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Lesson Info

Accountability

Accountability, when we talk about an approach you wanna have an approach of sustaining this over time. And, what's really important about it is you wanna have no, you need to have some structure to it. So what happens over time, you need to have some structure, if you don't have a structure that you exist inside of with accountability, or the person does, it's too much to just ask our brains casually to do things with a discipline. You have to have habits or structures. Whether that's putting it on your calendar, setting reminders, having little notes all around your office, or your house, or everywhere, there have to be structures you fit inside of. Hey, we're gonna do a meeting every two weeks to check in. That's a structure. Thirty minutes of check-in time. Structure. Anyone have a structure they like to use to, in their life that they, that's really successful for them? Like using Google Calendar? Or, a planner? Anything that someone in this room really uses. Paper, pencil to do l...

ist? Anything? Yeah. Yeah, I use the Google Calendar, and when I have something that I specifically know that I don't wanna do, I schedule time for myself to do that, to force myself, one to force myself to sit down and prioritize it, and two, to make the space to do it so that I don't find an excuse not to. Or find a distraction. Great way to not ever do something is to busy yourself to death away from doing that thing. So calendaring or creating space, block time, one of the biggest structures that will really help. Other people are either, they don't, not good at planning out a structure net. Or they don't follow through on it. That one thing of calendaring things, and time blocking things, in a reasonable amount of time, if you have to do one big creative thing, you need to give yourself like three hours to do it. Not like 30 minutes. Your brain gets distracted. It takes a long time to get into that zone. And then, once you get out of it, it's hard to get back in. So you gotta give yourself really uninterrupted time. That structure's really important. Thanks Sam. Milestones. Plan with them, what are the key milestones? And this is what Scott was saying. What are your goals? What are you actually driving towards? You might have one big goal. But can you break the big goal into four smaller goals? That's gonna be way more successful. I like to think of life as being in draft form. If I have to turn in a final product right away, it's a disaster. For me, if I can do a draft, and then have that time to edit that draft, great. Now other people maybe they're last minute people. And they like to just give you a final version. Well good. Maybe you need to trick them a little bit with a deadline. Putting a false deadline maybe even that's like a couple days before the real deadline. Finding a way to make it so they feel that pressure not at the last, last, last, last, last minute. I don't know. You gotta work with them on that. But having those milestones. And the last is integrity. Integrity is so important. We're gonna get into a little bit more in a second. So, sustained over time. Really, think about this part. I think we had Lauren to keep coming back to, thanks for playing with me. You were telling us an example in the course on leadership skills for new managers, actually I think it was the feedback course, that you were getting frustrated because someone wasn't changing the behavior when you'd told them multiple times. So we talked about maybe, okay I need to think about my coaching approach being a little bit more over a time horizon rather than like it's gonna happen right in this moment. Yeah? So that's such a key point. This has to be sustained over time. Again, going back to our model of the brain, that we had here, we have to give them time to build that new circuit. So plan that in. Do you have enough time? What is the amount of time that you can offer this person? If you can't offer them enough time, or enough frequency, can you have them use other resources that stand in for you? Peer coaching. Another coach. Let them hire an outside coach. Have them listen to certain podcasts or read a book that they can check in with. This is very important. This is like, people like, ah, I don't wanna be a micromanager, so I'm just gonna let my people do things. And then they never check in. So it's like, the Daoist side of things. Don't micromanage. But don't abdicate. Trust people. Give them trust in the coaching. Treat them as mature, fully functional adults, that are creative, resourceful, all of that good stuff. Full people. And verify. Build in enough where you're having an opportunity to check, are they doing it? It's not to be a parent to them. But it is to, if something is off the rails, you can correct it. Also people love to have someone to be accountable to. It's easier. If I go to the gym by myself, I work out very weakly. When I go to the gym and there's a bunch of other people there, like sweating really hard, I'm like, alright, cool, we're all doing this. They're like, they don't even know they're my accountability partners, but they are. And we kind of all know we are, but we don't talk about it. It's not like, hey accountability buddy. But just us showing up to the same gym class at the same time, we're taking a group class, we're all accountability buddies for each other. We all decided to show up here. Okay, we're gonna do this weird thing with stretchy pants. So, trust and verify. And build that into your coaching. This is really just around milestones and check-ins. On the long journey. If it's so long it feels like, ah man, this is forever away, then, people are, it's hard to stay focused. So, on structures, systems that support you both. You have to figure out, how are you gonna remember what you've been working on with this person. How are you gonna remember to check in with them, right? You can't just have a system that works for them and not you. That's why with all my clients I have shared Google Docs. So I have too many people I work with to remember off the top of my head everything we talked about so before the meeting I look at our Google Doc. What do we, what are my notes from last time? What were our action items? What are we gonna check in on? Cadence. How frequently does this person, for these needs, need to be checked in on? And how much correction do they need? How much feedback on how they're doing do they need? It's really individual perspective. I will say, I believe in something called immersion training. So immersion training is, let's say you had 10 hours of coaching or training. Instead of doing one hour a week, over 10 weeks. I'd rather do five hours a day over two days. If possible. The human brain works better when it's immersed and it has to adapt. So if you can think about, if it's a really important thing, if you can put some immersion into it with someone, that's gonna really be effective. And your version of immersion might, you might not be able to with that thing or person, meet with them for 10 hours in two days. Okay. But what, how much can you immerse them in that? How frequently can you meet to give them the, the experience they need to learn and grow. Design your one on ones. And I say one on one not just in the corporate sense, but anytime you're having a one on one with someone like in a meeting. Or even just in an interaction. How are you gonna use that time? Have some structure or design to that. We talked a lot about that in leadership skills for new managers, I just wanted to refresh you here. A coaching meeting, you can think about the prioritization right? There's this arch to the meeting. You have to do the intro. Get connected. Make sure you feel warm and fuzzy. You gotta figure out what you're coaching on. You gotta get into the coaching. And then you have to land the plane on what they're gonna do when they leave the room and have the structures. So the actual time for whatever meeting you have is actually not all the time you have to actually coach. If it's a 30 minute meeting, the coaching might only be 15 minutes. 20 minutes at most. An hour. Maybe you have 40 minutes of coaching. Yeah? So you gotta think about the bell curve of that. So I wanna talk a little bit about integrity really quick. When does a wheel no longer have integrity? So imagine a wheel with spokes. It's got like six spokes. If you start taking spokes away, when does it no longer have integrity? It's like a zen koan for you. (audience laughing) What does he want me to say? It's like a trick question. I would say, does anyone have a guess? I would just define that as when the wheel stops working. When it stops working as a wheel, it no longer has integrity. So, for you, and the person you're coaching, if you have six spokes on your wheel, and one spoke goes out, but it's still working, that might be okay. We don't need everyone to be perfect. You don't have to be perfect. But if two spokes go out, oh, the wheel might start wobbling. Three spokes. It's really not working. And when the fourth spoke goes out, the whole wheel collapses. So if there's not enough integrity in the system you're using, in your coaching, in yourself, or in the other person, it's not gonna work. There's a moral concept of integrity. Am I an integrous person? That's very subjective. And I'm not gonna get into that because that's really for you to play with yourself. For me though, what I want you to think about is, am I living up to integrity enough that the system I'm using, the way I'm coaching, or what we're trying to do is working? And if it's not, you need to look at yourself first. What integrity can I add into the system? Do you need to challenge someone to have more integrity? So, there's this, one of my coaching teachers once told me, when someone comes in and they haven't done their action items or their homework, when they come in I say, "Great job. Or fantastic." And when someone comes in that hasn't done their homework, I say, "Fantastic." And the point being that we don't necessarily want someone to feel super guilty and terrible about not having done something. I tend to look at that as, what is that telling me about them? Maybe I gave them the wrong homework? Maybe we weren't really aligned on passion? Maybe we need to pivot? So I try to look at myself first. How can we tweak it to make it easier for them. 'Cause I don't want a lot of effort. It's like swimming. I talked about that before right? The swim stroke should feel effortless. That's where we get speed. Least resistance possible. But, it could be you have to coach them on integrity. Some people, and many people, just don't do what they say they're gonna do. And they need to learn how to do what they say they're gonna do in order to be successful. That is a major blocker in the way of a lot of people, probably including people in this room, including myself. We could probably all grow. Who thinks they could grow their ability to do what they say they're gonna do? But some people have a much stronger need to be coached in this area than others. And it's the thing that's really holding them back. So what I would say is, don't be afraid to challenge on that, but don't necessarily, you could use your own approach. Some coaches really coach on integrity. They're in your face, like, listen we're gonna design, and you're gonna make some commitments, and you're gonna have your dreams, and then, if you don't do them, we're gonna hold you to account. We're gonna give you consequences. That works. It does. But there's probably somewhere between the very extreme on that and not at all that you wanna be. Somewhere in there. So ask yourself, do I let people off the hook too much? Or am I too intense on people and I burn them out? So, just think about calibrating that. But the integrity piece, none of this matters without that. We could design the best solution ever, speaking to Scott, but if then you won't go and do it, then it was not a very good design. Was it? Or we need to fit you into the design better.