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Category: Management

Manager, Manage Thyself: Quality 1x1s

Don’t be that guy.

Managing is a relationship business. You’re building and strengthening relationships between peers, representatives from other departments, leadership, and most importantly, your people. And while growing these relationships is a constant effort, one of the pillars of doing so comes during the 1×1 meeting.

Meeting with one’s manager can elicit a range of emotions in any employee, at any level of performance or stage of their career. By including deliberate structure and content to a 1×1, you can alleviate much of the emotional dread that can come from meeting with one’s manager, as well as calm any of your own nerves around running regular employee meetings.

First, let’s cover some notes on structure:

  • It’s called a One on One for a reason: it should be you and your employee. Not you and a handful of employees, or you and a few managers with the employee. Outside some occasional managerial observations of your own work, or some agreed-upon1And I do mean agreed-upon. You shouldn’t surprise your employee with some other person at their 1×1 as they arrive. Gain agreement and approval with them about guests at the meeting beforehand, not as it starts or as they join. They should be able to say No, or you’re not seeking their approval, only their notification. observations by peers or trainees to demonstrate via example, the meeting should be you and your employee without distractions or uninvited guests.
  • Schedule ahead of time. This shouldn’t be done on a whim between other things, or in 20 free minutes you found in a day. Schedule the meeting at least a few days in advance. A week is better. Both you and your employee should have more than enough time to prepare for the meeting and be ready to best utilize that time to both your benefit.
  • Set aside enough time. I find an hour is the sweet spot, where you’ll have enough time to cover all of the topics you want to go through as well as provide ample time for your employee to cover any topics they may have, as well as having some general conversation sprinkled in there. You might finish early, you may (hopefully rarely) go long, but around an hour as a target gives the right sort of expectation for how much to invest in the meeting and how many topics to go over.

With general structure sorted, let’s talk content. Here’s generally how I try to organize my 1x1s:

  • First, start with a greeting. It may be a month2Hopefully not, but things happen! Ideally, you’ve got a check-in or two sprinkled throughout the month to touch base on goals or other topics, but at a minimum, you should have this time with each other to reconnect. since you last talked individually with each other. Be polite, say hello! A little smalltalk to grease the skids into a conversation is usually helpful, if only to remind each other you’re talking to people and not job titles or roles.
  • As part of this initial greeting, take the time to see if there’s anything pressing that your employee needs. Often, once you get into the weeds of a planned conversation, their needs can get lost in that shuffle or forgotten while other topics take the fore. I find it’s helpful to ask up front if there’s anything the employee might need or whether there are any open issues they have that you need to weigh in on or close the loop on. Get those needs at least queued if not addressed and resolved, to ensure they don’t hang over the rest of the conversation.
  • Review the previous month’s goal3Hopefully just the one! and discuss whether it was fully achieved, partially achieved, or might need to be readdressed. Did they successfully complete the actions required? Did the implementation of that goal have an effect on the outcome we were hoping to influence? If not, what new goal might we want to look at to affect that outcome?
  • Review the current status and performance. How are they performing on their Key Performance Indicators? Are there specific callouts to make? Great calls or surveys to highlight? Opportunities implied in the data? Take a look alongside the advisor and discuss what you see from your vantage point. You’re the expert, be sure to provide the benefit of your expertise to not only point at a number but discuss the actions that led to that outcome and how it might further be influenced.
  • Ideally, listen to a call/review a chat/read an email or two. Depending on how your employee is supporting, there are opportunities to review examples of their work alongside them, asking probing questions about the choices made, highlighting strong aspects of the interaction, and discussing opportunities. I tend to recommend having a call or two queued up ahead of time that you’re ready to discuss, to ensure you’ve curated your thoughts about the performance, but there’s something to be said for the serendipity of reviewing a random interaction as well!
  • Set a new goal for the new month. I’m not going to rehash all of my thoughts on what makes a good goal, but be certain you’re picking the right goal for the individual, instead of setting a bulk goal that doesn’t reflect that individual’s opportunities for growth.
  • Demonstrate the goal. Have a discussion about how to implement the goal and have the employee demonstrate the goal with you during the meeting, to best ensure they understand what is expected of them before they leave the meeting. I also like to have the employee repeat the goal back to me, to confirm they clearly understand the expectation placed on them before concluding.
  • Finally, close strong, Set an expectation for the rest of month and any upcoming events, meetings, or other notes that you’ll want to confirm. Remind the employee of any last take aways, and if possible, set the next meeting date and time, so that you both agree on the next time you’ll get together.

By developing and following a considered and inclusive structure to your regular 1×1 meetings, you can take a lot of the unintentional worry and uncertainty out of individual employee meetings and reinforce a pattern of continual growth and development. And in so doing, develop a beneficial relationship between you and your employee that flourishes far beyond the structure of a 1×1.

Notes:

  • 1
    And I do mean agreed-upon. You shouldn’t surprise your employee with some other person at their 1×1 as they arrive. Gain agreement and approval with them about guests at the meeting beforehand, not as it starts or as they join. They should be able to say No, or you’re not seeking their approval, only their notification.
  • 2
    Hopefully not, but things happen! Ideally, you’ve got a check-in or two sprinkled throughout the month to touch base on goals or other topics, but at a minimum, you should have this time with each other to reconnect.
  • 3

Manager, Manage Thyself: SMART Goals

What makes a good goal?1I’ll begin by noting that I’m not breaking particularly new ground here. SMART goals are not a thing I invented, nor did my former employer. However, there’s something to be said for finding a voice that resonates with you, so here’s mine on the topic.

Many managers, seeking to be effective, or at least not be seen as ineffective, arbitrary, or worse, start looking to set goals for their employees. Last time we covered why we’re better off focusing on one goal at a time. This time, we’re going discuss how to not only choose the right goal, but craft that goal in the right way to both achieve a result and not waste anyone’s time in doing so.

If you’re a veteran manager, you’ve likely heard of some form of these before, but for those still early in their journey of management, what the hell is a SMART goal? And why do I keep capitalizing it like that?

Well, imagined audience, that’s because it’s an acronym2Not an initialism, (meaning, not an Ess Emm Ay Arr Tee goal), but an acronym, a “smart” goal.. SMART goals are goals that include and utilize the following five attributes:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable3Some folks use “achievable”, but you’re getting them the way I learned ’em.
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

Let’s break each of these down, not just in the abstract, but tied to a real-world example. Let’s say you’ve got an employee named Josh. Josh is friendly with customers but gets a bit long-winded, with the highest Average Handle Time on your team.4Friendly and long-winded is my life’s story. You want to see that handle time come down by 20%, to bring him more in line with the rest of the customer service team.

So, let’s set him a goal: “Be faster on calls.” Naturally he’ll just do that and be great, right?

If only.

A goal like “be faster” naturally raises questions like How? When? and even Why?

Let’s run through each facet of our SMART framework and see if we can make the goal a better one, answer those questions, and leave you in a position to set a good, useful, smart goal.

Specific

A specific goal is one that is clear and unmistakeable in its construction. There is no worse feeling than getting halfway through a month and realizing that your advisor doesn’t actually understand what you’re asking them to do. Compare:

“Make a sandwich”

vs

“Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with crunchy peanut butter, grape jelly, on wheat bread, cut on the diagonal.”

With the second, you know exactly what you’re going to get. With the first, hell, you might get a hot dog.

Let’s rewrite our goal to be more specific. Instead of “Be faster on calls” let’s try “Take less than twenty minutes per call.”

Not great, but definitely more specific!

Measurable

A goal being measurable means that we can know, in a Boolean fashion, whether or not it was accomplished. We should be able to tell with complete certainty whether or not our goal we set with the advisor has been achieved in each instance of time we’re measuring (typically a single customer interaction, though more longitudinal goals might have a measure that incorporates an entire customer/advisor interaction.

To understand why this is important, let’s empathize with our advisor. No employee wants to be bad at their job. They may not have the motivation or capacity to be great at it, but everyone that does a job wants, at a minimum, to achieve at a satisfactory level.

Our job as managers is to help that employee to achieve that level of success and to continually strive for improvement. If that employee doesn’t understand how their success is being measured, how will they have any way to know if they are doing well or poorly? For that matter, how will you?

You likely have a database full of various OKRs or KPIs or other performance metrics. If you don’t understand what these numbers mean or measure, they’re useless as tools. We should set our own goals to the same standards, and require that not only is it clear what our expectations are, but that we know for certain whether or not we’ve achieved them.

Our original formulation — “Be faster on calls” — is at best vague in its formulation. Our first pass at editing adds a level of measurement in that we’re now defining success as nothing over 20 minutes.

Let’s keep this measurability in mind as we progress to our next aspect of SMART goals.

Attainable

This piece of the SMART model can be deceptive. Many managers will simply ask themselves “Can they do it?” and assume “Yes, they can” and move on. Things are rarely this simple.

The first consideration is “Is this within my advisor’s power to affect?”

Consider the following goals:

– Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above

– Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call

– Take less than twenty minutes per call (our example goal)

Are these within your advisor’s control? Let’s consider the issues with each:

“Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above.” How are we measuring satisfaction? Via customer survey? Do the advisors have any control over whether the happy customers leave surveys? Whether there are any issues with the surveying system? Whether they get enough volume of surveys to make this a statistically significant sample? There are many aspects related to a purely numerical goal that are outside the control of the advisor.

“Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call.” Similar to the above, how are we measuring resolution? Customer surveys? Do customers understand that their issues are resolved or do they answer “No” because they’re waiting until later in the day (after they got surveyed) to confirm the issue was resolved? What if there’s a network outage affecting the whole system? Can your people resolve that for each caller themselves?

“Take less than twenty minutes per call.” This is a sneakier goal regarding achievability, in that, if a single call in the month goes over twenty minutes, they’ve failed. Is that the intent of your goal? What if your advisor hung up on every caller after 19 minutes. Would they have achieved the goal?

Incentives are important to keep in mind, and poorly written goals create poor incentives to achieve. Instead, we should write our goals seeking outcomes that the advisor has direct, demonstrable control over and can achieve through their efforts. By doing so, we’re asking something of them that they are able to achieve, that is attainable for them.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy! If it were, you wouldn’t be hundreds of words deep into an article explaining the difficulties of writing good goals.

Consider the following constructions:

– Rather than “Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above” try “For each survey rated 3 out of 5 or below, review the call notes and indicate what steps we could have taken to improve the customer’s experience.”

– Instead of “Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call” what if we asked “At the conclusion of each call, ask the customer if we have resolved the issue they called in for help with.”

– And our example: “Take less than twenty minutes per call” could instead be addressed as “Within the first two minutes of each call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving.”

Each of these new formulations moves away from measuring a goal’s success in terms of a reported number and toward a specific action your person is taking, that can be directly observed and measured. The goals are Specific, Measurable, and Attainable, and there isn’t any ambiguity as to what is being asked of the employee to accomplish.

We can enhance the goal even further, if needed, by adding even more specificity to it, addressing what to do if they cannot Gain Agreement with the customer on what is being addressed on the call, adding: “If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

Relevant

Relevancy tends to be a little more obvious than achievability, but it’s an important aspect to consider carefully. 

Credit to my old boss Greg for this analogy: If I set a goal of “Each workday morning for the next three weeks, stop by the local gas station, buy a copy of the local newspaper, cut out the headline of the top article on the front page, and place it on my desk.” that goal is very specific, can be measured in its achievement, and is attainable (as well as time-bound, which we’ll touch on in a moment). 

Does it have anything to do with your employees job?

Probably not.

It’s important to set goals that are important to your people, to the successful functioning of the business, and to the overall performance of both. There are many goals that can be set that don’t have direct relevance to your person’s job role or your company’s core functionality, that can nevertheless be “good” goals.

Relevance should act as a filter check. Are you setting the right goal, for this person, at this time? Or are you just setting the same goal for everyone, regardless of whether it’s specific to this employee’s opportunities and needs?

Does this goal align with the business’s overall direction and reflect any coming changes or growth you’re working within? Or is it ignorant of what the business cares about or is trying to drive?

Do we expect this goal to address a specific need or achieve a specific outcome? How?

For our example, by requiring the advisor to gain agreement with the customer on what issue is being addressed on the call, we avoid wasting time (and increasing Average Handle Time to no productive end) trying to fix the wrong thing, as well as help the advisor to find the right resources to fix this specific issue in a more timely manner.

Take a beat at the R of SMART to ask yourself if you’re setting the right goal, for the right person, at the right time, for the right reasons. If you’re not sure, maybe there’s a better goal to set for now?

Time-bound

Goals, to be effective, need to be achieved. If we set a perpetual outcome for a person to work at, we’ve created a directive, not a goal. In order to know if we’ve achieved a goal, at some point, we have to check and see that we’ve done it.

This isn’t to say that one size fits all here. Some goals may be simple to implement and only need a short period to put in place. Others might be difficult and require consistent, regular effort over the course of two or three months of effort.

Regardless of how long we’re assigning to the goal, we should put it in place with a clearly set timeframe to achieve the outcome. At the end of this agreed-upon period, you and your employee can reconvene and review their efforts, to determine whether the goal has been achieved or needs to be addressed in a different way.

There’s a quote that’s falsely attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry5Ostensibly in The Little Prince per the misquoters, or Citadelle, but, per Wikipedia, first found in 50 Ways to Lose Ten Pounds (1995) by Joan Horbiak, but is, as many misattributed quotes, helpful and true, that “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Similarly, a plan without a deadline is a suggestion. Agree upon a timeframe, then work with your advisor to put the plan into action.

For our example call, let’s add a time-bound piece to the goal: “During calls this period, within the first two minutes of the beginning of the call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving. If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

Does that mean after the period concludes, we don’t care any longer whether they do this activity or not?

Absolutely not! We’re trying to create a new habit; our intent is that the goal we’re setting is focused on heavily during the implementation period before becoming a natural aspect of how the advisor handles phone calls moving forward. We’re merely setting a time period during which we will measure this action specifically and expect a result tied to the goal.

Conclusions

So, we started with:

“Be faster on calls.”

and finished with

“During calls this period, within the first two minutes of the beginning of the call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving. If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

To be fair, we intentionally chose a rather vague goal, but it’s not far off from some goals I’ve seen managers set for employees. Does this new formulation meet our checklist?

  • Specific – It’s MUCH more specific now, both in what to do and what not to do.
  • Measurable – We can clearly measure whether the advisor takes the step we’re requesting.
  • Attainable – We’re setting a specific goal within their power to achieve.
  • Relevant – Presuming as we are that this person struggles with Handle Time, this goal is relevant to reducing the amount of time taken per call.
  • Time-bound – We’ve set a request period of “During this period.”

Well, alright! We’ve set a SMART goal!

But, ah, what if it doesn’t work?

Our supposition as managers is that taking these actions will result in a number moving. However, is our definition of success that the number moved?

No, it is not.

Our definition of success is that the person consistently demonstrated the action we’ve prescribed for them.

But what if the KPI didn’t move the way we hoped?

If the person achieves the goal we’ve set with them and the number does not change in a favorable direction, instead it means we’ve not found the best way to address the specific issue or set of issues that are creating that undesirable numerical outcome. We set the wrong goal to achieve that change. And so we’ll work with our employee to generate a new SMART goal.

In the end, however, we will have partnered with our employee on setting a goal that is Specific enough for them to achieve, Measurable enough for us to know whether they achieved it, Attainable for them in the course of their work, Relevant to their job and their specific needs, and bound in Time to a reasonable period to implement.

We’ll have set as good a goal as we can manage, which is all we can ask of ourselves and our people to accomplish.

Notes:

  • 1
    I’ll begin by noting that I’m not breaking particularly new ground here. SMART goals are not a thing I invented, nor did my former employer. However, there’s something to be said for finding a voice that resonates with you, so here’s mine on the topic.
  • 2
    Not an initialism, (meaning, not an Ess Emm Ay Arr Tee goal), but an acronym, a “smart” goal.
  • 3
    Some folks use “achievable”, but you’re getting them the way I learned ’em.
  • 4
    Friendly and long-winded is my life’s story.
  • 5
    Ostensibly in The Little Prince per the misquoters, or Citadelle, but, per Wikipedia, first found in 50 Ways to Lose Ten Pounds (1995) by Joan Horbiak

Manager, Manage Thyself: Setting Goal

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
Ron Swanson

There’s a question I typically ask when I start a conversation about setting goals. It’s the lead in to a metaphor, but it’s the sort of thing that only makes sense if there’s a common frame of reference. That question is: “Have you ever seen Charles Barkley swing a golf club?”

Assuming you haven’t, this is what it looked like:

Now, you may not play golf. You may not watch golf. I don’t do a lot of either. But you can probably tell that’s not what that is supposed to look like.

Charles Barkley is a world-class athlete, an NBA Hall of Fame player, and, by all accounts shot in the 70s before his swing turned into, well, that.

What the hell happened?

In the public disaster that is Barkley’s game, there is no definitive black box recording — no single piece of evidence that indicates exactly when all things went to hell.

What there is instead is constant chatter, much of it echoing in Barkley’s head.

“My brain’s got so many voices in it,” Barkley acknowledged earlier this year on GOLF’s Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.

In his own telling, Barkley’s woes began when he moved to Phoenix, and found that every functioning adult, from the barber to the banker, was either a Tour pro or a Tour pro-wannabe. He felt pressure to improve.

“I started taking lessons from every Tom, Dick and Harry,” Barkley told the Subpar hosts.

https://golf.com/news/features/charles-barkley-golf-swing-where-why-it-went-wrong/

Charles got in his own head. You can see it if you watch closely. The little hitches, adjustments, changes in the middle of what should be a smooth motion. Every piece of advice, every lesson or tip, all consciously or subconsciously being attended to and attempted, as he’s doing something that used to come fairly naturally to him. He’s trying to accomplish ten different things and, in doing so, failing at the one thing he’s trying to do more than anything: hit the ball off the tee.

So, why do I bring this up? Because, whether they realize it or not, this is what many managers do to their people.


Typically, a manager will stare at a dashboard or run through some series of KPIs (or more conspicuously, be run through these stats in some form of review with their boss) and find an outlier. They’ve got an employee that isn’t measuring up the same way everyone else is, or is significantly below means or medians in several areas. In some flavors of organization, it might be a stack rank that ranks well below the stack.

“How are we going to fix this?” They’re asked, or ask themselves.

“We’re going to set some goals!” the manager replies, eager to be seen to be doing something to fix it.1We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.

Out come the directives. Raise this, lower that. Hopefully tied to some form of “Why” and “How” as well, though far too often not. (These are a topic we’ll cover next, in discussing what makes a good goal.)

When the employee leaves their 1×1 (and for all that is holy, I hope they’re getting these goals via an individual discussion during a 1×1 meeting and not from an email or a memo or worse), they’ve got three or four or ten new things they’re being asked to do, starting right now, with the implied or outrightly stated add-on of “or else.”

This person, who has been doing their work the same way for months or years, suddenly learns that everything they’re doing has to change, because of some unfavorable columns on a spreadsheet.

How do you think that affects your people? Well, this is what it did to Charles:

A sane person would quit, and Barkley basically did. He went from playing 200 rounds a year to maybe five, all at charity events around Phoenix. “People wanted to pay their money to come see my swing up close. It was miserable,” he says. “It just sucks playing bad golf and constantly getting made fun of. I just got tired of getting my ass kicked.”

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it

Charles loved to golf. He was good at it. He was doing everything in his power to try and get better at it. And it made him want to quit.

Do your people love their work as much as he loved golf? What do you think their response will be?


Here’s my take: One goal. Assign at most one goal per month to your people, track their progress on that goal, determine if they’ve implemented it, then move on to the next.

Here’s why:

When you’re giving people a goal, you’re asking them to break a habit or build a new habit. Either stop doing things they way they’ve done them hundreds or thousands of times before, or start doing something brand new to them that upsets a pattern of behavior they’ve settled comfortably into.

Trying to do one of these changes is hard. Trying to do three of them, or five of them, or more, is asking something impossible. You’re setting your people up to fail. And that failure isn’t their fault, it’s yours.

Additionally, psychological research related to habit forming has shown that to reliably create a new habit or break an old one can take between 20-70 days, depending on frequency and attention to the habit. If you’re setting a goal for call center employees, who will be implementing the goal on a dozen or two calls per day, we can probably figure it’ll take around a month to implement and iterate to the point it feels natural.

This gives you time to do the work to reinforce that one goal you’ve set together. You can review their customer interactions to inspect what you expect. You can have a mid-month check-in or two and discuss their progress, listening to calls or reading transcripts together, and making any minor adjustments you might need to implement.

Afterwards, measure the effectiveness of the goal. Did the change have the effect you were hoping for? With that change made, did it make a new opportunity more obvious, or more possible to implement? Take next month and work on that.


Overcorrection and superfluous effort are common issues that come up in many areas. One example I like to point to is canoeing.

If you’ve never been canoeing, there’s a phenomenon that overwhelms new people when they first start to paddle. It happened to me. They become obsessed with going straight.

Canoes, as you can imagine, are not cars. Rather than static roadways, they float through a river of complicated flows, eddies, and currents. Rivers don’t run straight, they don’t flow at the same speeds, and sometimes that means you veer a bit. Additionally, canoes are powered by paddling, which is done on one side of the boat or the other, and due to physical forces, result in the boat turning slightly with each stroke.

Inexperienced paddlers can get a bit distraught at this. They erratically switch sides back and forth every stroke or two, lifting the paddle out, carrying it over the boat, then plunging it back in the other side, all in an effort to keep going straight ahead, to attempt to perfectly correct for these turns and currents. They waste a lot of physical and mental energy on it, all to go slower and get wet.

Instead, all they really need to do is turn the paddle a little at the end of the stroke. It’s called a J-stroke, and it corrects for the little flare out the boat’s nose does with each stroke. It’s easy to implement, a small adjustment to the natural motion of paddling, and has an immediate effect without superfluous effort.

One small change, calmly implemented, repeated consistently, that fixes the problem.


As a manager, implementing this “One Goal” practice takes intent and trust between you and your employee.2And often you and your own manager as well! It requires you to chart a larger path to better results and have the follow-through and patience to make each small change that will culminate in improved performance. Rather than trying to walk the entire trail at once, you’re picking a landmark and walking to that. Then picking another.

Ultimately, the intent is to get from one state of working to another state of working, through the application of small changes, the reaching of visible landmarks, over a period of time. The whole time it will feel like a person being themselves, with one small change they implement until fully absorbed, rather than trying to completely revolutionize what they do in an instant.

Changing someone’s entire structure at once isn’t possible. If it were, everyone would just, y’know, do that. It is, however, entirely possible to change one thing at a time, over time, until what results no longer resembles what it started as.

You can evolve a person’s work towards a better version of what it can be. With patience, partnership, reassurance, and recognition of the effort, you can work with your employee to implement lasting change and achieve the outcomes for which you’ve been working. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

They’ll come out the other side not only improved, but more enthused to work alongside you to continue achieving their goals and improving their performance, because you demonstrated trust, patience, and commitment to working towards a common goal.


So, how did Barkley fix his swing? He changed one thing.

Stan Utley, who had previously worked with former Masters Champion Sergio Garcia on a similar issue, had Charles show him what he was doing privately, in a 1×1 coaching session. He identified one specific coaching point, then had him make a single change to how he moved his hands relative to his swing motion. Charles wouldn’t work on anything additional with Utley for a year.

One change. For a year.

Barkley didn’t see Utley again until a year later, and when they reunited, the hitch had retreated 

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it

Remember how he looked up top? Here’s how Charles looks now:

Charles went on to explain that all those other points, all the clutter that was in his mind every time at the tee, went away. He was able to simplify, focus, and work on that one thing.

“He kind of unclutters my mind,” Barkley said of Utley. “I’ve had like 100 teachers, and all of them are talking to me at the same time. Now, I only listen to one teacher. Golf is a lot more fun when you listen to one teacher instead of a hundred.”

https://clubhouse.swingu.com/lifestyle/meet-the-teacher-who-fixed-charles-barkleys-golf-swing-stan-utley/

One change, and the patience to make it stick.

Notes:

  • 1
    We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.
  • 2
    And often you and your own manager as well!