CHAPTER 6
Surviving Versus Thriving
My wife likes to garden, and one thing she has learned after killing many plants and vegetables is that no matter how good or healthy the seeds are, if you plant them in bad soil, then they will not grow or produce.
The same is true for our employees. Leaders in the middle who coach down create a soil (a culture) that their people don't just survive in, they thrive and produce great results in. This culture must be informed by team unity, positive attitudes, and a willingness to do anything to be your best every day. You must demand this! But you don't need to be a hard-ass to get those results as a coach.
Joe Maddon, the baseball manager who broke the longest curse in baseball by leading the Chicago Cubs to their first World Series title in 108 years, is obviously a hero to Cubs fans. But even though I'm not a big baseball fan, he quickly became a coaching hero of mine. Not because he led his team to the top for the first time in a century. Not because he challenged his players and pushed them to be the best or that he never stopped (and thus never let his players stop) believing they could win the championship. All great coaches in all sports do that.
The one thing that stood out to me about Maddon was how he got his players to relax the day before a game. After several intense days of practice, he would have thematic dress-up days. For example, one time the players dressed in pajamas to travel to a road game. This serious-fun coaching style created a culture authentic to Maddon and his leadership style and thus fostered a genuine camaraderie among everyone on the team—and reminded them not take themselves so seriously. It's only baseball. No one is going to die.
Therein lies the lesson: Have dress-up days at your office! Okay, most of my clients just texted me to see if I need to see a doctor. I don't. Nor do I think you need to dress up if you don't want to. You just need to create a coaching culture that is healthy, authentic to you, and fun . . . but still focused.
A leader in the middle does not have to be a drill sergeant to coach down and demand results, though most leaders could learn something from those sergeants and vice versa.
Three Things a Leader in the Middle Can Do to Create a Thriving Culture
- Mandate that everybody on the team has a positive and powerful attitude. I mean everybody, even that one person. You know who I'm talking about; make it happen or make him gone. You owe it to your team to make sure everyone does his or her job and remove any teammates that have a negative impact on others.
- Implement a belief system of “we will.” When companies make big changes, your people focus on what they will do. When the competition lands a blow, your people respond with we will win next time no matter what. This we-will mindset means they don't worry about why something happens, they focus on how they will do better by maximizing a success or overcoming an obstacle. No victims, just victors.
- Implement the “Maddon effect.” Make winning and working focused fun. Can you imagine a culture like that? Everyone having positive attitudes. Naysayers shaped up or shipped off. Nothing is a problem, only an obstacle to overcome. Everyone having fun and laughing yet taking their jobs seriously and working harder than they have ever worked before to serve you! Man, that sounds great, right? And it's not a fantasy either. It's what happens when you coach down. But then, to really thrive, you must also sustain it. Thriving means focusing your coaching on the right people in the right way and then taking the time to keep doing it right.
Spend Time with Those Who Deserve the Attention
In sports, coaches spend the most time with the first-string athletes and the superstars. The other players work hard, learn the system, and do the jobs assigned to them but get less time. They spend most of the game on the bench. This is because the coach's time and attention are rewards for being the best—for success and hard work. Everyone gets the coach's respect, but more than that it must be earned.
In business, leaders in the middle tend to do the opposite: spend time with the people who need the attention, leaving their top performers who deserve the attention alone to do their thing.
I get the thought. “Why do I need to spend time with my winners? They're winners. They're successful. I can leave them alone and make the weaker people better and stronger. I need to turn them into winners.” Sounds good, right? Here's why it's not as good as it sounds, or good at all: Focusing your time on those who are struggling, for one reason or another, makes your involvement a consequence of their failure. Your involvement anywhere on the team is seen as a negative. Your top performers go from wanting your attention to wanting to be left alone!
When leaders spend time with people who deserve their attention, other employees see it and see the leaders' time as something they must strive for. It pushes them to do better—to work harder and deliver better results. Please don't take this as permission to ignore those who are trying hard and struggling. Leaders in the middle must keep building their benches and find ways to spend time with all employees. As coaches, they must help those who are not the best find success too, whether that is on their team, somewhere else in the company, or in a new company that better fits a person's attributes and skill sets.
But we can't do any of that unless we spend time with all our people “on the field” by practicing and scrimmaging with them.
Learn to Practice
Practicing is an absolute game-changer in creating thriving cultures. Nothing contributes to increased production, talent, and overall success than learning how to implement a powerful practice program. Whereas athletes practice 90 percent of the time, in business our teams practice less than 1 percent. Why is this a problem? Because the difference between our best employee and our worst employee comes down to skills that get developed in practice: interpersonal skills, leadership skills, and communication skills.
Before we continue, let's make one thing perfectly clear: I'm not talking about training. Most companies train employees on systems, products, and even throw in some annual development. That's fine but not the same as practicing.
Training is learning something new.
Practicing is getting better at something we already know.
Practicing is not something you do when the need arises. The need is always there, so practicing must be done on a weekly basis with all employees, not just the first-string or those who are struggling. Imagine how often our employees would show up to practice if we did not make them. Most of them already think they are good enough. And they might be good, even great, but they are never good enough to stop practicing. None of us are! In fact, the top employees should be expected to practice and be engaged the most, even mentoring those who are the top recruits to the culture as part of their responsibilities.
Practicing is focused on what are often called “soft skills,” the ones that are seriously undervalued in most cultures: serving and engaging customers, asking questions, dealing with upset employees . . . There are countless topics that could be practiced over and over again.
The key is to keep it fun. Anyone who played sports as a kid knows the difference between coaches who made practicing fun and engaging and those who ran it without a smile on their face, as if having fun at practice was the equivalent of laughing at someone clubbing a baby seal. The process of practicing is, by its nature, repetitive and redundant. Yet that's how we learn: by repeating the task and learning to apply it in different situations.
This is the case with anything we do as a leader in the middle to serve up but especially when coaching down. Simply put, it's the leader in the middle's job to mandate that everyone practice. Expectation and accountability—those are the keys. To create a culture that mandates practicing, leaders in the middle should hold weekly practice meetings to motivate and develop the team.
Turn those boring staff meetings into powerful practice meetings. Spend forty-five minutes to an hour (no more):
- Teaching a topic or skill (such as handling customer billing issues).
- Discussing the process and needed steps.
- Doing what every kid knows is the best part of practice: scrimmage it!
Learn to Scrimmage
This truly is my favorite part of coaching. This isn't about role-playing. That's for the bedroom to spice up a marriage, not a boardroom. Scrimmaging does require getting into character, but it is not about testing employees, which is what traditional corporate role-playing is about: Teach a program and then role-play to prove they had learned it. Forget about that. Scrimmaging is not about testing but preparation to make sure your team executes what they learned in practice before stepping “on the field.”
This is why most athletes, kids to professionals, will tell you that they like scrimmaging the most: because it gives them a chance to play without the pressure. They take it seriously but in a relaxed way to test themselves to do their best before game time. What works, they improve. What needs work, they identify. What they want to try before attempting it when the stakes are high, they go for it!
About to do a presentation to a tough client? Don't wing it or go in unprepared, rather teach the skill, discuss the approach, and scrimmage the presentation by bringing in the toughest people you know to critique it. Anything that can be practiced can be scrimmaged. How many times have you left a meeting with a customer, partner, boss, or employee and wished you had handled it differently? Or wish you had seen something coming? If you're like me and you're honest with yourself, most likely more times than you can count.
Next Time, Scrimmage It!
Think of scrimmaging as the communication style of great coaches.
Say you are a leader in the middle and you're getting ready to have a difficult conversation with an employee. How much better do you think you would do in that meeting if you and I scrimmaged that meeting before you really had it? We scrimmage different scenarios, anticipating issues, coming up with solutions in advance, and feeling prepared for what might come and how to help rather than flying blind. As a result, you will be more confident, relaxed, and effective as a leader.
Say you lead a group of inside sales/customer service people. What would happen if every morning you went on the floor and spent fifteen minutes with each person scrimmaging a situation they handled yesterday so that when it happens again today they are better prepared? You can do the same thing with any department—engineering, IT, finance, marketing—because everyone gets better by practicing and scrimmaging as opposed to just doing.
Here's what I predict: Once you embrace the process of scrimmaging, you will find yourself scrimmaging everything. If I talk to four leaders, I will most likely scrimmage in all four conversations. Not because we are practicing, per se, but because we are dealing with a situation that a leader needs to handle, and the best way I can understand the situation is to scrimmage.
And for those leaders in the middle who don't want to scrimmage because they're afraid their employees will find out they are not as good as they thought? Don't worry, their people already think that their boss is not that good, and that's okay. A great coach doesn't have to be a star quarter-back to lead a team into action.
Remember: A leader in the middle is humble first. How better to show our humility than scrimmaging and showing our team you can learn and get better too?
That said, scrimmaging is not just for the leader in the middle of front-line employees. In fact, some of the best scrimmages I have done have been with vice presidents and other very senior people helping their leaders in the middle who serve them deal with their employees. As long as you are somewhere in the middle, you need to be the best coach you can be to hold your people to the highest standards.