“Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.” ~Adam Hochschild
We don’t lack for noise in our lives and it’s been noisier than usual for the past year. No matter what 2021 holds for us, what I can guarantee you is that your employees will continue to have distractions tugging at their attention and draining their productivity.
We’ve talked about Coaching Through Crisis, but we aren’t always in a crisis. Even when things quiet down, there’s still all that noise, noise, noise. Some employees are more susceptible to the nagging pull of diversions than others.
It’s easy enough to tell a team member to stop doing something, but that doesn’t always stick. If we want to change habits, we have to be sure the individual is taking responsibility for their role in that. Empowering them means they are now actively working toward your goal with you instead of just ignoring another finger wagging disciplinarian.
Let’s look at few examples of using coaching to battle distractions:
Every task but the one they need to be doing:
Jason was always eager to help with projects any time. His manager thought very highly of him, but Anita had noticed a disturbing trend.
Jason often delayed working on heavier tasks in favor of ticking off insignificant things or accomplishing objectives that should be on someone else’s to-do list. This usually resulted in rushed work to meet deadlines on bulky projects and sometimes meant those deadlines were missed entirely. Anita had mentioned this to him a few times over the last year, in passing and formally. He seemed surprised that it was a problem, but promised to do better in the future. Unfortunately, Jason didn’t seem to be making any tangible improvements. She wasn’t sure how to tackle this without running the risk of losing an employee she considered high potential.
Thankfully for Anita, her company was about to implement Catalytic Coaching. After some training, she felt like this process could help her get through to Jason and give him a structure to change for the better. She even double checked with her organization’s Coach2 to be sure she had the Coaching Worksheet in good shape.
During their meeting, Anita highlighted all of the strengths she saw in Jason and gave special attention to his being an eager helper. One of the focus areas she gave him was developing prioritization skills. Using examples of some past projects, she showed him how he could achieve a much higher level of performance through awareness of deadlines and how long tasks would take. She even recommended a couple of good books that would help him identify the system that would work best for him.
Jason took this feedback and created a detailed development plan. It included not only the books Anita had suggested, but also an online workshop and deadlines for creating a working schedule. Over the next few months, there was a marked improvement in Jason’s work. Their progress update meetings confirmed he was on the right track. It was a happy ending all around.
There is such a thing as too connected:
Tamar was so easy to reach. She usually answered her email in less than 10 minutes. Her phone line was busy fairly often, but she’d call you right back. Tamar also seemed to know when there was a weird comment on the company’s social media pages before the marketing team did.
The thing that concerned her manager, Simon, was that all this responsiveness and communication didn’t seem to be moving contracts any faster. In fact, there seemed to be fewer and fewer contracts closed within a reasonable time. A couple of colleagues and his own supervisor had recently complained that Tamar had spent the last four departmental and company meetings on her phone, often posting on Twitter or Instagram. Simon had tried asking Tamar to put her personal phone away and stay off social media during office hours. He’d also asked her to focus more on getting the contracts processed. She’d agree with him, but nothing seemed to actually change.
When the company’s coaching cycle rolled around, Simon knew it was time to put Tamar in charge of improving her habits. In the employee input meeting, she had mentioned a desire to become a director in the next five years. It was an ambitious goal, but one that Simon wanted to encourage. She just needed the right focus areas.
Simon pulled examples of not only her own behavior that was working against her goals, but also leveraged stories of her more brilliant moments. Tamar was able to rein in her focus throughout the next year. Now she looks at her phone less and the bottom line more.
Home is where the heart… and the drama… is:
Lucas was the most efficient supervisor the company had ever had. Under his leadership, their projects were getting done quicker, with fewer accidents, and under budget. General manager Omar really appreciated the high level of productivity, but lately he’d begun to notice a disturbing trend among the workers.
It started several months ago with complaints about the abrupt way Lucas was treating everyone on the work site. Then came reports of him yelling and even cursing at some of the contractors. Now they were noticing a higher rate of employees turning in their notices or just not showing up, especially if Lucas was on the schedule. Linda in HR told Omar that she is having a hard time attracting new hires. Too many had heard horror stories about how managers treat the employees. When he was asked about it, Lucas insisted those employees just needed a thicker skin and to do their job correctly. It didn’t take a bloodhound to smell the whiskey when Lucas had entered the room though.
Around that time, Omar was trained to be a coach using the Catalytic Coaching process. He scheduled time with Linda in HR after she returned from the Mastery Program with her Coach2 certification. They agreed that Lucas was a valuable asset, but he needed help. Linda and Omar found counseling that was covered under the company insurance and some other resources for Lucas. During the coaching sessions, Lucas revealed he’d been struggling with addiction amid a volatile home life. He was grateful for the resources and excited to build a development plan that would not only help him at work, but begin to heal his family.
Moral of the stories:
Real change will only happen when the individual accepts their role and takes responsibility for making improvements.
Providing relevant examples of strengths and focus areas will strengthen the performance management process.
Not all performance impacting problems originate in the office, but coaching can still help to fix them.
Development plans need deadlines, clear goals, and progress update meetings to insure they’re successful.
Managers don’t have to go it alone. They can lean on the company’s Coach2 (coach of coaches) to enhance their efforts.
Garold (Gary) Markle is the creator of Catalytic Coaching and author of Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review. He brings real world experience from 17 years in HR leadership in major corporations coupled with over 20 years of teaching small and mid-sized organizations how to cultivate their leadership and ditch their detrimental performance reviews for a proven Coaching process.
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