Coaching Call #8 — May 20, 2024
This week’s coaching call focuses on how leaders continually improve performance, helping salespeople get back to the essentials, and what leaders should do this week to stay present with those we lead. Here’s the recording, session notes and resources. If you have questions, let me know in the comments or by email.
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This Week’s TLC Coaching Call:
What I’m Reading: The McKinsey Quarterly: Staying Ahead: How the best CEOs continually improve performance (00:00)
Back to the Basics in Training and Performance (00:00)
Using The Learning Objective Statement (00:00)
How to be more present for your people (00:00)
From: The McKinsey Quarterly: Staying Ahead: How the best CEOs continually improve performance
by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vik Malhotra, and Kurt Strovink
A great read for your ongoing self-improvement, this article reminds us of four ways leaders can avoid complacency and create even more value. Key suggestions include:
Enhancing your learning agenda, by thinking like you’re “new on the job” again and getting back into the field, having customer conversations, learning from every echelon of your organization, and putting formal training into your ongoing schedule. Leaders are always building their insights, knowledge and skills by making learning a persistent part of their tenure.
Taking an Outsider’s Perspective means looking at your business, markets and industry performance and asking yourself, What would an insider see, and do, if they suddenly took over our business today? Give yourself the benefit of a fresh set of perspectives by evaluating your situation from the outside — including different performance expectations, uses of resources, technology advances and even customer expectations. Leaders challenge their accepted-premises by looking from the outside-in.
Develop the next ‘S’ curve, by evaluating the current status of your plans and anticipating the need to design and implement new ones “before’ existing strategies plateau. The ‘S’ curve is a graphical metaphor for plans that start slowly, accelerate, then level off over time; leaders know where they stand on the curve and initiate new ones long before they become complacent.
Future proof your business by running through plausible scenarios for near- and long-term developments, then developing actual plans to deal with them in advance. Short, two-page outlines of the resources, course of action, timeline and risks can provide leaders and their teams with an additional source of confidence, as well as immediate plans should circumstances arise. Prepared leaders perform better because they have rehearsed for crises moment, even if it never arrives.
Training: Getting Your People Back to the Basics
As leaders, we must make sure the essentials and necessary procedures and protocols are taught, evaluated and followed to maintain consistent progress (and lower risk) at our companies. However, it can become a challenge when we’re trying to retrain salespeople and staff who don’t they they need “the basics,” again. Partially, it’s because we call many best-practices “basics'“ rather than essential; and partially because people have a cognitive bias that they’ve “graduated” past essential skills when even the best professionals realize the advantage of constantly repeating and rehearsing core abilities.
Use these ideas to get people re-engaged with Basic best practices at your firm:
Refer to basics as “essential” or “fundamental skill”: Airline pilots go through a checklist of basic protocols before they fly - every time - for their entire careers. The same is true for most professionals. Reframing essential or fundamental skills as part of what makes someone persistently successful can make a difference on perceptions to participate or not.
Evaluate the difference between preferred behaviors and current behavior. Train on what’s required, and what’s preferred, and describe the difference in outcomes for professionals who are masters of the core skills beyond an initial competency.
Use self-assessments. A brief quiz or survey on an essential skill can help people self-discover how much they really know. If they discover their own gaps, they’ll be more inclined to brush up on a skill or tool.
Consider holding “Fresh Look” training where you incorporate the basics into a “fresh approach” to the current state of best practices. Don’t call it going ‘back’ but ‘moving forward.’
Use achievement recognitions, certifications and even financial rewards for people who complete refresher training.
Scenario training or role-playing can create a fresh approach to essential skills. Rather than a lecture, present scenarios and let individuals and teams evaluate what went well, went wrong, or what else could have been done, applying the key skill or technique being retaught.
Great outcomes come from doing the right basic things over and over again.
The Learning Objective Statement
When building training, coaching or workshops of any kind, focus on the key learning outcomes to ensure your approach and content is targeted, effective and intentional. We’ve talked about the Learning Wheel on previous calls. It’s in The Leadership Handbook, as a way to design a four-step approach to teaching any skill or behavior. The Wheel’s effectiveness is improved if you begin with the Learning Objective Statement, which also has four steps:
