As leaders, we know our job is to maximize the performance of our people. We know that coaching is one of the highest leverage methods of maximizing their performance. We know we should schedule reviews with our people, integrating coaching into those reviews.
Whether it’s a deal review, account review, pipeline, prospecting forecast, territory, or a one on one, we get great power integrating coaching into each of these.
As much as we know the importance of this, as much as we may want to coach our people in these meetings, reality smacks us in the face. We don’t have the time to do these–at least at the regular cadences we should be conducting them. The unfortunate reality of most of our jobs, is we live in a constant state of disruption and shifting priorities. The regular cadences we aspire to are just aspirational.
As a result, we don’t provide the coaching and development we should be providing. And as a result, we are driving the performance improvements our people want and we need.
Other than throwing up our hands and giving up, what are we to do?
There are some of the classic time management techniques, which are valuable and we should leverage. Our attention, to often, gets diverted by crises. Things that appear urgent, yet may not be important. We drop everything we do to respond to a customer or request from our own management, when we might better say, “Do you need that now, or can I do this in a few days?” Or, very often, we might be better served by not responding to certain crises at all. They may actually not be things that demand a reaction.
We tend to have very bad habits in responding to these types of things. We, also, have a propensity to pile more things on, yet not eliminating anything we do. And this puts more pressure on our time. So we have to constantly look at what we should stop, perhaps never adding any new thing until we have also identified something to stop.
But as much as we try to be diligent, as many books as we read on time management and getting things done, the reality is that we will always be time poor. We will always have more demand on our time than we have time to do it.
And what gets sacrificed? Coaching! Al those business reviews where we want to also coach, get diverted. We conduct them, but irregularly, and we tend to focus on the business management aspects and coaching suffers.
While we should always strive to do these things, how, when reality comes crashing in, do we coach and develop our people?
It’s leveraging ad hoc conversations. It’s our ability to inject coaching into every interaction we have with our people.
It may be leveraging whatever the modern incarnation of “water cooler” discussions, or the current version of “windshield time.” It may be pulling someone aside for a minute before or after another meeting.
There’s a certain magic that happens when we leverage ad hoc conversations. They become more timely. For example, immediately after a customer call, a few minutes coaching–“Did we achieve our goals, what might we have done differently…..”—has far more relevance and impact. Or seeing certain behaviors in another situation, taking a moment to ask, “What might happen if you tried this….”
When we catch people in the moment, we have a far greater impact and it takes far less time, then deferring a discussion to a “deal review.”
Another characteristic of ad hoc conversations is they are far more focused. There is usually a single issue we are trying to address. As a result they have greater impact and take for less time.
We can, also, leverage ad hoc conversations very effectively, catching people doing things right, reinforcing that behavior with a quick comment.
We miss so much opportunity and impact by not leveraging the moment or by not integrating coaching into every conversation.
We still have to conduct formal reviews, we have to integrate coaching into those reviews. But we can amplify the impact of whatever time we can devote to these sessions by finding every opportunity to coach our people through ad hoc conversations.
Afterword: Coaching, leveraging ad hoc conversations, is not “shooting from the lip.” There is a structure and process to effective ad hoc conversations. I’ll be covering that in an upcoming post.
Leave a Reply