Dear Madeleine,

I was recently promoted and I am drowning. I am still supporting the person who took my former job while trying to get my head around my new job. My new team is huge, and I didn’t know any of them until I stepped into this job. I couldn’t get through my email if I spent ten hours a day trying. And that doesn’t include all of the stuff coming in on Slack.

My new boss has no time for me and clearly expects me to be able to hit the ground running, but I just can’t. I am supposed to get an assistant, but HR wants me to interview people, and I don’t have time. They have offered me a coach to help me—but again, I am supposed to talk to a few and choose one and I don’t have time for that.

My partner tells me I am headed toward burnout. I don’t think that is true. I’m not depressed or apathetic, just in way over my head. How can I get a grip? Any ideas you might have would be appreciated.

Need to Stabilize

________________________________________________________________________

Dear Need to Stabilize,

You have collapsed how you are feeling with reality. You are feeling like there is an emergency when there is no actual emergency. It sounds like you are in such a state of alarm you can’t think straight. And thinking straight is what you need to be able to do right now.

 So the first order of business is to turn off all of the noise and simply hear your own thoughts. Turn off Slack. Close your email. Turn your phone off. If you work in an office, go to another part of the building. A client I worked with once used to go to the stairwell. If you work from home, go to a coffee shop or a park. Step away from your normal environment and go someplace where no one can find you.

Put an out-of-office message on your email that indicates you will be focused elsewhere for the next 48 hours, and if the sender of an email deems it critical, they can resend in a few days.

Now write down everything you need to do—everything from the biggest, most complex things down to the smallest, and then prioritize it all.

Then delegate. Anything that someone else could conceivably do is to be done by someone else. Presumably the folks in HR are good at hiring, so tell them to choose the best candidate to be your assistant. Presumably the people offering you a coach have a pool of highly qualified coaches for you to choose from—and, honestly, any decent coach will be able to help you right now. There is zero research that supports the idea that anyone has an appreciably better coaching experience when they choose their own coach. Have the folks managing the coaching assign you a coach.

Do not spend a single minute doing anything that somebody else can do.

Tell your replacement that you need seven days to focus on your new job, and that they should collect their questions to bring to you then. They can text you if there is a potential train wreck about to happen.

Your boss expects you to hit the ground running? I love that expression because it sounds like something James Bond does when he drops out of a plane. It is not a real thing. But when your boss has no time for you, you can only assume you are on your own and you will have to use your best judgment. Draft an email to your boss outlining what you think is most important and what you plan to focus on for the next thirty days. They may ignore your email. Maybe they will respond with “OK fine, go go go,” or maybe they will suggest some changes. They may suggest (I have seen this before) that everything is a priority, which would be a cop out. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority, so you will have to use your best judgment. Either way, you will have kept up your end of the implicit bargain by sending the email.

Getting to know your team is a priority. Once your new assistant is in place, have them set up 1×1’s with each of your new direct reports. Have them send you an email before their meeting in which they answer the following questions, (obviously you should edit these to suit you):

• What are the tasks and goals you are working on?
• What direction or support do you need from me on each of those tasks?
• What should you be doing that you are not doing and what is getting in the way?
• What is worrying you?
• What are you pleased about?
• What are your top strengths?
• What is your superpower?
• What do you want me to know about you?
• What do you want to know about me?
• What do you think I should know about your world, and about the team?

As you meet with each person, ask yourself what things are on your list that you might put on their list.  You will probably be able to find a few things. Will they do it the way you would do it? No. Will they do it as well? Probably not. But they might do it better—and either way, it will be done. Done is better than perfect, at least for now. You are never going to be able to do everything yourself, so you might as well start getting things done through others right now.

Finally, remember that you were promoted because someone thought you were competent enough to figure things out. And I suspect that you will be, once your brain is available for use.

So.

Nobody ever tells you that half the battle of senior leadership is choosing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Stop. Breathe. Turn off the noise. Think. Breathe some more. Focus. Decide what you are going to do first, and what you will do in the next five days. Ignore everything else, for now.

You’ll feel much better.

“But what about the fallout if I make the wrong decisions?” you are asking. That may happen, but, well, then you’ll know, and you will learn from mistakes. I don’t know what your business is, but I am assuming that no bridges will fall down and no babies will die if you just take a step back.

Whatever ideas you have about how someone else would be doing way better in this situation are wrong. There is only you, right now, and it is up to you to take control.

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.

Quitting your job for a new one is the new normal.

Almost 4 million Americans resigned from their positions in June 2021.[1] More turnover is on the horizon: Some 40% of the global workforce is “considering leaving their employer in the current year,”[2] while “95% of workers are contemplating a job change.”[3]

This amount of turnover is historic. A record-breaking 10.9 million jobs were open at the end of July 2021.[4]

The pandemic is driving the turmoil. Americans are reassessing their priorities because of it, and they’re looking for jobs that offer remote work possibilities, greater fulfilment, career advancement, and flexibility.

The High Cost of Turnover

Turnover­ always demands your attention—and especially so at this unprecedented moment. To start, turnover is incredibly costly for a company: 30% to 40% of the annual salary for entry-level employees; 150% for mid-level employees; and up to 400% for highly skilled employees.[5]

What about the unquantifiable cost of turnover?

When a high performer leaves, so do their expertise, brilliant ideas, and contribution to the cultural fabric. An even more worrisome trend is high performers leaving with their colleagues for greener pastures.[6]

Tips for Keeping Your High Performers Happy

Keeping top performers at your company in this time of extraordinary change is critical. Here are some tips your managers can use to help them stay. 

Give high performers the spotlight: This is your time as a manager to flip the script. Instead of you telling your high performer what they should do, ask them how they accomplished something so impressive.

Let them talk. Let them share. Let them teach their colleagues.

When people share the strategy behind their successes, they feel energized and appreciated. It also increases their confidence, giving them the courage to take on even more strategic projects.

Let them choose new challenges: A high performer has earned the right to explore. Encourage them to pursue projects that are interesting. Don’t pigeon-hole them even though they are an expert at an important task.

Ask your high performer, “What interests you? How would you like to contribute?” Give them the opportunity to use their talents.

When your high performer takes on a different kind of challenge, they’ll be an enthusiastic beginner at the start of the project—the honeymoon phase, when we’re filled with excitement and enthusiasm. That state drives retention: When people love their work, they’re 50% more likely to stay at their jobs.[7]

Show appreciation: Let your people know that you’re grateful for their contributions. They’ll be even more engaged and productive. Make your words of praise specific if you want them to have the most impact.[8]

Don’t assume your people know that you appreciate them. Research shows that leaders believe their people know how they feel about their work, when in fact, they don’t.[9] And when people feel unappreciated, they start looking for another job.

Since the brain stores data in images, not words, saying things like, “Good job! Way to go! Nice work!” goes in one ear and out the other. 

For appreciation to stick, you need to share what they did, the effect it had, how it made you feel, and your gratitude for their partnership and efforts. For example: “When you stayed after the meeting to address the client’s hesitation, you deepened her trust and showed that we want to exceed customer expectations. I’m so grateful for your dedication, empathy, and desire to help everyone be successful. Thanks so much.”

Help your people take care of themselves: Just because someone is a high performer doesn’t mean they’re immune to stress. They can be so busy doing fantastic work that they forget to take care of themselves. Then one day, they wake up and say, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Your job is to remind your team that self-care is their top priority. Here are best practices you can use to keep your high performers happy:

• Hold walking meetings—even when they’re virtual. Instead of sitting in front of a monitor, everyone calls from their cell phones, pops ear buds in, and meets while moving.
• Offer to buy those interested an exercycle or treadmill.  Sounds expensive? Not compared to hiring someone new.
• Give people a brain break in meetings. Ask your team to stand up and have someone lead them in exercises for five to ten minutes. Most teams usually have someone who can do this. If you don’t, you’ll find plenty of free online fitness videos.
• Let people know when you are taking care of you. Share, “Today I am doing my run from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.” Be the example. Help people celebrate self-care.
• Oh, Won’t you stay? You’ve heard a high performer wants to leave. Why not ask, “What would it take to make you stay?” You’ve nothing to lose at this point and may be pleasantly surprised that you meet their demand.

The Great Resignation is causing a flood of resignations. Now you know how to stop the surge and keep your best people.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/success/how-to-quit-your-job/index.html

[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.yahoo.com/now/youre-not-only-one-whos-102605650.html

[4] 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

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

[6] https://hbr.org/2021/01/your-star-employee-just-quit-will-others-follow

[7] https://www.fastcompany.com/90679528/i-spoke-to-5000-people-and-these-are-the-real-reasons-theyre-quitting?partner=feedburner&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feedburner+fastcompany&utm_content=feedburner&cid=eem524:524:s00:09/23/2021_fc&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=Compass&utm_campaign=eem524:524:s00:09/23/2021_fc

[8] https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-little-things-that-make-employees-feel-appreciated

[9] https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-little-things-that-make-employees-feel-appreciated

Dear Madeleine,

I work for a scrappy startup that offers a system for weight loss and coaching. It’s for folks who need extra help losing and maintaining their weight and who want a healthier lifestyle. All of the interaction is over text, with some notes being automated to offer specific messages at different points in the program. The service is good, we are helping a lot of people, and I am proud of what we do.

I manage a team of 20 coaches. All have been carefully selected and have received a ton of training. My problem is the owners of the company are constantly trying to cut costs. They keep making decisions that impact the quality of the service and cause my coaches to have to work far more hours than they are supposed to. They are paid by the hour and aren’t paid overtime—but it isn’t humanly possible for them to do what they are supposed to do in the allotted time.

The owners don’t share the financials with us, but I can do math, so I have a sense of what is going on. It is clear they are making bad decisions to amplify profits.

The most recent situation is a perfect example. Several of my coaches put in for and were confirmed for time off this summer, but the plan that has been put into place is absurd: When coaches take vacation, they are not tell any of their clients. The automated messages will go out and when individuals do interact by text, a back-up team will handle all communication. The idea was fine, but it turns out that vacations weren’t coordinated between team leaders so we have a lot of coaches out at the same time. The back-up team is far too small—and some of them, it turns out, work only part time.

My coaches who are on vacation are freaking out. They are getting messages from clients who are upset that no one has replied to them. Some are jumping in and doing the work because they are worried their clients will complain about them and they will get bad reviews or even lose their jobs. I have raised the issue with the owners, who, true to form, seem unconcerned.

Some of our coaching is about having good boundaries and taking care of oneself so stress and resentment don’t turn into emotional or stress eating. It is really bothering me that my coaches aren’t getting their vacation time.

I don’t believe the owners of this company really care about our customers or our employees. I feel like a hypocrite continuing to work here. I would appreciate your view on this.

Stressing

_________________________________________________________________________

Dear Stressing,

Of course, I do have a view on this. But, honestly, you could just read your own letter out loud to yourself and have all the answers you need.

I don’t fault the owners for wanting to make money—that is the point of being in business, after all. However, the problem here is that if they keep up the corner cutting, they won’t be in business much longer. The weight loss/wellness space is exploding and the competition is brutal. The only way to survive is to be better than the other companies. Lying to customers (!), taking advantage of employees, and poor planning do not bode well for long-term success. Feeling hypocritical is fair—and unpleasant. But lack of confidence in the management of the company might be an even bigger concern.

I’ll bet you could find another similar job elsewhere, with an employer that values their people and has figured out how to run their business. You would be a role model for being proactive, having integrity, and taking care of yourself.

As you look around for another gig, of course, do try to talk to your employers. I imagine they will lose customers just from this last vacation debacle, and maybe they will pay attention to the holes in the systems once the dust settles from this mess.

Honor your instincts that something is wrong in the business, and that you know unsustainable business practices when you see them.

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 a branch manager for a regional bank. We are a small crew, and everyone reports into me. Things run smoothly for the most part. I have one team member—an older woman—who has terrible body odor. It is so off putting that I lose focus each time she comes near my desk. During our one-on-ones I have to breathe through my mouth. I am not exaggerating to say my eyes water.

This employee is fairly new, and is not a teller, so up to now it hasn’t been an issue with customers. But our lobby is closed and most customers use the drive-through. In the rare instance where we do allow customers into the bank, everyone is wearing masks. Eventually, though, we will open up again, we won’t be wearing masks, and I’m sure customers will notice.

A long-time employee that I have a great relationship with called me after work a few weeks ago and told me everyone is talking about this and I need to do something. I am a 32-year-old man and I just can’t think of how to approach this situation.

I really don’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings, but literally the entire office is looking to me to do something about it because everyone is suffering.

Delicate Situation

_________________________________________________________________________

Dear Delicate Situation,

Delicate indeed. This is a classic. Kudos to you for taking a moment to think this through. In my youth, I was an exercise teacher and my 7 a.m. class ganged up on me and told me I had to intervene with a regular who had the same problem. I was intimidated into acting with no preparation. I bungled it terribly and the member left the club and never came back. The owner of the club was furious. I was mortified. I couldn’t tell you what I said because I have successfully blocked out the entire thing. It got tucked into the same Black Box of Shame where I also store the time I asked an exercise client when her baby was due, and she snapped that she wasn’t pregnant. You only do that once, I can tell you. But I was young and stupid, and you are not.

You can’t avoid it—mainly because you have an audience and it is your job. If you don’t do something soon, someone will say something or do something offensive like spraying air freshener in the direction of the stinky employee. The next thing you know, you’ll have a hostile work environment lawsuit on your hands.

Step one is to talk to your HR representative, for a couple of reasons. If you are lucky, there might be something in the employee handbook about dress code and hygiene. That would give you a leg to stand on—to be able to point to a regulation that was shared at the beginning of the woman’s employment. It will also serve to give HR a heads up in case things go poorly and they get a complaint from this employee. You may even have an experienced and sympathetic HR person who can tell you exactly what to say, when to say it and how to say it. Wouldn’t that be grand?

I asked Kristin Brookins Costello, head of HR at The Ken Blanchard Companies, and she said:

“This is tricky, as some states have laws that specifically relate to what an employer can and can’t require regarding hygiene and appearance. Due to potential legal ramifications, HR should be consulted on any existing employer policies relating to hygiene. HR may even want to check with an attorney to ensure that the employer response is reviewed and cleared. In the end, the approach with the employee should be handled carefully due to the sensitive nature of this situation.”

If you can get your HR partner to take on this entire predicament, you should—not because you’re not capable, but to navigate any potential legal traps that exist. If you end up having to go it alone, here are some pointers:

Do:

• Find a moment when you and she can have a private conversation.
• Tell your employee that you need to discuss a delicate topic that may make her uncomfortable.
• Make clear that you are on her side, and that the situation in no way reflects on her work performance.
• Be direct. You may have to practice finding a way to say “you are too smelly” diplomatically. I grant that this is almost impossible, but something like “You have a noticeable smell, and it is distracting” might be a starting point. Try thinking about how you would want someone to tell you.
• Make a clear request:
  • “I need you to make sure that you bathe every day, use appropriate deodorant/anti perspirant, and launder your work clothes regularly.”
  • “I need you to take appropriate measures to make sure that your natural body odor is not detectable by others.”
• Be ready for any number of responses, including embarrassment or anger. Let it be okay; just listen empathetically. It never hurts to have tissues ready. Some people cry when they experience strong emotion. It doesn’t have to mean you have done something wrong.
• Practice a limited repertoire of things you can say that you can simply repeat. “I understand that you are [fill in the blank: upset, insulted, embarrassed] and I am sorry.”
• Schedule a follow-up meeting to revisit the situation as changes are made. I know you both will much prefer to pretend it never happened—but if nothing changes, you will need to discuss it again.

Don’t:

• Deal with your employee’s upset by trying to make her feel better or minimizing the issue.
• Make it about you. Ever.
• Try to ease your own discomfort by backtracking, explaining, or talking too much.
• Get dragged into an argument about whether the smell exists—your employee may very well ask who complained. So just don’t go there. Keep it about your own experience and resist the temptation to throw others under the bus.
• Get into the details, like asking questions about why the situation exists.
• Offer detailed suggestions on how to solve the problem unless you happen to be an expert on the topic, which I suspect isn’t the case.
• Assume anything. You don’t know if she comes from a culture in which strong personal smell is normal. You don’t know if she has a medical condition that is causing the smell. You don’t know if she lacks a sense of smell—it happens a lot. Who knows, maybe she got Covid and lost her sense of smell for the long term—it is apparently a long-hauler symptom.  

This is one of those management hurdles you will never forget—a rite of passage. Your employee may never know the favor you have done her, and in fact may never forgive the insult. That’s okay. Your people don’t have to like you, but they do have to play nice in the sandbox with their colleagues.

All you can do is your job. The rest of your employees will appreciate it. Be intentional. Be clear. Be kind. Be firm.

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 am a regional director of compliance for a global services company. Covid has been a trial for everyone. Most of my people had never worked from home before and were not set up to succeed working in what are, for many, cramped and noisy conditions. On top of this, Covid has resulted in a massive spike in demand for our services. On its face this is good, but the necessary restrictions make it almost impossible for us to meet demand. The teams that have to work together to ensure delivery are at each other’s throats.

Enter a new regional EVP who is hellbent on making his mark. He is engineering massive changes, most of which will result in outsourcing to areas where people are willing to work for less. The changes include a big move to digitization and automation.

One of my people called me in a panic when he was asked to interview with the consulting firm hired to create the plan. He had spent a couple of hours outlining his exact job and how he did it. “Are they interviewing me so they can automate everything and make me redundant?” he asked me, point blank. Things are happening so fast that I was unprepared. I said something half-baked in response. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I hadn’t considered the implications of what is happening.

Now I am the one in a panic. Why would our senior leadership decide to do this now? People are already suffering so much. The human cost of this is going to be staggering. I need some perspective on this.

Panicked

____________________________________________________________________________

Dear Panicked,

I have heard this from so many of our clients, and it’s a reflection of what’s happening at our small company as well. Automation and digitization are coming at all of us like a bullet train. Think about it. Industry leaders have accustomed all of us to getting exactly what we want, how we want, when we want it.

I recently went on a website to understand what it would cost me to engage a company for a small but complex specialized service. I expected the website to give me a short worksheet and generate a quote. Nope. I got four emails asking to set up a conversation, and someone called me three times to discuss my project. I was still in the speculation phase and wasn’t ready to talk to a person who I knew would try to sell me and then hound me. I simply wanted to access a ballpark cost to help me plan. Another website did this for me. Guess which one I will probably use?

This is why your senior leadership is doing this now. It’s because they want to take the noise, static, potential for inevitable human error, and wasted time out of the system. The additional pressures of Covid have exposed weaknesses in our characters and in our systems. Pressure has been applied to your current systems and you say your teams are now “at each other’s throats.” We tend to blame people but, really, this is a clear sign that your systems are failing you. Your executive leadership wants to make it easier for your customers to do business with you—to get exactly what they want, the way they want it. Because your leaders know that if your customers can’t do that, your company will eventually go the way of the buggy whip. Or Blockbuster.

It isn’t even that your leaders want to minimize head count—although that is always the fantasy promise. In some cases, they might be able to reduce the number of employees they need to get the job done but in many cases, they won’t. They will need the same amount of people doing different things. In cases where senior leaders seek to leverage automation, the ideal is not so much to reduce headcount, but to minimize the time-consuming and error-prone aspects of processes used to produce necessary results. Most processes, before they are properly automated, depend on humans doing exactly what needs to be done, in the right order, correctly, in volumes that are not humanly possible in the needed time frame. In short, these processes will inevitably cause errors, missed deadlines and conflict. Aren’t those human costs worth eliminating?

A colleague shared something a former boss used to say that has stuck with her: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like obsolescence even less.” Touché.

The change coming at you is sudden. For this, I do blame your new EVP. Change is hard and it’s harder when people are already stressed. The brain loves certainty. When you can’t offer that, you can at least share what you do know. People respond to change in predictable ways. You can equip your leaders to deal with change through effective methods they can use to help their people manage themselves through the discomfort. Check out our material on Leading People Through Change—even a high-level overview can help you make a plan.

You need to focus your attentions on three big buckets:

1. Understand exactly what the change is designed to achieve. Find ways to articulate it that will best suit each different audience, so that it will make sense to them.
2. Figure out how to leverage your position power and ability to influence so that you can better identify threats to humans and mitigate the pain of loss.
3. Devise a plan to help each of your direct reports—and help them help each of their direct reports—to navigate what is coming. This plan must involve a lot of listening and communication on your part.

Helping your people hide from change would not be a favor to them. In fact, in the end, it would feel like a betrayal.

I hope this is the perspective you were looking for—although I suspect you were hoping for something else. Max Dupree said “The first job of a leader is to define reality.” So putting your head in the sand and hoping this will go away is not an option. For that I am sorry. I work with many leaders, every single one of whom has wanted to go to bed and pull the cover over their heads. And some have actually done it. For a little while. But then they get out of bed and do what needs to be done. Go to bed if you need to. But then, you know what you need to do.

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!

The rapid onset of COVID-19 forced all of us in the leadership and talent development space to quickly create new ways of thinking, learning, and working; it affected every fiber of our world. In essence, the pandemic has forced the birth of new ways of doing just about everything, from parenting to schooling to working.

On the work front, organizations are being called upon to reimagine the way they do business, care for their employees, grow, and more. But rising tensions and stress cause people to withdraw from true dialogue or try to dominate it. The consequences are costly: Some 77% of employees say poor communication hinders their company’s ability to compete.¹

As a result, leaders became learners again, rediscovering how to build trust, manage in a remote setting, and engage in authentic, straightforward dialogue. Along the way we’ve gained more clarity around what’s truly important, found the ability to quickly change course, and become skilled at doing things that were once uncomfortable. We’ve also discovered new ways of building and fortifying human connections for living, learning, and leading in a time of unprecedented upheaval.

This experience has helped The Ken Blanchard Companies develop and refine a fresh, modern approach to effective, human-centered leadership development experiences at a time when effective leadership matters more than ever. Just like you, we’ve had to ramp up quickly to meet the changing needs of learners—and what a change it’s been, as we are now averaging over 500 virtual sessions per month! We’ve also accelerated our time to launch exciting new modalities designed to extend our ability to reach more leaders more effectively with human connections woven in. As industry has made the rapid-fire shift to virtual, in many organizations the human connection is diminished or completely missing. We saw this as the perfect opportunity to reach more leaders, to democratize leadership development, and to leverage what we’re best known for: building the most productive relationships between people at work using our timeless, enduring content that is beloved the world over.

It’s been a great opportunity to partner with clients to design new ways to reach individuals and leaders, distributed across locations and time zones, with the helping hand of smart technologies. The result has been learning experiences that are deeply rooted to our clients’ leaders and learners: who they are, what they do and when, and how they work. Together we’ve created experiences that improve awareness and capability, and move their businesses forward by imparting the skills their leaders need right now—not to survive, but to thrive.

I am a Solutions Architect, part of our Solutions Architecture Center of Excellence. We partner with our clients to co-create the perfect experience for your scale, timeline, technology needs, and budget. We begin our engagements with a design session that is collaborative and co-creative and incorporates the tenets of design thinking (specifically, Empathize, Define, and Ideate) to clearly understand your audience—in other words, who we are solving for. That who drives each set of decisions we make as we define the goals, craft the learning experiences for your various target groups, and determine how we will prove the value of our work together. Focusing on your audience early and often allows our design team to connect closely with the learner, develop relevant content, create context, and build world-class experiences for all levels of leaders.

We’ve been using this approach successfully with all of our content including our flagship offering, SLII^®, plus other core offerings such as Self Leadership, Blanchard Management Essentials^®, Building Trust, Leading People Through Change^®, Conversational Capacity^®, and Team Leadership. This approach allows us to create a common language and provide frameworks that are easy to apply from one level of leadership to another.

And we’ve packaged the content in ways that meet the demands of different learner groups:

• For small cohort groups up to 20 people, we’ve been suggesting Virtual Instructor Led Training experiences that will leave your leaders feeling as though they, well, went to class! Click here for a close-in view of how we “do” virtual learning at Blanchard.
• For larger audiences that need to learn new skills in a way that scales broadly and quickly:
  • We’ve developed a Collaborative Online experience that unfolds over time, usually six weeks, combining self-driven learning with the hallmarks of the best the classroom has to offer: peer discussions, application, and reflection, guided by a Blanchard expert. Click here to learn about our Self Leadership Collaborative Online experience and its impact on our most recent cohort.
  • Our new Interactive Keynote Collections target core concepts in a way that allows you to reach a large number of learners quickly.
• For more in-depth experiences, our Digital Learning Journeys provide a turnkey way for you to deliver leadership-level-specific learning, quickly. Many of our core programs are available in this format now and can be used individually or with intact teams.
• And to keep the learning at the forefront after the formal learning moments end, we’ve been layering in our sustainment offerings such as our multi-week SLII^® chatbot, called Kenbot^®, that extends the learning from the classroom into the flow of work. There is no easier way to reconnect and recommit than offering the chatbot as a performance support tool for your leaders.
• Blanchard’s Coaching Solutions provide additional rigor to all our offerings and turn newly formed skills into new habits and ways of working. Designs range from a peer coaching model that aligns to the journeys of different levels of leaders, to group coaching in groups of 8 to 12, to individual One on One coaching and executive coaching.

As we look to the future, it’s only natural to ask, “Will the classroom make a comeback?” That’s a question we all are asking. Our answer is, “Yes, in some form,” but what comes next will undoubtedly look different than it did prior to COVID-19.

We envision a leadership development experience that blends every modality, curated specifically to address the needs of your various audiences.

Perhaps it’s Building Trust in Virtual Instructor Led Training in small cohorts for your people in EMEA, the same content served up in Digital Learning Journeys with live group coaching sessions in the Americas, and again, the same content served up in face-to-face sessions in Asia.

Reaching further out into the flow of work, picture Interactive Keynote Sessions for your large, synchronous, global audiences on critical topics that resonate around the globe—or envision Blanchard’s digital licensed content served up in journeys your L&D team creates and presents on your LMS or LXP platform.

No matter what your learning platform, LXP, or LMS is, Blanchard can help you leverage your investment. We’ve incorporated much of our digital content and experiences in mainstream LXPs that scale the leadership development experience instantly. And for those of you with an LMS platform, we have a public API that can be used to integrate our content into your platform.

Learn more about offering our programs in plans and pathways on your instance. Together we can create a blueprint to build communities of connected, inspired leaders speaking the same language, as part of a unified approach to leading your people forward.

Our Solutions Architect team members are some of the most accomplished professionals in the industry. They can help you:

• Co-create a learning experience that meets your timeline, technology needs, and budget
• Develop à la carte options to fill in the gaps in your leadership development curriculum
• Create a leadership development journey that unfolds over time and incorporates Blanchard content, your custom content, and content from other providers
• Deploy a new leadership development experience on a learning management system, a learning experience platform, or other innovative learning technologies

I am ready to help. There’s a bright future of leadership development ahead of us. Schedule an initial design consultation with me or one of the other Solutions Architects to explore what the future of leadership development could look like in your organization. Or download our new Solutions Brochure. We’d love to share designs we’ve created for other clients and explore what your organization’s leadership development experience could look like.

About the Author

Ann Rollins is a solutions architect with The Ken Blanchard Companies. A modern learning champion with more than 25 years of industry experience helping form and execute learning strategy for Fortune and Global 500 companies, Ann always has her eyes on the technology horizon. Her passion lies in helping clients sort out the learning angles and attainability of technology in workforce learning and performance to build future-forward, human-centered experiences.

_{^1. Dynamic Signal, The Cost of Poor Employee Communication, 2018.}

Dear Madeleine,

I am a 31-year-old female attorney who was recently promoted to manager of an in-house legal team for a giant global not-for-profit organization. One of my direct reports is a man who came to us after having been a partner at a highly respected firm. This is to be his last job, as he is nearing retirement.

We all thought he would bring enormous expertise to the job and add value; but, in fact, he has caused nothing but trouble. His work is shoddy on his best days—I spend far too much time reviewing and correcting it before it goes out. He makes errors that make no sense in light of his experience. He is clearly not paying attention. He leaves work early on a regular basis, which would be OK if his work was done; but he misses deadlines, which ends up as a crisis on my desk at the end of the day.

All of this would be simply annoying, but it is compounded by the fact that he is downright rude to me. He makes no effort to disguise his contempt for my age and gender.

I have made tremendous efforts to be a good manager, making tasks and standards clear, providing ample time for one-on-one meetings to review workload, etc. I would fire him—I have an entire page of documented incidents in which he failed at his task or was disrespectful or hostile to me personally—but, because of the economic squeeze of the pandemic, we are in a hiring freeze. We just don’t have the manpower to cover his work, cruddy as it is. I have gone to HR, but they are overwhelmed with layoffs and furloughs in other parts of the organization. I am at my wits’ end with this situation.

Shoddy Work Making Me Nuts

Dear SWMMN,

This sounds tough. I definitely used to be automatically dismissed by older men—it is a consolation of age that that kind of thing tends to fade. But that doesn’t help you right now. Right now you have a couple of separate issues, so it might help to tease them out and address them one at a time.

The first thing to tackle is the idea that, because of a hiring freeze, you are not allowed to replace an employee who can’t—or won’t—perform. That just makes no sense at all. You might think about taking the case to both your boss and HR. This is serious and will affect your team’s ability to generate required results—so I can’t believe that with enough evidence and a well-prepared argument, you wouldn’t be able to get some support to make a change.

If you absolutely cannot make that happen, you will have to get ready for a hard conversation—probably a couple of them. Start by laying out all three issues at once and setting up times to work through all three separately. My new favorite tool for hard conversations comes from Craig Weber’s work on Conversational Capacity. Craig says that to find the sweet spot in a conversation, you have to start with candor—be ready to state your position and the thinking behind it. Then, you need to practice curiosity by testing your thinking and asking questions.

You will have to decide which issue is most important and start with that. I might suggest the order of priority as competence, commitment, and attitude. The thinking behind this order is the general principle that when people do not feel equipped to do their job, they tend to lose motivation and start lashing out at others. You may see a change if you can help your employee be more successful at his job.

Competence. It seems your supposed experienced expert might be out of practice. It is fairly normal that, as people rise to executive positions, they can forget the myriad details of the job or not stay abreast of changes. That might be the case here. However, that doesn’t excuse the lack of attention to detail he is demonstrating.

Be prepared to point out several examples of errors, and then ask some questions like:

• What is your perspective on this?
• Can you help me understand what might be going on?
• How do you think this situation might be addressed?
• Is there something I can do to help?

(Questions adapted from the book Conversational Capacity by Craig Weber, pg. 97)

Be prepared to continue being curious if your employee takes a position that is different from yours. You can say something like: “I admit my perspective is different from yours; perhaps you can share what you have seen or heard that leads you to see things this way.” The more you are curious and keep him talking, the more likely you are to get to a place where he might be interested in hearing your viewpoint. But you may not be able to get a dialogue going. And if you just can’t, that’s OK. You can always default to making a simple request, such as: “please catch up on proper legal terms and double-check your documents before submitting them.”

Commitment. You can observe to your employee that he often stops work before the agreed-upon time. Make sure you have a couple of examples. If you decide to go the way of curiosity, you can ask: “is there anything in particular that is undermining your motivation or ability to hit agreed-upon deadlines?” It will be interesting to hear what he has to say. At least from that jumping off point, you might be able to renegotiate deadlines moving forward. You can also share how critical it is that he follow through with his commitments—because you also have commitments and need to be able to plan your time. The more you can stay curious and neutral, the better off you will be. Which brings us to the third issue …

Attitude. This one is tricky—and it will color the other two issues. The more you feel attacked, the harder it will be for you to stay curious and open. So anything you can do to not take your employee’s behavior personally will strengthen your position. Remember: this is not about you, no matter how cruddy it may make you feel. I suggest you ask yourself if it is truly personal. There is a good chance he is a jerk to everyone. If you find it is only you, or only women in your office, it is an example of harassment or bullying against a specific class and you really do need to take it to HR. If you are forced to keep an employee who is creating a hostile work environment, you could actually sue the organization.

Obviously you don’t want it to come to that—so start again with your observations. Then ask: “Is there something I am doing that is causing you to treat me with such contempt?” He may claim that he isn’t doing it; he may claim to be unaware of it; or he may actually be unaware of it. You can continue to practice curiosity: “Clearly we don’t agree. Let’s see what our different perspectives have to teach us about this. Can you explain in more detail how you are seeing this?”

Ultimately, if he continues to be rude and hostile, it is your right to set a boundary. But that means you have to give him specific direction on how he needs to address you. You may want to create a list of never and always statements. For example (I am making these up based on my own experience):

• Never: smirk at me, mimic my voice, swear under your breath, or roll your eyes when I speak in meetings.
• Always: keep to commitments you have made, be civil toward me, and tell me when I do or say something you disagree with.

In the future, you will know to start with tight supervision with new people, point out errors or inappropriate behavior the first time you see it, and then, as the new person settles in, you can loosen up. It is almost impossible to go the other direction.

It can be hard to stand up for yourself, but no one can do it for you. There is a good chance your employee is just waiting for you to draw the line and will continue to push to see just how much nonsense you are willing to put up with. Once you call him out on his bad behavior he may straighten up.

This won’t be your last problem employee. Get ready for many more to come. It gets easier. Not much easier, because you will always expect people to do their best and strive to get along with others, in other words, to be like you. Don’t let it make you bitter or cynical that many people aren’t at all like you. But do get comfortable with drawing the line.

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,

It has recently become apparent that one of my newer direct reports is lying. In one instance, he told me a presentation was proofed and ready to go and I found out it wasn’t when I went into the document on our shared drive to make a change. In another instance, I learned from a colleague that he had claimed to her team that we were further along with a deliverable than we actually were. And there have been other, less impactful, little red flags.

The crazy thing is that the lies are so easy to uncover—especially the shared drive documents where anyone can see the last time he was in the document. When I confronted him, he claimed he had completed the deck but the changes weren’t saved. We are a technology company so claiming technical failure can work when a whole system crashes, but this is just bald-faced lying—on top of unforgivable technical ignorance. It is one thing to be caught and apologize, which is what I would expect, but now it is adding insult to injury.

I am very clear about my expectations when new people join my team, but it never occurred to me to tell people they are not allowed to lie. I am so mad that I’m having a hard time thinking straight about this. I don’t know what to do. What do you think?

Liar Liar

Dear Liar Liar,

My first thought is no. Nope. No, no, no, no. Zero tolerance for lying. Then I thought about it some more, and guess what? Still no.

It is true—you wouldn’t think you’d need to tell people they can’t lie. But then something like this happens and you realize that what is obvious to you just is not obvious to everyone. It is fair to say that all implicit expectations need to be made explicit. That way, when someone does something you simply don’t anticipate, you have your explicit expectations to fall back on. Black and white. No grey area, no confusion, no discussion.

Potential expectations and grounds for dismissal might be:

1. No lying
2. No cheating
3. No stealing
4. No drinking on the job
5. No showing up to work in a bikini top
6. No showing up to in-person client presentations in bare feet
7. Do not bring your dog to a client meeting
8. No smoking in the restrooms

Numbers 5-8 are examples of expectations I wouldn’t have thought I needed to set. I’m not that creative. Just when I think I can no longer be surprised by human beings, I am surprised!

Now, there are the little fibs that many people tell to boost their egos, hide a minor infraction, or just entertain themselves. The thing is, if it doesn’t interfere with work or create static in the system, you probably don’t even notice it. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

You sound like a sensible person. You must have hired this man for a reason—presumably, you thought he was going to bring something worthwhile to the table. You may be considering the high cost of hiring, onboarding, and training someone new. In case you’re motivated to try to salvage this employee, and if you think this could help, you might share our extraordinary Trust Model with him. This model does what all truly brilliant models do: it clarifies and simplifies a deeply layered and complex issue. You might even share this step by step guide to rebuilding trust with him. It can be helpful for people who need to break lifelong trust-busting habits.

Or you may just be fed up enough to not want to take the time. It’s up to you.

Before you go firing anyone, though, I suggest you get HR involved and start documenting. Call out the behavior every time you see it and make a note of exactly what happens. Work with your HR person to decide in advance how many (more) chances you will give Pants on Fire. People lie for all kinds of complicated reasons, many of which would evoke your compassion. So you don’t have to be mean about it, but you must refuse to tolerate it.

Prior to his final chance, you can literally say “lying will not be tolerated.” If you feel like you just don’t have the heart, I can recommend the work of Dr. Henry Cloud, an authority on setting boundaries. His book to check out is Boundaries for Leaders.

Don’t get mad. That just hurts you. Stay calm, point out the lies, and your liar will either clean up his act or lie his way out of a job.

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 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,

My boss is really tough—I would say borderline abusive. It isn’t just to me. He is awful to everyone. Because of this, I am in a constant state of anxiety and my work has definitely suffered. I was very good at my job but I know the quality has decreased because I have no confidence and can’t seem to make a decision anymore.

I wait for the boss to tell me exactly how he wants things for fear of doing it wrong. I know in my heart that I have a lot to offer and that I could do this job very well with little or no input from him.

Some days I feel like I just want to do the job the way I think it should be done—to hell with it—I’m going to get yelled at either way. What do you think?

Sick of Being Scared

_____________________________________________________________

Dear Sick of Being of Scared,

Well, at least it isn’t personal.

Okay, Sick, there is a continuum of options here. At one far end you have cowering submission, and at the other you have open conflict. No matter where you are on the continuum, you are going to be scared and your poor exhausted nervous system is going to produce cortisol and adrenaline. Eventually, something will give and you will get truly sick and have to take a leave of absence.

If you choose confrontation, at least it would put some control into your hands. The more control you can exert over your circumstances and the more certainty you can create for yourself, the less you will produce stress hormones and the better you will feel.

Are things too crazy for you to catch your mean boss in a calm moment and create some agreements? Tell him you want only to do excellent work and make him happy. Ask him to give you input at key junctures of your work so you feel confident about being on the right track. Walk through your ideas about how the work should be done and get input from him. Show that you are receptive to his ideas and willing to compromise.

Essentially, I’m saying don’t let your fear keep you from having discussions, especially since it sounds like he is going to huff and puff and yell regardless of what you do. If you can just remember that this is just the way he is, it doesn’t actually mean anything, and you aren’t going to die, you can take a stand for yourself and your ideas.

I think you nailed it—if you are going to get yelled at either way, to hell with it indeed; you might as well go for it. Think of your boss like you do cold rainy weather: put on your metaphorical raincoat, pop up your imaginary umbrella, and just let yourself be okay with getting a little wet. Who knows—he may respect you all the more for 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!

Does training really work?

“If we as leadership, learning, and development professionals can’t answer that question with an enthusiastic yes, we’re all in trouble,” says Dr. Paul Leone, ROI expert at Verizon and author of the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact: Bridging the Gap between Training and Business Results.

“The truth is, HR people don’t always know if training is working,” says Leone. “Often we ask for budget at the beginning of the year, but at the end of the year we aren’t able to show the training has had an impact on the bottom line. That’s not a good position to be in.

“Imagine how much better you would feel if you could go into meetings with senior leaders and stakeholders saying, ‘This time I have some data—and I can show that we are impacting the bottom line by X amount of dollars.’ I think that’s where we all want to be in the industry.”

The good news, according to Leone, is that you can demonstrate the impact of training if you know where to look, how to set up your initiative, and how to present your data.

“Begin with the end in mind,” says Leone. “What are the leadership behaviors you want to impact and what is the benefit in terms of increased sales or productivity, decreased costs from better alignment or efficiencies, or improvements to the customer experience?

“Senior leaders want to know that the money they are spending on training is generating a good return on investment. If you don’t clearly identify the benefits along with the costs of training, it creates some pretty lopsided equations and makes it difficult to talk about ROI—because training is seen only as a cost. That’s a vulnerable position.”

Start Small and Be Conservative in Your Approach

For L&D professionals just getting started with measuring ROI, Leone suggests focusing on a small, manageable test case, such as a pilot study with a group of managers who have direct reports with easily quantifiable key performance indicators (KPI).

“Two things are important here,” says Leone. “First, remember that you are measuring the benefit of better leader behaviors by looking at the improvement in performance of that leader’s direct reports—that’s where the bottom-line impact will show up. For example, better leader behaviors from a call center manager will translate into better performance from that manager’s frontline associates. Better goal-setting and coaching skills from a sales manager will translate into better sales performance from that manager’s individual salespeople.”

“Second, choose managers whose direct reports have KPIs that are easier to convert into bottom line impact. Don’t try to quantify the impact of better research and development performance among a group of engineers as your first project. Choose a group where you can measure shorter-term impact and easily convert improved performance into dollars and cents.”

Use a Proven Model and Process

Leone also recommends using a proven approach such as the Phillips ROI model and the Kirkpatrick levels of change. He suggests focusing on levels 3, 4, and 5 in the Kirkpatrick model which cover leader behavior changes and bottom-line impact.

Leone uses a survey administered 90 days after training to measure perceived changes in manager behavior. To corroborate answers and provide a more airtight case when presenting evidence of changed behaviors to senior executives, Leone surveys both the managers who participated in the class and their direct reports.

“It’s important to not only ask the managers if they have changed their behavior, but also ask the direct reports if they have experienced changed behavior from their manager. This provides a corroborating data point.”

To isolate the impact of the changed behaviors on business performance, Leone recommends comparing the financial performance of the treatment group (the managers who went through the training) with a control group (similar managers in an identical business unit who have not yet gone through the training).

“Comparing the treatment group with a control group allows you to isolate the benefits of the training. When senior leaders know that everything else between the two groups is identical, they are more at ease attributing the improved performance to the training initiative.”

Keep the Presentation Simple for Best Results

Leone also has a tip for how to present the data to senior leaders: keep it simple!

“When I first began presenting data after graduate school, I thought it was necessary to show things like multiple regressions and multivariate analysis in my presentations. But in reality, it had the opposite effect. When I made my presentations more understandable, they started to go higher and higher in the organization.

“If you want to squash your story, throw in a lot of numbers and tables,” says Leone with a smile. “But if you want to push that story up the hierarchy to the highest levels, make it simple and it will get up there.”

Establish Credibility that Lasts and Builds Confidence

“The goal with your ROI presentations is to create credibility within the organization—where you can say, ‘If we are going to keep a program, we are going to run a pilot and we’ll measure it. If it’s great, we’ll scale it across the organization. If it’s not so great, we won’t.’ I can guarantee you that at some point in the very near future, someone is going to ask if a training worked. You will want a study and some data to show that it did.

“Remember, you don’t need to measure everything at first,” says Leone. “Go in and measure one or two programs and do it right. Once you get your foot in the door as a credible evaluator, you’ll have a much easier time securing budget in the future.”

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

Leadership Training—Calculating ROI and Making the Business Case

Thursday, November 29, 2018, 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 with both identifying the expected return on investment for training expenditures and measuring impact after an initiative.

In this webinar, David Witt, program director at The Ken Blanchard Companies, teams up with Dr. Paul Leone, author of 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 class has been conducted.

You’ll learn:

• How to calculate the ROI for your leadership training initiative using Blanchard’s Leadership Training ROI Worksheet. (Worksheet provided to all registrants.)
• How to measure the impact of training using the methodology outlined in Leone’s 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 using this link!

That statistic is unnecessarily high, say organizational coaching experts Madeleine Homan Blanchard and Patricia Overland. As leaders in the Coaching Services division of The Ken Blanchard Companies, both coaches have seen the research and witnessed firsthand the failure that can occur when leaders are not provided with the support they need to succeed.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve coached leaders who were newly promoted because they had a set of skills and good relationships with people,” says Blanchard, “and when they got on the job, they failed.”

It’s not that surprising, she says, given the high expectations set for new leaders and the minimal support they actually receive when transitioning into a new role.

“Leaders are under a lot of pressure to produce results, but they often don’t get the mentoring support they need.  The thinking is that at this level they should be able to just do it.”

In conducting interviews with 2,600 Fortune 1000 executives, organizational and leadership consulting firm Navalent found that 76 percent of new executives indicated that the formal development processes of their organization were, at best, minimally helpful in preparing them for their executive role. What’s more, 55 percent of respondents indicated that they had little if any ongoing coaching and feedback to help them refine their ability to perform in an executive role.

“It’s a challenge for HR professionals,” says Overland. “And with the level of change and the number of executives transitioning into new roles, especially in larger organizations, the problem becomes magnified. It’s not uncommon for larger companies to have five executives in transition from five different parts of the company at the same time.

“Even one or two levels below the executive team, all kinds of change is occurring at the VP and director level. It’s always difficult when decision makers move. Now HR finds itself managing several different coaches from different companies, each with their own approaches, contracts, conditions, etc. It can be overwhelming, and that much harder to ensure quality and a return on the investment.

For HR leaders facing this challenge, Overland offers four words of advice: “Don’t go it alone—especially if you are managing a large number of executives in transition across a wide geographical area. This is where working with one company with global reach and a single point of contact really helps. Having one contact person who can help ensure quality, vetting, reporting, and ROI can position an organization to provide successful coaching to every leader who needs it.

“A larger, experienced coaching organization can provide a consistent quality of coaching. Not only is this good for the client and the leaders being coached, it also permits the coaches to talk to each other about how the coaching is going or about the challenges they encounter, and to ask for help when necessary—all without breaching confidentiality.

“This keeps the coaching aligned with organizational objectives and keeps the people focused on priorities,” says Overland.

Be especially careful about going it alone if you are looking to bring the executive coaching function in-house, says Overland.

“In my experience, executives tend to have a real hesitancy to work with an in-house person. They see a risk in disclosing potentially sensitive information to someone junior to them in the organization. Let’s say a senior executive is feeling stressed about a major strategy change, the sale of the company, or a pending merger. The executive won’t want to talk to an internal person about that.  An external person is almost always a better choice.”

Blanchard agrees. “Coaching gives people the direction and support they need for the complex, high level leadership and management skills used in a senior role. When I’m thinking about the role of coaching, I always go back to Jim Collins’s book Good to Great,” explains Blanchard. “Collins said that a leader’s job is to get the right people on the bus in the right seats and make sure that the bus is going in the right direction.

“That’s what you are accomplishing when you bring coaching into an organization. You are ensuring that the bus is going in the right direction and all the right people are in the right seats.”

Would you like to learn more about how coaching can improve the success rate of your executives in transition?  Join us for a free webinar!

Supporting Leaders in Transition with Coaching

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / 12:00 noon Eastern Time / 5:00 p.m. UK Time

When leaders are in transition—moving from one role to another within the organization, or moving in from an outside organization, ensuring their success is critical.  Leaders in transition can’t afford to fail—yet statistics show that a large percentage do.

In this webinar, organizational coaching experts Madeleine Homan Blanchard and Patricia Overland will show you how to leverage transition coaching during an executive’s first 90 to 120 days to ensure your leaders succeed.

Participants will learn:

• The 3 types of executive transition
• What the latest research reveals
• The 4 critical elements you need to build into your transition strategy

Blanchard and Overland will also share best practices and examples from two large company client initiatives.  Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to put these success strategies to work in your organization.  This event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

REGISTER TODAY!

I head up one of several R&D teams at a global consumer goods company. My team is amazing—brilliant, eccentric, creative, fun people who are blowing away their goals. (It takes a certain type of person to be good at what we do.)

Here is my problem. Some of my folks are good at the basics—showing up on time for meetings, submitting expenses, dressing appropriately, filling out paperwork, etc. But the others not so much. I am constantly on them to comply with the bare minimum of what is required to operate in this large system. Case in point: conducting performance reviews.

I know some managers who can throw all the rules to the wind and allow their creatives to operate as they please, but I just can’t do it. I have spoken to my own boss and my peers to get some ideas about how to get people to toe the line, but they all just laugh and say I’ll figure it out. I don’t have kids but I am starting to feel like a parent. It is making me really…

Cranky

Dear Cranky,

Presumably, you manage these people because you are one of them.  Are you not eccentric and creative yourself? How did the person previously in your position handle this problem? You must have leadership skills to have been so attractive to the best. Your people are doing well because you have created an environment in which they can thrive—and yet, you have also led them to think that they can get away with, well, acting like children.

Something you are doing—possibly not having proper boundaries—is sending the wrong signal. Henry Cloud is an expert on this. You may want to take a look at his work.

I am married to an eccentric creative, I manage a bunch of wildly creative people, and I am a parent. And still, my least strong suit is getting people to do tedious stuff they have to do, so I really do feel your pain. I must be clear, concise and relentless about what is necessary. Repetition and reminders without judgment are helpful. And however strong the temptation might be, I do not shield other adults from the consequences of their choices.

Your job as a manager is to clearly inform your people of the consequences of not complying with requirements. Putting a time limit on getting the performance review done might work: if something isn’t done in a certain time frame, they don’t get a raise. You may have already thought of this. I know with my huge team, we have finally resorted to not paying expenses that are submitted more than 30 days after the event. That works for some, but others just don’t care about money.

Another idea is to go to HR and see what special dispensation you might be able to get for your team. It may not be possible, but I know a lot of the large global companies are trying to be more flexible about these things. Maybe you could be a pilot program for some new, easier methods in this area.

Finally, leverage the genius of your team. Put this conundrum in front of them to solve. This is not your problem alone. It is draining you now and will begin to drain the energy of your team soon as well. Let them apply some of their brilliance and creativity—maybe even some old-fashioned peer pressure—to shift this situation.

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 a small team for a large nonprofit. One long-term member of the team really knows the ins and outs of the organization and can be really helpful.

The problem is, he does a couple of things that drive everybody crazy. He often decides to do things—presentations, publications, project plans—differently from the way the team has decided or I have instructed. He over-focuses on details and tends to go off on tangents that take up valuable time in meetings and add no value.

He doesn’t report to me, but everybody is looking at me to stop his behaviors because his direct boss is a big softie. I don’t feel it’s my place to reign him in or give him feedback. And if I went out on a limb and gave him feedback, I might damage the relationship and lose the value he does bring to the team.

Do you agree?

Annoyed

Dear Annoyed,

I understand that you are not this person’s direct boss, but you are his superior and he does in fact create work product for you. Your team members are going to lose respect for you if don’t at least try to change the behavior that is annoying everyone. You need to take control here. Forget his actual boss—you can give him feedback on what you observe and the work he does for you and your team.

Many leaders are skittish about giving feedback. I understand it is uncomfortable, but it is part of the job. There is no shortage of advice out there about how to give feedback—and it is often belabored so I will keep it simple.

• This will help you to cut out unnecessary words and get to the point. Think about the offending behavior, the impact it has on you and the team, and the change you are requesting.
• Be brief, clear and direct. Don’t give vague second-hand feedback such as “People on the team think that…” Take responsibility. Share your own observations and leave everyone else out of it.
• Keep your tone warm, friendly, and neutral. The idea is not to criticize, it is to be clear and increase your chances of catalyzing change.
• Tell the person you are asking for the meeting so that you can give them some feedback and make a request for a change.
• Meet in private. No one wants an audience when being taken to task.

Now for the actual meeting.

• Share that giving feedback makes you uncomfortable, that your intention to is help him be more effective, and that you see it as your job to have the conversation.
• Ask if this is a good time for him to have the conversation. Most people say yes, but if he says no, schedule another time to do it. You never know when someone is having a terrible day, has other things on their mind, or just needs to prepare themselves emotionally. It can really derail the hard conversation when you find out that your direct report’s dog died that morning and they are ready for the teeniest thing to push them off balance and fall apart.
• Share your observation and make a request; e.g., “In the weekly planning meeting you are always well prepared, but often, like yesterday, you go off on a tangent and tell elaborate stories that are not relevant to the task at hand. It is my job to keep the meetings short and efficient, so I must ask you to stop doing that.”
• You may want to limit it to no more than 3 items—presumably, they will all be related. If you see the person getting overwhelmed, tell him you have more feedback but you will save it for another time after he has digested what he has heard.
• Share how you will respond the next time you experience the offending behavior; e.g., “The next time you go off on a tangent in the planning meeting, I will politely ask you to stop and refocus the conversation.”
• Give the person a chance to respond. They may act defensive, hurt, or otherwise emotional. Or they might be perfectly even keeled. They will ask questions and want more information. Do not elaborate—if pressed, repeat what you have already prepared and do not deviate. The more you go off script, the more you may seem to be negotiating the request, which you are not willing to do. This is not a negotiation, so do not let the person think it is. You may be a dotted line, but you are still the boss.

Sound like a lot? It is. Being a manager is hard—I am sorry.

You may lose the relationship. This is always a risk, but frankly it may be worth it to increase the effectiveness of the team. And if you are kind, clear, and direct, the person getting the feedback can choose to get upset and take it personally—but you are just telling the truth, not being a big meanie. Your actual direct reports will know that you give feedback when it is warranted and will trust you more. They will also be grateful, because who wants to be regularly annoyed? Life is hard enough without having to dread the planning meeting because one person is oblivious. So make it stop.

Be strong. You can do it. Or, do nothing and continue to pay the price.

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,

About three months ago, my boss told me that I was in line for a promotion. It is now the middle of December and I haven’t heard a word. I asked about it at my last one-on-one and he looked at me funny and then changed the subject. I don’t think he remembers the conversation.

My boss is usually great and nice, but also sometimes moody and weird—and he often doesn’t remember conversations. I once submitted a report he had asked me to create – I spent four nights and a weekend putting it together. Again he gave me that blank look and it was obvious he had no idea what it was and no memory of having asked me to do it.

In the meantime, I really want that promotion. What do I do now?

Boss in a Fog

Dear Boss in a Fog,

Wow, this is tricky. We all have memory lapses and stress can make the problem worse, but this seems beyond the norm.

It doesn’t appear that the behavior comes from bad intentions, so you are going to have to prioritize which is more important to you right now: that your boss gets the help he needs to be clearer, or that you get the clarity you need to be as effective as possible in your job.

It all depends on the relationship you have with your boss. Clearly he has a problem, and some would tell you to go to HR to report it. The key, if you want to go with that course of action, is to keep track of incidents with dates and details.

I would only recommend this course of action if you don’t feel like you can have an honest conversation with your boss. I can tell you that if my employees noticed that I was being odd and inconsistent, I would very much want them to mention it to me. This option would require some practice and courage. I am a big fan of Susan Scott’s method from her book Fierce Conversations.

1. Name the Issue. He has said specific things which he then does not seem to recall.
2. Select a specific example that illustrates the behavior. The ones you shared here should do it.
3. Describe your emotion about this issue. You feel you do a lot of work that doesn’t make any difference to anyone. You got all excited about a possible promotion and now have no idea what is going on.
4. Clarify what is at stake. This is tricky. You can stick with how it is affecting you personally, or you can go out on a limb and share that you are worried about your boss’s health. The angle that you are worried about him can easily backfire, though, so take stock of the relationship. If you don’t have the history, he could easily get defensive.
5. Identify your contribution to this problem. Is it possible you are misinterpreting things? Be honest.
6. Indicate your wish to resolve the issue and be specific about what “resolved” looks like to you. This is critical and will provide both of you with a measure so you will both know that the fix is successful. In your case, I would suggest repeating back what you hear to make sure you got it right. Then document all conversations and email them to your boss for confirmation on what was agreed to.
7. Invite the other person to respond.

The thing I like most about this process is that it forces you to prepare for a conversation about one problem, and one only. You can’t pile on with everything your boss does that drives you crazy, but you can, maybe, make an impact on one thing he does that is impacting your success.

Maybe try a conversation first. If that doesn’t yield anything, then go to HR. You are not the first person to notice this, and this may even be a known problem. Regarding the promotion, you may just have to deal with the fact that it was never a real possibility in the first place. You won’t know until you tackle the fundamental problem with your boss or talk to someone in HR about it.

Happy holidays to you. I hope you get your promotion, and I really hope your boss is OK.

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!

Here are the three biggest challenges L&D professionals face—along with some resources to successfully address each challenge.

Adding Credible Numbers to Your Proposal. The first challenge is how to quantify the bottom-line impact of improved leadership behaviors. There are three areas to focus on, says Paul Leone, author of Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact. “Key in on performance indicators that produce revenue, cut costs, or avoid future costs.”

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 measure the impact of leadership training performance by looking at increases in direct reports’ performance and productivity.”

Leone shares more in his interview and webinar on Measuring the Impact of Training.

Convincing Others. Once you have your numbers together, you need to practice your financial presentation skills. “It shouldn’t be an adversarial meeting,” says Craig Spitz, chief financial officer at The Ken Blanchard Companies. “It’s about connecting the dots. Anytime learning and development professionals come prepared with models, numbers, and rationale that help make the case for training, they make the CFO’s job easier. If a training professional can show the impact of training, everyone is going to be interested in that.”

Spitz shares more in his interview and webinar on Presenting Your Training Initiative to the CFO.

Getting Out of Your Own Way. Finally, it’s important to recognize that there is a certain amount of guesswork when making assumptions about the impact of training. L&D professionals are often their own toughest critics, says Leone.  “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.”

But as CFO Spitz reminds L&D professionals, “Even the most thorough proposals are based on assumptions. Present your proposals confidently.”

Are you getting ready to submit a leadership training proposal? Don’t let these three challenges hold you back. For more on calculating impact, refining your presentation, and making the business case, check out these free resources available at the Blanchard website.

Blog Posts

Measuring the Impact of Training

Presenting Your Training Initiative to the CFO

Getting Buy-in for Leadership Development Training

Webinar Recordings

Making the Business Case for Training: Talking to a CFO

Leadership Training: Calculating ROI and Measuring Impact

Making the Business Case for Leadership Training

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!

Dear Madeleine,

I hate my job. I am just bored to tears. When I completed graduate school, I was recruited into what I thought was the perfect job for me—the job description was exactly what I was looking for. A year later, I am doing a ton of mindless administrative work and almost none of what was in the original job description.

I have tried to speak to my boss about this, but she says I need to pay my dues and that she will consider me for the next project that would suit my skills. In the meantime, my peers keep dumping their admin work on me.

I dread going to work. I have stopped going to the gym and I fear I am sliding into full-on depression, which I have a history with. It scares me. I would quit, but of course I have crushing student debt now. What do you think?

Bored to Tears, Maybe to Death

Dear Bored to Tears, Maybe to Death,

This is a terrible situation and I am so sorry. It must be really demoralizing to spend the money and make the big effort to complete an advanced educational program and then find yourself in a job that is killing your soul.

It sounds as if you are in a very bad way. Depression is no joke. I highly recommend that you find a therapist right now, I mean right this minute, to talk to and get some perspective. Given the details you provided, I suspect your company has an Employee Assistance Program and that you can probably get six sessions with a therapist. It will be totally private and will get you back on an even keel, back in the gym, and able to think straight. Exercise has been proven to be an excellent hedge against anxiety and depression, so get moving.

Once you have stopped the downward spiral, you will need to start an upward spiral. I hate to say it, but this probably involves looking for a new job. You may be able to make a go of it where you are now, but you would need to set a whole lot of boundaries and train everyone around you to see you in a new way.

Unfortunately, your boss and your peers have been getting away with treating you unfairly. I really don’t want to be mean, but people will continue unacceptable behavior as long as you allow it—and you have allowed it. Unless there was an upfront disclosure about having to pay dues with tasks that were not in your original job description, you seem to be the victim of some kind of bait-and-switch situation.

You didn’t say anything about salary, but I suspect they are underpaying you as well. And they will keep doing it as long as you put up with it. You may choose to have the hard conversation with your boss about how she needs to either upgrade all of your work assignments—now—or risk losing you. That conversation will go a whole lot better if you feel safe to leave, meaning you have another option.

The good news is that you have a graduate degree and a year’s worth of work experience under your belt. I think it is worth the push to brush up your resume and try hard to start over with a new organization and a new boss—who won’t take advantage of you because you won’t let them.

Get into action. In this order:

1. Get immediate help. Talk to a therapist, talk to friends, go to the gym.
2. Once stable, start applying for other jobs.
3. Use the new job possibility as leverage to fix your current situation; or simply walk away from people who do not have your back and go toward people who do.

It is really hard to stand up for yourself, Bored TTMTD, so you are going to need a lot of support. You are going to want to nurture your inner warrior. You might consider looking at Amy Cuddy’s work—her book is Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. The validity of some of her research has been challenged, but that does not diminish the power of her experience and work helping people who feel powerless to rise to a difficult occasion.

I am glad you wrote. I am sorry you are in such a rough spot. Get help. Now.

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!

Getting Buy-In for Leadership Development Training

One of the biggest challenges leadership, learning, and talent development professionals face when they propose a new initiative is convincing their CEO of the financial impact of the proposed initiative. 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.

Leading the Duke Energy Way

A senior leader at Duke Energy approached Stephanie Bush, director of learning and development, with a request for building leadership skills in his division. Already familiar with Situational Leadership® II (SLII®), Stephanie decided to pilot the program with this leader’s management group to see if it met their needs.

“I knew our leaders wanted to be able to have impactful coaching conversations with their team members. They needed to be able to set goals, hold people accountable, and provide a leadership style to match their employees’ needs. That is exactly what SLII provides.”

The feedback from the pilot sessions was so positive that SLII was added to the curriculum for the Duke Energy Leadership Academy which was created to support “Leading the Duke Energy Way” by aligning to the business strategy and leadership imperatives.

Podcast: Michael Bungay Stanier on The Coaching Habit

Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever shares how time pressed managers can effectively coach direct reports by asking instead of telling, being a little more curious, and engaging a little more often.

Developing Self Leaders—A Competitive Advantage for Organizations

The nature of leadership continues to evolve as organizational structures and business models change. A new Blanchard white paper looks at how top-heavy leadership approaches are shifting and in their place, individual contributors are being asked to step up in new ways, take on more responsibility, contribute differently, and look for ways to empower themselves—essentially to become self leaders.

You can check out the entire August issue here. Want Ignite delivered to your InBox each month?  You can subscribe for free using this link.

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.

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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!

Blanchard points to research that shows most managers don’t receive that necessary training, however, until they are about ten years into their managerial career.

“The effects are damaging at both an individual and organizational level,” says Blanchard. “More than 60 percent of new managers underperform or fail in their first two years.  And those who survive without managerial training often find themselves with negative habits that are hard to break—which can hold them back for years to come.”

With over two million new people stepping up to leadership for the first time each year in the US alone, Blanchard believes organizations need to take management training a lot more seriously.

“It is very important that those responsible for organizational training put together an effective curriculum for developing people into trusted professional managers. As a professional manager, you are responsible for what your direct reports do, and to some degree, how they feel—especially the emotional connection they establish with their job and the company.”

While some people’s influence and communication skills come naturally, every manager can learn and develop the skills they need regardless of their starting point, says Blanchard.

“Some people naturally understand how to work with others collaboratively and how to build rapport, while others come to leadership from a less developed starting point. But you still need a system if you are going to succeed as a manager. It’s something everyone can benefit from.”

According to Blanchard, all great managers do four things:

“Great managers begin by establishing clarity for their people through clear goals, accountability, and personal responsibility.  Second, they intervene appropriately when things are going well—and when things aren’t going well. Third, they adapt their leadership style to what is needed by appropriately identifying a direct report’s development level on a task and then modifying their style to best serve the direct report at that stage.

“Finally, great managers know how to create long term, long lasting relationships that are evidenced by trust and engagement over time.  This results in people who stay with the organization, talk positively about the organization to others, and perform at high levels in a collaborative manner.”

Blanchard explains that effective managers connect the dots between the work of the person, the work of the unit, and the work of the organization as a whole. They understand the correlation of action, motivation, and commitment. They successfully manage both performance and employee satisfaction.

“Great managers help people see the bigger picture from whatever seat they occupy,” says Blanchard, “and that can be a challenge.  People’s careers rise and fall and managers need to be there with coaching skills to help people through the ups and downs—even when there isn’t a clear path forward.

“These powerful skills almost always have to be developed through training—and once learned, they can help people focus and find a way forward in any situation.”

Interested in learning more about designing a leadership development curriculum for the managers in your organization? Join us for a free webinar!

Creating an Effective Leadership Development Curriculum—3 Essential Components

Online—July 25, 2017 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Great managers aren’t born—they’re trained. In this webinar, best-selling business author and consultant Scott Blanchard identifies the essential ingredients of a comprehensive leadership development program, starting with a first-time manager curriculum and moving through intermediate and advanced skills managers need to bring out the best in people.

Drawing on his company’s experience successfully training hundreds of thousands of managers for more than thirty years, Blanchard will share:

• Four communication skills and four conversations new managers need to master
• Three goal setting, diagnosing, and matching skills intermediate level managers need to learn
• Four specialized coaching skills that help advanced managers cope with management situations that are shifting or otherwise uncertain

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to put together a proven leadership development program in your organization!

Register today!

Looking for some relief? Recent research confirms that a little proactive self leadership results in significantly less strain (and more energy) at the end of your workday.

See for yourself by giving one—or all three—of these strategies a try.

Ask for Feedback

Tomorrow morning, try a bold start to your day. Ask for feedback from your manager, colleagues, or staff members: “Would you be willing to share one piece of feedback, based on your experience or observation, that you think would help me do my job better today?”

Neuroscience provides evidence that asking for feedback sets up a more responsive brain condition. Requesting feedback delivers the information you need when you need it, but also results in less defensiveness—meaning you are more likely to hear what you need to hear and act on it.

So, when you learn something of value, act on it! Put what you’ve learned to use. Asking for feedback and then acting on it will demonstrate the willingness to learn and grow and the courage to be honest. What’s more, others will see it as a valuable example of proactive behavior.

Identify Solutions to Problems

Ask people what is getting in the way of their being more productive and many will half-jokingly point to their manager, an irritating coworker, or an unreasonable client. Instead of bemoaning your manager who “doesn’t get it,” why not be proactive and sell your solution? Follow these four steps:

1. State the problem or issue in one clear sentence, including the implications for you and others if the situation isn’t improved.
2. Generate three solutions with the pros and cons of each solution. One of the solutions should be the one that you believe will solve the problem based on your experience and insight. But as good as your idea may be, you need to generate two more. Three is the magic number.
3. Identify the decision makers and present to them your three solutions and the pros and cons for each—not revealing which one you think is best.
4. After presenting all three solutions, provide your recommendation for the solution you think is best, along with the rationale for why. Then, seek agreement.

This technique has been proven to create either the change you desire or a valuable learning moment. Either way, you experience less stress and more energy.

Be Proactive

Stop waiting to be given authority. Be proactive.

It’s been said authority is 20 percent given and 80 percent taken. If you have a solution to a nagging problem or an idea for improving efficiency on a particular task or project, don’t let yourself get frustrated by the permission process or the hoops you need to jump through to get things done. Instead, take action. Build a business case for giving you the authority to act.

In taking action you will experience a sense of competence and autonomy—two psychological needs required to thrive at work. And those who give you the authority will also benefit by empowering you to do more so that they can focus on other things that need their attention.

Practice a little self leadership each day to reduce your stress and fatigue.  Ask for feedback, identify solutions, and be proactive starting tomorrow morning. You might find yourself able to devote more time to your health, family and friends, and all those dreams you’d pursue if you only had the energy!

About the Author

Susan Fowler is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies and the coauthor of Blanchard’s new Self Leadership program.  You can learn more about Susan and The Ken Blanchard Companies at http://www.kenblanchard.com

The same can be said about professional growth and development. If you want to master new information or develop a new skill, simply knowing that something is important won’t result in growth or change. You have to define a developmental plan and then take action.

Whether personal or professional, setting a goal for growth and then taking action on your own is easier said than done. Most people benefit from the support of others when they decide to make a change.

Managers are in a great position to offer this much needed support to their direct reports—many of whom already have either a formal or informal development plan for themselves.

If you are a manager, here are a few suggestions you can make to your direct reports to help them progress toward their goals.

1. “Link your development to your job.” Suggest they thoughtfully consider how their learning and development goals will specifically make them more effective at work.
2. “Practice what you learn.” Have them identify one or two behaviors they want to hone and think of where they can practice those behaviors on the job. For instance, they could practice during one-on-one meetings with you or in weekly team meetings with their peers.
3. “Keep your development top of mind.” To stress the importance of their growth, regularly touch base with direct reports around their progress. Ask them to set a specific date by which they will share a success story with you on how they successfully implemented their learning.

Being someone’s support system doesn’t have to take a lot of time or effort—after all, the person you are helping is doing all the heavy lifting! That said, letting a direct report know you care about their growth and development and cheering them on can make a huge difference in their success.

Are there opportunities where you can help someone grow? If so, try the ideas above and let us know what impact they made!

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.

We were correct. Our guide, Joe, had been a whitewater guide for twenty years. He had knowledge, experience, and a passion for his work.

Joe’s approach was completely different than that of the less experienced guides. He started with the basics: front paddle, back paddle, right and left turns, and the term brace, which means to lean in and hang on for dear life. We got really good at that one!

The other guides also went through the basics at the start of the trip, but what separated Joe from the pack is what he did once we were on the river. Before each set of rapids, Joe had us pull over into an eddy—or, as we liked to call it, a parking spot. Each time we did this, we spent at least five minutes in the eddy before going into the rapids.

First, Joe studied the water, making note of obstacles and how the water was flowing—or not flowing—around them. He looked for holes, logs, and anything else that might be a hazard for our boat. Joe had a plan in place for each section of rapids.

Then he focused on us. He went over all of his original instructions and had us practice each maneuver. He emphasized that when he yelled “Stop!” he meant it, and we needed to lift our paddles out of the water.

As we were going over these details, we watched the boats with the less experienced guides go by without stopping. Most were paddling full speed into the rapids without pausing at all. We saw many of them tip over, get stuck, or experience what’s known as unscheduled swimmers—the term used for people who fall out of the boat. Fortunately, nobody got hurt, but there were some close calls.

In contrast, our boat moved slowly and quite gracefully through the raging water as we followed Joe’s directions as closely as we could. Each time, we took the safest route—which, by the way, was usually the most fun as well. None of our crew fell out of the boat, nor did we hit any rocks. The boat stayed flat in the water just like it was supposed to. Joe was master of the river and we were a high performing team.

So what lessons for organizations can you take from whitewater rafting with a skilled guide? Here are a few:

• When you are looking for a guide or mentor, look for the person with the most expertise. They may not be someone you necessarily would choose for a friend, but you can learn from them. Remember that with age often comes wisdom (okay, not always) so don’t discount the ones with grey hair.
• Take time to plan and practice before you get into the whitewater. Be clear on your roles, your communication plan, and your purpose—ours was to be safe and have fun. This can be time consuming, but in the end it will help you move more quickly through the challenges. Also, be sure to have more than one contingency plan in place before you begin.
• Train your team on the knowledge and skills they need to safely navigate the whitewater, then reinforce often. Many times, training becomes a check-off-the-box activity without any reinforcement. This also takes time, but it will make the process flow much easier.
• Give yourself permission to hurry less and plan more. It is not always easy to stop action, but it is well worth the effort.
• Enjoy the whitewater! You always have a choice in whether to feel stressed or exhilarated. Why not choose the latter as often as you can?

About the Author

Kathleen Martin is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. You can read Martin’s posts as a part of Coaching Tuesday here at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

But now for various reasons, you or your direct reports may be struggling to stay afloat. Perhaps as a manager you have reached a stage where you feel discouraged or frustrated—or perhaps you see your team’s morale or performance floundering.

Marcus Buckingham says that people who are truly successful in their roles are doing work where they find the majority of their tasks to be enjoyable. A good balance for success is a job where about 70 percent of tasks are enjoyable and only about 30 percent are not as enjoyable. If much of your work consists of tasks you don’t enjoy doing, you may find yourself getting frustrated and beginning to dislike other things around you. Soon you may see decisions made by your company as inefficient and your team members annoying—and your first thought when you get humorous emails from your colleagues is Don’t they have anything better to do?

If you are already at this gloomy phase, here are three things you can do to help move past it.

1. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team members—and yourself.Whether you are constructing a new team or have been working with the same team for years, it’s time do a diagnosis of each person’s individual strengths and weaknesses. Based on your findings, determine if moving people into certain areas or roles would accomplish tasks or goals more efficiently. Evaluating your team members this way will allow you to place people in projects they like, have strengths in, and enjoy doing.In the same vein, do an honest evaluation of your own strengths and weaknesses as a manager. What are you good, and not so good, at? Do you take on too much because you would rather do things yourself to ensure they are done right?
2. Create a list of all your tasks and put them into two categories: Like/Can live with and Dislike. How do they match up? If you have a long list of things you dislike, you may be on the way to burnout. Look back at your team members’ strengths and decide which of your tasks you can delegate, and to whom. Your high performers will enjoy the challenge of being empowered and you will be able to focus on activities you find more enjoyable.
3. Think of ways to create new experiences to motivate yourself and your team members when doing those necessary but mundane tasks. Work with your team to come up with creative and fun ideas for games or contests associated with the work. Or go a different direction and create a dialogue with your people to bring understanding to the deeper meaning and purpose of these tasks in terms of the bigger picture. Taking the time to make work meaningful and fun can result in a new perspective for each person around the importance of their place in the organization.

Exercise Choice

Remember that being a great leader is a choice you get to make every day.  Skills such as diagnosing strengths and weaknesses in yourself and your team, assigning and delegating work that will play to everyone’s strengths, and being creative with daily responsibilities will not only help your team run more smoothly, it will also improve team productivity and morale while helping propel you toward long-term leadership success.

A survey of 450 human resource and talent management professionals by Training magazine and The Ken Blanchard Companies found gaps of 24–39 percent between what employees wanted from their leaders and what they were experiencing in 10 key areas.

Performance management is a key leadership responsibility. This survey suggests that significant gaps exist between employee expectations and what they are experiencing at work. And research shows that left unaddressed, these gaps represent a drain on overall organizational vitality through lowered employee intentions to stay, endorse, and apply discretionary effort as needed.

Better Communication Is the Key

For leadership development professionals, these survey results point to the need for including workplace communication skills as a key part of any leadership curriculum. For example, in Blanchard’s First-time Manager program new leaders are taught four key conversations:

Goal Setting: All good performance begins with clear goals. New managers usually prefer to be seen as supportive and try to avoid appearing overly directive—but that approach can backfire as soon as the first project deadlines are in jeopardy or performance standards aren’t being met. Being skilled at goal setting helps people start off on the right foot.

Praising: Ask some people how they know they are doing a good job and they will say, “No one yelled at me today.” Don’t make the mistake of not noticing. Are managers taking the time to catch people doing things right by calling out a team member’s specific behavior and the positive impact it had when they do things right?

Redirecting: When managers are not skilled at redirecting, they tend to be either unduly critical or so vague that the direct report walks away not sure what to do next. Do managers know how to use open ended inquiry questions to get the other person to talk about what is happening and ways to get back on track? Redirecting conversations are best when the direct report is doing most of the talking.

Wrapping Up: Are managers providing feedback on a frequent and consistent basis? A wrapping up conversation allows managers to measure success, review performance, and keep things moving forward. This is not a once-a-year conversation—it has to happen after the completion of each task or project if you want good results.

A renewed focus on improving workplace communication can have significant results on the performance of an organization. How’s the everyday leadership in your organization? Strong operational leadership with a focus on better communication is the key.

That’s simply too late. Without training, undesirable managerial habits develop that prevent new managers from being as effective as they need to be. It could also be part of the reason why 60 percent of new managers underperform—or fail—in their first two years.

In a new article for Blanchard Ignite, Linda Miller, master certified coach and coauthor of Blanchard’s new First-time Manager program, says, “If left on our own, we continue to lean on our habitual behaviors. Even when we change roles or move into a new job or position, we still are inclined to fall back into familiar patterns.”

That can be a problem in the case of new managers, explains Miller. “They often bring their individual contributor habits or practices into the new role. In this case, they may repeat a pattern over and over again—even when it is not helpful or appropriate—simply because it is comfortable and familiar.

As Miller explains, “When coaching first-time managers, I often ask how much of their work could be delegated.  A new manager has to have a plan for accomplishing results through others. Many find it easier to keep doing a familiar task themselves than to have a conversation with a direct report who could take on the responsibility. Although it may be easier for them to just do the task, as a new manager that work is no longer part of their role.”

Creating a New Manager Curriculum

Instead of letting new managers take a trial-and-error approach that potentially leads to bad habits, Miller believes organizations need to create a new manager learning path. This begins with normalizing the idea that transitioning from an individual contributor role into management is a big change—and that it is normal for first-time managers to feel awkward or even paralyzed by all the new skills they need to learn.

Next, identify some of the gaps or differences between being an individual contributor and being a new manager. For example, early discussions could focus on situations where old habits may not serve the new manager or the organization well.

Replacing Bad Habits with Good Habits

Once new managers have examined their behaviors and found patterns that aren’t working in their leadership roles, the hard work begins—changing those ingrained behaviors. This requires interrupting the automatic responses, says Miller.

“As a coach, many times I will suggest to people that they take some time before they respond to a situation. For example, before saying yes to a request, the new manager might wait two hours to think it through.  Or we might discuss coming up with a question they can ask themselves that will interrupt the pattern.

Don’t Wait

Miller’s advice to organizations interested in identifying and developing new leaders is short and sweet. “Don’t wait. Start now. Preparing your high potential people for management early will pay dividends—now and in the future.

”It’s much easier to train and develop good leadership habits in the first place than to change undesirable patterns that have been deeply embedded. Identifying high achievers and beginning leadership training before they accept their first leadership role does the organization, as well as the aspiring leaders, a great service. It’s not what most organizations do, but it is a unique and promising approach—and a far superior option to trial and error.”

Dear Madeleine,

I am a fairly new manager in a great organization. I just love the people side of being a manager.

My problem is that I don’t really understand the numbers part of the job. I really want to ask my boss to help me understand, but don’t want to reveal my ignorance.

I literally live in fear of being demoted if anyone finds out how incompetent I am with Excel. What do you suggest?  —Afraid of Numbers

Dear Afraid,

Boy, can I relate to this one. I used to have a completely unreasonable fear of numbers until I realized that I just didn’t know the language.

Few managers are strong at every management task—but you will need to develop a basic working knowledge, so at some point you are going to have to come clean with your manager. I’m guessing that since you probably haven’t demonstrated competence through prior opportunities, your boss may already know about this situation. It obviously isn’t too important, or this topic already would have come up.

In any case, do yourself a favor and get help. You’re not alone—as evidenced by the massive amount of books, classes and online tutorials devoted to finance basics for managers. Read up on Excel and take a class. Who knows? Your company may have training available in-house. Identify resources that will allow you to improve your finance skill set so that it equals your people skill set.

The critical thing is to not expect yourself to know something if you’ve never actually learned it. Even people who excel (no pun intended) at financials had to start somewhere. You might surprise yourself by not only catching on quickly, but being terrific at it. Just because you are great at the people side of things doesn’t mean you will be terrible with numbers. The best way to deal with fear of almost any sort is to get educated, get support from others, and dive in. If the dread of being demoted persists, refer to my previous response to a question about feeling like a fraud. Good luck!

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’ll summarize the major buckets as I saw them, but I encourage you (after you read this, of course!) to click on the graphic and read what people said in their own words.  This exercise paints a very human picture of the challenges new managers face when they first make the jump from individual contributor to supervising the work of others.

Here’s how I categorized things:

The vast majority of challenges dealt with people issues—things like managing former peers (about 20% of responses), managing conflict, improving morale, building trust, earning respect (about 15%), or working with older or more experienced team members (about 13%.)

The second biggest bucket contained performance management issues. This included setting goals, providing day-to-day feedback, coaching, redirection, and year-end performance review (about 13%.)

The topic of the third big bucket was personal concerns about the new role and included time management, prioritization, and finding balance along with trying to do it all and live up to expectations (about 15%.)

These findings are similar to what we have been seeing in an ongoing survey we’ve been conducting to inform the development of The Ken Blanchard Companies new First-time Manager program.

That research, combined with extensive interviews of managers and client organizations, helped us develop a curriculum for first-time managers that focuses on four essential communication skills—Listening, Inquiring, Telling Your Truth, and Expressing Confidence—together with four performance related conversations all new managers needs to master.

The four conversations were drawn from the three key principles in Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s best-selling book The New One Minute Manager®— Goal setting, Praising, and Redirecting—and joined by a new, fourth conversation, Wrapping Up, which is about bringing closure to goals and tasks.

What categories do you see when you look at the responses?  How do they match up with your experience as a first-time manager?  If you would like to participate in our ongoing research, please use this link to take a short five-minute survey, or just use the comments section below to share a thought or two.  What was your biggest challenge as a first-time manager?

We ask what they wish they had known before they started, what surprised them about their new role, and what mistakes they made.

The results have been both fascinating and heartbreaking. It is not a pretty picture. The story revealed in the responses is the same one I have heard in coaching sessions for the last two decades.

Unwitting newbies are seldom given clear goals and expectations for their new charges. They are generally unprepared in terms of time management and delegation skills. And they often receive absolutely no people or communication skills training. As a result, they are shocked that their peers don’t greet them with open arms and that their former peers often resent them and gleefully test them right out of the gate. They are surprised at how many employees aren’t that interested in doing their jobs well and don’t do what they are told. They are exhausted by the personal problems of their direct reports and the drama among coworkers.

A new infographic we’ve published highlights CEB research that 60 percent of new managers underperform in their first two years. A major culprit is a lack of training—in fact, 47 percent of companies don’t offer new supervisor training according to a survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity. Separate research by Zenger Folkman CEO Jack Zenger reported in Harvard Business Review shows that, on average, people are supervisors or managers for ten years before they get any training. Essentially, the way most companies promote employees into their first supervisory or management position is nothing short of Darwinian: only the strong survive.

I have had the rare opportunity to coach people at all stages of their careers. All of my experienced clients had to learn the hard way. This doesn’t have to be—and shouldn’t be—the norm. As a new manager, you need to take advantage of all available resources. Some people turn to books on management (there are a million) and try to create a self study program. But you can’t read everything—and some people simply aren’t readers at all. I’d like to suggest a guided approach. One of the services a coach performs for a client is to be both library and librarian, to pull out just the theory, the model, or the most current research that will help the client make sense of their current difficult situation. With the right framework, the new manager can develop a plan of action that helps them move forward.

What does this mean to you? If you manage people and you are suffering, don’t feel that you have to go it alone. Consider taking a class designed especially for first-time managers. Blanchard’s new First-time Manager program, for example, focuses in on four essential communication skills and four performance-related conversations new managers need to master. Or ask for a coach, or find yourself a mentor—but don’t suffer alone. Managing others is one of the most important jobs because you directly affect the quality of people’s lives. So don’t be bashful about asking for help. It’s important for you and others that you have access to the resources you need to succeed.

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.

Unfortunately, research shows that new managers are usually promoted without the skills needed to be a good manager and that 47% of companies do not have a new supervisor training program in place.

As a result, 60% of new managers underperform in their first two years according to a study by the Corporate Executive Board resulting in increased performance gaps and employee turnover.

More importantly, research by Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill has found that negative patterns and habits established in a manager’s first year continue to “haunt and hobble them” for the rest of their managerial careers.

It’s critically important that learning and development professionals help new managers get off to a fast start—both for their immediate and long-term future.  What type of support are new managers experiencing in your organization?  If it’s not what it should be, the new Blanchard infographic can help open up a conversation and encourage some steps in a better direction.

You can download the first-time manager infographic here—and be sure to check out a new Blanchard first-time manager white paper that explores the issue more completely—including suggestions for a first-time manager curriculum.

Dear Madeleine,

A long-time employee I really liked and respected recently left for another opportunity. I tried to keep her but couldn’t offer her enough money, so I gave her an excellent reference. The whole team was sad, and off she went with a fond farewell.

Surprisingly, while training her replacement, I was stunned to find an avalanche of work never done, errors concealed, and files in a state of chaos. I always knew she was a little slapdash, but I had no idea about the extent of her disorganization and deceptions.

I am ashamed and embarrassed in front of my employees that I allowed this to happen on my watch. I feel I should have known this was happening—perhaps I could have worked with her to fix the problems. Or perhaps I would have fired her years ago. Somehow she successfully kept me in the dark. I am tempted to call her new employer and rat her out for the phony she is—that’s how mad I am. How can I fix this? —Disappointed and Mad

Dear Disappointed and Mad,

There is really nothing quite like that sudden surprise of the rug being yanked out from under you, is there? One minute you are living in one reality and the next, everything is shifted. There is actually a neurological response when you expect one thing and you get a different, negative outcome. Neurochemicals associated with the flight-or-flight response are released—cortisol and adrenaline—and it feels like a car alarm going off in your brain.

So, let’s take a big step back, give the car alarm a chance to stop blaring in your head, and make a plan.

First, get a handle on your feelings. Shame, regret, and humiliation feel poisonous. Once you get a negative thought looping in your brain, it can be really hard to interrupt the pattern. There are a couple of excellent techniques that have been shown through experiments in social neuroscience to be very effective at loosening the grip of negative emotions.

• Labeling. It’s a misconception that talking about a difficult experience will only rub salt in the wound. This is only true if you ruminate—revisit the events with no tools to transform them for yourself. One way to make over the experience is to articulate how events made you feel and label them. You can do this with a therapist, a sympathetic HR professional, or a friend who is a good listener. You have already started to do it by writing your letter—a good first step. The more detailed you can get and the more specifically you can label how you feel, the less of a sting you will feel over time. You will gain some dominion over your experience instead of feeling like it has power over you. You will turn off the car alarm.
• Distancing techniques. Another tool to diminish the emotional turmoil you are dealing with is to tell yourself—in the third person—the story of the events that happened. Tell it as if it happened to someone else. For example, you might start the story, “I once knew this person who was betrayed by a trusted employee. Here’s what happened. . .” It may sound hokey, but it really works to help you get some perspective.
• Re-appraisal or re-framing. Right now you are taking all the responsibility for this debacle, which is actually kind of great. Many people would place all of the blame on the employee. So in this case, I would encourage you to take your newfound labels and your little bit of distance and use them to look at your situation and see how you might reframe the way you are interpreting events. You might consider how the environment in your workplace culture contributed to the situation. Or what about the part the employee played in the situation—she must have been charming, and a bit of a con. Con women are successful because they are masterful at diverting attention. You are not the first person to be hoodwinked!

These techniques, by the way, are useful for dealing with all kinds of deeply felt negative emotions that are getting in your way.

Once you have some equanimity about what happened, you can figure out what there is to learn from your mistake. I am betting this will never happen to you again. From a management standpoint, you will want to look at the extent to which you have absolute certainty that every single one of your people has the competence and commitment to do all of their tasks. Ken Blanchard always says that when people are starting on new tasks or goals, the manager has to start out giving lots of clear direction and not let up on the attention until there is ample evidence that the employee can be left on their own. It may be worth looking to see where this might be happening elsewhere, not to mention reviewing your performance management practices.

You are going to have to forgive your former employee and yourself. Hyrum Smith, known primarily as a time management guru and inventor for The Franklin Planner, has a wonderful point of view on forgiveness. He says that while most people say you have to forgive and forget, he says you actually have to forgive and remember, and then decide it doesn’t matter anymore. I have found this concept to be extremely useful. Remember, first learn from it. Then, when you are ready, decide it is no longer important.

Finally, under no circumstances should you contact the new employer. You would be breaking way too many HR laws and it’s just not worth it. Revenge is so tempting, but succumbing to it wouldn’t help you grow—it would only add to the list of things you feel ashamed of. The best revenge is to get smarter and stronger.

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 conducting classes with organizations eager to develop their own one minute managers (and, more recently, situational leaders), Blanchard and his work colleagues have often used an exercise that brings the distressing state of goal setting into sharp focus.

In this exercise, class instructors work separately with groups of managers and their direct reports. First they ask the direct reports to identify and rank order their top ten priorities at work. Separately, they ask managers of those individuals to identify their direct reports’ top ten priorities. The instructors then compare the priorities identified by team members with those identified by their leaders. As Ken Blanchard tells it, “Any similarity between the lists is purely coincidental.” In most cases, priorities are rank ordered quite differently by manager and direct report, with some important goals missing.

Digging into causes, Ken and his colleagues have found that day-to-day emphasis by managers on tasks that are urgent, but not necessarily important, are often to blame. Managers tend to focus on short term issues when delivering feedback, which causes important long term goals to fade into the background. Only when performance review comes around are the long term goals re-identified. Of course, by then it’s often too late to make any real progress. This results in missed targets and, often, hard feelings.

Don’t let this happen with your team. Take some time between now and the end of the month to make sure you and your team members are focused on the same priorities. Using the same exercise Blanchard instructors employ, ask your people each to identify their top five priorities for the coming year. At the same time team members are working on their lists, take a minute to identify what you believe their top five priorities are, given department and organizational goals.

Then, in your next one-on-one conversation with each team member, compare your list with that individual’s list. Identify and discuss differences. Gain agreement on the team member’s top five priorities and set goals around each priority that are SMART: specific, motivational, attainable, relevant, and trackable. Getting clear now will set up follow-up conversations during the first quarter where you can work together to review progress and make adjustments as necessary. The goal is to partner with your people to keep priorities top of mind so that important goals are achieved.

Don’t let the urgent crowd out the important in your organization. Re-examine priorities today—it will make all the difference down the road!

PS: Interested in a deeper dive on goal setting? Join Ken Blanchard for a free goal setting session on January 27. Ken will be helping hundreds of managers and individual contributors from around the world effectively set work and personal goals for the coming year. The event is free, courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

We spent several days, each taking turns on the hot seat to examine a big goal and troubleshoot the obstacles keeping us from achieving it. The group offered ideas, perspective, and loving support—and, to a person, we all had amazing breakthroughs.

At one of our meals as a fun way to engage all of us in conversation together, I asked a question (a Blanchard tradition, as anyone who has ever shared a meal with a Blanchard will attest). The question was: What is one of your biggest regrets?

We went around the table, each woman answering the question in turn. I was astonished when I realized that every single person had the same essential regret. Each story was different in terms of the details so it took me awhile to grasp that all of the stories were alike in one fundamental way. One woman regretted that she had let a toxic relationship go on too long. For someone else, it was a business venture she had known from the outset was doomed to fail. One person lost a business; another, a staggering amount of money. For me, it was both.

It wasn’t until my turn came that I recognized the common theme. At the root of each regret was that, at the outset, we hadn’t listened to the small voice that piped up in the quiet moments. The voice that said, “Don’t do it—this person does not have your back.” The voice that said, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” The voice that said, “Stop. Look again. Slow down.” The voice that got buried under the excitement of the moment, the time constraints, the unbridled passion and enthusiasm for an idea, and the clutter of countless daily tasks. The voice of intuition that registered the tiny red flags in an otherwise perfect scenario. The voice of the “gut” that detected a pattern it had experienced before, even if the brilliant brain in our head didn’t. In every single case, stopping the action to avoid what would ultimately be a major life regret would have involved disappointing others, disturbing a well-laid plan—generally upsetting the apple cart.

I would submit that if any of us had been working with a coach at the moment of impact, we might have avoided the heartaches, the headaches, and the losses. A coach would have encouraged us to think through to that extra deep layer. A coach would have heard the uncertainty in our voice and asked what was beneath it. A coach might have noticed the red flags we were unable or unwilling to see ourselves. Where was my amazing coach, who once yelled into the phone “Mad, I am standing up now, that is how strongly I feel that you are making a mistake. I don’t stand up very often, Mad. Mad, are you listening to yourself? Explain to me how this is going to work out well for you!”

Of course, the operative phrase there was: Are you listening to yourself?  This story makes me laugh today. I don’t even remember what I was thinking of doing, but I can guarantee I didn’t do it—and today it’s one regret I don’t have.

Many misconceptions still exist about what a coach really does. I would say one of the most important things they do is help us listen to that small voice we often ignore—the one that keeps us from making terrible mistakes. For those who are moving at lightning speed and juggling responsibilities and opportunities, I really can’t think of a more valuable service.

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,

I work for a very high profile not for profit. It is my first job and although I have been promoted twice in two years, I am still very young.  I mention this because although I have a couple of direct reports now, and have a lot of responsibility, my boss still doesn’t see me as credible in some ways. 

Here is the situation. About nine months ago my boss hired a marketing consultant—let’s call her Annette.  She is supposed to be an expert on millennials and marketing using social media.  She is constantly setting up meetings to brainstorm, but never actually does anything as far as I can tell.  She was recently given a quarter time of one of my direct reports who is being driven crazy because she has no idea what she is supposed to be doing and keeps coming to me for direction. 

Marketing is not my area and I have no idea what to tell her.  But her precious time, which I could actually use to do something tangible, is being wasted. My boss waxes on about how innovative Annette is and what great work is being done, but nothing is actually happening.  I try to point this out but am immediately shut down.  We are a small, strapped organization and it is killing me to see our resources go down the drain this way.  How can help my boss see that this consultant is full of hot air and a total waste of our precious time and money?  I feel like the little kid in the story about The Emperor’s New Clothes!

Dear Little Kid,

It is so frustrating when you can see things no one else can see.   And this case is a classic! I have worked with many consultants who are full of good ideas but fall short when it comes to execution.

My initial instinct here is to warn you away from trying to point out to the powers that be that the emperor actually has no clothes.  It sounds like your boss has a vested interest in Annette. Maybe they are friends and you have no way of knowing.  But experience tells me that in a situation like this, the person with the least amount of power will lose.  So reign in your need to be right and focus on helping your direct report.

Since you are technically the manager of the direct report, request a meeting with Annette to clarify the goals, metrics, and time frames for tasks.  If Annette refuses to meet, or refuses to set clear goals, document it and move on.  When your direct report complains that she has no idea what she is supposed to do, send her back to Annette or tell her to just stay focused on tasks that are clear to her.

It isn’t your fault if Annette doesn’t get results from the time she has been allotted.  Just keep your head down and wait for other people to notice what is obvious to you.  It will probably take longer than you want, but I can pretty much guarantee that it will happen—eventually.

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 lead a great team at a large construction engineering firm. I feel that my boss is being taken advantage of by a couple of my peers who report to him. My boss travels a lot, so he is never here to see what really goes on, but I see people coming in late, leaving early, and claiming that their plate is full and they can’t take on more work when I know they are on their computers trolling shopping sites for deals. Meanwhile, I keep taking on more and more.

My team is, and I am, really at capacity in terms of workload and I am getting resentful.  Should I rat people out? I really don’t want to, but this situation is getting out of hand. 

– Don’t Want to be a Rat

Dear Don’t Want to be a Rat,

I totally understand your frustration – I do – it stinks to be working like a dog while others are goofing around.  But the answer is not to rat out your slacking peers.  I can pretty much guarantee that it will not get you the result you want.  One question I would ask is this: what metrics does your boss use to measure performance? Is your team crushing the numbers vis a vis the other teams? For a lot of managers these days, hours and work styles are less important than actual performance. Teams are measured by the outcomes they reach more than by lesser variables such as time spent, attendance and the degree to which they shop online at work. In fact, studies have shown that when employees are allowed shop online, they tend to work harder—often coming in earlier and staying later because they don’t have to use off-work time to shop.

Ratting is really only to be used as a last resort in the case of ethical violations or serious matters that could risk people’s safety or cause great harm to the firm.  Why?  Because you might be seen as petty minded, judgmental, or interfering by your boss, who—to make things worse—might not like being told how to do his job. You might even end up ratting on someone who could get promoted and be your boss in the future. Ratting could earn you a reputation that follows you for your entire career.  The ultimate truth is that nobody likes a rat, and the cost of ratting is often high. So if you are going to risk it, only do it in dire circumstances.

But.  You have to do something because, as it is said, holding on to resentment is like taking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.  So. Here is what you can do: take care of yourself, your people, and your corner of the yard.  Set proper boundaries and don’t take on more work than is fair. Put your attention on your people and support them to do impeccable work so your team rises above the average performance of others.

Channel your anger into doing an amazing job and do anything you can to let go of your anger—because ultimately, it hurts only you.  Good luck.

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!

Just as Shari was on the mend, her husband was in a car accident and as a result needed extensive back surgery. Shari still claimed she didn’t need time off and could handle her responsibilities while tending to her husband. Not wanting to add insult to injury, my VP still said nothing as more deadlines were pushed. At this point his team was really showing signs of frustration and resentment. My VP was at the end of his rope.

Finding a Balance

Life is hard. Parents, spouses, and children get sick. Backs go out. The stomach flu makes the rounds of the office and then goes home to the family. Cars break down, basements flood, and everyone occasionally gets out on the wrong side of the bed. And isn’t it great to have a boss who gives you the benefit of the doubt when you have to run out of the office to deal with an emergency? Don’t we wish we all had a boss like that?

But when deadlines and quality suffer, and the team is becoming aggravated that someone’s poor performance isn’t being addressed, things have gone too far.

As a manager, you really do have to be kind and understanding when people go through rough times. But you also need to balance sympathy for the needs of an employee with common sense about the needs of the team and the business.

Here are four ideas that may help:

• Be sure each person on the team has a complete understanding of their individual responsibilities, tasks, goals, and deadlines. The more clear these are, the more evident it is when one person is picking up the slack for another whose performance has dipped.
• If something happens three times, it’s safe to assume it is a pattern. Once you allow a pattern to develop, it’s hard to backtrack—so nip it directly in the bud. Say: “I notice your car trouble is becoming a pattern. Let’s talk and see if we can come up with a solution.”
• The company has rules for sick days or paid time off for a reason. Use these rules and involve HR before you get in over your head. If a rule doesn’t exist that covers your situation, create one. Come to an agreement with your employee that you both can stick to. For example, let’s say someone comes in late three times and then admits it’s because her family got a new puppy and she hasn’t figured out how to work it into the family routine. You could agree to have her come in an hour late a couple of days a week and make up that extra hour from home on those evenings. Everybody wins.
• Watch for resentment on the part of other team members if one employee is perceived as getting special treatment because of a family emergency. If this scenario crops up, put it on the table to discuss with the team. Brainstorm as a group how to best support the team member in need.

As leaders, we all want to be seen as compassionate and fair. But if a manager is too flexible, even a dedicated employee may perceive it as a weakness that can be exploited. Discuss the situation with the employee involved and include the whole team if necessary. Be clear with everyone about performance standards, what leeway is allowed in a pinch, and what the options are if a person’s situation warrants extra help, planning, or intervention. Don’t stop being nice. Just be nice—and smart.

About the author

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Her posts appear every Saturday as a part of a series for well-intentioned managers.

Previous posts in this series:

Delaying Feedback? No News Is Not Always Good News

Providing Clear Direction—You’re Not Being Bossy; You’re Being A Boss

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

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

Surveys have helped organizations to identify areas that need to be addressed, but an inability to “move the needle” when it comes to improving scores has turned optimism into cynicism in many cases.

Organizations need to shift their focus says Bob Freytag, Director of Consulting Services for The Ken Blanchard Companies. In an interview for Blanchard Ignite, Freytag says it’s time to take action.

“Stagnant or declining engagement scores tell you that leadership fundamentals are missing,” explains Freytag. “Putting those fundamentals in place requires time, focus, and a strategic shift.

“Engagement surveys create a dynamic tension between what is and what is possible in an organization. The best leaders lean into those needs and become sponsors and champions of change.”

The Ken Blanchard Companies’ ongoing research into the factors that create a passionate work environment has identified three major areas of focus—Organizational Factors, Job Factors, and Relationship Factors—that leaders at different levels in organizations need to address to bring out the best in their people.

Organizational Factors include Fairness (as measured by Distributive and Procedural Justice), Growth, and Performance Expectations.  Job Factors include Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Task Variety, and Workload Balance.  Relationships Factors include Connectedness with Leader, Connectedness with Colleagues, Collaboration, and Feedback.

At an Organizational Level, senior leaders can begin looking at ways to shape the organization’s systems, policies, and procedures. At a Job Level, managers and supervisors can begin to explore the degree to which their direct reports feel their needs are being met in each area–and once identified, look at ways to set up the conditions that are more favorable for each factor. The scores on the four Relationship Factors can—and should be—addressed by leaders at all levels to understand how to improve the connections between people in the organization.

“But leaders need to address issues directly and not be vague or ambiguous,” cautions Freytag. “Help people see a clear path ahead and address what is possible. Also recognize how important you really are as a leader. Leaders often get in the groove like anyone else and they come to work, they execute against their list of responsibilities, and they forget the importance of their role.

“It’s important for leaders to remember that they are always having an impact—you have no choice in that. The only choice you have is what that impact will be.”

You can read the complete interview with Freytag in the November issue of Ignite.  Also be sure to check out the information about a free webinar that Freytag is conducting on The Leader’s Role in Creating an Engaging Work Environment.  It is a complimentary event, courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

That was all good. But here’s the thing. Despite the fact that elearning today is a $56.2 billion industry, and corporations are reporting that elearning is the second most valuable training method they have, it turns out that the reports of the death of traditional training were premature.

The truth is, human beings are social. They learn better together than they do apart. We’ve spent the last decade realizing you can lead a learner to great content but you can’t make them think, especially when you are asking people to change—to evolve—to consciously choose to develop themselves as leaders. The act of learning is an evolutionary necessity, but in our experience people are willing to change only when they are given the right conditions.

To change, people need:

• A vision of how they will be more successful if they change—or, even better, a tangible sense of the pain they will suffer if they do not The aversion to possible pain is stronger than the siren song of potential pleasure.
• A very clear and tangible way to change. People need to be able to see where they are right now in terms of their development and where they want to be. They also need a sense of the road they will need to travel to arrive at their destination.
• Time and permission to focus on change. Getting people into a classroom for a day is no more effective than sending them a URL and login for elearning if there is zero support for the time and effort needed to apply new behaviors.
• Support for the change from people around them. Learning in groups and communicating what is going on to relevant stakeholders enables people to practice and make mistakes.
• Accountability for change. It doesn’t really matter who holds the person accountable— it can be a professional coach, a peer coach, a boss, a learning cohort, or an HR sponsor—but without accountability, very few people will make a change.

In our newest offering, Blanchard Online Learning, we’ve built in these supports. Our vision is to make Blanchard content more accessible and usable to a wider audience of people. We know that just because people prefer to get their online content in small, manageable chunks, enjoy using games to make it fun and video to make it fast, and embrace the concept of flip learning, it doesn’t automatically mean they will actually make that change. But with a little bit of work and know-how, you can greatly increase the chances they will succeed.

About the Author:

Madeleine Homan-Blanchard is a Master Certified Coach, author, and speaker and is a co-founder of Blanchard Coaching Services.

That analysis found a 14-point customer satisfaction gap, a 16-point employee productivity gap, and a 45-point employee retention gap which translates into over $1 million dollars for the average organization.

In looking at the ways that leadership impacts each of these three areas, separate Blanchard research into the Leadership-Profit Chain and Employee Work Passion has found that better day-to-day operational leadership practices—including those that promote autonomy, collaboration, connectedness, and growth can significantly improve employee intentions to stay with a company, perform at a high level, and apply discretionary effort in service of company goals.

Taking some first steps

Looking to identify and address operational leadership in your own organization?  Here’s a three step process for getting started.

1. Double-check on goal alignment at the team and department level.  Make sure that all team members are working on the highest priority tasks.  Ask managers to check in and review priorities with their people.  Make sure the work is meaningful, on-target, and contributing to overall organizational goals.  You’ll be surprised at the amount of misalignment that occurs over time.
2. Identify what people need to succeed at their high priority tasks.  Depending on their experience and confidence with the tasks they are assigned, people can be Enthusiastic Beginners, Disillusioned Learners, Capable, but Cautious Performers, or Self Reliant Achievers.  Each of these development levels requires a different style of leadership—either Directing, Coaching, Supporting, or Delegating.  (Surprisingly, without training only 1% of managers are skilled at identifying and being able to deliver all four styles when needed.)
3. Make sure managers meet with their people on a regular basis.  While it is always best for managers to be able to adapt their leadership style to perfectly meet employee needs, that doesn’t mean that they should put off meeting on a regular basis to review goals and provide direction and support as best as possible while learning.  Even if managers aren’t perfect, people still appreciate a chance to talk, discuss progress, and ask for help.

Begin today

Academic research has established a strong correlation between leadership practices, employee engagement scores, and subsequent customer satisfaction scores.   The bottom line is that leadership practices matter. Encourage your leaders to review goals with their people, identify how they can help, and set up a regular time to review progress.  Take care of the people who take care of your customers.  It’s good for them—and your business too!

Interested in learning more?  Join me for a free webinar!

On October 30, I am going to be presenting a more in-depth look at the Cost of Doing Nothing analysis and sharing some strategies for addressing it.  This is a free webinar courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.  Over 500 people are registered and I hope you’ll join us also. Use the link below to learn more.

High Potential Leadership: Three Strategies to Boost Your Bottom Line

You’ll learn that:

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

LEARN MORE >