[MUSIC] I think you can see why the bad example is so bad, the manager is direct and insistent. Essentially, she just wants Ton to quote, figure things out, without helping him to think through any sort of approach to the problem. She's demonstrating that she doesn't even care what Ton's thoughts are on the situation. She sees a problem and wants it fixed, without having to really get involved in the issue. Obviously this isn't helpful for our employees. In contrast, the good example is an excellent demonstration of a developmental conversation. Featuring both mindset and skill set coaching. The coach identified pretty early on in her communication with Ton. That he didn't really know how to handle the situation with this new property management company. And so, there were some legitimate need to talk about it and help him, right? So let's walk through how this went down. The first thing the coach said was, hey I know there's a problem. What's the issue? And then Ton went into describing what the problem is. What I want you to notice is that when we're doing mindset coaching. When we're looking at our thought models, we don't need to indulge the story. We want to give him the opportunity to tell it, but he did tell us what happened, right? There was a changeover issue and there wasn't enough staff and then he got kind of in trouble for asking people to stay. The next question the coach asked was, why is that a problem? Ton's response was, they didn't like that I asked them to stay. Now it's important to not make assumptions about what you think is going on, right? Why is that a problem? What we found out through the conversation is that a process is changing and its causing a time delay. So then the coach kind of said, okay, well I can tell there are some things here that you are kind of resisting. And when we go through change maybe sometimes we need to think about things a little differently. And that's when she suggested that they consider that there might be another way to think about working. With this property management company as they're going through this change. In coaching, I call this heavy lifting. This is when we're doing some skill set development. So we're going to give our client or our employees some new ideas, some new things to think about, right? In this scene, the manager introduces this notion of what are the balances. If we're going to ask someone to do something for us, does it make sense that we might offer something to them in return? That's how we mitigate new relationships and make for better relationships as we're going through change. The next thing she did was to invite Ton to elaborate on other thoughts he had regarding the situation. And notice that what he said was that he wanted them to change, right? That was his answer, well, they need to change. [LAUGH] And the manager responded well, we know we can't control them so let's not wait for that. Because that's why so many people struggle, right? They say, well everything will be fine when someone else's behavior changes. [LAUGH] But this is huge in coaching, because we cannot change other people. We can only decide what we want to believe about something and how we want to react to something. So we don't want to wait for the property management company to miraculously be different. Because that they may not ever happen, they may never get more responsive. So then the coach tried another way. She said well, how do you want to feel, right? And what I want you to notice in that question is how he gave her more thoughts. She asked, how do you want to feel? And he said, there's always a happy medium. Well, we know that's not a feeling, that's a thought. But then she asked him, okay, so when you think there is always a happy medium, how do you feel? And that's when he said confident, right? That's when he gave her a feeling and then she said, so what kind of things do you think you could do? And he started having a conversation with his manager about being more proactive, right? So the manager used the thought model in the conversation to help Ton realize there's always a happy medium. And that makes him feel confident. That behavior, the action is pro-activity, which ultimately leads to hopefully. The result of a better solution for both, Ton and the property management company. But I think what's pretty cool is that she said hey, let's try it and see what happens. So we didn't end this conversation with, okay, the situation is resolved. We ended this with how about you go into this meeting? With this new perspective knowing that there's always trade-offs when we're going through change and see what happens. And then she ended the conversation by asking Ton to tell everything back to her. Again, this is an example of skill-set development. We can't just make an assumption that someone got something, right? So, he said it back to her and then she provided a little feedback on what he said. So remember our skill set model, tell, show, do, review. That example was the do and review part. So we had him say what he thinks he could say. She gave him a little feedback in what we call the review part of that skill set transfer model, so we had both things happening here. So in summary, this is what a developmental conversation for an employee who is already performing highly, might look like. So if we go to our employee continuum, we have an employee who is either ascending or is consistent. So we're doing developmental coaching. We're not having a direct management conversation, as wasn't the case in the poor example. The coach identified that a little skill set work was needed. So there was a little more talking from the coach because she was demonstrated and teaching him a concept that I call heavy lifting. Where she gave him some ideas about working through new relationships and dealing with change. But the manager also did some mindset coaching because she could tell he was frustrated. And that feeling of frustration was not going to lead to positive results for Ton. What we needed to do was help him think differently, so that he could behave differently and ultimately get a different result. Then when we look at the bad manager example again, we can see that the manager just lectured the employee. She wanted to let him know that she saw that there was a problem and she wanted him to know it was unacceptable. And that she wouldn't tolerate it again. You can see how that drives very little response from the employee. Again, the manager is going to think she did a good job. She's going to think, good, I addressed this with Ton. It won't be a problem again. However, this approach doesn't help Ton understand why there's a problem. Nor does it help him come up with a plan to address it if it happens again in the future. All we've done as a manager is check the box. I've told Ton this is unacceptable and he needs to figure out how to deal with it. And while in a moment, that can make a manager feel like they've addressed the issue, it isn't really solving the problem. Ultimately, it takes the work of coaching to really help an employee identify not just what the gap is. But why the gap exists and what they can do better to avoid it next time.
