How to get the change in behaviour you need

By James Brava | February 9, 2010

How to get the change in behaviour that you needIn order to get the change in behaviour you need from your team members (or child, spouse, partner or friend) you need to guide their thinking.

The key tool you have to guiding their thinking are the words you choose to use, the questions you choose to ask and the conversations you choose to have. Today we’re going to focus on the questions that you choose to ask.

Last week, I recommended that you do yourself a favour. When you’re correcting behaviour, or seeking behavioural change, I recommended that you ask open-ended questions to get your team member talking; to get the words coming out of their mouth rather than yours.

I’m hoping that you tried this out and received the benefits of taking this approach. But there is one trap you need to side-step when confronting any sort of performance problem or issue with behaviour. And that trap is asking ‘why?’

Let’s put this in context. Let’s imagine a very simple situation to illustrate the problem this causes. Imagine that it’s important for your team members to arrive at work on time, and one of them has just arrived almost 10 minutes late for the second day in a row.

If you ask them why they are late, what will you get? Excuses – yes? I suggest that this approach will create a defensive mind-set rather than a problem-solving mind-set. A defensive mind-set is not the sort of thinking pattern you want to encourage when you’re seeking behaviour change.

So, what do you do? Well, the past is just a memory. It is the person’s future behaviour you want to change, because you sure can’t change their past behaviour.

So, you want to create buy-in for future change from the person involved. To do so, you need to ask questions that encourage them to talk. Asking questions that focus on the consequences of their actions and their future behaviour tends to be much more productive.

Rather than asking ‘why?’ (as in “Why are you late?”), you could ask questions such as:

“How do you think your team mates feel when you arrive late?”

“Why is it important for you to be at work on time?”

“What can you do differently from now on to ensure that you’re at work on time?”

“Tell me about what might prevent you from getting to work on time in the future?”

“When will you make that change?”

Notice the mind-set these sorts of questions encourage. Much more of a reflective and problem-solving thinking pattern. When you’re on the receiving end of this it feels more like you’re being treated fairly and receiving good coaching rather than being reprimanded and told what to do. And you’re being treated much more like an adult who has their own solutions to the problems they face.

The end result is much higher buy-in to change. You get it by using open-ended questions focussed around how the other person could improve their future behaviour.

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How to Kick Butt by Asking Questions

By James Brava | January 29, 2010

How To Kick Butt - Photo by LentzstudiosLast week we checked out why you would ask questions to kick butt. This week we’ll examine how you might go about this.

Remember the old acronym KISS? Most people say it means, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Well, I prefer “Keep it short and simple”.

Short and simple, there are two main types of questions. What are they?

Right – open and closed.

A closed question can be answered by using a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or by providing a simple piece of information. Examples:

Question: “Are you going to the kitchen?”  Answer: “No”
Question: “What’s your name?”  Answer: “James”

An open question gives the person answering it much more opportunity to provide information they feel is relevant. It can, to some extent, force a person to provide more information then they would have otherwise. Examples:

Question : “What’s the book you are reading about?
Question: “What did you do on your holiday last week?

There’s a bit of a common theme to open questions with which you’re no doubt already familiar. Mostly the first word begins with ‘w’. ‘What’, ‘why’, and ‘where’. The other word is ‘how’.

In addition, a statement starting with, “Tell me about….” can also be used in place of an open-ended question. Examples:

Statement: “Tell me about the book that you’re reading.”
Statement: “Tell me about your holiday last week.”

Last week I suggested there were a number of beneficial reasons why you would kick butt by asking questions. The key to achieving those sorts of benefits is to get the other person talking. To get the words out of their mouth.

I’ve discovered that if your coaching (or corrective feedback) conversation seems just like a two-way conversation, it is likely to be productive. If it seems more like a one-way monologue, with you doing all the talking, you’re not likely to get the level of buy-in and commitment to change for which you’re hoping.

So what type of questioning is likely to be the most productive way of getting the person whose behaviour you are correcting to talk? Open or closed? Exactly, open questions create much more space, opportunity and incentive for people to talk.

But what do most frontline managers do when they are seeking behaviour change from a team member? They kick butt and take names. They tell people what to do and ask closed questions. As a result they get the opposite of what they are seeking – low motivation, no buy-in and little improvement.

Next time you need to kick butt, do yourself a favour. Ask open ended questions and get your team member talking. See where it leads.

Next week you’ll discover the final secret to using questions to get behaviour change from your team members. And you’ll get examples of the sorts of open questions you can ask.

Image by Lenzstudios
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lentzstudios/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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Why Ask Questions to Kick Butt?

By James Brava | January 26, 2010

Why Ask Questions to Kick ButtWhy would you ask questions to kick butt?

Good question. I’m glad you asked.

The results your people deliver for you don’t just happen. Your people have to do something in order for them to be achieved. Sometimes they do the right thing; sometimes they do the wrong thing. And sometimes they just don’t do anything.

Your job as a frontline manager is to manage the behaviour of your team members to ensure they are doing the right things to achieve the results you need. When they’ve done the wrong thing or nothing at all, our inclination can be to tell them. Tell them what they’ve done wrong. Tell them what they haven’t done. And tell them what they need to do differently. However, often there is a better way.

To understand why asking questions will often be a more productive approach, let’s put you in the hot seat. Let’s imagine that your manager confronts you about a piece of work that you’ve just completed which has been done poorly. If your manager simply tells you what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed, what’s your level of motivation to make the improvements? I’m guessing that it’s relatively low. It is likely that you’ll just do what you need to do without any significant sense of commitment.

Imagine the same situation except your manager has chosen to ask you questions rather than simply telling you. He asks you questions such as, “What’s the impact on other people as a result of this work?”, “What pressure do you imagine I’ll come under when I present this to my boss?”, “What could you do differently to improve the quality of this work?”, “What are you willing to commit to in order to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?”

In this second situation you’re going to be doing a lot more reflecting, thinking and talking. Once a decision is made about next steps, to which you voluntarily agree, what’s your level of motivation to taking the action you said you would? It is likely that it is much, much higher than if you had simply been told what was wrong and what you needed to do to fix the problem. Agreed?

Apart from developing a higher level of motivation and commitment to the job, there are a couple of other benefits to asking questions rather than telling people what to do. You’ve probably thought of at least one of them.

Firstly, you probably don’t have all the answers. Frequently your people will know their job better than you do. So by asking questions you also tap into their expertise rather than solely rely on your own. Secondly, they will frequently already know what to do. They don’t need to be told, they need to be motivated to do it. And if they don’t know why they should do something, or how to do it, your questions will uncover that.

So that’s the why. Next week we’ll look at the how.

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Why Leadership Training Fails

By James Brava | January 19, 2010

Photo by Lars SundstromLeadership training fails. Actually, you already know this.

Let me explain…

You’ve been to any number of training courses before. For some of them your evaluation may have been, “Great lunch and good content.” Yet, four or five months later how much of what you learnt were you really applying? Some, but in all probability not a lot I suspect you’ll agree.

A well-quoted study by Neil Rackham provides the data to back up your experiences. Rackham, the founder of US sales consulting, training and research company Huthwaite, carried out an evaluation of sales training in the Xerox Corporation. By establishing the degree of carry-over from the classroom to the job, he hoped to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the company’s training.

The results stunned everyone. The study showed, on average, participants lost 87% of their new skills within one month.

Close investigation showed an interesting exception in the Xerox data. Some sales people showed a smaller loss and some showed a skill gain. When Rackham investigated these exceptions, he found those who lost least, or continued to gain skills, had managers who systematically managed the application of the new behaviours by their sales people immediately after the training.

Now, sales skills and leadership skills are not the same, although they both include a specific set of interpersonal and communication skills. This research simply shows what happens when training is regarded as an event that people attend without any effort being made to ensure competent on-job application of the skills learnt.

Why this happens can be simply explained through the concept of a performance equation. You may have seen more complex performance equations, but at its essence we can consider on-job performance in the following way:

Ability x Motivation = Performance

Ability is about the person. Their natural talents and inclination, work experience, industry knowledge and task knowledge and skill. Motivation, on the other hand, refers to how willing people are to apply what they know and can do.

It is self-evident that performance is maximised when people are both willing and able. Yet, training only deals with ability. It doesn’t address willingness. This is equally true for frontline staff, frontline leaders and senior executives. So leadership training will fail unless the participants are supported and motivated to apply what they have learnt in training back in the real world.

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The 3 Frontline Leadership gaps

By James Brava | January 12, 2010

mind_the_gapI’ve just been reviewing a case study on the outcomes of Frontline Leadership consulting, training and support work we’ve been undertaking with one of our clients. There were key frontline leadership problems described which echo what I’ve been hearing from many clients and prospective clients.

Similar problems have been highlighted in a recent report from the Center for Creative Leadership. They regard the gap between current leadership bench strength and future leadership demands as a serious liability for organisations.

Our client worked with us because the frontline managers in her business unit were supervising rather than leading. This meant that frontline managers spent the majority of their time behind their desks. Coaching was identified as a ‘result session’ focused on the ‘what did work/what didn’t work’ methodology, rather than any effective behavioural coaching to maximise team performance.

Contributing to these problems was an issue that appears across many industries. Frontline managers had been promoted because they were technically good at their job, not because they had leadership potential. And there was little, if any, training given to help them to be a leader.

The core problem is that there is a lack of leadership capability in frontline managers that limits organisational productivity.

Interestingly, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) have concluded something similar in The Leadership Gap, a 2009 report on a study conducted over two years across 2,200 managers and three countries.

The leaders surveyed by CCL were asked to rate the importance of 20 research-derived leadership competencies, and the difference between what managers are actually demonstrating versus what they need to demonstrate to be maximally effective in the future.

The study found that the five most important future skills – leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment, managing change and developing employees – are amongst the weakest competencies for today’s leaders.

I’d argue that for frontline managers strategic planning, and to a lesser extent managing change, are lower importance competencies because they are less often called upon at that level of management. This means we can reasonably conclude that the three key competency gaps for frontline leaders are:

  1. leading people
  2. inspiring commitment
  3. developing employees

This aligns with our experience with a range of clients across the Asia-Pacific region. Yet organisations need to seriously address these three key competency gaps evident in their frontline leaders if they want to:

  • increase productivity
  • ensure a greater retention of key talent
  • improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • and maximise employee engagement
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Live long and prosper

By James Brava | January 5, 2010

live_long_and_prosperAfter the Christmas stuffing, I put my feet up over New Year and watched Star Trek.

I’ve always liked the half-Vulcan character, Mr Spock. Maybe it’s the nifty thing he does with his fingers – the Vulcan salute.

But mostly, I just love that phrase.

“Live long and prosper.”

May you.

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What is the key to Frontline Leadership – in one word?

By James Brava | December 29, 2009

keys3Relationships.

There it is. That’s your lot. For frontline managers, leadership is about relationships. Period.

If you’d like more than one word, stick around. Let me expand.

The difference between leadership at a senior management level and at a frontline management level is that one is strategic and the other is tactical.

For frontline managers, tactical leadership is simply about influencing and motivating others to perform valued work activities that generate desired results. Influencing their team members to undertake specific work activities which maximise productivity. And motivating team members to provide discretionary effort over and above the minimum required.

Nearly all jobs require employees to make choices about their work, such as the pace at which they work, how they do it and how well it’s done. The extent to which they choose to do more than the minimum requirement dictates their level of productivity or performance and is referred to as ‘discretionary effort’.

Increased discretionary effort is a direct predictor of improved performance. As such it is the only way an organisation can maximise performance. Consequently, organisations that can trigger valued discretionary behaviour from their employees do better than others. And the key to triggering this discretionary effort is the relationship the team member has with their frontline manager.

Taking this further, relationships are made and broken through the quality of interaction and communication. Improve the quality and frequency of communication and interaction and the relationship is strengthened, which leads to an improved ability to influence and motivate. Decrease the quality and frequency of communication and interaction, and the opposite is ensured.

All that is then left for frontline leaders to know is what frequency of interaction works best, and to understand how quality communication looks, sounds and feels.

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Thanks Christ

By James Brava | December 22, 2009

christIt is that time of year. The season to again reflect on the life, teachings and leadership of Jesus Christ.

Leadership is the process of influence. The process of influencing the thinking and the behaviour of others for worthwhile achievement. Jesus Christ has been one of the few people in the history of the world who have had a dramatic and long-term influence on hundreds of millions of people. Which places him as one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen, heard and experienced.

Jesus held a clear vision of who he was, where he was going and where he was trying to take his followers. And when he called his disciples to follow him, he gave them the support and guidance they required to develop into ‘fishers of men’. These are all key leadership practices.

Yet it was the message that Christ brought us, and lived, which is the major source of his influence.

As Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations with God books, puts it, “The grandest teaching of Christ was not that you shall have everlasting life, but that you do; not that you shall have brotherhood in God, but that you do; not that you shall have whatever you request, but that you do. All that is required is to know this. For you are the creator of your reality, and life can show up in no other way for you than that way in which you think it will.”

Christ was very clear on this teaching. For which I am most thankful.

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Is your coaching approach failing both you and your people?

By James Brava | December 14, 2009
Photo: Julie Elliot-Abshire

Photo: Julie Elliot-Abshire

Why is coaching so important? Well, the Sales Executive Council’s research has revealed a strong, positive correlation between coaching effectiveness and (a) the performance of average (or core) performers (as much as 17% improvement), (b) high-performer retention, and (c) high and average performers’ willingness to work harder. Pretty impressive stuff!

If that is the case, how could you go wrong? Unfortunately very easily.

I work with many different organisations. Many of them are keen to ensure that their supervisors, team leaders and managers are busy coaching their people to improve their performance. What’s interesting is that in most organisations the word ‘coaching’ frequently refers to one activity, one approach, one way of doing things. Yet by taking this approach, these organisations fail their people, their managers and their shareholders.

The thing to realise is that coaching is situational. So you need different coaching approaches depending on the situation you are dealing with and the outcome you desire. Here are the basic coaching approaches you need in your arsenal.

  1. To grow performance, use positive reinforcement In the workplace, positive reinforcement can best be describes as informal, immediate and specific positive feedback from a knowledgeable source. It was confirmed by the Corporate Leadership Council’s global research in 2002 as the “single most effective performance management lever available”. This approach is typically used informally during day-to-day coaching conversations.
  2. To confront performance problems, use corrective feedback
    This is a positive and supportive approach for confronting performance problems. It enables frontline leaders to easily address performance problems before they become a significant issue.
  3. For developing skill, use skills coaching
    Based on the Effective Behavioural Coaching model, this coaching approach has been shown to be up to 300% more effective at developing skill than conventional coaching methodologies. This approach would typically be used on a weekly or fortnightly basis in situations where on-job skill development is required.
  4. To coach people resistant to change, use coaching resistant performers
    This coaching approach is a more serious conversation for team members who are resistant to make a required change in their behaviour. The conversation can be an intermediary step between corrective feedback and performance management.
  5. To develop, guide and mentor people, use the GROW conversation
    This coaching conversation is focused on asking effective questions to mentor, lead and build awareness and responsibility in the person being coached. This longer conversation is typically used during performance reviews and monthly one-on-ones.

Coaching is a way of motivating and creating engaged employees, and is particularly effective in turning average performers into high performers.  The untapped potential lying dormant in your frontline employees is staggering.  Coaching is a powerful tool to harness this potential for the overall benefit of organisational performance, provided you take the time to apply the right technique for the situation you face and the outcome you are seeking.

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Why your coaching may not be working

By James Brava | December 7, 2009

It seems like everyone is talking about coaching in business these days, and perhaps with good reason. In their 2005 Strategic Research Findings, the Sales Executive Council identified that teams not receiving coaching under perform by a significant margin. On the other hand, teams that report receiving more than three hours of coaching per month exceed their goals by 7% on average.

The report went further to identify that managers repeatedly under perform in the critical skill area of coaching their people. So, let’s explore one of the reasons this might be a problem.

To understand what works in terms of where to put your time and energy in coaching, consider a performance distribution curve. Arguably, across any organisation about 15% of people could be termed high performers, about 70% could be termed average performers and the bottom 15% low performers. It is now acknowledged that the opportunity for maximising organisational productivity lies in lifting the performance of your average performers, since they are not yet performing to their capacity and they make up the majority of your people.

In terms of coaching, conventional wisdom says to focus on our high-performers. They’re the people delivering for us so we want that to continue and we want to retain these people. However, most managers spread their coaching time equally across all of their team members. They don’t differentiate between their high, average and low performers.

What works best is something different again. If the opportunity to maximise productivity lies with our average performers, then the place we should spend most of our coaching time is with them. On the other hand we want to retain our high performers and continue to encourage their willingness to work hard, so we have to continue to spend some time with them.

Except for new, high potential team members, there is no evidence to suggest that spending coaching time with low performers delivers a substantial return on investment.

So, stop treating your people all the same. You have limited time to coach your people. Use it wisely by spending most of that time with your average performers.

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