Good managers help their people discover and fix the things that are holding them back. But in order for them to be able to help their people improve, the team members must first trust that the manager is credible. To be a more effective manager, and keep more of your employees sticking around, you need to help create the greatest possible perception of your trustworthiness.

Most employees are looking to know that their managers possess the following traits:

If you are a great manager, you already know that great managers drive everything: They drive commitment, they drive loyalty, they drive performance, and they drive retention. If you are a great manager, you also know that coaching is everything. So, in this chapter, we will spend some time discussing how your own management and coaching efforts can help improve the retention rates and performance of the people you have struggled so hard to hire.

One of the philosophies that is most important to keep in mind during the process of improving any workforce is this: it is necessary to pick the best, and then challenge the rest. What I mean is that no matter how much effort you expend in selecting the very best people as new hires, you still have to contend with existing members of the workforce who may not have been hired with the same expectations of skill and potential as your new hires. This especially applies to companies that have set higher expectations and accountabilities for teams, and who have decided to improve their selection process as part of that goal.

The first phase of good coaching is to establish credibility by continuously setting the example of excellence in front of your people. Your high performers, in particular, will be watching your every move. They will be looking to you for continuous guidance because they want to continuously learn, grow, and improve. You and your managerial colleagues are the front line—you are the ones who are ultimately setting the standard of character for the entire company. If your people always see you modeling the character traits you would prefer them to display—for example, confidence, reliability, and self-reliance—then they will be far more likely to display those characteristics themselves.

Remember the anecdotes that I shared about the Marines earlier. In that part of the book I mentioned that when I showed a Marine recruiter a list of some of the most important character traits we are looking for in certain jobs, he mentioned that the Marine Corps looks for a very similar list of traits in the people it seeks to recruit. The Marine Corps also has an extensive program to help recruits work on and develop the particular strengths or traits on which they think they need to work. But, as we discussed then, the key to the effectiveness of “success modeling” in the Marines is this:

Marines would not respect their drill sergeant in boot camp—or learn anything at all from their drill sergeant—if they didn’t know that the drill sergeant had “earned his stripes” and had gone through the same experiences the recruits were being asked to go through. In other words, the recruit has to know that the drill sergeant already possesses the qualities of grit and character the recruits are being asked to display, and is a living model and embodiment of those traits.

In corporate leadership and management, the same kind of modeling must take place if you are to first select and then retain high performers. High performers will only stay if they respect the people who are managing them, and they will only respect the people who are managing them if they feel that the manager is a living example of the traits they are being asked to emulate. So, again, the great manager must always possess:

In the first part of this book we focused on how you can improve your overall selection process—a topic we will continue to discuss. One question that always arises when people set out to improve their selection process is this: What do I do about the lower-performing individuals we happened to hire before this improved selection process was implemented? Obviously, you would not and should not set out to dismiss everyone who was hired before you improved your selection process or set higher expectations for both new hires and existing hires. Certainly, there will be many team members on your existing staff whom you will want to keep, even if they do need tons of help. For those with less than excellent performance, you may simply ask them to try and rise to the occasion and give a visible and renewed effort to modeling higher levels of achievement. As you do this, you may want bear in mind the experiences they could have had with a previous manager. If their previous manager was a bad manager—incommunicative, unsupportive, and weak in providing feedback or direction—there could be any number of reasons the employee seems lost or lethargic.

If that is what happened to them, and you are their new manager, you may be able to fix a lot of things quickly. In any working environment, team members tend to thrive when they are continuously educated and mentored, especially when managers can help them identify the personality traits or working habits that might be holding them back. If you are that kind of manager, you will not only help select champions, you will help build them.

In helping to build them, of course, you will need to help them build meaningful action plans for professional growth. Helping your team members build meaningful action plans for growth starts with setting expectations and clearly explaining how the areas you are asking them to improve will help the company improve as well. Helping employees to better understand, in fact, how their own action plans for improvement will affect the company’s goals is one of the best things you can do to improve trust and collaboration.

With this in mind, let’s consider a few methodical approaches you can take to help your team members see where it is they need to go.

In order to get at the issues that will most readily yield meaningful individual action plans for your team members, it is always necessary to first map out the goals of the company and compare them with the goals of your department.

The following exercise may sound simple, but I have found it useful in helping managers to find a solid starting place for improving the effectiveness, morale, and skill sets of their team members.

The answers you have provided to those questions help you continuously keep in mind the high-level overview of where you feel you need to go as an organization. It is the answers to these questions that help you to develop organizational action plans. But perhaps most importantly, it is the answers to these questions that help you keep your center as a leader. These are the questions that help you always keep your eyes on the prize.

But, as you know, organizational action plans only work when they are seamlessly integrated with the action plans of the various departments supporting the organization. Therefore, the second set of questions that guide the process of building high-performing organizations would be as follows:

The answers to these questions are the answers that help us make the necessary plans to sharpen our competitive edge in terms of the force, or energy, that drives results. Organizational action plans provide the direction for improving the competitive edge. Departmental action plans create the steps that will be necessary to implement the changes.

However, it will not be possible to actually implement those steps without meticulously zeroing in on the areas of training and development that each member of the team needs in order to play the most effective role in the efforts of the team as a whole. And it will not be possible for team members to work on the areas they need the most help in unless:

Thus, the four most important questions to ask at the initial stage of building high-performance teams are:

Question number four, from the perspective of organizations I have worked with, is critical. In fact, in many organizations I have studied where retention issues were a serious problem, it was clearly identified that a significant number of managers were lacking in people skills and mentoring skills. (There were some good managers in place, but the bad managers were ruling the day.) This is why the assessment of managerial teams from the standpoint of competency in coaching and mentoring skills is paramount to organizational success. You may be a good manager, but how many of your colleagues are? And does the executive branch even know who is who? Is anyone doing anything about it?

Ultimately, the key to retention is this: When employees feel they are receiving respectful and helpful interaction with their managers, they tend to stay. When they feel that they are not receiving respectful and helpful interaction with their managers, they tend to leave. So, if you are concerned about the overall welfare of your company, you have to be concerned about the overall composition of your entire management team.

From a practical standpoint, then, the three most critical questions to ask about your management team are:

Some organizations simply do not know, keep track of, or do anything about the answers to the preceding questions. And because of that, attrition issues will continue to be a problem for them. Those that do focus on hiring and developing managers with excellent communication and coaching skills, however, are always more successful—their productivity is better and their people stay longer.

The best way to develop coaching and training efforts for team members is to be as thorough as possible in your evaluations of your team members, and to use several different tracks for assessing developmental needs, including the use of competency-based assessments, but also incorporating internal performance data.

Try to imagine that you could fix every problem in your team overnight. What would you do from a training and development perspective if you could do everything? Now that you know what everything is, consider this: what would you do first, say, tomorrow by 7 a.m.?

We will assume a best-case scenario for training and development for your team around those goals as we ponder the following questions. In doing so, we will also assume that you already have chosen and implemented some type of assessment or survey (perhaps validated tests or surveys) to discover where your people rank in terms of skill level for others in the profession, and where they might need the most help developmentally.

Interrelated tracks of analysis that will help you put together the best possible training and development programs for your team members are as follows:

Here’s an example of how we put this practice of multitrack assessment into action with a sales force.

The overall goal of our development and training effort was to increase the abilities of all salespeople to better communicate the competitive advantages of the company’s services to the client. During the process of discovery we found that there was indeed a correlation between scores on tests of sales competency and scores on homework assignments that were given to test an understanding of corporate sales messages. By studying the response time on the completion of the exercises (how long it took them to complete), and what the quality of the response was, we were able to draw definite conclusions on two things:

The way the Marines go about preparing their recruits for the coaching experience is illuminating and psychologically instructive, especially from a candidate-attraction standpoint. Some of the character traits that are important to the Marines (which also reflect the character traits of top performers) are self-reliance and self-discipline.

When a candidate is interviewing with the Marine Corps, he or she is asked to self-rate him- or herself on the character traits that the Marine Corps is looking for.

For example, the Corps will ask something similar to this:

Marine Question 1: “How would you currently rate yourself in the area of self-discipline?”

Once the candidate answers this question (and recruits are asked to answer as truthfully as possible), he or she is asked a series of other fascinating questions:

Marine Question 2: “How do you think that a level of less than optimal self-discipline may have held you back, or put obstacles in the path of your success so far?”

Marine Question 3: “If you were to maintain that same level of self-discipline and never improve, how far behind do you think you will fall, in terms of the goals you would like to achieve throughout the next five years?”

Once the Marine recruit answers these questions truthfully, the recruiter is able to provide the following information, which is pivotal to creating the first level of indoctrination to what will essentially be an ongoing coaching program.

Marine Offer: “Now that you have identified your weaknesses and areas of improvement, let me tell you how the Marines are going to help you strengthen, mold, and improve your character throughout the next years of your life, so that you can achieve the goals that are important to you.”

Any employer who is studying this will notice a fascinating lesson in the duality of performance in the workplace: High performance is not a one-way street. It is a state created by the raw material of character and talent on the part of the candidate interacting with the raw material of continuous guidance, continuous opportunity, and continuous leadership on the part of the employer.

I have mentioned several times in the course of this book that writing ability is inextricably connected to an assessment of potential when looking at the qualities of many managers and team members across industries.

By writing ability I don’t mean we are looking for Shakespeare or Jane Austen—I am simply referring to the ability to document what one understands about one’s job, one’s expected results, and what one plans to do about achieving those results.

Writing, in and of itself, is a mirror of the mind, and in many ways, writing exercises allow you to capture aspects of a team member’s understanding of your mission and values, which no assessment test alone can ascertain.

You may ask employees in positions of accountability to write a simple SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) about what they perceive to be your company’s competitive advantages. Or you may ask them to write a simple essay describing what they feel are the greatest strengths of your company, and the greatest opportunities they have for making a contribution. Or you may ask them to write a short essay on any other mission-related topic of your choice, and then have the quality of these documents graded by an internal leader whose judgment you trust.

Key qualitative points to look for and grade might be:

These are but a few factors that can be studied and measured by the simple assignment of job-related writing exercises. Coupled with the use of other measures, such as assessment tests and the collection of in-house performance data (goal attainment), writing exercises can be invaluable in helping you to truly get a comprehensive picture of a team member’s energy, passion, commitment, attitude, and willingness to put out that extra level of mental effort that means so much when analyzing potential.

But perhaps most important is this: Writing exercises can help you ascertain what a team member plans to do (what actions they plan to take) in the near future in order to step up to the plate and implement the goals for which they have been made accountable.

Ultimately, what you really want to find out is whether a team member has a knowledge, drive, passion, and concern for your business, and how and why he or she is committed to doing something abut the goals you feel are most important.

When you ask people to put this down on paper, you will usually learn a lot in a short amount of time—about what they know, what they are willing to learn, and how much thought they have already given to the goals that matter to you most.

Not too long ago I was working on a selection and retention analysis problem at a call center in the financial services industry. They were having some major retention problems. People were dropping like flies.

We did a cultural assessment through field interviews and assessments, and found that the top performers who did want to stay seemed to possess the following traits:

So, in a combined skill-based interview and motivation-based interview format we proposed, we suggested that interviewers look for the following traits and indicators among others:

But looking for a candidate such as that could not possibly solve the entire retention issue, because there was another problem: There were management issues, and in my experience, management issues are the single greatest cause of retention problems.

In our assessment of one manager, we found a rather low score for optimism, bordering on pessimism. So, gently, in our coaching session with the manager, we asked him if he thought he was portraying optimism on the floor with the people he was managing.

“Not really, I guess,” the manager said truthfully. “That is something I suppose I need to work on.”

A colleague of mine who was in the management coaching session then launched into a speech characteristic of a former football coach:

There was a long moment of silence. The manager contemplated this. Then he said, “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. But I wonder if it will sound phony if I start acting enthusiastic all of a sudden.” We emphatically advised the manager that any day is a good day to start acting more enthusiastic around your team members. Enthusiasm hardly ever fails. The time to start being more enthusiastic is now.

In his book Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Jon Katzenbach addresses a realization that many great managers have intuitively known for ages, but may not have precisely documented—the realization that people will have higher levels of performance if they are emotionally committed to their work. In other words, people will be more successful in their jobs if their hearts are in it.

The troubling issue, according to Katzenbach, is that many companies talk about the importance of nurturing employee fulfillment, but not every company has a specific plan for helping their people actually achieve these interrelated goals. Katzenbach conducted research on high-performing workforces at more than 20 leading companies, such as The Home Depot, Southwest Airlines, Avon, Marriott, and even the U.S. Marine Corps. What he found was that companies and organizations that actually have a plan to help people become more emotionally committed and emotionally connected to their work are more competitive than those that don’t. It is the emotional commitment to company success that creates a competitive workforce that is able to consistently deliver higher levels of performance than the competition, Katzenbach concludes. In order to develop a strategy for balancing employee fulfillment with organizational performance, Katzenbach purports, the best-performing companies seem to be giving attention to five important areas that he describes as “paths.” These paths to success, which enable the cultivation of employee fulfillment and organizational performance, are:

Finally, Katzenbach makes the point that in truly competitive organizations, leaders recognize that it is important to balance emotional fulfillment in employees with organizational success, and to actually do something on a regular basis to make sure that important areas such as the five paths of success outlined here are given more than lip service.

As a great manager who is concerned about keeping your best people, you probably want to make a few field notes here as well:

Examine those five paths and write notes on what you have done to accentuate those paths lately. What would you like to do?

When seeking to assess and develop teams, continuous assessment, coaching, and training is key. High performers like to know there they stand, and where they need the most help in order to improve their performance.

Finally, here are a few points to use as guideposts when seeking to increase the retention of your high-performing team members.

In the next chapter, we will be given additional examples from multiple industries to show how the use of validated and competency-based selection tools can help in your efforts to be more successful in hiring high-performing individuals. This chapter will also continue to demonstrate why peak performance is always achieved when great people are being led by great managers. Thus, we will continue to discuss why there must always be consistency between the skills and competencies of your selected team members and the managers who have been hired to guide and educate them.