By Dr. Lilian Abrams, PhD, MBA, MCC
Some weeks, my executive coaching meetings tend to have a theme. Recently, the theme was “Employee Accountability Week”.
Accountability for outcomes, of course, is the downstream outcome of someone’s motivation. In each client conversation, we quickly moved from starting with what went wrong, to the client’s lessons learned. We then focused on new approaches to help my client individualize their approach to motivating their employees, and preventing the original negative outcomes in the first place.
Here’s my first example: One leader, “Susan,” is very smart, ambitious, hard-working, and fast-moving in her pace. She also has been rather unsympathetic to people who have performance levels that are lower than the high standards she demands for herself.
During our recent coaching meeting, Susan began by telling me about an incident where Anna, her direct team member, didn’t act with quite the high urgency level that Susan felt was necessary, to plan an upcoming multi-day meeting with a high-stakes client group.
Anna let the ball drop repeatedly during the planning stage, and Susan was very disappointed and frustrated. Susan gave Anna feedback in terms of the negative impression she was having on the client. Anna then stepped up her performance.
Susan and I discussed what she could learn from this incident, and what she might do differently from the get-go next time. Then, Susan sighed, and said plaintively, “Why don’t I have team members who would run through walls for me? I would love to have people who would do things really well, not because I told them bad news, but just because it was me who asked!” Well, this led to an entirely new discussion, about what it would take for Susan to achieve that level of rapport with her team members.
After discussing a few leaders who Susan thought had the kind of followership she wanted, Susan realized that really, it needed to start with her. As Susan began to understand, it’s “transaction in, transaction out” – if she treats people transactionally, then that is what she will get back, as opposed to the “running through walls” relationship. To get a different dynamic, she saw that she needed to start it off by, in her words, adopting a stance of “overflowing,” in how she showed others her sincere caring and thoughtfulness on their behalf, both personally and professionally.
As a case in point, we started with Anna. She told me that Anna really enjoyed drinking fancy teas. She also noted that Anna dearly wants to be promoted during the next promotion cycle. Susan therefore decided to proactively think about who Anna might need to meet in her firm to help her achieve her promotion, and how Ann might approach them, as well as how Susan could help her. Susan is now planning to bring that up proactively to Anna during their next one-on-one meeting. On the personal side of the relationship, Susan also decided that the next time she and Anna were in the office together, she was going to bring Anna a special tea to try. We then started to apply this thinking to each of Susan’s directs. I expect that it won’t be long until Susan experiences a shift from Anna and others!
Next was Chang. To make a long story short, we discussed two of his “problem” employees, one of whom was procrastinating and seemed to care primarily about his reputation in the organization, while another was timid and wanting strong direction because he was afraid to make a mistake. Our discussion helped Chang land on what he could do, including the right wording and approach he could use, with each one of them, to motivate them towards better outcomes. I look forward to hearing good things from him as well!
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To learn more about accountability, motivation, and executive coaching, reach out to Lilian for a consultation.