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"Manager's Minute" Tip

No-Nonsense Strategies For Coaching Your People
by Dave Anderson

If you’re a manager more suited for social work than leadership this article will offend your bleeding heart sensibilities. The following strategies are honest, direct and best of all, work. But most managers won’t use them because they’d rather coddle people than confront them; choose perpetual harmony over temporary discomfort and accept the belching of baloney over bringing home the bacon. The following coaching strategies are a short-course in psychology because when you’re in the people business—and you are— you’re in the psyche business whether you like it or not. Distribute and discuss these strategies at your next management meeting and work them into your coaching repertoire.

1. Teach people that the most decisive battles they fight are inside of them. Focus them on what they can control. Contrary to what whiners think, their biggest threat comes from the inside: lack of discipline, no goals, poor attitude and deficient skills. They can’t control the economy, the competition or how bad they think their boss is. By focusing on what they can control they author their destiny.

2. Determine whether the person has a real strategy for success or if they’re simply stumbling along through work and life, reacting and improvising, hoping things work out. Winners in business and life have a plan and if it isn’t working they change it. They don’t wing it, hold their breath, cross their fingers and hope they catch a break. Our business is littered with weak links subscribing to this philosophy. Don’t let your people fall into this pit.

3. Don’t allow people to focus on why something shouldn’t be happening. Get them to deal with what is. They must see the world as it is, not as they’d like it to be. Teach them to face and deal with reality.

4. Insist they accept responsibility for their lack of results. Explain that when they choose the behavior they choose the consequences so they must push their problems and shortcomings to center stage and deal with them. This is painful, but it’s more painful to sweep problems and shortcomings under the rug and act like they’re not happening.

5. Shake your people out of denial. Denial is dangerous. It deludes and leads to inertia. Denial kills dreams and careers. It encourages people to look in the wrong places for answers. Until people accept personal responsibility for their actions and results they will misdiagnose and mistreat every problem in their career and in their life. And if they mistreat the problem they’ll never cure it.

6. Don’t let your people feel or act like victims. You know the type: everything is done to them, not by them or with them or for them. Life is often unfair and while we cannot choose what happens to us we can choose our response. Excuses are a natural human tendency but they must be exposed and rejected. And when excuses and whining become the rule rather than the exception the perpetrator should be removed. Continual excuses and whining is the DNA of underachievers.

7. The quality of one’s work must ultimately be measured by results, not good intentions or best efforts. People cannot continue trying to build a reputation on what they’re going to do. Somewhere along the line they’ve got to stop talking and make something happen. Create an environment that honors an outcome orientation. Reinforce solid efforts but focus people on and reward results.

8. What people think is right and what works are often two different things. If something is not working in someone’s career or life they must change it. Hitting two buckets of balls instead of one with the same lame swing isn’t going to improve your game. Fix the swing.

9. Explain to your people that failure is not an accident. They either set themselves up for it or they don’t. Failures become failures long before they’re recognized as being failures. Somewhere along the line they repeat the same errors in judgment, fail to develop disciplines, stop learning and don’t work hard or smart. Wherever someone is in their career—and life—is a result of decisions they’ve made in the past and where they are tomorrow depends on decisions they make today. Focus people on making the right decisions while accepting responsibility and learning from the wrong ones.

10. Challenge people by asking them if what they have in their career and their life is really what they want or is it what is safer, easier and less scary than what they want. Don’t let your people settle too early, too cheaply. If you’re not stretching them, you’re not leading them.

In recent years, pop psychologists have tried to convince us it’s ok to live in a gray area. They’ve seduced us with thinking that says one’s problems or sorry state in life can be blamed on parents, teachers, genes a bad environment or because we haven’t gotten in touch with our inner something or another. You can hardly blame so many people for embracing this fuzzy philosophy rather than facing that, when all is said and done, they are responsible for their lack of success and for their lives. Yes, people can have tough breaks and setbacks. But everyone has their share and while some are destroyed by stumbling blocks others turn them into stepping-stones. Your people must understand that problems, failures and challenges are not select penalties reserved especially for them. Help them fight through the fog and see reality: they are responsible, they are accountable and the consequences they reap are a direct result of the behaviors they sow. Get in their face with tough love and help them understand these ten points. You owe it to them because one of a leader’s first responsibilities is to define reality. Invest in them, yes. Help them, of course. Encourage and motivate them, absolutely. But somewhere along the line you’ve got to stop hugging and burping them, dislodge their head from their behind and get them going! Stretch and direct your people to work and live purposefully. Don’t allow them to continue bobbing along, hands in their pockets, taking what comes their way and complaining about what they don’t have. Some people will wake up and respond to this dose of reality and some will become more resolved in their delusion. But at least you’ll have a benchmark to determine those worth developing and those you must help pack and leave before they drain more of your time, energy and resources.

There’s no question it’s easier to let your people live in a fuzzy fantasyland than face reality and accept accountability for results. That way they can pretend they’re not losers even though they’re not getting what they want, could or should. But there are absolutes in work and in life. There is a right and a wrong. There is winning and losing. And it’s up to leaders to create the clarity, accountability and consequences necessary to establish the right thinking it takes to develop people to their full potential. You surrender your position as a leader by merely massaging their hearts, soothing their egos and letting them off the hook for all they could and should become. Mr. or Mrs. Leader, if you inflict this betrayal on your people, the shame is on you.

About The Author: Peak performance author, columnist, trainer, speaker and radio show host for sales, management and leadership, Dave Anderson walks the talk as a leader. He has led some of the most successful retail automotive dealership in the country—the most recent dealer group he led had over $300,000,000 in annual sales—and now gives 150 presentations, workshops and speeches annually on sales and leadership development around the globe.

Dave is author of over 50 training programs on sales, management and leadership including the books, Selling Above The Crowd: 365 Strategies For Sales Excellence and No Nonsense Leadership: Real World Strategies To Maximize Personal & Corporate Potential. Dave authors a monthly leadership column for Dealer magazine, publishes a monthly leadership newsletter and hosts the weekly radio talk show, Dave Anderson’s Learn To Lead Hour. His books, cassettes, videos, newsletter, column, web articles and live presentations pull no punches and provide real world strategies for peak performance in business and in life.

Dave is a member of the National Speaker’s Association and is a featured speaker at conventions worldwide.

Dave is president of the Dave Anderson’s Learn To Lead and LearnToLead.com, a cutting edge web site providing hundreds of free training resources to thousands of subscribers in over 30 countries.

Contact Information:
The Dave Anderson Corporation
P.O. Box 1119
Los Altos CA 94024
Phone: 800-519-8224
www.learntolead.com
dave@learntolead.com