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Tag: Coaching

Manager, Manage Thyself: Quality 1x1s

Published by Josh on November 28, 2023
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: Setting Goal

Published by Josh on August 31, 2023

“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!

Manager, Manage Thyself: Intro

Published by Josh on August 18, 2023
Photo by Arlington Research on Unsplash

So, way back in 2020, I wrote a post wherein I promised a series of posts about management, and specifically managing people in a call-center environment. And then three years went by, I changed roles twice, then left that company (which, now that I’m not beholden by some rather prickly policies about commenting on my working for them, I can tell you, was Apple).

However! I still feel there are a number of things I have to offer for others who might be starting out in that sort of role, looking to elevate themselves from a customer service role to a management role, or those who’ve been in the role a while and are looking to grow.

And so, I’ll be following through with the posts I discussed, regarding setting goals, leading with empathy, change management, developing trust, managing remote employees, and other topics that I think have real value to people who are in that world.

Of course, you might ask, why the hell should anyone listen to me? I don’t do that job anymore, and there are hundreds if not thousands of people who could give advice on the subject.

Which, sure. But let me lead with my bonafides beyond that this is my blog and I’m gonna write what I want:

  • For 7+ years I managed teams and managers for AppleCare with Apple, who have regularly been the top ranked company for customer service in the world
  • At Apple, I regularly ranked in the top 10% of LOBs in Customer Satisfaction, Issue Resolution, Average Handle Time, and a number of other KPIs
  • I taught call evaluation and review to dozens of managers and managerial candidates
  • I spun up and led a new division of Advisors made up of sales people during the pandemic, teaching their leadership how to manage their employees in call center roles, and leading the education of their employees on handling customer service to the Apple standards. This division led all of AppleCare in performance for their LOB after three months.

There’s more, but, hey, believe me or don’t. I’m going to tell you what Apple taught me, and what I then taught to others within Apple. I hope that’s worth reading.

First up, we’re going to talk about the foundation of being a good manager, and the thing that I sincerely believe you must have before anything else matters: Empathy.

Keep an eye out for a post on the topic to come next week, and in the meantime, let me know what you’d like to learn about managing at Apple, being a great call center manager or supervisor, and what you want to see me cover in upcoming posts.

Thanks, and we’ll seeya soon!