) will end up being a new normal. My point is that, just as with COVID, it will take years for everyone who is affected by all the changes in regulations to find their footing.

As a leader, job one for you is to stay calm. Your people will take their cues from you, so if you can demonstrate that the sky is not, in fact, falling, that will help.

Another thing you can do is listen. Let people share their distress and help them brainstorm how they might respond to their misfortunes and changes in circumstance. You can’t fix anything for people, but you can listen with empathy and let them know you care. No one wants to hear “everything is going to be okay” until they have had a chance to share all the reasons they don’t believe it. You will find it takes more time than you want it to take, but you will immediately experience the value of it.

Perhaps your company has an Employee Assistance Program that your people can take advantage of. Many EAPs will provide at least some appointments with a therapist so that people can fully express their distress and potentially learn some coping strategies.

Finally, it may help if you share that despite the uncertainty with some contracts, there is still “plenty of work.” An approach I have seen to be very effective is when leaders share, clearly and succinctly:

1. What I know for sure (today);
2. What I believe will happen (based on experience); and
3. What I don’t know and we will all have to wait and see.

This is a slightly modified version of listing what is within our control, what is somewhat within our control that we might be able to influence, and what is most definitely outside our control. The “sphere of control” exercise might be a helpful framework for some of your most deeply affected folks.

It is much more likely that sailors will weather a storm when their captain appears to believe they all can. It sounds like you do believe your organization will be okay, so it can’t hurt to share that reassuring point of view with your people.

Finally, after every conversation in which you listen and reassure people, you can redirect their focus on what they can do in the next hour, today, and this week. Research shows that switching from ruminating, which can deepen and strengthen negative thoughts (and requires that the brain be in the default mode network), to focusing on and accomplishing a discrete task that requires full concentration (which requires the brain to be in the task positive network) interrupts the downward spiral. It’s because these modes are mutually exclusive—the brain cannot be in both modes at once. This is why, when we become paralyzed by our negative thoughts, it can help to simply make the bed or perform administrative tasks. There is a reason that humans often have the instinct to stay busy in the face of challenging and unpleasant emotions.

For the foreseeable future, it is possible that the best you can hope for is to help stop the spiraling and keep people at least semi-functional. Stay calm and optimistic yourself. Stay focused on what is working and what can be done.

You will be a hero.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services as well as a key facilitator of Blanchard’s Leadership Coach Certification course. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I recently hired a new member for my team. She was great in the many rounds of interviews, seemed to have the skills we needed, and was unanimously the first choice of the hiring committee.

She is now about six weeks in, and I keep waiting to see the person I met in the interviews.

She has not completed any of her onboarding training. When I look in our LMS, she seems to have made it through only about 40% of some of the required modules. I have had to show her several times how our Teams site is set up (she was used to the Google Docs system), and she keeps asking questions that she would know the answers to if she had looked at the different files I have assigned to her. I can see in people’s files the last time they were opened, and she has only opened about a quarter of what I expected.

It’s like she can’t remember anything we talk about from one day to the next.

I asked her to submit a short report on all the calls she is attending with her teammates so that I can keep track of what she is picking up. She submitted one short report and then nothing. (I should have at least fifteen by now.) We meet every other day and I have brought this up several times. She assures me she is working on them. I know she has plenty of free time but I have no idea what she is doing with it.

I’m so confused. I don’t want to come down on her like a ton of bricks, but I need to get to the bottom of what is going on. I think I may have made a terrible mistake. What should I do?

Terrible Mistake

____________________________________________________________________________

Dear Terrible Mistake,

Oh dear. I am sorry. It is so strange when people come across one way all through the interview process, and then turn out to be not at all what you were led to expect.

The only thing to do is tackle this head on. Share with your newbie what you expected compared to what she has managed to accomplish and ask her what is going on. The question is: “What has gotten in the way of your being able to meet these expectations in the past six weeks? Is it too much work? Is it lack of clarity? Is there something you need from me that you aren’t getting?”

She will either be honest and tell you, or she won’t. If she does, then you’ll know what you are dealing with. Much as I hate to speculate, it might help you to prepare for different scenarios.

• If something totally unexpected has happened, she might need help to arrange for a short-term leave.
• If it turns out she has no idea how to prioritize all of the tasks, you might offer to break down the tasks you expect to see completed day by day.
• If she is feeling so behind now that she has become paralyzed, you might re-negotiate her deliverables and offer a fresh start.
• If she is second-guessing her own interpretation of what a good job looks like, you can offer more clarity. Your newbie may very well need a list of what you expect laid out as daily tasks until she finds her footing.

It would be smart to involve your HR business partner if you have one. If your newbie has a learning difference and needs extra time or help, there may be provisions for that. If she is dealing with an unforeseen challenge, she may need to take some time to deal with it.

She may decline to tell you the truth about what is going on and try to head you off with more promises to catch up, so you should be prepared to not accept that. The key is for you to tell the truth as kindly as possible, without judgment or blame. It might sound something like: “Look, let’s not worry about catching up. I’m okay with letting go of the reports I asked for—those were to help you keep track of what you are learning. But I do need to see x, y, z by the end of the week. Is that something you think you can commit to?”

You will also want to be prepared to share the potential consequences if it becomes clear that she is not able to do the job the way it needs to be done. Maybe you won’t have to share those just yet; but if she commits to something you think is eminently doable and then doesn’t come through, you may have to at that time.

It sounds like you have been patient. It also sounds like she may think she can fly under the radar with substandard work. It is time to get the cards out on the table—to be clear that you are paying attention but also that you are invested in helping her succeed. But for you to help, you have to understand what is going on.

Being direct and telling the truth can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to mean “coming down on her like a ton of bricks,” It just means—well, being direct and telling the truth. Not doing that won’t serve either of you. If she is ultimately not capable of doing the job, keeping things in limbo will just make things worse.

Be kind. Be respectful. Be truthful.

Give her step-by-step instructions if you both agree it will help. Give her an out if there doesn’t seem to any help for it.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I read your last blog Not Sure How to Address Burnout? with interest. I work in consulting with one of the big five consulting firms. We hire go-getters and work them hard. The competition is fierce and only the most driven get promoted. The rewards are, shall I say, significant—but I won’t lie, the workload is intense. We never pretend otherwise.

We hire kids straight out of the best business schools because we know they’re the brightest and are used to brutally hard work. Yet, in the last few years, I have noticed a lot more complaining about workload. There seems to be an expectation among our newbies that they should get to have lives outside of work. WTH?

Frankly, that just isn’t the way it works. I keep referring them back to what was shared with them before they signed on:  There is quite literally—I mean, in writing—the expectation set that, at least for the first couple of years with us, people should expect to not be able to do much other than work. I don’t know how we could be more explicit.

I find this very tiresome. What happened to paying your dues? What happened to sucking it up and devoting oneself to high performance? What happened to dedication? I know I should be more empathetic, but when I try to empathize I always go back to feeling resentful. The voice in my head says, “Well, I worked like a dog for umpteen years, I figured it out, I never whined like a big baby, which is why I make the big bucks and get to boss your sorry ass around.” I know that attitude is not getting me anywhere, but I am not sure what to do with it.

Any insight around this?

Exasperated

________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Exasperated,

If you found my blog, you must have an interest in leadership—which is good, because ultimately it is your job to figure out how to lead these young people. Your long-term success and the continuation of the big bucks, as you say, depends on it.

At the risk of offending you, may I point out that you sound like every boomer and Gen Xer who complains about millennials and Gen Zers? To be fair, you sound like every member of every generation who has reached middle age and complains about “kids nowadays.” You probably have trouble getting your head around their music, their fashions, and the way they use social media. And I can just hear you rant on the topic of gender politics. But that’s okay. It is only human.

Let’s take a look at your industry. Like high finance, medicine, and the law, many people were attracted to your kind of work back in the day because of the promise of status, money, and material success. Most of the millennials I know today are attracted to professions that are likely to afford them some stability and a shot at achieving or sustaining what you and I once thought of as middle class, let alone the opportunity to build generational wealth. The specter of student loans is big, dark, and chilling. That is how radically the world has changed.

The generations you now manage are also much more interested in meaningful work, personal fulfillment, and life/work balance, possibly because they witnessed their parents work like dogs and take very little pleasure in life. Just to provide some clarity about what younger people today don’t want, envision someone watching their dad devote thirty-five years to paying down the mortgage and trying to put something away for the kids’ college tuition only to see him drop dead a week after retiring. It’s a bracing cautionary experience.

These generations have also grown up with constant one-upmanship and unrealistic expectations set by the fairytale lives they see on social media. By the time they arrive on your doorstep, they’ve been under absurd amounts of pressure since middle school. If you are exasperated by their behavior, imagine what it must feel like to them to be judged and found wanting at every turn.

You say they are complaining. To whom, I wonder? About what? Did you never complain when you were in their shoes? I’ll bet you did. And I’ll bet that if your superiors heard about it, they ignored it. It is a normal thing to do, it is a way of letting off steam, and in no way does it indicate burnout. Complaining vociferously about how hard you work is a time-honored form of boasting—what the kids call “humble bragging.” If you are actually worried about burnout, watch for symptoms such as a radical reduction in productivity in someone who was once a star performer, unusual amounts of absenteeism, or an uncharacteristic lack of civility.

I appreciate your attempt to be empathetic. That is a great impulse. You are right that the voice in your head (which made me laugh btw, thanks for that) isn’t helping you. But if you think people can’t hear that voice, you are dead wrong. They hear it loud and clear, and it is eroding their trust in you. I encourage you to find another talk track for the voice. Perhaps a curious voice; one that asks “What might be motivating to this person? What are they looking for that they aren’t getting?”

Seek to understand what your people are really saying. Ask questions like:

• Can you tell me more to help me understand what is really going on right now?
• What exactly would you want to be different?
• What would work better for you if we could make changes?
• What does it mean to have a life? How is that different from what you have now?
• What is missing that would make a big difference to your quality of life at work?
• What strengths do you bring to the table that you might be underutilizing?
• What else do you want me to know?

Listen for what is real. There is a good chance you will find it much easier to empathize. It is entirely possible that, like most young people, your employees are perfectly happy to work incredibly hard as long as they have the flexibility to do the other things that are important to them. It is possible that just being asked the question and having a chance to talk out the answers will be all they need to go back out there and crush it.

One thing every person from every generation has in common is that no one wants to be judged. Chris Argyris, a Harvard professor and an influential authority on organizational behavior, said in the 90s that the secret to the success of the big five consulting firms—including yours, presumably—was that they identified and hired “insecure overachievers.” (I can’t find the exact quote, so it might be an apocryphal anecdote I heard from someone who worked at Boston Consulting Group.) You’ll know if that was true when you were a newbie, and if it is still true now. The reason it matters is that there is a fine line between harnessing anxiety and fear of failure to drive successful behaviors and letting it reduce you to a quivering mess. If it is still true, your job is to help your people walk that fine line to ensure their own success and, therefore, your own.

Your job as a leader is to influence your people; to help them connect to the meaning of what they are engaged in and what matters most to them. If they are in it for the money, that is an easy motivator. But many of your people may be driven by other things. Find out what they are and have conversations in which you brainstorm how to connect the work with what drives them. Listening without blame or judgment will send the signal that you care. Wait till you see how people perform when they think their manager actually cares about them. You may see a radical turnaround. Ask yourself the question “What do these kids bring that we didn’t have, and how can we leverage that?”

If you resent that nobody ever cared about you, and you had to soldier through with horrible bosses, well, okay, I am very sorry about that. But isn’t that all the more reason not to inflict those experiences on anyone else?

So suck it up, Exasperated. Cut out the judgment, get curious, and see what there is to learn in all of this. There is a good chance you could become an expert at this approach and even influence others in your company. Wouldn’t that be something?

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I work for a national mortgage company and recently took over a team from a leader who had led it for 37 years. Every single person on the team is more experienced in the business of the team than I am. And every one of them is very disengaged because their former leader clearly had checked out a long time before he left.

A lot of the processes—some of them possibly of no use whatsoever—are outdated and labor-intensive. When I ask why things are done the way are done, the answer is always a variation on “that’s just how we’ve always done it.” There are some time- and labor-intensive tasks where the owners aren’t clear why they are done or who cares about them.

All of my questions seem to be making people nervous. I am confused as to how this happened. The other parts of the company I have worked in are well run and up to date, and we were always asked to look for efficiencies. My manager has no explanation for me, and precious little guidance.

I am intensely frustrated with the condition of the team. It feels like everyone is lost in the land that time forgot. It needs a massive overhaul. I am pretty sure we don’t even need half the people on the team. I don’t want to scare anyone, but as the team leader, I can’t let things go on like this.

Any suggestions for how to approach this mess?

Need a Reboot

_______________________________________________________________

Dear Need a Reboot,

I understand your frustration and your confusion. It is uncommon these days to uncover parts of a business that have not been forced to slim down or to leverage technology to do more with less. For reasons you may never know, your predecessor was left to his own devices with little to no oversight. The people he left behind probably are either delighted to have a job they can coast through, completely burned out, or too bored and worn down to care.

I think you have a great opportunity here to rebuild your team from the ground up. At Blanchard, we define team leadership as an influence process focused on helping the team reach and sustain high performance. We define a team as two or more people working interdependently to achieve a common purpose with shared accountability for results. Let’s not call this group of people a “team” until they actually behave like one. You can find more detail on our thinking about teams here.

The thing that will trip you up is a deadly combination of too much, too soon, too fast. Slow and steady wins the race. It doesn’t sound like your manager is paying attention anyway, so why rush?

You might start by sharing your vision for the team with the team. This will be personal and sound something like, “Our team is an energetic and creative group that adds value to the organization by providing x, y and z.” You can share your plan to make some changes, but that you are committed to carefully planning each step so that all points of view are considered, nobody feels overwhelmed or left behind.

Next, outline some high-level goals—the first of which is to really understand all critical deliverables, who in the organization wants/needs them, and the purpose of each one. Once you have that figured out, you can brainstorm ways to go about delivering on them.

Then, get to know each individual on the team. Get detailed information about what they do, what they are good at, what they like to do, and how they see themselves contributing moving forward. You can assign specific tasks like research around software or updated ways to accomplish things to match skills and interests.

Create a first draft of a plan, get input from everyone on the team, tweak, and refine. Once you have a plan, you might think about creating a Team Charter.

A Team Charter is a co-created document that outlines:

• Your company’s vision
• Your company’s values
• Your company’s purpose: What does the organization do? For whom do they do it? Why do they do it?
• Team Purpose: What do we do? For whom do we do it? Why do we do it?
• Team Goals: What are the measurable outcomes the team is responsible for in order to achieve the team’s purpose?
• Team Roles: What are the key responsibility areas of each team member for achieving the team goals?
• Behavioral Norms: What are the behavioral expectations and team practices (strategies and processes) that the members agree the team should follow? What are the ground rules? These can include but are not limited to: communication, decision making, problem solving, and accountability.

Along the way, your group of employees will either be excited by the opportunity to make a tangible contribution to your company or they won’t. If you are vastly overstaffed for the work required of the team, this process will make it easy to identify the people you can probably get along without.

Stay focused on moving forward and let go of your distress about the past. Make a concerted effort not to criticize anyone or anything done in the past—the person responsible for it is gone, and it will just make people feel like you blame them. Let people know you have the backs of those who are all in on creating a future together. Put a road map together and move deliberately, step by step, toward your milestones. You will definitely have some bumps, but at least you will be acting as a team and creating a landscape that makes sense.

It will be an adventure, but it sounds like you are ready for one!

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

The Great Resignation. The Great Attrition. The Mass Exodus.

The historic turmoil taking place in today’s workplace has been given many names—and for good reason. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record-breaking 10.9 million jobs were open at the end of July 2021.[1]

This unprecedented turnover will stretch long into the future. Some 41% of the global workforce is “considering leaving their employer in the current year,” while “95% of workers are contemplating a job change.”[2]

All this turnover comes at a staggering cost: 30%–40% of the annual salary for entry-level employees; 150% for mid-level employees; and up to 400% for highly skilled employees.[3]

The costs are particularly steep for the sales function:

• The average salesperson needs 15 months before becoming a top performer.^[4]
• A company spends on average $106,374 for a salesperson’s salary, health care, etc., before the person starts to reach their quota.[5]
• The annual turnover rate for salespeople is 27%—twice that of the overall labor force.[6]

A little reflection reveals a sobering conclusion: A company cannot succeed if there is significant turnover in its sales force. The cost of the investment, the long lead time before success, the risk of a salesperson quitting, and the opportunities lost along the way are financially crippling.

The Pivotal Role of the Sales Manager

Sales managers have an oversized influence on the struggles and successes of a salesperson.

Gallup found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units.[7] An article in Harvard Business Review went even further:

High-performing sales leaders reported an overall average annual quota attainment of 105% compared to 54% for underperforming sales managers.[8]

The same article stated that when salespeople rate their manager as being excellent or above average, 69% of them exceed quota.[9]

So how can sales managers help their new hires?

Using SLII® with New Hires

SLII®, the world’s most taught leadership development solution, is a proven way to help salespeople succeed. It categorizes a person’s capability for a given task or goal into four categories:

• D1—Enthusiastic Beginner. You’re usually at D1 when you’re starting to learn something new.
  • Remember how you couldn’t wait to ride a bike? You were at D1 on that goal.
• D2—Disillusioned Learner. You inevitably discover that what you’re trying to learn is harder than you first thought.
  • Pedaling, steering, and keeping your balance was trickier than it looked at D2.
• D3—Capable, but Cautious, Contributor. You need to build your confidence in using the new skill.
  • At D3 you could now ride around the block, but your first outing to a crowded park was a bit intimidating.
• D4—Self-Reliant Achiever. You’re highly competent at a task and committed to doing an excellent job.
  • When you reached D4, you could help your younger sibling learn to ride!

SLII® teaches managers to match their leadership style to an employee’s needs by using the appropriate directive and supportive behaviors. The four leadership styles are S1 (Directing), S2 (Coaching), S3 (Supporting), and S4 (Delegating). When leaders match their leadership style with an employee’s development level on a particular task or goal, the person develops competence, motivation, and confidence. And because their development leads to new career opportunities, they stay with your company.

New salespeople are at D1 or D2 on many tasks. They have considerable commitment (motivation and confidence) but little competence, even if they were a top performer at their previous job.

Here are examples of Style 1 leadership that sales managers can use to get new hires off to a fast start:

• Give clear goals
• Set timelines for accomplishing them
• Prioritize tasks
• Create a step-by-step learning plan
• Show what a good job looks like
• Give access to resources
• Share generous feedback on progress

Sales managers should also acknowledge a new hire’s transferable skills and commitment. People at D1 on a specific task or goal are receptive to direction when you acknowledge their commitment.

Sales managers can also paint a picture of success. That means showing the new hire what a good job looks like instead of letting the person develop bad habits as they struggle to find their own way. This tactic works because brain stores information as images, not words.

Time Well Spent

Millions of people worldwide are reevaluating their careers because of the pandemic. Competition for talented sales professionals is fierce. What’s a sales manager to do?

Take the time to invest in your new hires. Use SLII® when you lead. It will pay returns for years to come.

You can learn more about the impact that SLII® can have in your organization by downloading the new eBook Turning New Hires into Top Performers… Quickly. Looking for more content specific to sales management? Check out Meeting the Quota Challenge: Critical Skills Every Sales Manager Needs to Excel. Both downloads are free courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

ENDNOTES

[1] https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert_actsubs&utm_content=signinnudge&deliveryName=DM150635

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work#:~:text=Today%2C%20our%20research%20shows%20that,major%20pivot%20or%20career%20transition.

[3] https://www.clickboarding.com/employee-turnover-what-is-it/

[4] https://www.indeed.com/career/salesperson/salaries

[5] https://www.sba.gov/blog/how-much-does-employee-cost-you#:~:text=There’s%20a%20rule%20of%20thumb,little%20harder%20to%20pin%20down.

[6] https://hbr.org/2017/07/how-to-predict-turnover-on-your-sales-team

[7] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231593/why-great-managers-rare.aspx#:~:text=Companies%20fail%20to%20choose%20the,of%20the%20time%2C%20Gallup%20finds&text=Managers%20account%20for%20at%20least,severely%20low%20worldwide%20employee%20engagement.

[8] https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-7-attributes-of-the-most-effective-sales-leaders

[9] https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-7-attributes-of-the-most-effective-sales-leaders

Dear Madeleine,

I am a fairly new manager for a well established and growing not-for-profit organization that brings arts education to underserved communities. When we have open positions, we prioritize hiring alumni of our programs.

About nine months ago, I hired a promising alumnus who seemed perfect for an entry level program administration job. She had graduated college with excellent grades, had glowing recommendations, and is a delightful person.

I expected her to take to the job quickly and blow us all away. That hasn’t happened. She just doesn’t seem to be able to retain any information about how to do certain tasks. I keep having to walk her through the directions for tasks every time, even though I have done it repeatedly.

The purpose of hiring someone for this position was to free me up to do other critical tasks—but I am spending so much time teaching and re-teaching this person that I now seem to have double the work.

I am frustrated and confused. I can’t tell whether she can’t do the tasks or won’t. I don’t want to make her feel like I’m not happy with her performance (even though I’m not) but I have no idea how to get her to up her game without making her feel criticized.

Any advice would be welcome.

Beginner Stalled at Go

____________________________________________________________

Dear Beginner Stalled at Go,

This sounds frustrating. I am sure your new hire is equally frustrated and confused, because everyone wants to be successful. This sounds like a perfect occasion for you to apply SLII®, our company’s time-tested, research-based development model.

Essentially, SLII® helps managers and direct reports break down all goals and tasks, diagnose the competence and confidence of the employee in relation to each task, and then identify exactly what kind of leadership style is needed. You can watch a little video that describes it here and download a cool e-book about it here.

In the language of SLII®, your alumnus—Let’s call her A for the sake of clarity—is stuck at Development Level One, “Enthusiastic Beginner.” She seems to believe she needs to come back to you for clear direction for every task, every time. What could be going on? Is it that she can’t build competence or is it her confidence that is lacking? Here are some ideas:

• It’s possible A has a learning disability she hasn’t shared with you and is somehow not able to retain your instructions. You can’t really ask without insulting someone (“what’s wrong with you?” never lands well) but some questions (see below) may help to surface an issue like this. If a learning disability is, in fact, present, you might consider having A take notes when you give instructions and send them to you for editing so she has written instructions for next time.
• Maybe A doesn’t believe she is ready to do things on her own. She thinks she knows what to do and how to do it, but still needs permission from you to try it and some reassurance that it will be okay if she makes an error or two. Sometimes young people new to the workplace just need permission to go for it.
• Perhaps A isn’t crystal clear that you expect her to do things on her own yet. I know it sounds crazy, but I worked for a lovely man long ago who kept saying “we need to get this done and that done,” and he would go down the list of everything we needed to do. I kept waiting for him to come to me and get my help with all of things on the list. After a couple of weeks, I asked him how he thought things were going and he said, “I am confused, I keep asking you to do all of these things, and you seem eager, but then you don’t do any of them.” I was shocked. I told him I was waiting for him (he was, after all, the boss) to initiate the tasks “we” needed to do, but it turned out that every time he had said “we.” what he really meant was “you.” I guess he didn’t want to sound bossy—but he was so indirect, I didn’t understand what he wanted. I was young and was used to being bossed around by teachers, bosses, parents. Today I would just say, “do you actually mean ‘we,’ or are you telling me to do it?” But that is the beauty of being older.

We can speculate all day long, but ultimately you are going to have to ask A what is going on. Let go of your judgment and pre-conceptions and gently ask the questions. They might go something like this:

• I have explained how this task needs to get done several times now, which is okay. However, I had anticipated that you would be able to do it on your own at this point. Can you help me to understand what is getting in the way of that?
• Is it possible that the way I have explained this is not clear enough?
• Would it be helpful for me to create written instructions for some of these tasks?
• Is there something I am doing or saying that leads you to believe that I don’t trust you to do this task on your own?
• What would give you the confidence you need to do this task on your own?
• What do you need from me that you are not getting?
• Are you worried you will make a mistake? I expect that you will make mistakes—that’s okay. I will show you the little spots where errors are likely to occur and what to watch out for.

The key is for you to kindly share your expectations for how she should be progressing and ask her how you can craft a plan to help her get there. Pretending everything is fine is not going to get either of you anywhere.

So bite the bullet and raise the issue. The sooner you do, the sooner you will know what’s what.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I was promoted to VP of sales a few months before the pandemic hit. I feel like I have been in an industrial washing machine ever since, and am just starting to come up for air. There was a lot of training at the beginning but then our entire book of business and go-to-market strategies shifted. It has been mayhem, but things are starting to settle now.

I have an amazing team. I physically moved in order to take over a new region, so all of my people are relatively new colleagues, which is nice. About two years ago, our company changed CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. [Note: This is the system that sales leaders and marketing use to gain visibility into prospects, contact info, opportunities/pipeline, forecasting, account plans, competitive intelligence, etc.]

The new system is fine; not any worse or better than the old one. My people have figured out how to make it work for them and comply with requirements. But there are exceptions.

One sales rep, who creates amazing relationships with his customers and crushes his quota, cannot for the life of him get his info into the system. It’s great when he suddenly brings in huge projects, but then there is a scramble to deliver on the contract. Then there’s another rep who puts everything into the system beautifully but can’t seem to get anything done other than that—and she certainly can’t close.

My boss is giving me a hard time about both of them, but very little guidance on how to get them to where they need to be. Thoughts?

CRM Conundrum

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(If you missed last week’s blog, Part 1 of the response can be found here. This is Part 2 of the response.)

Dear CRM Conundrum,

Last week we discussed how to deal with the rep who won’t use the CRM. Now let’s take a look at the other two situations you are dealing with.

1. One rep who is very good at CRM management but doesn’t seem to know how to actually sell.
2. A boss who isn’t very helpful.

Your rep who can’t sell probably needs some training on mechanics as well as a ton of support to boost her confidence. If she already has been through training, and can tell you what she should be doing but can’t seem to do it, you have a confidence issue. Perhaps she used to be good at selling and something happened that made her start doubting herself.  

However, if she’s never been successful, she probably doesn’t know exactly what to do and how to do it. Whatever your company’s sales training is, she will need to attend. She will also need super clear direction from you, and then extra time. If you can attend some of her sales calls with her as a fly on the wall and then give her feedback, that would be ideal. Or, if she could tag along with some of your superstars and see how they do it, that would also be great.

In the last post, I floated the idea that this rep might apprentice with your sales rock star who can’t (or won’t) use the CRM, and they could tutor each other on their strengths. Role play is also a terrific tool—it is much easier to say certain things if we’ve practiced.

If she was once great and lost her mojo, you’ll need to ask some open-ended questions to help her talk things through so that you can gain some insight into what is getting in her way. Ask questions like:

• What happened that shook your confidence?
• What do you think might be going on?
• What might help you get back on track?
• What would be helpful to you right now?
• What kind of help would feel right?

Make sure your employee knows that you are on her side, you really want her to win, and you’ll do anything in your power to help her get there. Help her build a step-by-step action plan that will get her to her goal.

If there is still no improvement over time, just as with your other situation, there will need to be consequences. Not everyone is cut out for sales and it won’t serve you to belabor things. If that is the case, the faster everyone comes to terms with a mismatch, the better off everyone will be.

Now. Let’s talk about the fact that your boss offers neither direction nor support, just a “hard time.” That isn’t a shocker, but it does mean you are probably on your own. If you are like most managers, you were promoted because you were an amazing salesperson, not because you demonstrated skill at managing people. The sad and kind of scary fact is that most managers are in their jobs for ten years before they get any kind of training. You sound like you have great instincts, but why learn by trial and error if you really don’t have to? There is no shortage of brilliant advice out there for new managers. Of course, I think ours is top notch, but I wouldn’t want to limit you. I guarantee your organization has some kind of training available. Attend. Pay attention. Take notes. Formulate intentions and practice new skills.

You are probably thinking you don’t have time. You won’t remember the opportunity cost of the time you took, and you will remember three or four tidbits that will change your work life. Your people will thank you and you won’t regret it. I promise.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I am the EVP of sales for a global professional services and SAS company. As you can imagine, we are reeling from the pandemic and the economic train wreck that seems to be coming at us. In the midst of this chaos, I have a long-tenured sales professional—let’s call her G—who is running amok. For many years, G has exceeded huge sales goals; therefore, she has a huge base salary. But for the past five years or so, G has fallen way short of goal.

About 18 months ago, her manager worked with G to recalibrate her goals and she agreed to all the points. She has achieved almost none of what was decided. Instead, she has been focusing on customers outside of her regional mandate. She has also put far too much time into developing strategic partnerships that are not useful to the organization. There are other problems I won’t get into.

The executive team agrees that G is a valuable employee and is willing to get her an executive coach. How would you recommend we go about it? We have provided coaching in the past without seeing quite the results we wanted. How can we ensure that the exorbitant expense will be worthwhile?

Need a Fix!

Dear Need a Fix,

I am so glad you asked. We have a lot of experience with this kind of thing. With clients, we call this Turnaround or Targeted coaching—but internally (don’t tell anyone) we call it Problem Child coaching. Even though our business is designed to offer coaching on a large scale, most clients who request this kind of thing want just one person coached. They want to fix someone who has been valuable but who has run into trouble. This used to be the definition of coaching: bringing in an outside professional to fix people. It was usually kicked off with assessments, which in my opinion do have their place in development but can’t be a substitute for a boss who is too spineless to tell it like it is.

Coaching has since evolved to be an invaluable tool for high performers and high potential employees who need to speed up their development. It almost always adds value and delivers exceptional results. We still do turnaround work, but we charge a lot because it is dangerous: it is time consuming and rarely yields the desired result. We really try to avoid selling expensive approaches that may very well not work—because, frankly, it’s bad for business. But when clients insist, we go in with eyes wide open and we are very upfront about the hazards.

At the risk of offending you, we would probably suggest you get a little coaching yourself to see if you can make the needed impact without the expense and potential insult of essentially forcing a coach on G. Ask yourself:

• What part have I played in this situation? What might I have done differently?
• How did I let this go on for so long? What kept me from setting proper boundaries and making direct requests?
• Are there any other situations where I might be doing this right now?
• How might I nip this kind of thing in the bud in the future?
• What changed for G—one minute she was a rock star and then she wasn’t? Did the market change? The company processes? Did she have some kind of personal problem she wasn’t able to recover from?
• Did G lose a key personal motivator? The science of motivation has taught us that we need the right mix in the areas of autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Was G suddenly tasked with learning a new software she just couldn’t master? Did she lose her best friend at work? Did she get a new boss who started breathing down her neck and micromanaging in such a way that put her on tilt?
• Am I willing to have a brutally honest conversation with G in which I just ask the questions and listen deeply to her answers?

In any event, working with a coach yourself will not be wasted time or effort.

Now, back to the problem of G. Why is Turnaround coaching such a rocky road? So many reasons.

Lack of clarity: We are often asked to have the coach give the client—in this case, G—feedback they have never heard before. Managers—in this case you—are often convinced that feedback and requests have been shared and clarified, but that is rarely the case. You may have said things clearly, but you would be surprised at how easy it is for some people to tune out what they don’t want to hear. What you think sounds like a request might have sounded like a suggestion to G. Your observations about unacceptable behaviors might have been mistaken for input rather than clear requests. Many managers are so worried about damaging the relationship that critical requests can easily end up soft-pedaled and unclear. So for the coaching to make a real difference, you must be prepared to give G crystal clear feedback on what she is doing or not doing that is not working, with crystal clear examples of what would be acceptable. Ask G to repeat it all back to you. Then have her put it in writing.

Lack of measurement: Often the boss is unable to identify desired results that are measurable. They claim they “will know success when they see it.” This is a madly waving red warning flag for us! The results we are looking for must be black and white. Either something is done correctly or it’s not. There can’t be any room for subjective opinions. We like to suggest an “always/never” list. Always do this. Never do that. It lends some real grit to the task at hand.

Lack of consequences for noncompliance: Change is hard. Most people need to truly understand the rationale behind the desired change—and even when they do, they need to feel the discomfort or even the pain of not changing. The neuroscience of goal achievement tells us that we are likely to take actions to avoid pain. The negative consequence for G not making the desired changes needs to be real—and dire. Demotion or actual termination is what I am talking about here. And it can’t be just a threat. You must be ready to do it.

Do you hate me yet? I kind of do. Did I say this was hazardous? Yes, I did.

It is hard to change perception: People tend to commit to their opinion of those who annoy them. Even if G does make significant changes, it might be hard for those around her to see and acknowledge the changes. It is very difficult to change stakeholders’ impressions, even in the face of direct evidence. So if you need to see changes in the way G works with others in the organization, she is going to have to discuss her coaching with each person and ask them for help—not only constant feedback when she reverts to old behaviors, but also a chance to shift on the fly. G is going to need to involve others in her quest to improve. This takes an awful lot of courage. She may or may not have it.

Sometimes it’s the fit: There is always a good chance that G is simply in the wrong job or the wrong organization. Maybe there have been so many changes around G that it will never be right. Some clients really should consider that what they need to be successful is a different environment. You need to be prepared for the possibility that the safe environment and soul searching she finds in coaching may result in her choosing to leave the organization. Sometimes this actually the best-case scenario.

Some people are not willing or able to change: There are many potential reasons why G is underperforming. Maybe she is trying to get back at someone. Maybe she has serious personal problems. Speculation is a waste of time, but the truth is that maybe G either isn’t willing to step up and do the work or just can’t. The coach will know within the first three months if G is committed—and G needs to know that the coach will have that conversation with her. Good coaches know when they are being “yessed.” The coach, in all good conscience, should end the coaching if that happens.
Nobody wants to think they need to be fixed: Do you? I sure don’t. So the whole thing needs to be set up carefully and G needs to know you have her best interests and her career success at heart.

Need a Fix, you might want to start by having a bona fide heart-to-heart with G. You may be able to avoid the whole coaching thing this way, especially considering you’ve already tried it. Maybe if G feels safe enough to explore what is true for her, you can reach some kind of resolution. It is worth a try.

Good luck—this is a tough one.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 150 coaches have worked with over 16,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services.

Dear Madeleine,

I lead a team at a global bank that is going through constant upheaval and change. I have used Blanchard’s change model in the past to try to meet my people where they are and address their concerns. The problem with the latest change is that I don’t have any answers for my people. I really have no idea what is going to happen next. I’ve tried to get answers from my own boss about strategic direction, but he is either clueless or just not talking.

I’m so tired of trying to take care of everyone. I feel like saying “Look, I don’t know any more than you do. Please just do the job in front of you and be patient.” I feel like I’m failing as a leader because I just don’t know what to do.

Leading in the Dark

Dear Leading in the Dark,

Uncertainty is so uncomfortable. Neuroscience research reveals that we get flooded with stress hormones in the face of constant uncertainty and it does make it hard to persevere. You are experiencing that your people need to be talked off the ledge all the time, and it just takes it out of you.

For some perspective, I offer the story of Ernest Shackleton. He headed up an expedition to the South Pole during which his ship was crushed in the ice. He led his crew through quite extraordinary hardships and, remarkably, did not lose a single man. He didn’t know what the heck he was doing at any given moment either, but he kept a good attitude. This might make you feel better because at least none of your folks are going to starve, freeze to death, or drown.

I realize this sounds like I am being facetious, but I really am not. It is important to continually remind yourself that (generally, stock market crashes aside) nobody dies in banking. The most important thing you can do for your people is to do whatever you can to stay calm. Act as if everything is fine until you have definitive evidence that it isn’t. If you stay calm, your people will stay calm. So breathe, go for walks, meditate, play music in your office—anything you can do to get a grip and lighten the mood will be helpful.

Next, get your team involved in finding a way to deal with the uncertainty. You shouldn’t have to carry all of this by yourself. You are absolutely allowed to say “Look, I don’t know any more than you do. Please just do the job in front of you and be patient.” Your people aren’t children, so treat them like grownups and get them involved in figuring out how you can all thrive in this crazy environment. Sit down with the whole team and make a big flip chart picture of what you all can control and what is out of your control. Gain agreement as a group to stay focused on what you—as a team and as individuals—can control. Agree that you will all redirect each other to stay focused on what is within your control at any given moment.

Finally, get everyone focused on what is working and what they do well. If you use team meeting time to focus on the positive, you will literally change their brain chemistry. For example:

• Have everyone point out people they enjoy partnering with to get things done.
• Ask each person to list two of their top skills and how they are able to leverage them in their job.
• Get each team member to take the VIA Character Strengths assessment and share the results with the team. It is free and fun.

You may have some nay-sayers who give you a hard time (there’s always at least one in every bunch). Who cares? At least you’re being creative by trying to lift everyone’s spirits instead of just being a victim of circumstances.

You can get through this, Leading in the Dark—and you and your team will be the stronger for it when you all get to the other side.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Drawing a page from his newly released third edition of Leading at a Higher Level, bestselling business author Ken Blanchard asks senior leaders, “Have you set up your organization to be high performing?”

Blanchard identifies seven focus areas to make sure that a company is positioned to be the employer of choice, provider of choice, investment of choice, and corporate citizen of choice.

1. Information and Open Communication—people have easy access to the information they need to do their job effectively. Plans and decisions are communicated so that they are clearly understood.
   
2. Compelling Vision: Purpose and Values—leadership is aligned around a shared vision and values. People have passion around a shared purpose and values.
   
3. Ongoing Learning—people are actively supported in the development of new skills and competencies. The organization continually incorporates new learning into standard ways of doing business.
   
4. Relentless Focus on Customer Results—everyone maintains the highest standards of quality and service. All work processes are designed to make it easier for customers.
   
5. Energizing Systems and Structures—systems and structures, are integrated and aligned. Formal and informal practices make it easy for people to get their jobs done.
   
6. Shared Power and High Involvement—people have an opportunity to influence decisions that affect them. Teams are used as a vehicle for accomplishing work and influencing decisions.
   
7. Leadership—leaders think that leading is about serving, not being served. Leaders remove barriers to help people focus on their work and their customers.

Blanchard also offers a quick 14-question quiz and a link to a 60-page Leading at a Higher Level eBook summarizing the key points.

You can access both here at Blanchard’s recent blog post.

Dear Madeleine,

I started a new job as a senior leader for a large manufacturing firm about four months ago—and I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the disaster I’ve walked into. All I heard about when I first came on was how much everyone loved my predecessor, how smart he was, how much he got done, and how much fun he was. It seemed that he generated incredible results. He sounded like Superman.

The further I got into the details, the more clear it was to me that the results were, indeed, incredible—because they were faked! But get this: he wasn’t fired, he quit. So nobody, including senior leadership, knows about this.

To make matters worse, he was everybody’s best friend. He never set goals with his people, gave feedback, or did performance reviews. He somehow charmed HR into letting him off the hook, but now I am being held accountable and my people aren’t used to anyone actually acting like a boss.

I don’t want to trash this guy—it wouldn’t make me any friends and it just isn’t my thing. But how on earth am I supposed to get things back on track here without making people hate me?

New Guy

Dear New Guy,

The last time I worked with a client in this position, she thought she was alone—but it turned out that the wool hadn’t been pulled over everyone’s eyes. I’ll bet if you diplomatically poke around, you will find the same thing. When the emperor has no clothes, there are always a few people who can see it.

It’s imperative that you come clean with your boss and your HR business partner. You can’t fight this fight alone. You may find out that they know all about it—that your predecessor was, in fact, fired, and they are testing you. That would be messed up, but I’ve seen it happen. However, if the news is all a big surprise to them, you will want to be gentle and stick to the facts. No need to call anyone names or place blame. Just share what you have uncovered as dispassionately and objectively as possible. Either way, you’ll create a few allies and buy yourself a little time to become the model manager.

Then do what you can to figure out what the true past results should have been and share that information upward. Your team doesn’t really need to know, and you might be able to preserve their fond idea of him.

Once you get a sense of the actual results, you can set your goal numbers a little above those—at least for starters. Approach your team by talking about team goals at first. You don’t have to trash the big faker; just talk about yourself. Share that you are goal oriented and a fan of goals and goal setting. Heck, show them this video of Ken Blanchard talking about it. Teach your people how to set goals and make it clear that you expect everyone on the team to have their own. You can also share your experience with giving feedback to help people stay on track.

Make clear that you think it is your job to help the business succeed by helping your people to succeed, and you want nothing more than each person’s success. Be kind. Be fair. Be patient. Go slowly and carefully and you will be okay. Yes, people may still hate you at first, but once they see you truly mean them no harm, they will stop hating you. And just remember, none of it is personal.

Forge ahead, do as well as you can, and stay positive. Everything is going to be okay.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Best-selling business author Scott Blanchard says managers who are effective at goal setting with their people keep two things in mind:

1. The big picture—why we are doing it and what matters about it?
2. The short term—what do we need to do now to move forward toward the larger goal?

Blanchard gives an example of this process:

“I just finished some work with a fairly large organization that has sixteen general managers. I asked if I could interview two of the GMs who were achieving the best results. Even though I interviewed them independently, their approach to goal setting was remarkably similar.

“Both of these GMs set big goals and have clear expectations with their people that the goals will be met. They also stress the importance and discipline of a weekly Monday meeting to discuss with their team what’s in front of them this week, what they can handle, and what they need to do to accomplish the larger goal. They succeed in the long run by focusing on the short run and connecting the two.”

Blanchard says another important key for successful goal setting is resilience—the ability to adjust when things don’t progress as planned.

“Rarely do things go exactly as planned. But too often when things go awry, instead of talking about what can be done to get things back on track, people come to a full stop.

“My clients referred to what they call “mental toughness”: the ability to keep performing when things change, go sour, or take longer than planned. Early in the process, teams are primed with the mindset that things aren’t always going to go smoothly—and they are given ways to respond in the moment to achieve the best possible result. Goal setting is not meant to be static. If the team is stuck or heading in the wrong direction, the manager works with them to restate the goal and make adjustments.”

Blanchard also emphasizes that regular check-ins are especially important when the goal is new, difficult, or one the team has not achieved successfully in the past. “When a team is focusing on something new or challenging, frequent check-ins with the manager are essential. As the team gains confidence and demonstrates competence, these meetings can be scheduled further apart.

“In both our SLII® and our First-time Manager programs we teach that once goals are set, managers need to check in with team members on a regular basis to remind them what they are trying to accomplish and why it matters. Managers also need to take opportunities to have praising conversations when things are going well and redirection conversations when things deviate from the plan.  

“Over time, as people become more confident and trusted, the manager can delegate more and pull back on the frequency and intensity of these conversations. As people become self-reliant, the manager can turn over the responsibility for achieving the goals to the individual or the team.”

It’s all part of seeing the leader/direct report relationship as a partnership, explains Blanchard.

“It’s about working side by side with people—providing direction and support in a way that lets them grow into their autonomy. For example, when a salesperson is working for a sales manager, their goals are interdependent. As the salesperson demonstrates an increased capacity to achieve the goal, the manager can direct a little less and use more of a coaching style. Instead of telling, the manager is asking and listening.

“Setting goals is a foundation for success,” says Blanchard, “and having clear agreements about performance expectations, with regular check-ins, is the process for getting there. Obstacles that can undermine relationships and results are a lack of clarity and a lack of clear agreement.

“When things really matter, effective managers make the effort to ensure the team is crystal clear on goals and procedures. This takes extra time at the beginning of a project, but it will pay dividends in the long term. Plus, it sets a process in place that the team can use on future projects.

“That’s a win-win for everybody,” says Blanchard.

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Would you like to learn more about helping your managers develop their goal-setting, direction, and support skills? Then join Scott Blanchard for a free webinar!

3 Steps to Building a Purposeful, Aligned, and Engaged Workforce

February 20, 2019, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

In this webinar, best-selling business author Scott Blanchard will share a 3-step process for creating a focused, purpose-driven, and engaged work environment. Blanchard will show participants how to

• Set clear goals at the individual, team, department, and organizational level
• Identify motivation and competency for identified tasks
• Ask for—or provide—the resources needed to get the job done

This webinar is designed for leadership, learning, and talent development professionals charged with improving leadership skills and overall organizational performance. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to create a focused, purposeful, and aligned work environment in your organization.

Use this link to register today!

Measuring the Impact and ROI of Leadership Training, a new ebook just published by The Ken Blanchard Companies, shows how training and development professionals can calculate an estimated return on a proposed training initiative by looking at the bottom-line impact of better leadership in three areas: employee retention, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity. Utilizing Blanchard’s ROI methodology, readers will be able to demonstrate that leadership development programs produce a return on investment of at least 8:1 after program participants adopt new skills.

More discoveries from the ebook:

• Better leadership practices reduce voluntary turnover by up to 32 percent.
• Better leadership practices improve customer satisfaction scores by up to three percentage points—the equivalent of 1 percent of annual sales. That equals $1 million in increased revenue for companies with $100 million in sales.
• The largest benefit of better leadership skills is improved employee productivity. Citing a case study with a large financial service firm, the ebook identifies that better leadership practices can generate productivity improvement of between 5 and 12 percent. When calculated as a percentage of annual payroll using the same $100 million dollar company, that’s an amount equal to at least $2 million per year!

According to the new ebook, leadership training generates a large return on investment because of the multiplier effect. When organizations train one manager, it creates an improved work environment for seven or more individual contributors who report to that manager.

Leadership, learning, and talent development professionals who want to learn more about calculating the impact of their proposed training initiatives can download the on-demand ebook from The Ken Blanchard Companies for free! Use this link: Measuring the Impact and ROI of Leadership Training.

Why? What causes some people to fully commit to the team and give their max effort while others don’t?

It’s trust.

In research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies and Training Magazine, over 60% of respondents say the most important factor influencing the effort they give to a team is how much they trust their fellow teammates.

Having high trust in your teammates frees you up to focus on your own contributions without worrying about others following through on their commitments. Trusting your team gives you freedom to take risks, knowing your teammates have your back and will support you. Team trust allows you to have open and honest dialogue and healthy debate that leads to better decision-making, and conflict gets resolved productively instead of people sandbagging issues or sabotaging the efforts of others.

But developing trust in your teammates doesn’t happen by accident; it takes an intentional effort to proactively build trust. There are three major areas to consider in fostering team trust:

Team Leadership Behaviors—The team leader needs to focus on behaviors that provide the right blend of direction and support for individual team members as well as the team as a whole. It’s a delicate balance between the two, because too much focus on directive behavior can lead to micromanaging and the squashing of team member initiative and morale. Leaning too much on supportive behaviors can result in a lax culture where accountability is absent and team productivity is diminished. When team members receive balanced leadership, clear expectations, praise and recognition for achievements, and seeing their leader act in ways that show he/she has the team’s best interests in mind, they are willing to pledge their trust to that leader and their teammates.

Team Culture & Norms—High-trust teams have clear operating norms and a distinctive culture that fosters the development of trust. Decision-making processes are a particularly important aspect of a team’s culture. Processes that allow for open sharing of information, encouraging divergent point of views, and fostering healthy debate among team members are all trustworthy actions a team can build into their day-to-day operations.

Personal Trustworthiness—Trust starts with you. If we expect others to grant us trust, then we have to prove ourselves worthy of trust. There are four primary ways we show we our trustworthy. The first is through our ability. Demonstrating competence in our work gives others confidence that we are skilled and knowledgeable and will be able to pull our weight on the team. The second way we demonstrate trustworthiness is by showing we are believable. When we give our word, people can believe it. They know we are honest, act with integrity, and behave in alignment with our values. The third way to show we are worthy of trust is to care about others. People want to know they matter and that their team members care about them as individuals, not just anonymous co-workers. Developing rapport, putting the needs of others ahead of our own, and giving praise and recognition are ways to show our care for others. Finally, the fourth way to demonstrate trustworthiness is being dependable. Dependability means you behave consistently, follow through on commitments, are accountable, and will be there in the clutch when your team needs you.

I think Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski sums it up best in his book, Leading with the Heart, the power that trust brings to teams and organizations:

“In leadership, there are no words more important than trust. In any organization, trust must be developed among every member of the team if success is going to be achieved.” ~ Mike Krzyzewski

Randy Conley is the Vice President of Client Services and Trust Practice Leader at The Ken Blanchard Companies. His LeaderChat posts appear the fourth or last Thursday of every month. For more insights on trust and leadership, visit Randy at his Leading with Trust blog or follow him on Twitter @RandyConley.

“Part of effective communication between manager and direct report is a mindset and part is a skillset. Both are required,” says Phillips. “It’s easy for managers to convince themselves they don’t have time for quality conversations, especially when they aren’t particularly interested in having them and don’t really know how to do it.

“Every manager I’ve worked with has so much of their own work to do all day, every day, that some can’t see their way clear to spending time with the folks who work for them—other than performance reviews, rushed interactions, or crises,” explains Phillips. “Conversations between these managers and their people are mostly manager-led directives of ‘this is what I want you to do; here’s how to do it.’ The manager is focused on getting stuff done and on what needs to happen—not on their direct reports’ career growth or needs.

“Unfortunately, when individual contributors in this scenario become managers, they treat people exactly the way they were treated. Sub-quality conversations become a cultural norm.”

The good news, according to Phillips, is that managers can learn to be more effective in their work conversations.

“If a manager has the right mindset and training, it’ll drive the right behavior,” says Phillips. She recommends focusing on three specific conversations to get started.

The Goal-Setting Conversation

“All good performance begins with clear goals. Effective goal-setting conversations begin with clarity—what to do, by when, and what a good job looks like,” says Phillips. “Be specific—and don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s critically important to take the time to make sure both parties are interpreting the same words in the same way to avoid misunderstandings.

“Conversations and relationships can go sideways when people interpret things differently but don’t have a conversation about that interpretation. Never assume!”

This leads to the second important conversation at which managers need to excel—giving feedback.

The Feedback Conversation

“A friend of mine recently told me I tend to hijack conversations,” says Phillips. “The funny thing is, I was just about to tell her she does the same thing! We discovered that what I interpret as hijacking and what she interprets as hijacking are two different things.

“We talked about how, when she’s talking and pauses to think, I rush in to fill the empty space.  It goes back to my experience at home. In my family, you talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, and there are no pauses. So when my friend goes silent, I fill in the gap and start talking about something.

“Then I explained to her that I feel she hijacks the conversation when I tell her about something happening in my life and she immediately turns it into a discussion about something that’s happening in her life. It’s related, but it still feels to me like she is making it about her.

“Because we are committed to our friendship, we’re willing to discuss things that are uncomfortable and to consider each other’s point of view. That’s important at work, too. Managers and direct reports need to have the type of relationship where they can talk honestly. When a manager cares about a direct report as a human being—and vice versa—they build up an emotional bank account they can draw from.  That allows them to have difficult conversations when they need to.”

Sadly, the word feedback has a negative connotation in business today, says Phillips.

“People seldom think of feedback as praise or recognition. When people hear that word, they think at best it’s going to be constructive criticism. But it rarely feels constructive—it just feels like criticism.

“It’s another area where most managers don’t have the skills they need—especially feedback around performance improvement and redirection. Managers are so concerned about how someone might respond to feedback, they tend to avoid it altogether.”

One way managers can be more successful when preparing to give feedback is to make sure they are coming at it from the right place.

“Your feedback can’t be based on your own personal agenda,” says Phillips. “It has to be about helping other people be successful or otherwise improving the team. If you come from a personal agenda, your feedback will come across poorly.

“In my conversation with my friend, she gave me the feedback about the way I hijack conversations because she wanted our conversations to be better.  I knew that, and it gave me a chance to think about my behavior and run it over in my mind. That was a good learning for me—to recognize that behavior I picked up from my family might be misinterpreted when I’m dealing with other people.”

The One-on-One Conversation

Listening and focusing on the other person’s agenda is especially important when managers conduct one-on-one conversations with their direct reports, says Phillips.

“It’s easy to fall into the manager’s agenda, where one-on-ones can turn into a review of how the direct report is doing on each of their goals. At The Ken Blanchard Companies, we teach managers to schedule semi-monthly one-on-ones, where the agenda is driven by the individual contributor and what they need.”

The manager’s primary role is to listen and provide support, says Phillips.  Senior leaders are generally better at this than are new managers.

“At the senior levels of an organization, a VP typically will have more experience asking a direct report how things are going and finding out what the direct report needs to succeed. As you move down to the frontlines of an organization, managers are less experienced at taking the lead in a conversation like that.”

Especially at the frontlines, Phillips observes, managers and supervisors need training in how to have effective one-on-one conversations. Otherwise, the direct report is likely to default to the manager and ask the manager what they want talk about.

“It’s important to teach managers to ask open-ended questions about what an individual contributor’s needs are. Suppose the direct report comes into the meeting with a blank piece of paper and says, ‘What do you want talk about?’ The manager should take that opening and say, ‘Let’s talk about some things you are working on. Let’s list the three or four tasks, discuss your development level, and talk about how I can help you.’ Eventually, that direct report will become more proactive and learn to take the lead in those conversations.”

It’s a process and a joint responsibility—one where everybody benefits, says Phillips.

“Leaders influence through the power of their conversations. Train your managers—and your individual contributors—in the skills they need for more effective conversations at work. It’s one of the best ways to improve performance and satisfaction.”

Would you like to learn more about improving the quality and frequency of conversations in your organization?  Then join us for a free webinar!

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT 101: 3 CONVERSATIONS ALL MANAGERS NEED TO MASTER

Wednesday, August 1, 2018, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Managers influence and lead through the words they use and the communication skills they apply. In this webinar, Blanchard senior consulting partner Ann Phillips will share the three types of conversations managers must know how to conduct.

1. The Goal-Setting Conversation—how to set goals collaboratively with a focus on motivation.
2. The Feedback Conversation—how to praise performance when it is aligned and how to redirect performance when it is off track.
3. The One-on-One Conversation—how to set aside time to hear from direct reports using high levels of inquiry and listening.

Don’t miss this opportunity to evaluate how your organization is currently addressing performance management. Learn the elements of masterful performance management and how to apply these principles in your own organization. Ann will share tips and strategies you can put into practice immediately. The event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Register today!

Dear Madeleine,

I know you have heard it before, but I just don’t know what to do about the amount of email I get. I cannot possibly attend to it all.

I am constantly showing up at meetings and facing the question “Did you read my email?”

The answer is almost always no, but people expect me to be up to speed and I am embarrassed. I am pretty sure that if I really spent the time I need to deal with email, it would take another 3 hours—and I am already working 10- to 12-hour days.

My team feels the same way, yet we continue to drown.

Drowning

Dear Drowning,

I have heard it—a lot—and I am right there with you. Just when I think I have it figured out, I am once again way behind. And god forbid you come down with the flu and are out of commission for a few days. I don’t know about you, but more business messages are now coming via social media and text, adding to the pileup.

You don’t say what level you are in your organization, so it is hard to tell how much power you might have to affect organizational email policy. You can certainly raise the issue with the powers that be to make that happen, as many organizations have. But you do have immediate control over your team, so I highly recommend you start there. Get together and brainstorm some team protocols to help you manage the onslaught. Examples are:

• Make sure that all email communication is somehow connected to team’s goals and outcomes.
• Use interoffice IM for quick questions.
• When possible, use the subject line to get the message across; e.g., Blue Team not required at Thursday staff meeting; details upon request.
• Use the subject line to indicate level of urgency; e.g., ACTION NEEDED for Friday’s presentation; or FYI only; or URGENT: 12-hour deadline.
• Only send email to the people who really need it. Step away from the cc and the reply all.
• Use your Out of Office when you have a day of back-to-back meetings to manage expectations.
• Find ways to shorten emails to get salient points across efficiently. At Blanchard, we use “ABC” and it works really well: Action Needed, Background, Conclusion. Do not send an email unless you can boil down your thoughts into 3 lines.

There are a lot of great ideas in The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before it Manages You, and of course there are other excellent books. The thing is that we are all in this mess together and we can agree on some ways to cope that will serve all of us. As the leader of your team, you can take a stand.

You can make your own rules, too, and share them with your team. I work with someone who has made it clear that he will not read anything on which he is cc’d. His staff expected him to stay abreast of all their dealings by reading everything he was cc’d on, and finally he asked everyone to compile a quick list of everything they think he needed to know and send it along once a week.

So put some method to madness. You can do it. In the meantime, stop blaming yourself and being embarrassed. If you haven’t read an email, the answer is, “Nope, haven’t gotten to it, sorry.” I guarantee you aren’t the only one.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

In working with clients on setting One Minute Goals, Blanchard would often have managers and their direct reports identify their top five goals separately and then compare them.

As Ken Blanchard tells it, “Any similarity between the two lists was purely coincidental—especially later in the year.” In most cases, the work priorities were rank ordered quite differently by manager and direct report, with some important goals missing.

Digging into causes, Blanchard found that a day-to-day emphasis by managers on tasks that were urgent, but not necessarily important, was often to blame. Managers tended to focus on short-term issues when delivering feedback, which caused important long-term goals to fade into the background. Only when performance review came around were the long-term goals reidentified. Of course, by then it was often too late to make any real progress. The result was missed targets and, often, hard feelings.

Don’t let this happen with your team. In addition to setting clear goals at the beginning of the year, take some time, at least quarterly, to check in on what you are emphasizing as urgent.  Maybe priorities have changed.  Maybe the goals are outdated.

Good goal setting is not a once-a-year process.  In the best organizations, goals are reviewed on a regular basis and updated as needed.  Once goals are set, be sure to continually manage and review performance to stay on track throughout the year.

But this isn’t true, says Paul Leone, senior ROI consultant at Verizon and author of the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact: Bridging the Gap between Training and Business Results. In Leone’s experience, financial executives are receptive when anyone in an organization shows that money being spent is producing a return.

“Senior executives just want to make sure money is well spent. They are not necessarily looking to reject the proposal. If it will generate results, it’s in everybody’s interest for the organization to do it.”

It’s important for HR and L&D professionals to realize that they are not the only ones coming in with proposals based on assumptions, says Leone. Even the most tangible projects are based on best-guess scenarios.

“Let’s suppose marketing is proposing spending budget making a commercial. They have to ask for budget just like any other department. So they do some predictive analytics and some research, but in the end they are making an educated guess that the commercial will produce an uptick in sales.”

L&D professionals shouldn’t feel that everyone else is going in with rock-solid assumptions and metrics, says Leone. Everyone is in the same boat more than they realize.

“Maybe it’s because we come from the social sciences or a more academic background. Maybe we tend to be harder on ourselves or hold ourselves to a higher standard—almost as if we think we need to write a thesis or a dissertation. That’s not the case. We just need to show value.

“I can honestly say that I think it’s safer to bet on a training experience to improve performance than to take a chance on a commercial. We are adding bottom-line value with training—it’s just that we never measure it.”

When Leone looks at the typical measurements organizations can use to measure the impact of leadership training—employee retention, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity—he recommends a rank order on how to use each of these common measures to make the case for training.

“Productivity is the best and most immediate indicator of training impact. If you send someone to training, increased productivity can happen as fast as the next week or the next month. That’s where your business case should focus. Key in on performance indicators that produce revenue, cut costs, or avoid future costs.

“Customer satisfaction is also good to show, but it’s second down from productivity. In many organizations, there’s not a dollar value assigned to customer satisfaction.

“Employee retention is number three because it is long-term. By the time you show that your training had a positive effect on employee retention, so many other things over the same period of time could’ve happened in the business that could take credit for that.”

When measuring programs designed to increase the effectiveness of leaders, Leone reminds practitioners to focus on improvements made by the direct reports of the leader in question.

“A leader’s productivity is really an accumulation of their direct reports’ productivity. I’m not talking about the leader’s ability to make better presentations, better speeches, or better contributions to teams—even though those things could be counted as gains in productivity. I measure the impact of leadership training performance by looking at increases in direct reports’ performance and productivity. I look to see how these leaders are impacting their frontline people who have the tangible Key Performance Indicators we are tracking every day—sales, repeat calls, phone-ins, customer satisfaction, and the like.”

Leone is also passionate about what he calls Level Six measurement—identifying factors that lead to high levels of ROI.

“After a training event, certain factors in a training participant’s immediate work environment can make or break your training initiative’s overall impact. These factors have nothing to do with your training content, or your trainers, or with how well you planned out your delivery. This is about the manager that the training participant is returning to in the workplace.

“We conducted a recent training where the overall return on investment was about 6 percent—a modest positive return.  But when we focused on a subgroup of 50 people who reported to one specific manager, we found that group had an 1800 percent return on investment! This was directly attributable to what the manager was doing with participants after the training—things like bursts, boosts, contests, and sit-downs, with the manager shadowing people to see if they were handling the calls in the way they had been trained.”

For leadership, learning, and talent development professionals still on the fence about including projected impact numbers in their training proposals, Leone offers encouragement.

“You always get the biggest bang for your buck with leadership training, because you’re sending one person through and influencing the ten people who report to that person. You’re paying for one person and influencing so many others.

“Don’t be afraid to measure the impact of your training. If you don’t, people will never know the value you bring to the organization. Speak up and show your value!”

Would you like to learn more about calculating ROI and measuring the impact of training?  Then join us for a free webinar!

Leadership Training—Calculating ROI and Measuring Impact

November 29, 2017, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Improving leadership skills is one of the best ways to impact your organization’s bottom line. Still, many leadership, learning, and talent development professionals struggle to identify the expected return on investment for training expenditures and to measure impact after an initiative.

In this webinar, David Witt, program director at The Ken Blanchard Companies, teams up with Dr. Paul Leone, author of the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact: Bridging the Gap between Training and Business Results to show you how to identify anticipated fiscal impact of a leadership training initiative and how to measure it in a cost-effective manner after the training is finished.

You’ll learn:

• How to calculate the return on investment for your leadership training initiative using Blanchard’s Leadership Training ROI Worksheet. (The worksheet will be provided to all registrants.)
• How to measure the impact of training using the methodology outlined in the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact
• How to improve the adoption of new leadership practices from the classroom to the work environment

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to quantify the impact of leadership training in proposals—and how to set up your training to deliver on expectations.

Register today!

“We have to look at leadership as a two-sided coin,” says Fowler. “Some people in organizations don’t realize that the quality of their work experience depends on their being a good follower. They don’t know how to manage up—to help their leaders give them what they need to get their work done.

“As a result, leaders are left to guess what their people need, and they often don’t guess correctly.  Direct reports must accept responsibility for knowing and communicating to their manager what they need to succeed.”

Fowler believes communication is important in every relationship—and especially those in the workplace.

“The importance of communication in our personal lives can’t be overstated. But we don’t expect our significant others or our friends to always know what we need—we have to communicate it,” says Fowler. “So why do we expect our leaders, who don’t know us nearly as well, to always understand exactly what we need?”

In a work environment where managers have two or more direct reports, each working on different tasks, it can be even more difficult for managers to know the needs of their people.  “It’s unfair to expect a manager with multiple direct reports to figure out what each individual needs, let alone always provide it.”

The key to effective leadership is to see it as a partnership process and to use a common language, says Fowler.

“The good news is that we can teach people how to be good partners in leadership. We can teach individuals to ask for feedback, collaborate on making goals SMART, and go beyond problem spotting to problem solving.

“Our Situational Leadership® II program helps leaders understand that they need to be flexible and match their leadership style to the development needs of their direct reports.  In our Self Leadership program, we teach individual contributors the mindset and skillset to communicate what they need.  When direct reports can meet their leader halfway, the potential for achieving goals and peak performance improve exponentially.”

Having direct reports become more active in the management process can take some getting used to. After all, it can be a little unsettling when people start telling you what they need from you.  But Fowler says that managers whose direct reports have gone through Self Leadership training actually experience a profound sense of relief.

“Imagine,” Fowler says, “if a direct report comes up to a manager and explains, ‘I’m clear on what you want from me, but given that I’ve never done this task before, I need clarity, direction, and an action plan on how to do it.’ Everyone wins when people have the mindset and the skillset to diagnose their situation and ask for what they need. You avoid wasted time and missed expectations.”

Fowler shares three skills from the Self Leadership program that direct reports can use to meet their managers halfway. These skills are parallel with what is taught in Blanchard’s Situational Leadership® II program.

Goal Setting. “Self leaders learn how to clarify a goal that isn’t specific, measurable, or trackable, how to negotiate a goal if it is not attainable or relevant, and how to reframe a goal if it isn’t optimally motivating for them.”

Diagnosing Development Level. “Who better to diagnose an individual’s development level than the individual themselves? Self leaders learn how to diagnose their own competence and commitment on a goal and how to share their development level with their manager.”

Asking for what you need. “This means being able to say ‘Here is my development level and here is the matching leadership style I need from you.’ Self leaders learn how to use the same language and the same model as their managers, which makes one on one conversations more effective.”

“When direct reports become better at self leadership, they enable their managers to be better leaders,” says Fowler. “Research has proven that when the direct report proactively asks for feedback, the feedback is more likely to be received and acted upon in real time.”

Fowler admits that seeing leadership as a partnership requires a shift in perception—especially within organizations that believe managers have primary responsibility for the performance management equation.

“The focus on the manager as the seat of power is a relic of the old command-and-control approach to leadership,” Fowler explains. “When top leaders believe the only people who need training are those in a position of authority, it limits opportunities for creativity, innovation, and optimally motivated employees. Why not train both sides of the equation? Continue to invest in your managers, but leverage your investment by training the other side of the partnership—the direct reports. Don’t ignore half the equation. Make effective leadership everyone’s job.”

Interested in learning more about leadership as a partnership?  Join Fowler for a free webinar!

Self Leadership: The Rest of the Story

Online—September 28, 2017

In this webinar, bestselling author Susan Fowler reveals three key strategies for taking advantage of your organization’s greatest secret weapon—individual contributors. Leadership works best when it is a partnership. Managers and direct reports both have roles to play. Don’t suffer the opportunity loss of just training one-half of the equation. Discover the power of equipping both managers and direct reports with the mindset and skillset to set goals, diagnose development level, and match leadership style.

Register for this free webinar today!

Without a clear sense of the positive financial impact, it’s easy for a leader to dismiss a new proposal as being too disruptive, too expensive, or too time consuming.

An analysis of more than 200 organizations by The Ken Blanchard Companies found that every year of delay in improving leadership skills costs the typical organization an amount equal to 7 percent of their total annual sales.  This represents millions of dollars each year—because poor leadership behaviors not only increase the loss of high potential employees, they also lower the employee work passion and productivity of the people who remain with the company.

Employee Retention

Research originally conducted by Leigh Branham, a leading authority on turnover and retention and author of The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, identified that at least 9 percent and possibly as much as 32 percent of an organization’s voluntary turnover can be avoided through better leadership skills. Branham, who partnered with Pricewaterhouse Coopers in conducting the study, identifies that trust, hope, worth, and competence are at the core of most voluntary separations.  When employees are not getting their needs met in these key areas, they begin to look elsewhere.

Employee Work Passion

Research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies using its Employee Work Passion Assessment has found significant correlation between positive work intentions and a leader’s ability to build trust, use coaching behaviors, and create an engaging work environment. This environment includes high levels of Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Growth, Fairness, Collaboration, and Feedback, along with six other factors (see complete list here.) Failure in any of these areas on the part of the leader leads to lowered intentions on the part of employees to perform at a high level, apply discretionary effort, remain with an organization, endorse it to others, and act as a good corporate citizen.

Employee Productivity

Providing employees with the tools, resources, direction, and support they need to perform at their best is the key to creating a high performance work environment. Research conducted by Dr. Paul Leone with a large Fortune 100 financial services company involving 300 managers and 1,200 direct reports found a 5 to 12 percent increase in productivity among direct reports of managers who attended leadership development training and immediately began using the new skills they had learned.

Leadership Impacts the Bottom Line

Leadership matters! After all, leaders help employees set goals. Leaders make sure those goals are in alignment with overall corporate strategy. And leaders are responsible for providing the direction and support employees need to succeed on a daily basis.

Even though a leadership development initiative—like any change—can be disruptive, difficult, and financially challenging, taking no action is often the most expensive option of all.

Most executives instinctively know that strong leadership is essential for overall organizational success. By evaluating and improving leadership practices throughout their organization, leadership, learning, and talent development professionals can remove a persistent drain on financial performance and allow their organizations to grow and thrive.

# # #

Want to learn more about quantifying the impact of leadership training?  Join us for a free webinar!

Making the Business Case for Leadership Training

Thursday, August 24, 2017 at 9:00 am Pacific Daylight Time

Organizations lose millions of dollars each year due to poorly trained leaders. In this webinar, David Witt, researcher and author of The Ken Blanchard Companies eBook 7 Ways Poor Leaders Are Costing Your Company Money, will share how poor managerial behaviors negatively impact engagement, alignment, productivity, and employee retention.

Drawing on original research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies, Dave will explore:

• The 7 biggest gaps between employee expectations and leader behaviors
• The 3 ways to measure the bottom-line impact of leadership training
• The 5 keys to leadership training that works

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to evaluate your current level of leadership readiness, how to measure the impact of your leadership development, and how to get started on deploying training that makes an immediate difference. The event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Register here!

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Each of these one-word questions can push organizational leaders and their team members toward the clarity they need to achieve success. In this post I’d like to focus on who and what.

When leaders set clear expectations, outcomes are much more likely to hit the mark. And it’s just as important for leaders to set milestones en route to the outcome. Doing so keeps people on track by helping them get the support and redirection they need when they need it, which sets them up for success so that they do their best work and hit their deadlines.

At this point it is helpful for a coach to ask what questions, such as:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• What is the scope?
• What will it cover?
• What is left out?
• What are we not doing?

Stating clear expectations, however, is just the start. The next step is for leaders to create clear agreements with others about what is expected. This is where who questions come into play. Let me share a recent example.

I coached a leader who acknowledged that when setting expectations, her team often sees things differently than she does. So instead of just addressing what, she also expands her discussions with team members by including who questions. Some great who questions include:

• Who will be responsible for what?
• Who will talk to whom?
• Who will report to whom?
• Who will follow up with whom?
• Who will be left holding the bag?

By using both what and who questions, leaders can provide better clarity, accountability, and agreement—all of which provide the foundation for shared success!

Rather than be annoyed with team members, or just doing the work yourself, consider how a combination of what and who questions can help you fill the gap between your perspective and the perspective of others to provide clarity and shared agreement.

About the Author

Mary Ellen Sailer, Ed.D., is a Coaching Solutions Partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team. Since 2000, Blanchard’s 120 coaches have worked with over 15,000 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services. And check out Coaching Tuesday every week at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

Here are five of the most important techniques coaches use in their conversations with clients.

Consider how these techniques could help the managers in your organization be more coach-like in their communication style.

• Be fully present. Practice being fully present in your conversations with people. Avoid distractions, give undivided attention, and show you care. Of course, we all know this is easier said than done—but this alone can go a long way toward building trust.

• Get, and keep, the conversation focused. It is easier to help a direct report move forward, faster, if they are the one who declares a specific focus for the discussion. Having them establish a focus creates a more deliberate and intentional conversation. Keep in mind there will be times when the conversation goes off topic. When it does, the manager is expected to get the conversation back on track.

• Ask mostly open-ended questions, especially those starting with what and how. Open-ended questions promote discovery for the other person. The most essential questions coaches ask are what and how questions that help direct reports discover their own answers or course of action.

• Stay action focused. Help the direct report create a plan of action that will move them forward. Share coaching questions such as “What do you think you need to do now?” As much as possible, keep the ownership of the plan, and any actions, in the direct report’s court. Actions they take may turn out to be excellent growth opportunities. Keeping the ball in the other court allows managers to get on to other things on their to-do list.

• Follow up. Check in with direct reports on their progress, their learnings, and any challenges they might be facing. Doing this helps them keep what they said they would do top of mind. It also shows them again that you care—which is never a bad thing.

There are many ways for managers to incorporate a coaching style to help people develop more competence and confidence. The ideas above are in no way a complete list, but I encourage you to have the managers in your organization give them a try. Practicing coach-like behaviors in your conversations creates a learning environment not only for those you coach, but for you as well.

Let me know how it goes!

About the Author

Joanne Maynard is a senior coach with The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 130 coaches have worked with over 14,500 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services. And check out Coaching Tuesday every week at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

Dear Madeleine,

I am a new manager of a large team in retail.  The work is fast and furious and involves constant running around and heavy customer service.  I have no complaints except one.  How do you do your life when you work like a fiend with no coming up for air during regular working hours? 

My people are struggling with this, and so am I.  How do you deal with getting your refrigerator fixed, going to the dentist, and signing papers for a new apartment?

I try to jam things into my fifteen-minute breaks, but I find that just one phone call to the cable company takes longer than that.  I am trying to be a grownup and take care of things, but I am finding it really difficult.  Is there something I don’t know?  What do other people do?

Trying to Do Life

Dear Trying to Do Life,

Boy, do I hear you.  In my hunt for good answers, I have to tell you I came up with—not a whole lot.  People have all kinds of bright ideas about life/work balance but not many on just managing the logistics of life.

But I do have a couple of ideas for you.  The reoccurring themes you will see are to be hyper-organized, plan scrupulously, and get help.

• Figure out everything you want to get fixed or cleaned. Plan it way ahead and schedule all of it on the same day so that you can do it on a day off. Get your appliances serviced, get your carpets and windows cleaned, and get Amvets to show up to cart away everything you are getting rid of—all on the same day that you know will be your day off.
• Find service providers who work evenings and weekends. Cultivate your relationships with them.
• Make friends with a neighbor who has a different work schedule than you do and agree to be each other’s at-home-for-emergencies person. Or trade off with a friend.
• Check out sites like TaskRabbit to get extra help when you need it. You can hire a person to come and hang out at your house all day and manage the people coming in and out who are doing stuff.
• If you live in a city, use a messenger or courier service to get documents back and forth for signing.
• Use professionals—financial, legal and real estate—who offer digital signature capability.
• Use your lunch hour to get things done—it sounds like you might be skipping yours.

Also, I recommend that you don’t ever have kids and don’t ever get sick.

(Haha! Just kidding!  But not really.)

This is the part of your life where you learn how to manage all the dumb and boring but critical stuff that needs to get done before you add on to it with impossible stuff.  Seriously, the one absolutely non-negotiable job requirement for me once I had kids was flexibility—because my partner had none.  Someone in the house has to have some, or you just go nuts.

And I know you can’t really avoid getting sick, but you can reduce your chances by taking care of yourself. This means adding that to the after-hours list, no matter what it looks like.  It is my experience that people who manage to get it all in and build their future do not waste time on anything—like TV or mindless social media surfing—that has no added value.

Good luck to you.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Often, 20 to 35 percent of value-added collaborations come from only 3 to 5 percent of employees, according to a recent study shared in a Harvard Business Review podcast with Rob Cross, University of Virginia professor and coauthor of the article Collaborative Overload.

“As people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance,” says Cross.

The downside? This kind of collaboration usually comes at a cost—not only to the person who is shouldering the load but also to the organization. Here’s why.

When someone is called on to be involved in everybody’s projects, sooner or later an organizational bottleneck is created when numerous groups are waiting for the person to work on their job. This is not healthy for the organization or for the overworked individual, says Cross. When one person is in extreme demand from several sources, that person will eventually suffer from burnout.

Wondering if you may be an excessive collaborator? Your calendar can offer some hints. Over the past four months, how many times have you:

• been involved in projects outside your core responsibilities?
• received routine informational requests about projects that you don’t need to be part of anymore?
• been asked to make routine decisions when you are not adding value?

All three of these questions point to signs of either a poorly designed role or one that has experienced scope creep. For example, you are unable to let go of old projects that could now be handled by others or you are still part of an archaic approval process put in place years ago that doesn’t really serve the organization any longer.

Cross explains that bottlenecks, burnout, and turnover can affect the performance of an entire organization. Don’t let yourself become a pinch point. Begin in small ways to remove yourself as an assumed collaborator by saying no, shifting priorities, and placing buffers in your work life.

Finally, if you are a manager, make sure you are not inadvertently asking people to become overloaded bottlenecks themselves. For example:

• Do you ask people to be always on?
• Who do you pick for assignments—is it typically the most connected, overworked people?
• Do you ever choose people for tasks who are less busy and could quickly learn the job?

Take a look at your culture and what kind of work ethic it encourages. Don’t put yourself, your people, or your organization at risk of burnout.

To learn more about the risks of collaborative overload, check out the complete article at Harvard Business Review. Are you a podcast listener? You can hear Rob Cross discuss these concepts on the HBR Ideacast.

I grew up with a cat, and she was quite the opposite. She roamed the house when she wanted to and would occasionally come to me if I had something of interest (i.e., food), but otherwise would generally leave me alone.

Leaders’ behaviors can be very similar to the behaviors of cats and dogs. Some constantly hover around and pull you out of your work for status updates, meetings, and side projects, while others leave you completely to your own devices and are nowhere to be found when you need them. And it can be quite frustrating to deal with either.

Do you work with someone like this? Here are ways to cope:

Dog Leaders: These leaders don’t necessarily understand how disruptive their behaviors can be. They simply want to ensure that progress is being made and work is getting done, but they also want to make sure they’re giving you what you need. Perhaps they are new to their role or are unsure of their own leadership capabilities. Be sure to provide plenty of positive feedback for the good that they do while also letting them know a few things that could be done even better. To keep them informed, use a simple virtual communication/collaboration/project management tool where you can post updates on your work. You can direct them to this tool for any updates, leaving yourself to work distraction-free.

Cat Leaders: These leaders require much more work on your part. When they give you your task, you must think several steps ahead, anticipate any questions you may have later on, and then ask the questions while they are with you. Be sure to ask the best way to contact them if you do have any urgent questions since they may have a preferred method of communication. Also, take the initiative and schedule regular meetings with them that last 15-30 minutes for the purpose of providing quick status updates. If any questions come up, you can ask them during these meetings.

By understanding these two types of leaders, you can work with them more effectively and get more done with less fur-ustration.

Cat Owner Life VS Dog Owner Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaU4a86aYb4

If you are suffering from “excessive productivity,” here’s what I would recommend as your prescription.

Get rid of those things that don’t add value to your life. Take a moment to think of those things that are in your life that just don’t carry their weight. This could be at work or in your personal life; they aren’t necessarily bad, but are time wasters masquerading as productive efforts. There are many things in your life that can take your energy and time that aren’t adding value. They could be excessive meetings to satisfy your own need for control, social media that isn’t beneficial, or people in your life who don’t help you grow.

Learn to say no. This might be a hard one for you. To some, saying no implies that you can’t handle it or don’t have the skills to take on the task. Remember, everything that you say yes to means you are saying no to something else. Does what you are saying yes to align with your current focus? Is there something better that you could be doing? Take a serious moment to think about those things in your life and learn what to say yes to and what can wait. If you are focused and have a good sense of the big picture, then saying no will become a lot easier.

Get focus and clarity. Do you value being focused and clear? If not, maybe it’s time to take a brief self-inventory. Slowing down and processing your feelings and goals will help you to get really clear on where you want to be. Remember, this is about you and your focus on life and work. No one else is going to live your life. Be careful of being pulled into too many different directions that need to be taken care of “immediately.” If everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. Be clear, focused, and methodical.

Slowing down is not stopping; it’s not being less productive. It’s being more focused on those things that really matter: what you value. Take control of your surroundings and make sure you are the one driving your life and not being a passenger.

“Once managers realize they’re supposed to maintain their own workload, coaching and support quickly gives way to ‘Here’s the assignment. Do your best. You’ll be fine. I figured it out when I was in your position—I’m sure you will, too.’”

But when managers don’t take time to connect with direct reports other than issuing orders, the result is work that proceeds slowly and often needs to be redone. By the time its gets to that point, the relationship is already strained. The manager is annoyed at the lack of progress; the direct report asks “Why you didn’t you tell me this in the first place?’ and the manager reacts defensively, saying ‘I thought you knew.”

Phillips’s advice is to not let the situation go that far. Spend a little time up front discussing the person’s skills and their development level on the task you’re asking them to do.

“If they are a beginner, prepare to provide a lot of direction. If they are more experienced, it can be a combination of direction and support. And if they are very well versed in the task, a delegating style is completely appropriate.”

For time-starved managers , Phillips recommends short, regular meetings that are well organized and focused.

“Always start your conversations within the context of what the goals are. Are they clear? What are the shared expectations around those goals? Next, identify the direct report’s capability and commitment to the task. Identify where the person is in terms of development level. What is their ability to do the task? Have they ever done it before? What is your confidence level with them succeeding at the task? This where you begin to surface their feelings around confidence and competence.

“Leaders can build on that when they discuss what they need to provide to make sure the direct report has the direction and resources to move forward.”

One caveat to leaders—be on guard. Phillips says direct reports tend to overcommit or overestimate their ability to get things done.

“People want to project that they are confident and competent and can get things done. They sometimes don’t think things through in a logical way, which can lead to them agreeing to do something when, in fact, they have no experience.

“People also want to be perceived as highly skilled. It’s rare that someone will say, ‘I don’t know how to do that,’ or ‘I’m going to need extra time to learn how to do that.’ As leaders, we need to make it safe for our direct reports to tell us when they don’t know how to do something.”

Phillips reminds us that surfacing concerns and determining skill levels ahead of time can save a lot of trouble and heartache down the road. “If you don’t take the time now, you’ll be taking the time later, and under more difficult emotional circumstances.”

Make the best use of that time. It may take some effort, but in the long run time saved is something we could all use.

Interested in learning more? Join Phillips for a complimentary webinar, Finding the Time to Manage: 3 Key Skills, on July 27. The event is free, courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Dear Madeleine,

I am a staff manager at an academic institution. Of my eleven direct reports, seven have been with the University for more than thirty years and the rest have also been here for a long time.

They are smart and capable and very good at what they do, as they should be—they have been doing essentially the same job for most of their working lives. And that is the problem. I can get my people to do exactly their jobs and nothing more.

I read about work passion and engagement and achieving great things by harnessing discretionary energy, but this feels impossible with the culture in my department. I would bet that most of my people could get their jobs done in twenty hours a week and use the rest of the time for special projects that would enhance the department and benefit the organization. But anytime I throw out ideas for projects and ask for volunteers, I get blank stares and silence.

When I try to force the issue, I get constant pushback: “the busy season is just starting,” or “so and so is out on maternity leave and covering for her is overwhelming me.” You know the drill. It is so frustrating. How do I get these people inspired and energized?

Discouraged

Dear Discouraged,

You are not going to like what I have to say about this. (I don’t even like it.) But I know from research and vast experience that it is true. Ready? Here goes: any institution that has not had to keep up with constant change can become a safe harbor for people who are set in their ways and happy to stay in their comfort zones. What you are actually talking about it is total culture change. You can never underestimate the power of culture to kill any plans you might have to change things. The culture you are fighting has been shaped over years and it does not welcome anything new including variations that might require a little extra effort. Revolution is not welcome here. You might be able to shift the culture to get people to step up—but I warn you that you will need both some serious grit and the following:

1. A fundamental shift in expectations for work production that is passed down from the highest possible leadership. If your department hasn’t been targeted for budget cuts, it is only a matter of time before it is. You can ask your boss what the future holds and get senior leader support for adding tasks or even whole key responsibility areas to individual workloads.
2. A plan to match people with tasks and projects that are interesting to them. You will need to have conversations with each person and ask big, open-ended questions that will get them thinking about what would make something new and different feel exciting instead of burdensome, or worse: scary. Examples of such questions:
   • “What would make you feel like jumping out of bed in the morning?”
   • “What made you interested in working in this field in the first place?”
   • “What do you read about/learn about in your spare time?”
   • “If you could wave a magic wand and do anything you want for work, what would it be?

Using this information to shape the right project for the right person will require some creativity but it should help your people feel some initiative and ownership for any new tasks.

3. An extremely compelling reason for people to change. In this way, motivation is less of a mystery and you can tap into what really motivates each individual person on your team. Each person will have core needs that get met at work—and it will be critical to understand what those are so that any change won’t affect them. In addition, the science of motivation tells us that people are most impacted by changes in their autonomy, relatedness, and competence, so focusing on how change will affect people in those areas will be key. Click here for more information on the art and science of motivation.

Finally, you might want to consider your own motivation—it sounds like your department is getting along just fine. Why fix something that isn’t broken? Perhaps your people are just dandy but you crave the excitement of a fast-paced, super challenging environment? It might be easier to move yourself to a new location than try to change the one you are in.

I warned you that you weren’t going to like it. I’m really sorry. I’m not saying you can’t do it—I’m just saying it will be the fight of your life and you’d better really, really want it.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Dear Madeleine,

I run the Americas finance for a large global company. I am very good at my job and people give great feedback about working for me. Their only real complaint – and mine – is that the workload is crushing. We all work absurd hours and when we need to prepare for big board meetings, it’s all-nighters and weekends.

I have lost two managers in the last six months—which, of course, adds greatly to the problem—and haven’t even had time to hire replacements.

I recently went to my boss to talk about hiring requirements and he said, in essence, “We’re doing so well without those folks, why replace them?” I nearly blew my top – but of course that isn’t going to help me. What will?  –Overwhelmed

Dear Overwhelmed,

I assume your boss is the CFO or some other kind of numbers guy. Tales of woe about how hard you and your people are working are not going to be effective. Speak to a numbers person with numbers—it’s the only language that will be heard. Create a spreadsheet showing how much time all of the tasks need and what it takes for your skeleton crew to deliver. You need to show, in concrete terms, the toll this situation is taking and how hiring one or two folks will add value in the long term. One theme you might bring up is the consequences the department will face if a team member is out with the flu, what effect the holidays will have on work getting done, etc. Take the emotion out of it. Tell the story with facts and numbers, and you are much more likely to get what you need.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

I recently coached an ambitious sales person with ten direct reports after he attended a three-day Managing People workshop customized for his employer by The Ken Blanchard Companies.

This leader was very busy, working an average of twelve hours a day. Due to scheduling conflicts, we set his first coaching session three weeks after the workshop took place. Research indicates that you lose 70 percent of what you learn within one week if you don’t use it, so we started the session by clarifying his top two challenges.

The first challenge was that he wanted to contribute more to his company and achieve a higher leadership position. The second was his desire to have his direct reports take over more of the routine problem solving so he could better balance both his managing up and managing down duties.

I asked him, “From what you learned in the workshop, what do you think would help you with your priorities?”

After a little time with him not really answering the question, I gently asked again, “So in your opinion, which of the workshop concepts would help most with your priorities?”

It took a few more seconds of thought, but then the answer came to him: “I feel that I need to strengthen my relationships with both my boss and my direct reports.”

“How do you see this happening?” I asked.

“I think I can achieve it through the one-on-one meetings they talked about in the workshop,” he replied.

From there, he swiftly identified how implementing one-on-one meetings could help him both upstream and downstream:

1. Strengthening relationships through more communication: One-on-ones would allow him to spend more time with his boss learning about corporate projects and identifying opportunities where he could contribute more to the organization. The one-on-ones with his direct reports would help strengthen relationships by allowing a time to discuss their needs in a more scheduled way than through quick hallway consultations.

2. Improving competence all around: He could learn from his boss how to manage big picture items and projects, and his direct reports could gain competence through his increased direction, coaching and support to help them solve problems that arise from day-to-day operations.

3. Increasing delegation: As his direct reports’ competence improved, he could delegate more to them—and thereby open up time for him to be involved in big picture projects. Also, with the one-on-one meetings’ recommended best practice of the manager setting the time and the direct report setting the agenda, direct reports would become more empowered and would take more charge of the items under their responsibility.

4. Clarifying expectations: One-on-one meetings would also provide the occasion for him to clarify his direct reports’ goals as well as to provide feedback on desirable behaviors within the organization. Additionally, these meetings would present a great opportunity for him to catch his people doing things right!

One-on-meetings become time savers with the mentioned relevant benefits for all parties involved when used on a recurring basis. Follow these five tips for getting started:

1. Make one-on-one meetings short: 15 to 30 minutes in length.
2. The leader sets the meeting date and time and the direct report provides the agenda.
3. Meet at least once every two weeks.
4. Focus on what the direct report wants to talk about; i.e., progress reports, obstacles, concerns.
5. Show direct reports that meetings are valued and important by treating them as a priority. If a meeting has to be postponed, reschedule promptly.

It was fascinating how this leader—by identifying the need for one-on-one meetings with his supervisor—also recognized how this could help his direct reports. Need more time in your work life? Make sure one-on-one meetings are a managerial resource in your toolkit.

About the Author

Antonio Estrada, MBA, Certified Professional Coach is a member of Blanchard Coaching Services network of executive and leadership coaches.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 130 coaches have worked with over 14,500 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services. And check out Coaching Tuesday every week at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

It brings me back to the day I learned about the original The One Minute Manager. Like so many people, I was introduced to the book by someone who loved it—a client who had stumbled upon it and found that its lessons really helped her to manage her three assistants, something she had been struggling with. I immediately got the book and was stunned at the simplicity of the ideas and how actionable the steps were. The new book is so exciting because the basics have been updated for a new generation of leaders. It feels current and just as relevant now as it has ever been.

For example, I recently worked with a client who was complaining about a new employee—she called him “the kid,” and, in fact, he was just nineteen years old. “I tell him the stuff I want him to do and he forgets,” she told me.

It reminded me, once again, that most managers just don’t start with the basics.

One Minute Goals

In The New One Minute Manager the first secret is to set One Minute Goals. The critical step here is to have your employees write goals down and put them where they can refer to them every day. Nobody ever thinks they are going to forget their goals and tasks, but the fact is that our days get away from us, the unexpected crops up out of nowhere, and life is filled with distractions. Everybody, from an entry level kid to a CEO, has to stop, take a moment, refer to their big goals, and make a to-do list for the day. It is the only way to make sure the right things—not simply the distractions—get done.

One Minute Praisings

The second secret is One Minute Praisings. This is particularly pertinent for managers who want to be more like a coach. Taking a minute to praise a person for something well done is simple and easy to do, but for some reason most people just don’t do it. Certainly, as an executive coach working in organizations, I was considered a freak because I gave so much positive feedback. I couldn’t help it—it was simply part of my training. But the crazy thing is that praising works. It helps make employees more confident, more creative, and more willing to take risks. One of the phrases that struck me when I first came to The Ken Blanchard Companies was that a manager should “catch people doing things right.” I thought, “Okay, I’m going to get along just fine here.”

One Minute Reprimands Re-Directs

The third secret is the biggest change from the earlier book. Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson have changed the One Minute Reprimand to a more time-appropriate One Minute Re-Direct. Back in 1982 when the original book was published, when a direct report made a mistake, the in-command manager told them what they did wrong and took steps to see that it didn’t happen again. The tone of a reprimand was well meaning but parental. Today, people at all levels are in a constant learning mode. A reprimand isn’t appropriate for someone who is continually learning new skills. Personally, I have never been comfortable reprimanding anyone, so the Re-Direct works better in today’s world—it re-clarifies goals and gets people back on track faster.

Better than Ever

I generally don’t recommend books to clients, especially to those who don’t have the time or inclination to read—but Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s ability to boil down the complexities of management and leadership to simple, doable steps has been a gift to all of us for over 33 years. If you never experienced the original book, The New One Minute Manager is a great place to get started. It just doesn’t get old!

About the Author

Madeleine Blanchard is the co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, Blanchard’s 130 coaches have worked with over 14,500 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services. And check out Coaching Tuesday every week at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

Dear Madeleine,

My organization is unable to hire all the people we need to truly get the work done. Our senior leaders keep saying we have to do more with less. I see my people pedaling as fast they can and they really can’t get all of it done. I am concerned we are going to burn them out—and me along with them! Help!

Burning Out

Dear Burning Out,

I regularly get variations on this particular question and there are no easy answers to it. (Actually, that’s not true. The answer is easy enough; implementing the solution is the hard part.)

The crux of the problem is that there are a lot of cost pressures in today’s highly competitive economy. The only sustainable solution is increased employee productivity, which causes executive teams to make the request for people to do more with less.

This can work for short periods, or as a stopgap between the current situation and a big change, but it can’t go on forever. What really needs to change is what is actually being done and how it is being done. So instead of asking people to do more with less, I would challenge your senior leaders to think about going back to the drawing board and coming up with new and different ways to get the same or better result.

Sit down with your boss and carefully review every task being done by your people with an eye toward what is mission critical. Any activity that isn’t absolutely mission critical needs to be deferred or permanently eliminated. Every task that remains on the critical list should then be reviewed for redundancies and possible gains in efficiencies. This is where innovative thinking comes in handy.

Is there anything that can be automated? Can regular meetings be streamlined? Are all the people in every meeting absolutely necessary? Can 1 hour meetings be changed to 40 minute meetings? Or even better, can all meetings be “blackjack” meetings—none longer than 21 minutes?

Once you’ve tackled the low hanging fruit, look at ways you can apply the same process to more complex situations. Often when faced with doing more with less, we end up doing exactly the same things we have always done, just a lot more of them. That’s only one of your options. What are others?

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

In the latest issue of Ignite! Fowler explains that individuals bring one of six motivational outlooks to any goal or task they face—and that three of the outlooks perform better than the others for generating positive, long-lasting, and consistent energy for getting a job done.

The three optimal motivation outlooks are

Aligned. This is where an individual derives a sense of meaning from the goal or task, is able to align the task with important personal values, and is making a conscious and deliberate choice to do the right thing.

Integrated. This is where an individual is motivated because the goal or task fulfills a deeply felt sense of purpose, or is regarded as a self-defining activity.

Inherent. This is where an individual perceives the goal or task as pure fun and enjoyment.

The three suboptimal motivation outlooks are

Disinterested. This is where an individual feels overwhelmed, cannot find value in the task, or doesn’t have the energy to manage what’s required.

External. This is where an individual is primarily motivated by the promise of a tangible reward or incentive, or the expectation of increased power, status, or respect.

Imposed. This is where an individual is motivated by pressure to perform by either self-expectations or the expectations of others. Their actions are an attempt to avoid feelings of guilt, shame, or disappointment.

The challenge for leaders is to help themselves (and their team members) identify which of the six motivational outlooks is currently in play, shift to one of the more positive outlooks, and then reflect on the impact. Fowler’s research shows that this three-step process leads to greater performance, productivity, and well-being.

You can read the complete article, Motivated Leadership, by checking out the March Ignite! online newsletter.  Be sure to see the link to a free webinar that Fowler will be conducting on 3 Skills for Activating Optimal Motivation at Work. Want to diagnose your own motivational outlook?  Fowler has a short online assessment you can take!

I don’t remember how it came up, but one day my husband remarked on how good I had become at bossing people around. I was floored and asked him to clarify. He pointed out how comfortable I seemed to be telling my assistant what to do. I countered and asked him how my assistant was to know what I wanted her to do if I didn’t tell her. Looking back, it was the first time I had made the distinction in my own mind between providing an employee with clear direction and simply bossing someone around.

And even with that understanding, when I overheard that same assistant on the phone referring to me as her “boss,” I was still somewhat uncomfortable.  When she got off the phone I said, “I’m not so much your boss as I am your employer.” She laughed and said, “Oh cut it out, Mad, you are too my boss–and if I didn’t want to have a boss I would start my own business like you, so just relax.”

The Benefits of Clear Direction

It took me a long time to get comfortable with being a boss. And as much as no one wants to be bossed around all the time—especially if they really know what they’re doing—likewise, no one wants to do a bad job because they don’t know what a good job actually looks like.

The In-Director (the first character we looked at in our series on seven ways good managers sometimes get it wrong ) shies from being straightforward about what the job is, the expected result when the job is done, the exact steps that will create the result, and even how long it should take. Having a boss who is an In-Director is a little like following an unclear recipe: you have to figure it out using trial and error. This is a waste in every way—not to mention totally annoying.

Nobody wants to be bossed around all the time. And nobody wants to be thought of as bossy. But when you are, in fact, the boss, you must gather your courage and practice giving clear direction. Maybe you could write out the instructions at first. Use a neutral tone. Smile. You won’t seem bossy; you’ll seem as if you know exactly what is needed—and your employees will thank you for it.

Giving clear direction helps your employees be successful at work. And who doesn’t want that?

About this column

Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard, and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Previous posts in this series:

Setting Boundaries: 7 Ways Good Managers Get It Wrong

The Well-Intentioned Manager’s New Year’s Resolution: Have More Fun

The Top Three Mistakes Good Managers Make

Managing Polarities: A Key Skill for the Well-Intentioned Manager

That was the response John, a VP in the high tech industry, gave us when we asked him this question. And from what we could see, he was right. He was overworked and exhausted—because he was doing all the work for his employees! Given the constant deadlines he faced, he still believed this approach was easier than taking the time to coach his direct reports toward better performance.

This is a common problem we coaches face when working with well-meaning managers. They know they can’t keep operating this way, but they can never seem to find the right moment to slow down and put a new plan in place.

For John, it wasn’t until we had him track how much time out of one week he spent either doing the work himself or telling his people what to do and how to do it that he finally decided it was worth it to make time for day-to-day coaching.

That breakthrough led to these three questions John now uses as the basis for his new approach to coaching others to higher levels of performance.

1. What is getting in your way?
2. What do you need from me?
3. What will you do next?

Turns out, asking those three questions and listening to the answers netted John an increase in saved time of more than eighty percent! Now instead of doing the work himself, John is able to quickly identify—in partnership with the direct report—what the challenge is, where the direct report is in terms of competence and commitment to meet that challenge, and what leadership style is required to keep the project moving forward.

Eighty percent time saved. John says it’s the best experiment he’s ever conducted. Now he’s a believer.

How about you? Examine the possibilities. Try something new. Get new results. How much time could you save? This is just one example of the power of coaching—it benefits you as well as the people you lead.

About the Author

Patricia Overland is a senior coach with The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Coaching Services team.  Since 2000, our 130 coaches have coached over 14,500 individuals in more than 250 companies throughout the world. Learn more at Blanchard Coaching Services. And check out Coaching Tuesday every week at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

The room was impressive. The huge wall screens provided a full view of participants at tables in other locations. The ceiling-mounted microphones and speakers and the large, locked cabinet of sophisticated controls showed the effort and expense invested in this facility.

The only problem was that this room—like most expensive videoconference facilities I’ve toured—was rarely used, required an IT person to assist with the complex setup, and was so precious that executive approval was required for use.

Sometimes, the same attitude prevails when shopping for virtual team technology. But what I’ve found is that the best technology for virtual work isn’t the most elaborate—it’s the most easily used. This prioritized list is based on the belief that for effective virtual teamwork and collaboration, accessibility and simplicity are most essential.

1.     Phone headset. When we don’t have visual cues, we need to listen more carefully for tone, hesitation, word choice, and what isn’t being said.  A speaker phone simply doesn’t have the microphone and speaker quality needed for deep listening.  If you can add only one piece of technology, this provides the greatest return on investment.

2.     Shared calendar. Working across time zones to coordinate meetings is often cited as one of the most challenging issues virtual teams face. A shared calendar that displays availability and automatically places the meeting in the time zone of each participant saves hours of coordination time. 

3.     Phone rollover. Rolling your office phone to a home line or a cell phone means that your customers and colleagues only place one call to find you. Make sure that a voice mail feature is automatic if you aren’t available. 

4.     Instant conference lines. These services provide global toll-free numbers and access codes and don’t require a reservation. This is the best resource for an instant or planned conversation within a team. 

5.     Webcam. Most modern laptops have a built-in webcam and many types of communication software allow its use. If you want people to truly collaborate, handle conflict, and build relationships, encourage your team members to see each other while chatting. Seeing facial expressions increases trust and personal connection. 

6.     Two screens or large computer display screen. The ability to have your calendar, document, and video connection up at the same time makes it easy to collaborate, share thoughts, and coordinate work. 

7.     Shared document site. This is the most complex of the technology tools listed here. Shared sites require team agreements around maintenance and use (such as document-naming conventions). Whether your team uses a public or private platform for sharing is an important decision. But when used well, these sites can reduce email, provide a way to instantly update project plans, and allow around-the-clock collaboration with a single focus and product. 

There are many other innovations that are also useful. Technological platforms that allow screen sharing and polling, project tracking software, and, yes, even video conferencing can be useful and worth the investment if used and readily accessible.

Well, that’s my list—what’s on yours? Any other tools you would add as accessible and cost-effective?

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies who specializes in increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world.

The moles don’t stay up for very long. As the game continues, two moles pop up simultaneously, then perhaps three, and eventually on opposite sides of the grid. In the end game, it gets crazy, because time is running out fast.

Does this remind you of your job? You have to move quickly to respond, sometimes without much real information.  You knock one mole down and two others pop up.  It’s always nuts close to deadlines. The more you do the harder it gets…

And how about that other player—obviously not as good a corporate citizen as you.  While you’re trying to whack as many moles as you can, you observe the peer next to you, who is being very selective, perhaps only focusing on one or two moles. 

You’ve got to wonder, don’t you, “Is that a better way?”

Here are three actions to help you deal with the Whack-A-Mole conundrum:

• You don’t have to whack every mole. It’s not possible, and you really shouldn’t try. So don’t.
• Your workday is a zero-sum game.  You don’t likely have bundles of free time at your disposal. If you add a new chunk to your workload, something somewhere is going to have to give. As former Medtronic CEO and Harvard professor Bill George says, don’t keep piling stuff on. If you’re considering adding to your to-do list, then immediately ask, “What can I add to my not-to-do list.”
• You’re probably going to have a dramatic turn of events everyday; the negative ones are the most memorable. You’re going to miss some moles. But the sky isn’t falling, and you have a sacred responsibility to be a healthy role-model to those you lead. 

Having a strategic focus is critical. People either get that or they don’t. Be one of those who get it. 

About the author

Dr. Dick Ruhe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Photo Credit: Whack-A-Mole photo courtesy Miami Herald blog (miamiherald.typepad.com)

Accountability tops the list of management challenges in many organizations.  But most leaders are approaching the issue from a compliance standpoint instead of as a motivational issue. That’s a mistake.

As Scott Blanchard, principal and executive vice president with The Ken Blanchard Companies shares in the company’s January Ignite newsletter, “You cannot crack the whip enough, or hold someone accountable enough, to achieve the kind of results you can if, instead, you focus on helping people understand the vision, care about it deeply, and see themselves as a part of it.”

In Blanchard’s experience, leaders who create that kind of alignment don’t have to worry about accountability. Instead, employees will start holding the leader accountable to clear the way and help employees get things done.

Alignment Can Be A Challenge

In Performance Management: Putting Research into Action, author and consultant William Schiemann shares the results of a Metrus Group survey that identifies six gaps that get in the way of organization alignment. While each factor on its own contributes to a portion of the problem, the cumulative effect is staggering—only 14% of the organizations Schiemann polled reported that their employees have a good understanding of their company’s strategy and direction.

Strategies for Closing the Gap

For leaders looking to close the alignment gap in their organizations, Schiemann recommends seven key steps:

1. Develop a clear, agreed-on vision and strategy.
2. Translate the vision and strategy into clear, understandable goals and measures.
3. Include and build passion for the vision, strategy, goals among those who are implementing them.
4. Provide clarity regarding individual roles and requirements and link them across the organization.
5. Make sure that people have the talent, information, and resources to reach the goals.
6. Give clear, timely feedback on goal attainment.
7. Provide meaningful incentives to encourage employees to develop or deploy sufficient capabilities to achieve the goals.

Impact Mapping

One of the tools that Blanchard uses to begin closing the gap is an “impact map” that creates a clear line-of-sight between an individual employee’s work and the overall goals of the organization.

“When people understand where their organization is going—including the role they play in it—they step up, work less selfishly and they tend to make better business decisions on behalf of the company. That’s because they can see the impact of every decision and how it impacts overall results.”

For managers looking to set and achieve goals more effectively in the coming year, John Hester, a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies, recommends a three-step process.

• Approach goal setting as a partnership. This is something to be done in partnership with your team member. It should be a collaborative process. So the manager needs to know what the employee’s key areas of responsibility are, what is expected in the role, and what they want to see in terms of performance. The key is to have that discussion with the employee.
• Identify why a particular goal is motivating. What difference does it make in the organization, or to the team, or to the individual employee? Sometimes all people need to know is why the task is important. The “why” explains how the person’s task fits in with overall job performance and the goals and objectives of the unit, division, organization, and customer. It clarifies how the task supports higher-level outcomes.
• Diagnose competence and commitment levels. It’s important that a manager find out about experience with a specific task and then partner with the employee to determine what they need in terms of direction and support to be successful with this particular assignment.

To read the entire article, check out Rethinking Accountability.  You’ll find some additional ideas by motivation expert Dr. David Facer on Six Alternatives to an Accountability Discussion, plus a link to a free January 30 webinar on 3 Keys to Building Alignment and Accountability, courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

This advice falls into three basic categories: Reduce the amount of email you send and receive, Send clear, concise messages, and Keep your inbox clean 

Reduce the Amount 

Sure, it sounds easy enough, but how do you do it? Believe it or not, the easiest way to reduce the amount of email you receive is to send less. The less email you send, the less you receive. Here are some ways to accomplish this goal:

• Pick up the phone. When you expect a conversation, don’t use email. Pick up the phone or get up and go talk to the person.
• Use cc: and Reply All sparingly. Only copy or reply to people who really need the information.
• Use No Reply Needed in the subject line or in your signature. Too many emails are sent just to say thanks or to let the sender know their email was received. If you don’t need someone to reply, let them know in a prominent spot.
• Create an alternate email address for junk mail. Create an email account to give out to people or companies you don’t need to interact with on a daily basis. Once a month, go to that account and do a quick scan to see if there’s anything you need to read or act on. 

Send Clear, Concise Messages

Clear, concise messaging can dramatically cut down on the time we spend on email. Consider the following:

• Use descriptive subject lines. Help readers know the intent of your email in the subject line.
• Put required action in first paragraph. For example, you might type Approval needed, Information Only, or Need Help Immediately to let the receiver know what you expect.
• Only send email that’s okay to forward. If you wouldn’t want the message to be sent to others, use the phone or communicate face to face. It also helps to go with the assumption that your email will be permanently stored. 

Keep Your Inbox Clean

Manage your email so your inbox stays empty. A full inbox is a major time waster.  To keep your inbox clean, each time you open an item for the first time, do one of three things with it:

• Act on it. To act on an email, you can:  handle it immediately; delegate it by forwarding it to another person; schedule it as a task for later; or schedule it as an appointment in your calendar. Once you have acted on it, either file it for later or delete it. 

• File it. If you think you may need the email later, put it into a specific folder for that client, project, or individual. Consider saving attachments and deleting the email. If you are unsure whether you will need it later, create a 30- or 60-day Hold folder for items you might need to go back to. Periodically clean up this folder or simply set it up to automatically delete mail older than 30 to 60 days. If necessary, make a note on your to-do list or calendar to remind you where you filed the email.
• Delete it. If you don’t need the email after you’ve read or scanned it, simply delete it. 

I hope you find one or more of these ideas for managing your email helpful in the New Year. Let me know any other best practices you use to manage your email.

About the author

John Hester is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies who specializes in performance, productivity, and self-leadership.

At work our team has been stuck trying to choose between spending money on one strategy and finding out more information about an alternative choice. It’s been on our meeting agenda for almost a month now and, really, it’s not that big a deal.

Ever been there? The more you think about the options, the more it seems like a tie. One is just as good as the other, but you can only pick one. So you pick nothing. You procrastinate. Well, not exactly—because after all, you are doing something: you’re thinking this over. Right?

This dilemma has been around for a while.

Fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan suggested that if you put an ass (the donkey type, not the human type) between two identical piles of hay, it would be unable to choose between the two and would die of hunger. This became known as the Paradox of Buridan’s Ass, whose picture you see above. (We can’t guarantee the authenticity of the photo.)

Even further back—in 350 B.C., to be exact—Aristotle proposed that a person who is equally thirsty and hungry and has to choose between food and drink might stay exactly at that position and starve to death.

More recently, the character Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof had trouble making decisions because of his annoying habit of always saying “…but on the other hand, this, and on the other hand, that …” Fiddler opened in New York in 1964.

You may notice that all these observations happened long before multi-tasking as we now know it, incoming cell phone calls, being buried in emails, etc. By the way—should you pay to drive in the car pool lane today, or stay right where you are?

So what’s a procrastinator to do? Here are three suggestions:

1. Just do something. Anything. Have you ever noticed that if you are trying to push a stalled car off the road, it’s very difficult to get it moving initially? But once it is moving, it’s relatively easier to keep it going. Physicists call this “static friction.” It’s harder to move things that are currently stationary than things that are already in motion. You might think of it as activation energy.
2. Don’t delay. There is a business theory that delay is better than error. Actually—no, it isn’t. First of all, the opportunity you’re putting off now will not be identical to what might be the case in the future. It will likely become more complex as you hold off taking action. Conditions change, and dilemmas usually intensify. Secondly, doing something provides you with some helpful information because you’ve got observed data. Call it a “pilot,” if you prefer. Keep in mind that very few decisions are absolutely final. During implementation, there will be opportunities for adjustment.
3. Pick a small first step and add that to your to-do list. Don’t write “Income tax.” Write “Get forms,” or perhaps “Gather expense receipts.” The smaller the line item, the more doable it will seem. And put a deadline on it.

Of course, having a goal is helpful. In fact, it’s downright essential. But it’s not enough. Progress is all about taking action. Goals without action are merely dreams. So if you’re serious about productivity and execution, you’ve got to get active. As Einstein said, “Nothing happens until something moves.”  Inactivity breeds discouragement. In real life Buridan’s ass acts and sounds a lot like Eeyore.

Finally, to close the loop after you’ve done something—even an eensy, teensy, stupid little something—celebrate. Even if your celebration is merely a private party in your brain that you hold for yourself. Take a breath, smile in satisfaction, and feel good. And then move on. Come on, we don’t have all day here.

About the author

Dr. Dick Ruhe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Years ago, the woman had worked as a barista at a coffee house. The holidays were just around the corner and she was asked by her manager to get the store ready for the holidays.  It was almost closing time and she told her manager that she was happy to stay late and get it done, but also that she had never done displays before and wasn’t quite sure what to do. Her manager responded with a quick, “You’ll be fine,” and left for the night.

She stayed for a few extra hours after closing and put all of the holiday decor on display. It took awhile but she got it done and thought it looked good.

That’s why she was so surprised when she walked into the store the next day and saw that all of her displays had been completely rearranged. When she asked her manager about it, the first thing he said was, “You set it up all wrong—you didn’t follow the book.”

“What book?” she replied.

“The book that is in my car—I guess I forgot to give it to you.”

Use behaviors that help (and especially don’t hinder) performance

As you might expect, this young woman walked away feeling frustrated. The sad part is how many times this happens to people in their jobs every day. I don’t think managers intentionally forget to give employees the book, but unfortunately, employees don’t know what your intentions are—they only see your behaviors.

If you are a manager, keep these three things in mind to set your people up for success:

1. Do your homework.  Check to see if employees have experience with what you are asking them to do.  And if they don’t, teach them.
2. Praise employees’ progress or redirect them if they are still learning.
3. Never reprimand a learner.

Don’t frustrate, or even lose, good employees because of your lack of leadership. Remember, your first and most important customers are your employees.

About the author:

Kathy Cuff is a senior consulting partner and one of the principal authors—together  with Vicki Halsey—of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Legendary Service training program.