Keeping Sales Simple Is Hard

The path to success in sales is simple.

Be human. Ask great questions. Listen slowly. Deliver value at every opportunity. 

The challenge is that keeping your selling simple is hard work. 

It’s easy to get distracted by the latest shiny object that promises to magically transform your results. 

Or become anxious when you see yet another report that claims you’ll soon be replaced by a machine. 

What you have to keep in mind is that your buyers aren’t clamoring for you to use technology to make your selling less personal. 

They aren’t anxiously waiting for a machine to sell to them. 

Buyers want a human experience that helps them quickly gather information to make a good decision with the least investment of time and money possible. 

That’s why it’s essential to keep your focus on developing your simple human sales skills. 

Technology, methodology and process are vital in selling. 

But they aren’t constant. Technologies change. Methodologies and processes go in and out of fashion. 

What doesn’t change or become outdated is the fundamental and irreplaceable human connection that is at the heart of the B2B sale.

And, it’s up to you to keep educating yourself about the human skills of sales that enable you to make that connection. 

To master how to connect with another human, engage their interest, build their trust and inspire them to take action. 

Without a strong foundation built on these simple human sales skills, even the greatest sales tech, sales methods or sales process won't help you reach your goals. 

Actually, I shouldn’t label them as “essential.” 

Essential makes them sound important but not mandatory. 

Don’t kid yourself. These are not optional sales skills. 

Being human is not an option. 

Asking great questions is not an option. 

Listening slowly is not optional. 

Delivering value is not optional. 

You don’t have a future in sales if you aren't continually improving these simple skills. 

Peter C. Mclees, Sales Coach and Trainer

Smart Development

Mobile: 323-854-1713

We help sales reps and sales organizations accelerate their sales. 

The One Thing New Supervisors Need Most

Every day, in organizations everywhere, people are promoted to their first leadership role. They receive titles like supervisor, lead, foreman, or front-line leader. The titles matter less than the situation – people are moving from doing the work to leading the work. And every day, these people are congratulated, patted on the back, and sent into their future. They are scared, excited, anxious, and likely unclear about what is now expected of them.

The Situation

The support that organizations provide these new leaders varies widely. While some have a very clear process of training and development for these new leaders, others provide little or nothing. However, in my  experience, most all organizations miss what those new leaders need most and need first …

Put yourself in that role as a new leader. Once the excitement of the promotion wears off, what are you thinking? Yes, you are probably thinking you need some more skills, but you have a more immediate question. 

The question is some version of:

• What am I supposed to do now (and everyday)?
• How will I know if I am successful?
• What is expected of me?

Whether asked in exactly these ways or not, these are questions of clear role expectations.

In our experience, most new leaders move through the most challenging job transition of their life without knowing exactly what this new job is, what is expected of them, or how to be successful.

Let me be direct: If you want your new supervisors to be more successful immediately and for the long term, give them crystal clear role expectations.

What Clear Role Expectations Look Like

For your leaders to be successful, they need clarity in at least these four areas:

1) The work itself. New leaders need clear answers to questions like: 

• What is the level of work required?
• What should their activities be?
• How much of the work of the team should they do (or not)?
• What should their relationships with team members look like?
• What is and isn’t a part of their role?
• Are they representing their team, or representing the organization, or both?
• How will I know I am succeeding?

Questions like these go far beyond the job description, which sadly is often all that is provided.

2) Communication. 

• With whom do they need to communicate?
• In what ways and with what frequency?
• What topics should they talk about, and what things shouldn’t be asked?

Don’t leave this to their personal preferences or their past role models.

3) Priorities. Once in a leadership role, the amount and variety of work expands immediately. Consequently, new leaders are asking themselves some version of: What is the relative importance of different parts of my job? Help them have a clear answer to this important question.

4) Culture. Make sure your new leaders understand how you expect them to go about their work. Without this conversation and understanding, leaders will operate based on their comfort zone and past role models, which might not be what you want leaders to do, say, and think in the future. Help your new leaders see themselves as a leader of culture, not just work.

Who is Responsible?

For something this important, everyone shares ownership. It is easy to say everyone is responsible, but that typically means everyone thinks someone else is doing it. But for this to be most successful, all three of these parties need to work together:

The Organization. Whomever is responsible for any other training and development of the new leader has a role to play here. They can provide answers to some of these questions with the offer letter, in any onboarding of new supervisors, or in some other programmatic way. While this is helpful, it isn’t enough.

• The Leader’s Leader. As the coach and supervisor of the new leader, this person plays a critical role. First, in clarifying the expectations for the specific situation, and then coaching that new leader as they work to reach those new explicit expectations.

• The New Leader themselves. If you are a new leader, you need answers to these questions. If you don’t have them, you can ask for them. While you need to be proactive, hopefully, you don’t have to do all the asking yourself. If you are in one of the other groups, don’t rely on the leader to ask if they aren’t clear. You can assume they don’t have the level of clarity they need, and you want them to have.

Hopefully this is helpful, and may have outlined a gap in your current new supervisor process. If so, please support those new leaders with clear role expectations as soon as possible!

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how to develop your new leaders? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please contact: 

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

How to Set Expectations That Employees Fully Understand

“What do you expect?”

People say that all the time in an earnest or quizzical way, or sometimes with outright exasperation. However, more often than not, people simply think it without ever taking the extra step to clarify what is expected of them.
That leads to mistakes, conflict, shoddy work and productivity losses, because your employees and coworkers ask or think of asking that question when:

• They really have no clue what is expected of them.
• The task is new, and they don’t see the context of the request in the big picture of their work.
• What they were told didn’t make sense or was shared in a one-way medium like an email or text message.
• They were seemingly given autonomy to complete the task, but in the past they’ve been burned because they didn’t deliver what you wanted.
• You don’t really know what your expectations are and you are taking an “I’ll know it when I see it” approach.

As you can see from that list, the question indicates that there is a serious gap in communication and understanding. You want people to say it out loud to you, rather than simply thinking it. The problem is a good bit of your employees aren’t asking you that question. Perhaps they worry about looking foolish. Or maybe you responded negatively to their inquiries in the past, and they want to avoid dealing with your anger.

If you want to improve both productivity and the quality of people’s work, you need to encourage people to ask the question. More important, however, is that you want to do everything you can to establish crystal clear expectations so that employees don’t have to ask the question. Here’s how you can do that.

• Make it part of every conversation. To avoid even small gaps in expectations, make a conscious effort to talk about expectations regularly.

• Be clear yourself. You can’t provide clear expectations if they aren’t clear to you. Understand exactly what you want the outcome to be for each request or assignment before you speak to employees.

• Talk about the big picture. Put your request or task into context. Tell employees why each assignment or request matters and how it contributes to team and organizational goals. Once people see what the overall goal is, your request will be much clearer.

• Share boundaries. Perhaps you have some parts of the task that you want done in a specific way, so provide specific instructions. However, if you care more about the result, and not how employees get there, let them know the budget, time parameters or whatever else matters in the situation, and explain where they have latitude and flexibility.

• Confirm understanding. Always take the time to confirm with employees that they fully understand what you expect, the next steps to take, and what success will look like. Ask them to paraphrase back to you to confirm their understanding.

• Provide the needed skills. Sometimes people aren’t able to meet expectations because they don’t have the necessary skills. When this is the case, provide them with the advice and skills needed so they can meet your expectations.

Finally, while this isn’t required, I highly recommend that you don’t be too rigid. You don’t want to tell people exactly what you want in such detail that they have no room for creativity, self expression, personal commitment or an opportunity to create something even better. Giving people some room to work within your expectations will garner you greater commitment and better results. Be willing to let employees go about a task in the best way they see fit, if their way works.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how leadership coaching and training can benefit your organization? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please contact: 

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

70 Percent of Accounts are Lost from [drum roll....]

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You don’t send me flowers, you don’t sing me love songs, you hardly talk to me anymore. Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sang these words in their iconic love song “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” where two lovers, who have drifted apart, describe the feeling of being taken for granted.

Have you ever been taken for granted? Can you describe the emotion? Does it make you feel unimportant, small, resentful, angry, and indifferent?

The reality is, and the data tells us, that almost 70% of customers are lost because of neglect. Not prices, not products, not the economy, not aggressive competitors. Neglect! They feel taken for granted and unimportant.

Often when customers defect to a competitor we fail to face the real reason. When you ask your customer directly why they left, more often than not, they respond with a litany of “logical” reasons because it is difficult (and painful) to articulate the emotion of neglect. In other cases, post modem surveys ask only about the rational reasons for defecting rather than the emotional reasons.

Organizations also, more often than not, accept the excuses of their sales people and customer success reps for the reason the customer moved to a competitor. They’ll tell you it was price, product, service, or an unscrupulous competitor – but you’ll never hear, “I just didn’t pay enough attention to the customer and make them feel important and like we cared. So they moved on to someone else who loves them more than me.”

This leaves executives chasing expensive pricing, product, and service fixes instead of focusing on improving the customer’s emotional experience which almost always delivers a higher return on investment.

Neglect Creeps Up on Customer Relationships

Neglect happens slowly. It creeps up on customer relationships. It happens when businesses get into the habit of fighting fires rather than preventing them.

The cure is a system that  proactively engages customers. Some organizations set up monthly or quarterly account reviews that focus on account updates and problem solving. Others set aside time each day to proactively reach out to customers by phone or e-mail. This daily focus is powerful because the cumulative impact of touching a few customers each pays off over the long-term. Those calls and e-mails keep you connected to your clients and let them know you care.

Protect Your Turf

A simple, regular, inexpensive phone call check-in goes a long way. Sondra, is an account manager for a company that sells digital advertising  Her product is not superior—she and all her competitors are about the same. Since her clients pay by monthly credit card billing, it is easy to forget about the account. 

Sondra doesn’t forget though. She checks in with her accounts every week. Sometimes by phone, other times by e-mail. There is nothing special about what she does. How are you doing? How can I help you? I have an idea; can we schedule a call? Have a great weekend? Yet her regular contact ensures that her clients never forget about her and her company and when they have additional budget to spend on advertising, she always gets it.

Sondra understands that you’ve got to protect your turf.

Devin, on the other hand, was devastated as he reluctantly called his boss with the news that he’d lost a top ten account. He knew that with this loss, his job was on the line. Earlier that day his customer emailed to let him know that they were not going to renew their contract and were going with one of his competitors. Devin explained to his boss that the competitor had promised significant service improvements and a big price decrease and that the buyer was convinced that making the switch would save lots of money. “With our pricing the way it is,” Devin whined to his manager, “my hands are tied.”

The truth that Devin kept from his boss was that he hadn’t spoken to this customer in over six months. Since the customer never called or complained, Devin assumed they were happy. He figured the contract would just automatically renew and roll over. But while Devin neglected the relationship, his competitor filled in the emotional gap.

An Onslaught of Relentless Competitors

This same scenario plays out again and again across the business landscape. It is the reality of the hyper-competitive marketplace. You must retain customers against an onslaught of competitors that relentlessly pound on the door. When you fail to proactively manage your customer relationships, those competitors slip through the cracks and encourage buyers to consider other options. Aggressive competitors don’t miss an opportunity to topple embedded, long-term relationships. The battle never ends and vigilance is the key to protecting your turf. Losing your customer base can be catastrophic. Customers are essential to the survival of your organization.

Take Nothing for Granted – Keep Your Fingers on the Pulse of Your Customers

You and your team must take consistent daily action to protect your turf. You must take nothing for granted. Every customer and every relationship is at risk. Hoping for the best is a losing strategy. You must take systematic action to shore up and strengthen your relationships and reinforce the value of your product or service. You must respond swiftly to any real or perceived service issue no matter how small. And you must get proactive in meeting with your customers to learn about their business issues, uncover problems, and proactively suggest ways to solve those problems.

I’m not saying this is easy. One of the hardest things to do is keep your fingers on the pulse of your customer base. It is made even harder by the fast pace of twenty-first-century business. Strong, trusting relationships are the key. Devin was unaware that he was in trouble until it was too late. However, had he been managing the relationship, it is highly likely that he would have been given a heads up that would have allowed him a chance to save the business.

A Systematic Approach to Account Management and Customer Success

The key to protecting your turf is a systematic approach to account management. Start with ranking and segmenting your customers based on revenue and profit contribution. Once you know where your customers rank by revenue and profit contribution, take a closer look at how often and in what ways you are connecting with them.

• How often are you contacting them through phone, e-mail, regular mail, or face-to-face interactions?
• How are you using social media to remain in their bubble of familiarity?
• What are the objectives of those interactions?
• Are some customers getting lots of attention while others are getting none? Why?
• Where do these customers rank on your list?
• Based on segmentation what might be a more impactful proactive outreach process?

Take an honest approach. Keep it real. Make an effort to view your account management activity through your customer’s eyes.

Do your relationship-building efforts cause your customer to  want to buy more from your company? Where is the evidence? Does your customer feel like really care about them? 

How do you know?

Do you really understand your customer’s business problems and unique situation? If not, what needs to change?

Based on your analysis, develop a more systematic approach to contacting and building relationships with your customers. Decide on the frequency, objective, and methods for staying connected. You may be constrained by budget cuts and travel restrictions so be prepared to get creative. Then execute your plan. Staying connected will put your finger squarely on the pulse of your highest value customers while they’re still customers.

Good selling,

Peter C. Mclees, Sales Coach and Trainer
Smart Development
petercmclees@gmail.com
Mobile: 323-854-1713

We help sales reps and sales organizations accelerate their sales. 

Four Things That Keep Managers Up at Night (And how to sleep better)

The Inevitable Challenges Every Manager Must Face with Surprising Regularity

The research shows that the overwhelming majority of the seemingly inevitable problems that vex managers almost always flow from these factors:

• Staff discontinuity. People come and go. That’s always been true. But employment relationships today are far more short-term and fluid than they have been before in the modern economy. So you are always losing good people. And you are always trying to get new people on board and up to speed. On top of that, one great employee is worth more than 2-3 mediocre employees. Sometimes you have to go to great lengths to effectively reward, retain and develop the very best employees.

• Constant change coming at you from every direction. Technology. The markets. The weather. Geopolitics. Micropolitics. Customer requirements; vendor requirements; employee requirements. Change regularly forces rework, often involving lots of moving parts, and therefore lots of counterparts here, there, and every where.

• Inter-dependency. Again, more and more of our work involves lots of moving parts and therefore lots of counterparts here, there and everywhere. Most people must rely on many others within and outside of their immediate work group in order to do their own work.

• Employees being human. Human beings have strengths as well as weaknesses. Humans are not always great a self-management. They have habits, and not always good ones. Not only that, but everybody has bad days. Some people have bad weeks, months, and years. Productivity and quality of work are highly variable, sometimes due to employee performance. On top of that, humans have attitudes, and not always good ones.

How Managers Spend Much of Their Time

Many managers spend too much of their time on four insidious time drains.

1. Attending Too Many Mediocre Meetings

Group meetings, team meetings, cross-functional, special projects, committees. Meetings are a big time suck for managers. Ask any manager.

Most of us work in highly interdependent workplaces where we all must rely on each other on complex projects with lots of moving pieces. With more and more people working interdependently, there are more and more meetings.

A well-run meeting can be good for:

• Communicating in-person information that everybody needs to know.

• When multiple people need to discuss and solve a problem together.

• Shared experiences to build cohesion, commitment and motivation.

But so many meetings are not very good. Too many people attend too many meetings in which they neither add value nor take anything valuable away. Five people in a room for an hour—that's five hours of productive capacity in the room. You better make those meetings good.

Meetings (Unless intentionally designed for it) are also not very good for creating real accountability. It’s too easy to hide in a team meeting. It’s even easier to point fingers and divert attention.

2. Wading Through A Never-Ending Tidal Wave of Email

Electronic communication is at everybody’s fingertips all the time. You inbox pulls you in and demands you reply. It’s so hard to resist.

At its best, email is great for:

• Communicating remotely information that everybody needs to know.

• Documenting verbal communication.

• Maintaining asynchronous conversation in between scheduled conversations.

But so much of email is unnecessary, duplicative, and/or sloppy. The pernicious thing about all that email is that mixed in with all the bad email is important information, and we want to assume that, because we sent it, the recipient had read and understood it. Even worse than a message never sent is a message sent but never received.

3. Touching Base, Checking In, and Shooting the Breeze

“How are you?” “How’s everything going?” “Is everything on track?” “Are there any problems I should know about?”

These are questions managers most commonly ask their direct reports, yet they tell you very little about what’s really going on. They are gestures, mostly. You might as well say, “Tell me you are fine.” “Tell me everything is going fine.” “Tell me everything is on track.” “Tell me there are no problems I should know about.”

The worst thing about managing by “touching base” is that it makes you feel like you are staying on top of things, but it takes a lot more than rhetorical questions to really stay on top.

The right questions are: “What did you do? How did you do it? What steps did you take? What step are you on right now? Questions like that can’t be asked and answered in a meaningful way if the conversation happens just in passing.

4. Interrupting and Being Interrupted

Something pops into your head, you interrupt them. Something pops into their head, they interrupt you. “Do you have a minute?”

When you are interrupted, you are not at your best. Most likely you were in the middle of something. You have to break your attention. Pull yourself out of whatever it is you were doing. Try to focus. But you are not prepared. And what you really want is to get back to whatever it is you were doing before you were interrupted. Your responses to your direct reports (and anyone else) when you are interrupted are never going to be as thorough and accurate as they would be if you had time to prepare. The same is true for your direct reports and other colleagues when you interrupt them.

So what’s a manager to do? 

What do the very best managers do? The managers whose employees consistently deliver the highest productivity and quality, with high retention of the high performer and high turnover among the low performers, with the best business outcomes and high engagement/morale and team spirit, whose direct reports are most likely to describe the manager as “one of the best manager I’ve ever had.”

What is the common denominator among those managers? An abiding commitment to the fundamentals—relentless high quality communication. Consistently engaging every direct report in an ongoing, structured, content-rich one-on-one dialogue about the work that person does and the internal and external customers they serve. Things go much better when managers consistently make expectations clear and provide candid feedback for each individual every step of the way. Use team meeting only for what team meetings are good for—and make the most of them.

When managers build and maintain high-quality one-on-one dialogues with their direct reports, they almost always increase performance and engagement and achieve significant measurable improvements in business outcomes.

Check out these related posts: 

The Single Biggest Mistake A Leader Can Make

Keystone Habits: The Hyperlink to Accelerating Your Leadership Impact. 

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how leadership coaching and training can benefit your organization? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please contact: 

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

8 Questions to Ask Before a Difficult Conversation

Tough conversations.You know, the ones we need to have, but are concerned about.The ones that remind us of the similar conversations that didn’t go so well in the past.

And, as a leader (Or spouse, parent, friend), they are often necessary.

Perhaps as a leader we find ourselves needing to have them more often due to the nature of our job. And perhaps, sometimes you put them off because they are hard; but you also likely know from experience that avoidance isn’t a good strategy either.

Here are eight questions for you to ask as a part of your preparation for these difficult conversations.These questions will challenge you to think in new ways about the situation and your preparation for it. 

What is your goal? Determine the outcome that you hope for from this conversation.

Am I in the right frame of mind to discuss this now? If you know you aren’t, wait, but don’t wait forever. If you must discuss it now, change your mindset first!

What are some options to solve this problem? There is always more than one way. Make sure you have options in mind going into the conversation.

What information do I or we need? Sometimes the right information will make all the difference in the world in creating better outcomes.

What role did my behavior play in this situation? This is always an important question, but as a leader it is critical.

How do you think they view the problem? This question puts you in the mind of the other person. You may not know the answer, but thinking about it first will make you far better prepared for a successful conversation.

Am I ready to apologize or take responsibility? (and for what?) Well, are you? If not, the conversation may be harder than you are even speculating.

How can I contribute to a better outcome? If you have answered the first seven questions, you likely have some ideas here. Don’t go into a difficult conversation without an answer to this one.

Perhaps you hoped that these questions would magically make difficult conversations easier – they will not.

But they can be magical. If you take the time to ask yourself these questions, and answer them, you will be better prepared and it is very likely that while the conversations might not be easier, they will arrive at far better outcomes.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how leadership coaching and training can benefit your organization? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please contact: 

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

The Case for Progress or Perfection When Coaching Employees

Coaching success as a leader ultimately rests on answering one question: Did the person being coached reach the level of performance or behavior desired at the start of the coaching? Reaching the objective is one thing, yet the process of coaching is more nuanced than that. And there is often much time between the setting of the goal and the achievement of it.

There exists a question, often unexamined, but always felt in the day-to-day of working, leading and coaching. Your perspective on this question, as a coach, can make a big difference on your ultimate coaching success with your team members. The question is this:

Are we seeking progress or perfection?

Let’s examine the case for each and come to some conclusions about what will lead to the greatest coaching success.

The Case for Perfection

First, I realize that perfection is a very high bar. And while some may argue that is the goal, my point in making the case for “perfection” is suggesting that our focus as a coach should be solely on the desired outcome, performance, or behavior. The case for perfection starts and ends with this question: Is the person meeting the goals? If not, the coaching hasn’t yet been successful.

After all, we are coaching to reach that goal. So, until that goal is reached, there is work to do. The case for perfection is a snapshot, binary view of the world: either the person is meeting the expectations, or they are not.

It is hard to argue with this case. Except when taken to the extreme, it may have some consequences that aren’t intended.

The Case for Progress

Consider someone who at the start of coaching isn’t meeting a performance standard. At some time period in the future, there has been marked improvement, but they haven’t yet reached the performance standard. Assuming the performance standard isn’t related to something legal (“Congratulations, you aren’t breaking the law as often as you used to”) or a similar black and white standard, where should the coach focus their attention?

The case for progress centers on this question: Is the person getting closer to the performance standard in a meaningful way?  The case for progress is a video of performance overtime: is the person making progress towards the standards that are in place?

This sounds like a good perspective, yet the person still isn’t doing the job they’ve been asked to do.

My Suggestion

The answer isn’t perfection vs. progress, it is perfection and progress – the best coaches consider both.  Yes, in some cases, as mentioned above, the standard should be the sole focus.  If the standard is absolute and isn’t being met, the person might need to be relieved of this work without additional coaching.  In far more cases though the standard is a relative one, and that is the situation I am addressing.

First, people must know what the performance standard is, and there must be a way to objectively measure it.  Without these two factors it is impossible and completely unfair to hold anyone to the perfection standard. But if the standards are clear and objectively measured and someone isn’t achieving that standard then what?

Since this is the situation most all coaching happens in, the coach must be clear on their purpose.

My suggestion? Make sure that the performance standards are clear and measured, and people always know where they stand.  Performance should also be tracked over time.  If the trend is consistently in the right direction, this progress should be the focus of the coaching, using questions like:

• What is allowing for the progress?
• What else can you do to continue the progress?
• How can I (as your coach) help?
• What resources do you need to continue to improve?

None of these questions excuse the performance gap or lower the standard. Rather, these questions provide encouragement and a continual focus on reaching the standard as quickly as possible.

Having a perfection and progress approach allows you as a coach to have more patience without lowering your standards.  When you approach your work as a coach with patient persistence you will likely gain greater results and respect from your team members at the same time. This approach will grant you greater coaching success in the short and long term.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step... 

Interested in learning how leadership coaching and training can help you create a high performance culture and drive results? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please contact: 

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth. 

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.