Coach Your Team - Don't Manage It

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds. It is something one creates."

 

-- Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist

That's right - we all need to wake up to the fact that the old beliefs about managing people in business are just not very effective. We need to learn to coach them. Coach and lead the business like a great professional sports team. No more, annual reviews, no more focus only on the numbers and push and cajole the team to achieve them. Instead focusing on having the best talent in every position and focus on making each individual the best they can be. Focus on coaching in practice, not managing i.e. showing people how to do things in the heat of the game.  

Listen to this 5 minute audio, which is Part 2 of how to build a team of people who are accountable for results - not just for being busy.  

(If you missed it last week, Part One is Stop Answering Questions. Check it out here.) 

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

Stop Answering Questions - Build the Team you want

"Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results."

-- George S. Patton, US Army General

Do you feel like the place couldn't run without you? Too many interruptions and questions and fires to put out? Does it seem like there is no time to focus on the business and making it better?

What you need is a team that is accountable for results, not for being busy. People that don't need to be managed and babysat all day.

Did you know that you have created this situation and every day you continue to feed the beast and reinforce behavior that is just the opposite of what you want to see? It is not your team's fault, it is all about you.

I see this with clients all the time. Too busy, business depends on me to work, or they can't get everything done because of the interruptions and questions.

Solution --- stop answering questions. Yes - stop answering everyone's questions. Listen to this 5 minute audio that will change the way you lead and create the behavior in your team that will solve the issues above.

The next 2 weeks I'll share 2 more parts of the puzzle in short audios. 

All the best, 
Rick Wallace

Why You Should Be Defenseless

"I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities."

- Bob Nardelli, CEO Home Depot

"The most expensive thing a person can own is a closed mind." - Don Hutton

From Seth Godin:

The opposite of 'defenseless'  

It might be defended, or defensive.

If you're asking for feedback or coaching or an education, neither of the above are going to help you very much.

The person who has ideas that are well defended isn't going to be able to listen carefully for the lessons that can help him change those ideas.

And the person who is defensive not only won't hear the ideas, but he'll push away anyone generous enough to share them.

Defenseless is the best choice for those seeking to grow.

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

On Making Money

"What we fear (hate) doing the most is usually the thing we should most be doing."

- Anonymous  

From Steve Chandler: 

One day I was down and out. I was low. I decided to book a session with my coach. I told him I wasn't making enough money.  

 

He said, "You want to know a surefire formula for making money that always works?"

What was I going to say, "No"? Of course!

"Find someone with a problem," he said, "and solve that problem for them." 

I have lived by that formula ever since. I have found that it is not hard to find someone with a problem. That would be anyone you'd run into, wouldn't it?

The simple things are the hardest to learn and incorporate, because our minds are
conditioned to take simple things and add drama and emotion and self-doubt and false beliefs and deep confusion and fear to every challenge. 

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

Your Brain on Multitasking

"Every result in your life and in your business has a system that is perfect for creating it. If you want to change a result you have to develop a new system."

 - Steve Chandler

What Multitasking Does To Your Brain

By: Drake Baer

In case we needed another reason to close the 15 extra browser tabs we have open, Clifford Nass, a communication professor at Stanford, has provided major motivation for monotasking: according to his research, the more you multitask, the less you're able to learn, concentrate, or be nice to people.

Our brains are plastic but they're not elastic.

For a case study, turn to your nearest broadcast news station (and don't say Fast Company didn't warn you): if the talking head on the screen is accompanied by a "crawler" at the bottom blurbing baseball scores and the day's tragedies, you'll be less likely to remember whatever the pundit is saying. Why? Because, research shows that the more you're multitasking, the less you're able to filter out irrelevant information.

As Nass told NPR, if you think you're good at multitasking, you aren't:

. . . We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. 

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And . . . they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Multitasking rewires our brains.

When we multitask all day, those scattered habits literally change the pathways in our brains. The consequence, according to Nass' research, is that sustaining your attention becomes impossible.

"If we [multitask] all the time--brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably adaptable," he says, referencing neuroplasticity, the way the structures of your brain literally re-form to the patterns of your thought. "We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains back, our brains are plastic but they're not elastic. They don't just snap back into shape."

How it Affects Our Work

As James O'Toole notes on the strategy+business blog, the dangers of multitasking are as multifarious as they are nefarious.

Multitasking stunts emotional intelligence: Instead of addressing the person in front of you, you address a text message.

Multitasking makes us worse managers: The more we multitask, the worse we are at sorting through information--recall the broadcast news kerfuffle above.

Multitasking makes us less creative: Since attention is the midwife of creativity, if you can't focus, that thought-baby isn't coming out.

My Experience:

This is why the practice or habit of blocking time on your calendar, committing to that time, focusing on one Rock/Task/Action for that hour produces 3 times the results of multitasking. It seems you will also be nicer!

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

The Art of No

"You can do anything -- but not everything." 
 - David Allen

"It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much.

- Steve Jobs  

The great time management guru David Allen has nailed a profound truth here. We don't have time to do everything we want to do today. If you have any kind of success at all going on in your life, that will be your reality: more to do than time allows. Celebrate that. Then go warrior on your list and DELETE and/or DELEGATE as many items as you can. It's what you say NO to that creates your focus and pathway to an invented future. Not what you keep saying YES to all day in a vain attempt to please others and get them to like you and think you are accommodating. Accommodate the future.

Live well and prosper,
Steve Chandler

My Experience
You can't find the time to do important things that will create your future and help you reach your goals - you have to make the time. Say "no" to many things and block hours during the week to commit and focus your attention to Rocks/Important things that will move you and your company along. Treat these appointments with yourself like they are with your biggest customer and don't move them. Why do you get so much done on a Saturday morning? Because you can focus and work uninterrupted. Like my attorney client Chuck Beinhauer said, "I've got it now, I now make Tuesday morning my Saturday morning."

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

69 Percent of Employed Are Job Hunting

"The best people are working for someone else."  

I don't know who said that but they are 95% right. He/She who have the best people have the best company.

"Best" means they not only have the right skills but share the culture, core values and core purpose of your company as well as are accountable for results, not simply being busy.

Survey: 69 Percent of Employed Are Job Hunting
So this survey cuts both ways - 69% of your people are open to a move. The best may be looking because you let the others get by and they see it every day and ask themselves "why doesn't the boss do something about them?"

But it also shows that there are people out there, that if you are always recruiting, are willing to go on your Virtual Bench and be there when you are ready to hire. Keep your eyes and ears open all the time. Block an hour a week to doing something that involves recruiting "A Players" for your bench.

If you have a bench of "A Players" ready, it makes it a lot easier to let the "C Players" you have now go. You can replace them knowing you don't have to do a recruiting blitz, something that takes a lot of time, we dread and usually rush to get a body on board.  

Write down each of your employees names and ask yourself the Netflix question:

If he/she walked in tomorrow and said they were leaving in two weeks to go to work for a competitor, "how hard would I fight to keep them?"

I'll bet it would be a relief to you if one or two did that. If so they need to be replaced but you probably don't do it because you think about having to find someone else and you dread recruiting. Do it a little at a time - always be recruiting - will solve this issue and 69% of the people employed are open to a change.

Survey Results

75% of working-age Americans are "job seekers" - they're currently looking for or open to a new job - according to an online survey of more than 2,100 people by the hiring software company Jobvite.  

Among the employed respondents to the 2012 Social Job Seeker Survey, 69 percent said they were either "actively seeking" a new job or "open to" a new job. That number is up from 61 percent in Jobvite's 2011 survey.  

"Job seekers ... intuitively know that the best opportunities are found through people, not search engines," Finnigan told Forbes. "As social networking has become a core part of our cultural dynamic, we are continuing to see more and more job hunters taking advantage of a vertical they are comfortable with in order to find work."

All the best, 

Rick Wallace