Hey, this is christ with Hacking your Leadership. On today's discussion around employee engagement. I want to kind of do a follow up to the episode that we published on Monday three days ago. We were talking about accountability and we had a tremendous amount of engagement from listeners, lots of LinkedIn and Instagram messages from people who are you know, we're wondering how best to hold people accountable when it comes to you know, the expectations, and it you know,
it got Lorenzo and I thinking about. One of the most important elements of accountability is coaching. Because if if the coach, if the accountability is on something that is very clearly known and and you know, you know what the rules are, the employee knows what the rules are, and a rule was broken and it's very black and white, then fine, maybe you don't need a lot of coaching for that. You just need to make sure that they're
held accountable. But a lot of accountability ends up falling on the heads of people who didn't have the skills or the training, or the knowledge or the leadership to accomplish the thing that they're now being held accountable for, and that never feels good and so a strong culture of accountability has to come with a strong culture of coaching.
And there are very specific elements when it comes to effective coaching cultures that will help you in terms of holding people accountable and at the very least, it can help you as a leader sleep well at night knowing that if you have to hold somebody accountable for something, that you're never wondering whether or not you gave them the tools and resources and skills and abilities and support that they needed to get it done to begin with, and that their their lack of ability to get the
lack of it getting done is not rooted in anything that you had the responsibility to provide from them in the first place.
Yeah, you know, I could go on for days. Yeah, talk about coaching and accountability.
Yeah.
I think that there is so much to talk about an unpack here because I think that for me, when it comes to you know, we term we throw the term coaching around all the time everywhere for everything, and it is the right term, like essence, it's the right term. I think where we get lost a little bit when it comes to coaching and accountability is that that's where
we start. We think that coaching is accountability without the true and belief of coaching is the intention of helping somebody get better at something that they want to get better at, you know what I mean, Like I don't I don't go to like the local playground and see kids playing somewhere and then start coaching them and be like you you could, you could swing on those bars
faster if you do it this way, bring your elbows in. Hey, Like, I'm gonna go down to the local park where some people are playing basketball and start telling them how they should run plays or what they should do. Like they didn't raise their hand to want to say, I'd like for you to spend time focused on telling me what to do to get better at this thing. I'm just doing this thing right. Yeah, And I think that I think that we forget that there's an element of coaching
that that is really based within culture. It's based within trust, it's based within the relationship. That there should be an expectation that if you work at a job and you want to paycheck and you want to do things, that you should be focused on doing those things well, and that if you want to continue to work there, you should get better at those things that you're focused on
Like that, that makes total sense to me. But I think sometimes we jump into this idea of coaching and immediately start with here's what I see in what you're not good at, and therefore I'm here to make you better at that, versus me saying Chris, let me tell you what my role of coaches, my role of coach in all of this together as I'm coaching you is, I want to see what you do. I want to jump in and help to correct it. We're going to
do this together. I'm going to be really focused on what you're doing so that I can best help give you advice on getting better at the thing that you're working on. But here's what I need from you in this, Like I need to know that you want to get better at this thing. I need to know that you are committed to putting into practice when I'm giving you, and I want you to know that like this is not like, it's not personal. I'm not attacking or trying to tell you to be a different person or telling
you that all things you're doing are wrong. But like, for us to have a great relationship from a coach standpoint, we both have to be on the same page here as to the value that we're both trying to add to this and what the outcome is going to be.
And I think that like so much of that dialogue and conversation is just assumed and it's never had or it's like big picture, big theory, and we don't talk to the individual about it, and therefore there's this massive disconnect in the actual behavior of coaching, which then then
just leads into just accountability. And then it's like, well, then then you know, we're not actually coaching with the intent of making better, We're coaching with the intention of getting rid of you, and like those things, that doesn't work well if you're trying to build a true culture of coaching, do that have honest accountability?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of a lot of issues and instances where leadership tends to blur the lines between coaching and accountability. Even though they are far far different things from each other, they're almost becoming synonymous in the minds of a lot of people. And so what I want to do is I want to start talking about some of the ways in which those things are different and how they need to be treated as different.
When you are interacting with your people. But first you want to get up toward from one of our sponsors. All right, If you're leader are people, you start thinking about the fact that if you look at a coach of like a sports team, a coach of like a baseball team or a football team who's running a practice, you don't look at that as punitive or like someone's being held accountable for something. You look at the relationship is that the coach is helping to train and teach
the team of people what to do. And so if your idea of coaching is that that's a great way to go forward, meaning you are working with your people in order to help them get better at the skills they need to get better at. If you're using coaching as a term for what it means to go up to somebody and say this is what you're doing wrong and this is how you need to get better at it, that's not coaching. That's accountability, and accountability can't be there
without the coaching. First, A strong culture of coaching has to be in place before you can hold people accountable, because you have to know that you've given them the tools to be able to do the things that you're expecting of them before you can hold them accountable to actually doing it. They won't just have those skills simply because you told them they need to have them. And so when you think about coaching, think about a couple
of things. One, you're looking for development over direction. You're not telling people what to do. You're telling people how to get better at something. That's very different than giving them a process. Anybody can give somebody a process. You can write it down on a PowerPoint and email it to an entire company. Development requires the interaction one on one, and it requires people to be in to the idea
that you are developing them. The second thing is results will never be there unless there's a relationship between the leader and the employee. People aren't going to put forward their best effort and listen to the things that you're saying to them when it comes to coaching. If they don't trust that your goal is to help them get
better and to help the open doors for them. If they perceive your motivation for giving them the coaching is how you can make their job easier, or how they can make your job easier, or how they can stop being a pain in your side, then you've already lost them.
And then the third thing is there needs to be a support system in place for the things that you're doing from a coaching standpoint, meaning the people you're coaching need to be able to look at broader organizational support for the process you have in place to coach them. So there needs to be a an interval. There needs to be a the amount of times you interact with a person and what it's gonna entail, so that when
those things happen, those coaching interactions happen. They don't start the interaction from a standpoint of Oh, I'm being held accountable. I'm being held accountable. Then the defense mechanisms come up, and then a coaching interaction might only last ten minutes. If the first four and a half of them are the employee having to come down from the defensive standpoint, then you've already wasted half the session and you've lost the ability to coach them. They need to look at
those interactions as something they can be excited about. Oh great, here's another one where I can help get better. Not another time where I'm being judged or hell accountable. Another time I'm getting some one on one time to get better at the skills I need to get better at Almost like if your coach said, hey, we think you're gonna be great at this, I'm gonna have you work with a batting coach, not just me, to get better at this thing. Right there. You never look at that
as punitive. You look at that as oh, awesome, someone is investing in me in my future to get better. Your people need to feel the exact same way about you and the interactions you have with them. If you're calling it a coaching interaction.
Yeah, it's such a great call. I think it's It reminds me of when we talk about development versus training, and I will constantly say, like, development is a feeling, yeah, because you get to decide like do I feel developed or not?
Right?
Training is an action like I can train you on how to do this. I developed you, I developed exactly. But yeah, but we will say like I'm great at developing.
People will argue like do they feel developed? Right? Like what are you doing to not just maybe connect the dots on the language for them, but how are you approaching the conversation, the dialogue, the actions in a way that people feel like they were truly impacted and then they got something from it, and it's the same thing that you're talking about when it comes to coaching, like like, there has to be this feeling, there has to be this understanding, there has to be this this level of
trust and acceptance that we're doing this together when it's at its best. And when somebody says, I don't want to get better, I don't care if you help me, and I have no of changing my behavior, then that's not even coaching. That's just like you shouldn't be here and we're going to have a different conversation, sure, right, So like let's not let's not bundle those things together.
If you're getting that type of pushback or that type of attitude, then there's something else that's that's broken here that has nothing to do with the intention around coaching,
but that that coaching piece should feel really great. And when you have that, it becomes significantly easier for there to be accountability amongst the team, amongst yourself, amongst where you're going, because that trust aspect is now like, okay, the accountability is happening because you're not doing what you said you were going to do or that we committed to or that we agreed to. That's a different conversation.
But that is is, when done correctly, is coming from a place of we've had these a great you know, we've had these agreements, we've done these things together, We've poured into the to the coaching aspect of it. We're doing the best that we can. You're just choosing not to at this point, right, I completely agree with that.
The last thing I want to say about this, and I think it's really important to remember, is that you as a leader, have to preface these coaching interactions as what they are and make sure that your employees understand this is not accountability. This is not telling them what they've done wrong. This is not telling them how they've failed you, or how they need to get better at this or this is going to happen. That isn't coaching.
So if you're coaching somebody, you need to tell them what that means, what it looks like, and when it's not. And the reason this is so important is that there are very few organizations and the workforce as a whole
does not have a strong culture of coaching. There's a pretty strong culture around accountability from leader to employee that exists across organizations and as if an employee, and I would I would make an argument that the vast majority of employees have not worked for organizations that have strong
coaching cultures. And you combine that with the fact that it's not ubiquitous, and people will interpret coaching interactions as accountability interactions unless you tell them it's not, and you make them feel like it's not, and you make sure they understand what the differences between the two, and that your desire in these interactions is to help them get better, not to hold them accountable or to make the paper trail happen so that you can get rid of them.
It is because you desire an outcome that says getting better. These things will open doors for you, It will make you happier at work, it will create a strong relationship between us of collaboration. All those positive things happen out of coaching interactions. But again, you have to define them as that so the employee knows what is about to happen and what has just happened. Otherwise they will just interpret them as accountability interactions. Thank you for joining us
in this episode. We'll see you back here next Thursday for the next one. You have a great day,