The Silver Bullet: Weekly Coaching Conversations

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Welcome to the Manager Lab. Today, we're going to be discussing the Gallup article from May 2021 titled, Gallup Finds a Silver Bullet, Coach Me Once a Week. It's by Jim Clifton, who at the time was the CEO of Gallup. The article opens with a provocative question. What CEO would take a leadership course called An Introduction to Maximizing Human Potential. The author says none. I think there would be a few would actually take him up on that.

But it starts with, while we all want to be more productive, we all want to lead high development cultures, we just don't know where to start. Gallup has found that managers report higher stress and higher burnout than the people they actually manage. This means, mathematically, that the 130 million managers leading the world's 1.3 billion full-time employees struggle with their mental health more than their teams do. The practice of management is really broken.

Ouch. That kind of hurt. As someone who really studies and loves and wants to help managers, that's a tough sentence to read. But let's look at the actual data. Now, this is obviously an older article. I went back and looked at the Gallup employee engagement data for 2024, the latest data that we have. Only 30% of employees in the United States are engaged, according to Gallup definitions. That's an 11-year low.

53% are disengaged. And that leaves 17% that are actively disengaged, meaning that they actually do things proactively to hurt an organization's, you know, culture, mission, goals, that type of thing. So, that's kind of a damning report on the state of U.S. Employee engagement. So. We know that this type of engagement has a very negative impact on the culture of organizations. It's also very economically concerning because when you have this type of engagement, it really affects productivity.

It slows organizational growth. It presents all kinds of other issues like safety concerns, things like that. So we know that we have to do something as managers to get back in the game. Well, the breakthrough that this article references, it says, Gallup has discovered through studying what the best managers do differently. That great managing is an act of coaching, not one of directing and administrating.

One of Gallup's, of course, most famous leadership breakthroughs, which I've talked about in several podcasts, and I routinely bring this up when I'm coaching managers, is that a full 70% of the variance between the highest engaged teams and persistently disengaged teams is just the manager. The manager sits at the fulcrum of whether or not an employee and ultimately the extension goes to the full team is engaged or not, all of that hinges on the manager's engagement with their team.

There really is, according to this article, a silver bullet to running a culture of high performance and high development. It's always the manager. Now, we can run as many cultural assessments as we want, as many surveys as we want, create as many employee PERC programs as we like. They seem to not make very much difference at all in the way our employees respond to all of these activities. It's just the manager. It's hard to think that it's just that simple.

And really, it's not that simple. But if we can help managers learn how to engage with their people, if we can just do that, we're going to see a huge shift.

Here are basically five things that Gallup recommends that we can do as managers to help this situation. Number one, Gallup finds that the whole world wants, that what the whole world wants is a good job. That's true for millennials, even more true for Gen Z. They actually want to learn and grow.

So we have to address this learn and grow mandate, if you will, by making on-the-job training a lot more about learning, you know, either upskilling, reskilling, whatever you want to call it, making sure that our employees are getting learning opportunities. And then at some point, transitioning a conversation into career path conversations. Make that part of your weekly routine with your people. Number two, transform your culture from an administrating team to a coaching team.

So going more from an admin focus, more of a compliance focus, to more of an experience focus. I love that idea. Number three, announce a change in the actual practice of management within your organization. So Gallup wants us to communicate these changes as we're trying to make them. But define the change exactly this way. We lead through a habit of having at least one meaningful conversation every week with every team member. Let me repeat that. This is important.

We lead through a habit of having one meaningful, I'll insert, coaching conversation every week with every team member. I learned that, what, 30 years ago when I was a manager within the pharmaceutical industry. I was required to do weekly one-on-ones. That was a requirement. Don't know if they had the Gallup data to support it. Didn't matter. They felt like it was important. It was. It changed my entire, well, it didn't change anything. I didn't know any better.

It's the first real big management job I ever had. but that was, I didn't know any better. So I just did it. And looking back, it made all the difference, right? Number four, what should the conversation be about? So if we're going to ask managers to do these weekly one-on-ones, what are they going to talk about? Well, the number one answer is to talk about goals.

According to Gallup, the silver bullet conversation is about progress on goals and winning with their customers, whether they're internal customers or external customers. And then number five, well, I don't know how to coach that well. How exactly do I do that? Well, the fundamentals of coaching, if I can use a sports analogy, is simply. Maximizing the strengths of your members, of your team players, and minimizing their weaknesses.

So observing their strengths, observing their weaknesses, leveraging their strengths, mitigating their weaknesses. That's something that all of us can do. That's basically one-on-one or one-on-one coaching, right?

But here's some other things that you can do. Number one, just read some articles. Start reading articles on coaching. Maybe set a goal for reading at least one coaching article every week. Find a model. There's all kinds of coaching models out there. The model that my organization uses is called ACE.

Ask, connect, and energize. It just helps you think about asking questions in the moment, making sure you're really connecting emotionally with your people, and then energizing them, motivating them by talking about goals and progress on goals, progress on their career path, etc., etc. Number three, engage your HR team. Your HR team will likely have lots of resources for you on coaching. They may have a model that you can try.

Just engage your HR team in a conversation around coaching. And then finally, just do something, right? Oftentimes when people get stuck, the way they get unstuck is just start doing something in whatever space they're trying to do.

Really encourage you to really take this weekly one-on-one seriously. It will be a game changer for you. Everybody's life will change. Most importantly, your life will change if you can move to this weekly one-on-one coaching conversation. Your people will win more at work and in their life. Your customers will win. Your stakeholders will win. Your organization will win. And most importantly, you will win. So that's it. The Weekly Coaching Silver Bullet.

Hope you enjoyed this. And until next time we meet in the Manager Lab, do good. Music.