Pick your battles. Pick fewer battles. No, fewer than that.
While it is difficult to quantify, managerial talent is a limited resource. As a manager, you cannot observe, counter, and address all behaviors. You have to choose.
Further, the people you lead cannot make changes on multiple fronts at once. Most of the time, all of us, however ambitious, can only make small and incremental change.
The task of a manager is to identify which changes lead to the most positive outcomes and iterate through the process as rapidly as the recipient can manage.
Contact center work provides easy illustrations of this. A common case is an employee who takes too long to process calls compared to the norm and at the same time fails to provide the customer experience your organization expects. Coach to both and fail at both.
The better path lies in identifying behaviors that are likely to improve both the employee’s efficiency and customer experience delivery while having a conversation that’s focused on a single goal. For example, “John” needs to take additional time understanding the needs of the customer by listening more. You know this will likely lead to more efficient answers delivered correctly the first time as well as improved customer experience. But if you tell John they need to give better customer experience and speed their calls up by 2 minutes, John is likely to become more curt rather than more engaging.
But let’s be clear: John needs to fix both. As a manager, you must iterate quickly to reach the goals. A coaching plan is going to look aggressive with nearly daily contact.
| Monday AM | Coaching conversation – 30 mins. Identify behaviors, secure commitment to attempt modified behavior |
| Monday PM | Evaluate effectiveness – 30 mins. Did John try? Did it work? |
| Monday PM | Deliver feedback – 10 mins. Reset expectations if needed, praise for accomplishments in effort and outcome |
| Tuesday AM | Reset intention with John – 10 mins. |
| Tuesday PM | Evaluate effectiveness – 30 mins. Did John try? Did it work? |
| Tuesday PM | Deliver feedback – 10 minutes. Reset expectations if needed, praise for accomplishments in effort and outcome |
Keep it up. By Wednesday or Thursday John should be getting this down so much it’s a habit. It would be harder for them to go back to their old ways than to keep doing the new behavior. As soon as the first behavior is secured, start on the next one.
And you have to do this with multiple employees simultaneously. So you need to think carefully about who gets your managerial bandwidth and what you can accomplish with it.
Think about all the opportunities to coach and develop your employees. Write them all down in order of most impactful to least, then tear off the bottom two-thirds of your paper and put it in the shredder. What you’ve got left, plan it out and follow through.
The value you have as a leader is often determined not by what you do but by what you choose to leave undone.
Lexi Emmons 