00;00;00;14 Junior: You hire Olivia and you hire Mark. Similar resumes. Similar interviews. Similar work experience. On paper, they look virtually the same, and even throughout the interview process, they look pretty much the same. But six months later, Olivia is closing enterprise deals and Mark is struggling to hit quota. And he's blaming the CRM. Six months after that, Olivia has been promoted and Mark is gone out of here.

00;00;28;02 Junior: So what's the difference between those two? Coach ability? And for many leaders, it's difficult to spot. So that's our topic today coach ability how to spot it. How to develop it in your people and what to do if it's not exactly where you want it to be. Tim how are you doing today?

00;00;44;00 Tim: Doing great. I want to chime in on this. This is such an interesting

topic, junior, because it may at first blush seem pretty straightforward, but coach ability is just positively correlated with performance. And I think that it probably is to some extent when people are maybe early in their careers, but it's not that straightforward after that. Yeah, we see people who are advanced in their careers that have done a lot and they become and their coach Bill, is really low.

00;01;21;12 Tim: It's also situational. It can be dynamic where the coach ability ebbs and flows, don't you think?

00;01;27;09 Junior: I do. And one of the mistakes that managers make is they'll pour effort and time energy into the wrong people because they haven't appropriately assessed the coach ability of the people on the other side that they're in charge of developing. And so maybe they're spending too much time on someone that they shouldn't be. And the inverse might also be true.

00;01;47;08 Junior: So in the Olivia and Mark example, surely there can be, problems aside from coach ability that can affect an outcome like that. But this is a big one.

00;01;57;29 Tim: It's it is a big one. And I got to I gotta say, one of the things that strikes me is that some of the least and I don't know why this happens, but some of the least coachable people that I've worked with are they have been some of the most successful at some points in their career, but then their coach ability kind of comes to a halt.

00;02;23;21 Tim: So that's an interesting thing to think about as we move into this conversation. Yeah.

00;02;28;27 Junior: I like to think about NBA All Stars who have been in the league for 10 or 15 years, and they still have coaches, and they're in the locker room at halftime. And maybe the coach has two years in the league. That's always a super interesting dynamic.

00;02;42;20 Tim: It is you.

00;02;43;08 Junior: You have those all stars sitting there and saying okay coach. Right.

Let's drop the play. Yeah. And they'll chime in. But pretty interesting to see that I can stay stable across time even with the highest performers. So let's get into what coach ability actually is. Coach ability is a function of two variables willingness and self-awareness. So we've got willingness on the y axis.

00;03;03;27 Junior: Self-Aware ness on the x axis. And you'll see that we've created yet another two by two matrix.

00;03;08;29 Tim: Yes.

00;03;09;24 Junior: So that's what we're going to be using today. To frame the conversation, we're going to go through each of these boxes, which is a combination of those two variables. We'll talk about the symptoms, how to identify when someone is in one of those boxes and then what to do about it, because ideally we want them to have high willingness and high self-awareness, but they may not at first.

00;03;31;11 Junior: We want to help them get there. So let's define each of those self-awareness. What is it? An accurate, evidence based view of one's impact and performance. Tell me a little bit about self-awareness as a variable in people. You lead.

00;03;48;05 Tim: Well it's crucial. Without self-awareness, if you don't know where you are, junior, if you don't comprehend your current position, you really can't make progress. You're you're kind of at sea and you don't know where to go. And so you need. And I love the definition. It's evidence based. You need sources outside of yourself to help you understand where you are.

00;04;13;16 Tim: And that remains true, I think, throughout life. And so we'll talk about how to get there a little bit more, but an accurate evidence based view of one's impact and performance. So first of all, there's a metacognition requirement. You need to think about how you think you need to pay attention to how others react to you, the streams of data that are coming back to you as you interact with others.

00;04;40;17 Tim: So you're being it's there's such a huge component of, I guess you might call it intentionality. You're very deliberate about paying attention to the way that people react and respond to you. You're thinking about that, you're processing that, and that takes practice. But even with all of that, you're still going to need outside sources to help you, to give you unvarnished, unedited feedback about yourself.

00;05;11;23 Junior: I think it's worth pointing out that the self-awareness isn't just social. It's not that they're only paying attention to the social impact of the things they're doing. There's a technical angle as well. If we look just at outcomes, they're going to have a really accurate sense of what the root cause was, and it's going to match the observable facts.

00;05;31;18 Junior: And it's a great way to be able to deduce someone's self-awareness is if they can explain root cause. And it matches the observable facts, both in a social and in a technical sense. You can say, wow, this person has high self-awareness. If the opposite is true, and when they try to explain root cause, it's not matching what actually happened in the situation, socially or practically.

00;05;56;09 Junior: Then we have a problem. And that's one of the ways to unpack early on if someone has high self-awareness or not.

00;06;03;04 Tim: Another thing, junior, is you got to learn how to pay attention to your own longitudinal data, your own time series data about your life. So, for example, what do you know about your own resilience and how do you know about that? That's not short term data. So you're gathering you're looking at evidence over time to see what your pattern is as you travel through adversity.

00;06;32;09 Tim: That's just another example where it's not short term. It's not situational. It's long term. That's also part of self-awareness.

00;06;41;11 Junior: And then it leads into great interview questions if you can ask people about their patterns.

00;06;45;18 Tim: That's right.

00;06;46;04 Junior: Let's go to the next one. How would we define willingness? Willingness. We define a sustained readiness to receive feedback and immediately convert it into deliberate action. Willingness is an important thing in management. It's an important thing in those you manage sustain readiness.

00;07;03;24 Tim: I love that, by the way. Sustained readiness, that combination, that word combination really struck me.

00;07;12;10 Junior: Why say more?

00;07;15;01 Tim: Because I think we go in and out of willingness. A lot of us, sometimes we're more willing, sometimes we're less willing. And to be to have that be a sustainable pattern. Sustained readiness. That means that willingness is a part of who you are. It's a part of your makeup. It's a part of your character. That's really what we're looking for.

00;07;41;12 Tim: And that contributes to, as we will see, accelerated development. And so that's a question. That's a question that we can all ask ourselves.

What is the nature of your willingness? Not only is it high or low, but does it ebb and flow? Are you sometimes highly willing, sometimes not very willing, sometimes very resistant, stubborn, entrenched, intractable in the way that you respond to things, in the way that you try to get better or improve, grow, develop.

00;08;17;20 Tim: So I just love that sustained readiness to receive feedback.

00;08;25;03 Junior: Oh, me too.

00;08;26;13 Tim: I tell you, that stopped me dead in my tracks. Because I have to confess that sometimes I don't exhibit sustained readiness to to receive feedback. That's a that's a probing, question that we can ask ourselves a willingness.

00;08;44;08 Junior: So how do you spot willingness in a person? I think willingness has a lot to do with offense. I think willing people are more apt to move. These are hand raisers. These are doers. These are note takers. These are Asker.

00;08;59;29 Tim: These are volunteers or volunteers.

00;09;02;02 Junior: These are people who are moving. They're doing things. And one of the patterns that I've noticed in my own response to the people that I get to interact with professionally, I really like high willingness people. Oh, I really like them.

00;09;17;05 Tim: They're a joy to work with.

00;09;18;09 Junior: They really are. And we'll get into the combination of willingness and self-awareness. But it man, if you key in on one, you see a pattern in somebody of high willingness. You know that there's potential.

00;09;29;17 Tim: You know.

00;09;29;24 Junior: Out the.

00;09;30;04 Tim: Gate, you know you're going to have an adventure together.

00;09;32;05 Junior: Yeah. So again, if you can dive into that creates some behavioral interviewing questions about willingness. Do it. We're not going to go there today but it's an important thing. Okay. Now let's get into the combinations. The first combination we're going to talk about is low willingness low awareness. So we're going to say there about here on the willingness scale maybe here on the awareness scale.

00;09;56;17 Junior: And that's going to put them into this box. And we call this the failing box. That might seem harsh. Why do we call it the failing.

00;10;03;00 Tim: Well what else is it going to be? You're not self-aware and you're very low in willingness. Where are you going? You're you're just not going anywhere. Most likely you're regressing. You're not willing to put forth the effort, and you're not willing to do to take, an honest, penetrating, unsparing view of yourself and really dig in. And so where can you possibly go except backwards?

00;10;35;11 Tim: Yeah, really?

00;10;37;03 Junior: We're going to be using, car analogy as we go through these four boxes. And this one we're going to call flat tire, no GPS okay. We're not going anywhere because the tires flat. Yeah. And even if we were, we wouldn't know where we were going because we have no GPS. So imagine you have no map. You're out in the middle of nowhere and you have a flat tire.

00;11;00;15 Junior: You are dead stuck. And in that case, the willingness. You don't even care to get unstuck. You you're just going to stay there, which is problematic. So what does this look like in reality? This is going to look like excuses. It's going to look like deflection. A person in this box is going to do very minimal to no preparation for anything.

00;11;23;11 Junior: They're definitely not going to be taking notes. They're not going to be raising hands and volunteering. These people are going to be stagnant. And so if you see this in a person, what do we do? That leads us to the next slide. Confront and decide this is what you do. So as a leader you're going to be surveying the landscape.

00;11;44;15 Junior: You're going to be looking at the person in front of you. You're going to gauge the self-awareness. You're going to gauge the willingness. And if someone falls in this box, this is going to be our prescription to you. You're going to have to confront and decide. So the first thing we do in, in this situation is we present a gap with data.

00;12;03;05 Junior: So we have to help the person understand that there's a gap going on. The first thing we want to do is see if they can key in on that themselves.

00;12;13;06 Tim: I was just going to say if the if the willingness is really low and the self-awareness is really low, they're not typically going to be excited to confront the gap. And if you coach through questions, typically you're not going to get very far because they're not going to go there on their own. They don't want to they don't want to see the gap.

00;12;37;16 Tim: They don't want to address the gap. They don't even want to acknowledge the gap. Yep. And so you're it's not going to be a pleasant journey to, to get them to to view the gap.

00;12;49;22 Junior: Well, here's an example. Let's say that you have, a mark on your team in a sales context. And Mark is 60% to goal on the month, and the team is already at 105%. You have that data in front of you and say, hey, Mark, it looks like you're 60% to quota. The team's at 105. Help me understand what's going on.

00;13;11;26 Junior: If you see the patterns of deflection that we talked about in a recent episode, you see blame denial or excuse. And that becomes habitual. That's a pattern. There's not a lot we can do because the willingness isn't there. Even if we impose the awareness by saying, hey, here's all of the data, here's exactly what's going on, here's what we see in the situation.

00;13;32;21 Junior: Here's what your team members think about it. Here's what we've heard from customers. If there's blame, denial, an excuse, and a complete aversion to reality, we have no other choice but to decide. And that's the second part. So if in that confrontation, you clarify the nonnegotiable and you're still not seeing the willingness and you're still not seeing the self-awareness, we move into a 30 day performance improvement plan with micro targets.

00;13;57;23 Junior: If that 30 day plan doesn't bear fruit, we manage you out. It's as simple as that.

00;14;05;21 Tim: Yeah. What else are you going to do now in sales junior in in the example that you're given performance is usually quite visible and measurable. And you've got the metrics that show you where you are. But in other positions in organizations, it's often not like that at all. It's not it's not as transparent. There's more ambiguity around performance.

00;14;31;22 Tim: And you can kind of hide behind things, especially if you're not responsible, clearly responsible for certain outcomes. But you're more involved in processes and you have kind of you have intermediate handoffs in a long chain of, of, of tasks. So you, you know, people hide, they often hide in the bowels, especially of large organizations. And sometimes they they just kind of work out this cozy accommodation with professional life.

00;15;06;24 Tim: And they go along and they get very entrenched and they kind of calcify into their roles, and they do get sterile and they do get stagnant and they get very resistant to change. I've seen this again and again.

00;15;24;15 Junior: I've seen it too. And I want to dig in to a point that you made about the difficulty. Sometimes outside of an environment that's really quantitative, to hone in on whether or not we're being successful. Pro tip for anyone who has direct reports, you have to establish what success looks like with your people. You have to do it.

00;15;43;01 Junior: If it's not from.

00;15;43;19 Tim: The beginning.

00;15;44;10 Junior: From the very, very beginning. So ask yourself that about your direct reports. Are you confident that every single one of your direct reports knows what success looks like for them? If you can't answer yes to that question, you need to immediately one figure that out for yourself if you don't know, and then to figure out a way to help them understand, you need to have a conversation immediately.

00;16;04;25 Junior: One of the things that I really like to do is anytime we have a new hire, we set those goals from the beginning and we have a 30, often a 4560 day type check in, depending on the nature of the role, will outline what success looks like. We'll see if we're making progress to whatever that vision is and then we'll be able to have an intervention.

00;16;24;26 Junior: If you don't do that and there are not clear expectations, good luck trying to hold people accountable. You're going to have a really hard time.

00;16;33;03 Tim: You created ambiguity from the beginning.

00;16;35;04 Junior: And I've done this more than once. And it's not fun because then you're put into a situation where you know that there's none performance, but you have really nothing to lean on in terms of holding them accountable to some sort of standard. Right? So especially in those roles that are a little bit more subjective, you got to go impose that.

00;16;56;17 Junior: Okay. Let's move into the next one. Progressing. Progressing is the next combination. We've got high willingness. We've got low self-awareness. So that box right here is the progressing box Tim tell us a little bit about that progressing right.

00;17;10;25 Tim: So your willingness is high. That means you are willing to put forth the effort even though your self-awareness is low. If you're willing to put forth the effort, you will make some progress. It may come slowly. It may be a very gradual ascent, but you're still going to make progress. And that's the key. So, you're just not going as fast as you could because you're you're your awareness is lagging.

00;17;38;11 Tim: But you know, what I find is that if someone fits this profile, junior, and they are progressing over time, even if it's slow, the self-awareness will increase because they continue to strive it continue to put forth the effort they can. They're trying. And so it comes. It may come slowly, but it comes.

00;18;00;28 Junior: In the car analogy. We call this good gas pedal foggy windshield. So you're good at laying on the gas. You can move the car, but you've got a foggy windshield. You're not entirely sure where you're going because the awareness isn't there. So what does this look like? Practically speaking, this is going to be someone with good energy. That's often what I find.

00;18;20;23 Junior: They've got good energy. They're hand raisers. They're doers. They often over. Promise. That's a pattern in this group. They often misdiagnosed root cause, so they're raring to go. They're bright eyed and bushy tailed.

00;18;34;25 Tim: But so they play. They play offense, but they make mistakes.

00;18;38;02 Junior: Yeah, well, if you have to.

00;18;39;06 Tim: Go back and clean things up a lot.

00;18;41;26 Junior: You'll ask something about root cause and they'll either mis attribute something that might seem fairly obvious to you, or they'll excuse something that they're not quite up to speed with. They don't understand. And so this category is one that's pretty interesting. And you have to make sure to get this right. If you misdiagnose the willingness piece or the awareness piece, your coaching response is going to be incorrect.

00;19;08;13 Junior: So if we go down to the coaching response for progressing, what do we do? We're going to say that your play is mirror and model. You want to model the right behavior so that they have something to go off of. And that's one of the things that helps build awareness in people is a comparison. And it's often why.

00;19;27;25 Junior: Again, pro tip I like to hire in twos. If you have someone who is high willingness, low self-awareness, and they don't have a model that's a peer that's doing well, it's really difficult. It's also difficult for you to know if they're doing well or not, if you don't hire in dues. But that's one thing that you can do.

00;19;45;22 Tim: Because they don't have references.

00;19;46;27 Junior: They don't have references. I think people that you would classify as overzealous junior would often fit into this category. Yeah, the energy's there, the willingness is there, the enthusiasm is there. But they go, they're there. They're just they're not directing them. They're not correcting themselves along the way. They're not diagnosing along the way. They're not adjusting along the way. And as you said, they don't have often.

00;20;18;14 Tim: It's for a lack of models or reference points or guidance along the way, too.

00;20;24;02 Junior: A lot of people don't understand the idea that they see that the eventual goal is to have them coach themselves. A lot of people have not understood that principle. They've never been exposed to a coaching scenario where they were the ones who were expected to come with some answers, which builds dependency, which Bill builds learned helplessness. So they might be in a situation where they're just waiting for feedback, and they haven't taken that step to say, well, maybe I might be able to look at my own performance and self-diagnose and self-correct.

00;20;56;13 Junior: And so that's why we have the mirror piece of this prescription, which is use replays, use data dashboards, encourage nightly or weekly reflection logs. So let's say that you have someone in client success. It's a client facing role. You've got recorded calls or let's say that you're just in a team meeting that's probably more broadly applicable. You're going to want to immediately after, look at film, right?

00;21;21;05 Junior: Either literally or figuratively. Yeah. And ask, how did that go? Because what do we want to do? We want to help build some introspection, some metacognition, to have them look back at performance and say, well, it actually didn't go as well as I had hoped. Okay. Why do you think that? Well, because so-and-so responded this way. Why do you think they responded that way?

00;21;41;26 Junior: Because I said this thing where I said it this way or I didn't do anything. If you can start to build that muscle and the person is high willingness, now you can see how it's possible to start building the awareness. That's right.

00;21;53;26 Tim: That's right I love that. Okay, go back and watch the film.

00;21;57;07 Junior: That's right. And that can be a scary thing for people, I might add. It can be a scary thing for me. Right? I might have to go back and watch this podcast over and say, what did I do to mess it up? Okay. Plateauing. This is the next combination we've got low willingness, high self-awareness. This is an interesting one.

00;22;16;05 Junior: So this box over here, we call the plateauing box. Have you ever had someone in the plateauing box.

00;22;22;18 Tim: Yes. Yeah. So you think about the combination. The willingness is low. It may once have been high but for some reason it's low now. But the awareness is high. So this is someone who is pretty savvy about where they are, how they perform, how they interact, the impact they have, their skills, their abilities, their performance, their their competence.

00;22;52;29 Tim: They're aware of all of this. They're there. They're keenly aware. But they just for whatever reason, junior, they lost their motor. They've lost their motivation. And so they are on a plateau.

00;23;11;03 Junior: For this one will say maps. The route won't drive. So they know where to go. They're highly aware of what has to happen in order to accomplish the objective, but it just won't.

00;23;21;12 Tim: What I found in this, in this, case, junior, is that often it's situational. For example, if someone is highly aware of all of these things, that that is evidence that they they have some good skills and they once had willingness, often it's evidence that they once had willingness. So what I often find is that when you find someone that's plateauing, there's a situation and there's something that's getting in the way. It it could be a problem. It could be, a life event. It could be some kind of adversity. It could be that they are, that they are very resistant to, an initiative or a direction or a decision. Something's gotten in their way, and they have just lost their willingness and their motivation. And so if you can do some root cause analysis with them when you're coaching them to figure out why they are where they are, it's it's usually a temporary situation.

00;24;34;17 Tim: And it's, it's, there's something that is is keeping them there. We've got to go find what it is and dislodge it if we can.

00;24;44;22 Junior: I'm thinking about the word usually, and I'm trying to figure out if I agree or disagree, if it's usually temporary or if it's usually permanent. If we look into some of the behaviors I wrote down a couple accurate self-talk, low initiative, analysis paralysis, perfectionism. So if we're seeing some of those things and we're trying to get to a root cause, I think leading with inquiry as usual is probably the best approach when we get into the prescription for all of you, if you see this in your own people, we say mode it.

00;25;19;28 Junior: If you see this in your own people, we say motivate and contract. And I love this first one. Link goals to a personal why. The personal why is usually what gives the high willingness, the drive, the movement forward, the offense and often a pattern can be that when people have lost that willingness, they're no longer tuned in to their personal why.

00;25;45;05 Junior: And so if you take an executive as an example, who's made it inside the organization, and they were once high willingness and high self-awareness and they've lost the motor, it could be that they've lost their personal why there's no longer connection to the goal. There's no longer connection to the brand, the vision. And so you might have to try to reconnect that, splice the wires and help them regain momentum.

00;26;09;09 Tim: Oh, I think that's a really good point. Let me give you two examples, junior. Here's the first one. The first one is situational, where I worked with a gentleman and he lost his Y and therefore his willingness because someone was promoted to be his new boss and he didn't like that person, and he didn't respect that person, and he didn't think that person was competent and should have been promoted.

00;26;36;11 Tim: And that was extremely deflating to to him. And so for a time he was plateaued. And he, he just he was not willing to even work. Does that make sense?

00;26;50;23 Junior: I made a ton of sense.

00;26;52;22 Tim: Excuse me. But we were able to work through that over time, and he was able to, I guess, reconcile his feelings and his opinions and his attitudes and learn how to work with this gentleman. Case two, though, is a little bit different. The second example that I can think of is another person that I worked with.

00;27;19;06 Tim: Who plateaued, and for them it was really a matter of they were late in their career. They were no longer willing to do the work to stay current. They let their skills become obsolete, and they were kind of coasting and in semi-retirement, still on the job, eventually coasting into retirement. But just saying this is the final chapter of my professional life.

00;27;51;03 Tim: And, and, you know, almost with an entitlement mentality that I've worked hard throughout my life and I'm competent and I've contributed a lot, and therefore I get to, take my foot off the pedal and kind of coast into retirement. Yeah. And this person, we could not turn around. Yeah. Interesting. Very different situation. But but another example of plateauing.

00;28;19;16 Junior: And it's difficult to help them understand in those situations that the market owes them nothing. Right. The market doesn't care. And so you may say, well, you know, yeah, they have contributed and great. That's well and good. And we appreciate the seniority and we appreciate tenure and we appreciate contribution. But the second that that stops why should the organization care if the market doesn't care. Well. And this were the this is where the distortion comes in junior because an entitlement mentality takes over and the person thinks this institution that I'm working for should take care of me.

00;28;58;12 Junior: Now they owe it to me.

00;28;59;17 Tim: Yeah, they owe it to me. Right. Very dangerous.

00;29;03;15 Junior: Well, and that's that's why I bring up the market perspective, because that becomes arguable if you look in isolation at the institution and you're like.

00;29;11;14 Tim: Yeah, so should the institution buffer the market, right. And say the market doesn't care.

00;29;16;12 Junior: That's the question.

00;29;17;01 Tim: We need to.

00;29;17;25 Junior: That's the.

00;29;18;08 Tim: Question. Yeah.

00;29;19;03 Junior: Right. It's an interesting question. It isn't it. And I'd be interested to see what people think. If this is a controversial point of view. But I think that the organization they can buffer a little bit for the most part should reflect what the market says. Yeah, the market's not going to be wrong. Yeah. And the market's going to tell you that if you're not creating value that you're not welcome here anymore.

00;29;38;16 Junior: So either you continue to create value or it's going to be a drain on the organization, on the organization as a whole. Everyone in it, it's performance in the market. Those effects are far reaching and long lasting.

00;29;54;20 Tim: Okay. I'll give you a careful. Yeah. I'll give you one other example from academia. This one is been repeated over and over again. I had a professor years ago who had gained tenure and had been very productive in research and, and, and, publishing his research and contributing to his field. And then he, he gained tenure. It wasn't long after he gained tenure that he went into a mode of basically retirement.

00;30;32;16 Tim: He wasn't contributing. He wasn't creating and contributing original research. He wasn't publishing, he would often not even show up to class. But he was he was secure in his tenure track position. And, that's the way that he contributed after that. And he was totally buffered from market forces. Junior. Do I think that's right? Absolutely not. Yeah.

00;31;03;08 Tim: Absolutely not a a complete disservice to the students. And he was exploiting he was taking advantage of the institution and the concept of tenure. The concept of tenure does not exist to coddle him, from the time that he gained tenure. But that's what he was doing.

00;31;25;00 Junior: I'll qualify this by just saying that will allow for you. People have bad days. People have that. They get into funks, and sometimes we need to help them get out of that. We're allowing space for that. But if that becomes the dominant pattern.

00;31;38;24 Tim: Yeah. For 20 years.

00;31;40;02 Junior: Yeah. Yeah, certainly. Then at that point we've got a problem. Okay. Let's go on to the last one. Accelerating. This is high willingness. High awareness. So this accelerating box is the fun box. But here's the interesting point. I think a lot of leaders who have people who fall into the accelerating box make the wrong decision with these people.

00;32;01;24 Junior: They often feel like once someone's in this box, they don't have to do anything because the person's high willingness, their high awareness. So they should be good to go, right. But that's not the case. So how do you know if someone's in this box? They seek stretch. They teach others, they self initiate post-mortems after action reviews. And so what are we here to do?

00;32;24;08 Junior: Here's our prescription challenge and champion.

00;32;28;21 Tim: I really love the way that you frame that.

00;32;31;28 Junior: It's important. Both of these things are really important. Challenge. Oh I could talk about this one for a long time. People who are high performers who are in this category, who are high willingness, high self-awareness, need challenge. And the the misstep of many managers who have these people is to not give the person enough challenge. That will often happen.

00;32;57;05 Junior: The the opposite can also be true, where they overload because the person will just continue to perform. And so you have to be careful in finding the appropriate balance.

00;33;07;13 Tim: Yeah. We don't want to exploit.

00;33;09;03 Junior: No. But there has to be healthy challenge. And then champion is also important. You want everyone in the organization to be able to see that person, see that they're recognized and want to model that person's behavior. Good point. So if you can point at them in public and say, hey, this person is in this box, another you would say it that way.

00;33;29;14 Junior: But when you see instances of high awareness and high willingness, you want to call those out publicly. Yeah. And to the person in private, you really want to shed light on what they're doing well, so that they continue to feel motivated to do that.

00;33;42;23 Tim: So you don't want to exploit them, but you also don't want to exercise benign neglect, right? Which is what we often do because we just say, let them go. I'm going to I'm going to spend my time with those who are struggling. But, we do that too much. Yeah. I love I love the, the point here, junior, to rotate them as peer coaches.

00;34;08;09 Tim: Yeah. They can be. They're very versatile. They can help about anybody. So you send them on assignment? Yep. And you keep that going.

00;34;19;29 Junior: Here's, I think one of the, the patterns of neglect that managers show their high performers. There's a stat I found that I threw in the notes. US managers spend nearly one full workday per week managing poor performers. That's a lot.

00;34;37;22 Tim: That's a lot.

00;34;38;21 Junior: So it's an instance of the squeaky wheel gets the grease, where if you're a manager and you have people in the other three boxes, you're often going to ignore the people in the upper right quadrant because they're likely to be able to take care of themselves, and you got to go and fix all of the other trouble.

00;34;56;22 Tim: That's exactly.

00;34;57;12 Junior: But you got to be careful in doing that. So for those of you who are out there managing someone who is in that box, the accelerating box, you got to make sure to pay attention. And it's ironic because they get maybe five, 10% of your total attention relative to the 80, 90% that you're giving your poor performers, yet they're the ones who provide the exponential returns for you.

00;35;19;19 Tim: They are the players, the players.

00;35;21;18 Junior: They're the ones that are probably ten performers. That's right. You ought to be careful. Okay, let's go back or not back, but forward to what? This, this next slide we call the learning loop. Action data reflection and adjustment. This is what we want to help our people do. This is what we do as effective coaches. So we're going to present data.

00;35;44;01 Junior: Hopefully there will be reflection on the part of the coaching. We're going to help facilitate that. Hopefully we see a behavioral adjustment and then we'll see new action and results. We want to keep this loop going in an effort to move people out of the box that they're in. If they're in one of the three that we don't want to be in, I'm going to go back to the coach ability framework up here.

00;36;06;24 Junior: So if you have somebody who's in the progressing box, the failing box, the plateauing box, you know which axis you need to work on if you're in failing both progressing. We need to work on awareness plateauing. We need to work on willingness. If we're up here in the accelerating box, we got to keep it going. So I like this model because it gives us some prescription.

00;36;28;15 Junior: As leaders, what do we do when we see people in these buckets? My last invitation or every manager, would be to present your people with this model and have them plot themselves. It will help you see if the awareness is there and where you're at relative to where they are in the coaching scenario. It's a really useful exercise and then you can set goals accordingly.

00;36;52;27 Tim: I would agree with that, junior. Don't keep it a secret. And if you as you take your people through the model, that exercise itself is an exercise in self-awareness. So explain the two by two matrix. Explain the axes. Explain the quadrants and the labels, and then say so where do you think you would plot yourself and then help me understand.

00;37;21;18 Tim: And then listen. That gives you I can't think of a better way to assess the self-awareness of one of your direct reports. Yeah. 00;37;32;02 Junior: I agree everybody. That's been the conversation for today. Coach ability, willingness and self-awareness. If you liked today's episode, leave us a like, subscribe and share with a friend and I would like to know what your favorite part of today's episode was. So if you're watching somewhere where there's comments, let us know. And if you have any future episode ideas, we'd love to hear those too.

00;37;52;15 Junior: We will see you in the next episode. Take care.