Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. [upbeat music] Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:15 I have two guests on this segment. 0:17 The first is the founder of ECSL Institute, a research-based organization that works with leaders internationally to help them better understand, measure, and elevate coaching's impact on performance. 0:30 My second is the vice president of client services at ECSL Institute, and she advises executives from all across the globe. Today, they're both here to talk about their new book. 0:41 So please join me in welcoming Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth, co-authors of The Coaching Effect. Bill, Sarah, welcome to the show. Thanks, Peggy. Thank you, Peggy. It's fun to be on your show. 0:55 Well, we are delighted to have you. So Bill, let's start with you because I have lots of questions, and we have a short time to get to it. 1:01 So let's start with y-you, you've got a lot of things here, but I have to ask, why do you say managers are one of the biggest drags on performance today? I kinda understand that, but you gotta tell us what that means. 1:15 Well, i-i... What it means is, uh, managers are typically put into a role, Peggy, because they were good at a former job or a previous job. 1:26 In, in sales, for example, if I'm a great salesperson, chances are I'm gonna get promoted into a management role. 1:33 And one of the things we've learned is that one's ability to sell and one's ability to coach sales have very little in common. 1:44 And when we use the term or you use the term drag on performance, yeah, it is exactly that, that we see in our research approximately thirty percent of managers, a little over thirty percent of managers actually withhold performance. 2:00 Meaning that if they weren't in that role, uh, their teams would likely perform better. They... And in sales it means they would sell more stuff. 2:08 So I think Sarah would probably agree that somewhere around between forty and fifty percent of sales are... of managers are miscast for their roles. 2:20 So if that's true, Sarah, h-let's, let's go to-- Let's flip this discussion, and let's talk about how do we get the model for high-growth coaching. 2:31 You know, I mean, you guys talk about there's four steps, so how do we engage that so we get the best out of this instead of the worst out of performance? You know, we get the best out of our- Yeah. -coaching. 2:44 How do we do that? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, it's, it's pretty straightforward in terms of what you wanna be doing, at least through our research. 2:52 You-- We have four high-growth coaching activities that managers who are achieving better results, i.e., leading more productive teams, are doing. 3:03 And not only are they doing those activities like one-to-one meetings or team meetings, but they're doing them differently than other managers. 3:11 So they're doing them at a more regular frequency, um, they're doing them at the right frequency, and they're having a better quality in terms of how they're actually conducting those activities. 3:22 So they have an agenda and an approach to coaching that leads to better interaction, better engagement, and ultimately better motivation through their team members. So are there like... 3:36 So they have an agenda, they have a better approach. I mean, these are the things that they're doing. Is there a better thing... other things that they cons-consistently do then? Yeah. 3:48 Y-- So to start off with, um, number one, they build stronger relationships. So they tend to know their people better. 3:55 They have not just, uh, an understanding of what they're trying to achieve professionally, but they know what their personal goals are. Uh, they know what's important to them. 4:04 They know why they're trying to work and to achieve those goals. So they have that personal bond and connection. That's number one. Number two, they have an order and a structure by which they coach. 4:16 So say, for example, with one-to-one meetings. We've found that the best frequency for one to one tends to be every other week. That's what the most effective coaches are doing. 4:26 And they follow an agenda for that, starting off with personal updates, moving on to, um, strategic priorities and progress against those, more day-to-day, week-to-week priorities, and then ending that conversation with, "How can I help? 4:41 So how can I support you, and what do you need from me to be more effective?" So they bring that order to the coaching. 4:47 And then finally, they use a lot of questions when they coach in order to inject complexity, to challenge their team members' thinking, and to get them to hopefully get outside of their comfort zone and think about different ways to do their work more effectively. 5:03 So if I'm hearing that, Bill, you know, y-you're saying you got that one to one going, is what Sarah's saying. But what about when you have these giant team meetings? How do you then... 5:13 'Cause you gotta have team meetings, right? I mean, we're always talking about gotta build the team, rah, rah, rah, right? [chuckles] You know, I mean, we- [clears throat] -sports. We all live for football. 5:22 We all live for baseball. We always have our teams, right? How do we successfully then structure a successful team meeting and get the most out of those team meetings? 5:31 If we're doing these one-on-ones, how do we do a successful team meeting and manage that? Right. That's a good question, Peggy. The... 5:41 What, what we found is the most effective, again, the, the highest-performing coaches, when they hold team meetings, um... I'll start off by telling you what they're not doing. 5:50 Um, first of all, they're not running the meeting all themselves. It's not the manager giving updates, telling everybody what they need to know. 5:59 Um, it's not the manager holding court for an hour.What we found that that was strange is that the most effective coaches actually are only holding team meetings once a month. 6:14 And that, that surprised me, and I think it surprised Sarah and everyone else in our team as well. And it's really what's happening then within those meetings. 6:23 So to answer your question, what they're doing differently, number one is while they're providing updates, they run different aspects of the meeting in a different way. 6:32 For example, there's part of every made-- meeting that's dedicated to, uh, training and education. And it's not the manager's job to provide that training and education. 6:45 They rotate it around the diff-- with the different people on the team. So each team meeting, someone else is in charge of putting together a training and education component to the meeting. Best practice sharing. 7:00 Again, I don't, I don't think the coach necessarily have all the best answers when it comes to best practices. So again, that is an idea of something that is shared by the different people within the meeting. 7:13 So the manager actually has a much smaller part of the meeting than they ever envisioned having. And I know when we [chuckles] up at our organization, up at Excel Institute, 7:26 w-when our meetings got way better, when I gave up running those meetings and started to share in the responsibility. So now I only run meetings about one out of every nine times. So then let's ask this question. 7:40 How can people tell when they're being better effective coaches on these? You know, how can they tell that they're stepping back and saying, "Hey, let's put the ball in other people's court at this point"? Yeah, well, 7:53 the, the only way to tell whether they're better coaches is to measure it, and the only way to measure it is... The, the, the only way to measure your effect is through the eyes of the people on your team. 8:06 And so Sarah, you know, is, is much more, um- So Sarah, we really should be asking you. We shouldn't be asking Bill. [laughs] We should ask you [laughs] and poll the rest of the world on that. [laughs] That's right. 8:17 So if you- If you wanna know what kind of coach Bill is, ask the people that report to him, and that's the same way with any kind of coach or leader. 8:23 You know, you seek feedback from your customers if you're an organization. 8:26 Well, if you're a coach, your customer are the people that are on your team, and so that's who you want feedback from as to whether or not you're doing a good job. 8:37 Well, you know, you guys raised some really good points, so let's talk about this quickly. We're running out of time, but where can our listeners... 8:43 Bill, thank you, Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth, co-authors of The Coaching Effect. Where can our listeners get your new book? Amazon. Um, they can order... They can pre-order on Amazon. It comes out April second. 8:58 Uh, it'll be at Barnes & Noble as well, but the... I think the place to pre-order right now is through Amazon. So they can go to our website and find it, or they can go straight to Amazon and search The Coaching Effect. 9:10 And your URL, Sarah, is what? excelinstitute.com. So E-S-E-L-L institute.com. All right. Thank you both for joining us. Okay, listeners, that's all the time we have t- for today. 9:24 Remember, we are broadcast live every Tuesday at twelve PM Central. You can check out our website at thepeggySmedleyShow.com, or you can check out connectedworld.com. 9:34 But certainly, by all means, please tweet at us at connectedwmag 'cause we wanna know anything you want to hear. We wanna make sure and get, uh, engaged on Twitter. 9:44 This is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. 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