Episode 57 - Viewer Questions
Speaker 1:
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Lou Quinto:
Hi, welcome to Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Lou Quinto.
Craig P. Anderson:
And I'm Craig Anderson.
Lou Quinto:
Craig, today we're going to do something that we've never done before. We're going to dip into our mailbag and we're going to respond to some of the questions and comments that we've gotten from some of our listeners around the world. I think it's timely. Three of them all deal with COVID and where they want a little bit more information on exactly what I should be doing here and there. And so we'll just go through them and give some quick answers where we'll just go back and forth. I'll read the first one and I'll let you give me an answer. And if I've got any feedback, I'll also give an answer.
Lou Quinto:
But the first one we get is from Janice in Chicago and Janice works for a major company in Chicago, and she writes that, "I schedule a fair amount of coaching of employees as far as time goes. And I find that what I'm doing is time-consuming. How would you all recommend reducing the amount of time coaching, but still have a significant impact on my team members?" So, Janice, here's your answer from Craig.
Craig P. Anderson:
Here's your answer. Well, Janice, I think the place to start is one, congratulations and kudos to you. Lou and I-
Lou Quinto:
She's coaching.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, you're coaching. We put you immediately at the top of the class, Janice. So thank you so much for actually taking on that role and you're right, it can be a very time-consuming activity. So you have a couple of options. One, if you and your employees feel like it's frequent enough, or even too frequent, you could scale it back. Alternatively, not to be too terribly self-serving, but you could also look at bringing in external coaching for your staff. It could be something that you build up as a group coaching session. It could be something you do as one-to-one, and maybe take some of that time off your plate. There are obviously times you're still going to want to meet with them. And every time you're interacting with an employee is an opportunity to coach, but as far as dedicating coaching time, depending on how many employees, yeah, that can fill up your week pretty quickly. Right, Lou?
Lou Quinto:
Yeah.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah.
Lou Quinto:
And especially if Janice is making these formal coaching sessions where she's blocking them out as actual meetings, then yes, I can see it's very time-consuming. My quick comment on that one, if it's just regular coaching is go back to what our mainstay is, and that is catch people doing things right.
Craig P. Anderson:
That's right.
Lou Quinto:
So perhaps if Janice is having those formal coaching sessions, that can be very time-consuming. So I would definitely recommend is that she catch people in the act and coach as soon as she sees it, as opposed to collecting information and then saying, "Okay, let's sit down once a week or once every other week, and let's have a half hour to an hour discussion on what I've seen." As you and I both know, Craig, and we've talked about this before, catching people in the moment, you can redirect someone very quickly when you catch them in the moment. Plus from that intrinsic value, when we talk about motivation, if you can catch people doing things right, and let them know as soon as you see it, that's only going to motivate them even more.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, it would be really interesting Janice to know what are the coaching topics you're working on with them. Are these long-term developmental objectives? Are these short-term things you're working on? So depending on what that is, really is going to drive what the best thing is for you to do. But again, kudos for doing it. It kind of reminds me when, at my last company I was leading, I wanted to move us to kind of quarterly short form reviews and the team turned them into the same annual review process, four times a year and hated me for it. I was like, "No, that's not what we meant."
Craig P. Anderson:
So it sounds like you've engineered something very positive, but look to see what you're working on coaching them on, and then see if there's some opportunities for you to do as Lou noted, to just really catch them doing the right thing or when they have an opportunity for correction to hit it or to look to some external coaching organizations if you've got some specific needs to fill for your team.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Minimize the formal coaching and really depend on a lot of the informal coaching.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yep. Perfect.
Lou Quinto:
Okay, good. We hope that helped you, Janice.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. This is so fun. This used to be my favorite segment on the old Letterman, viewer mail and then we have viewer mail. I wish I was more funny. All right, here we go. From Jamal, from Charlotte, North Carolina, "Training has never been a priority for our organization. We've always focused-"
Lou Quinto:
Ooh, I want this one. I want this, it's a training question.
Craig P. Anderson:
You got it. All right. You have to be funny. "We've always focused on dry programs that deal primarily with technical skills, but I'm finding that the remote work has exposed my team's soft skill deficiencies, such as interpersonal relationships, presentation skills and time management. Are 90 minute, two-hour webinars as impactful as half day or one day classroom training programs?"
Lou Quinto:
Perfect. Jamal. It's a good, great question. Because a lot of companies, because of COVID, they have gone from the elimination of classroom training now into webinars. And as we all know, when it comes to attention spans on a webinar or a Zoom link or something like that, 90 minutes to two hours really becomes the maximum that you can keep people's attention. And so that becomes the first one.
Lou Quinto:
Now your question though, Jamal, is, are they as impactful as the half day and the full day? My immediate response is, they can be. Obviously, one, in 90 minutes to two hours, you really have to make sure that the training is focused on specifically what you need to do. So don't try to take, and don't let any outside vendor, or if you're doing internal development, take what you would normally have in a four hour program or a one day program, and immediately try to cram it and shove it all into 90 minutes because, no, they're not going to get anything out of it at all.
Lou Quinto:
In fact, what I would do is I would break up a significant training session into different modules that you can then deliver in a very effective way that would increase the engagement, increase the participation, as opposed to just trying to read a whole bunch of PowerPoints in a 90 minute period where you're going through 80 of them and people are just sitting there and they've checked out. So yes, they can be impactful.
Lou Quinto:
Two things. One, be very focused in your training and two, make sure that the person delivering the training is dynamic. Make sure that they're passionate about what they're talking about, because if they just end up reading off of a PowerPoint slide, you're probably going to be just as good just sending them the PowerPoint presentation, saying, "Hey, read this over." As you would do if you gave them an article or a book to read. So yes, they can be impactful, but my two pieces of advice, focused, condensed, and make sure that you have engagement by a good facilitator, that you have breakout rooms that at least once during the 90 minutes to two hours, you're putting them into a breakout room for some sort of activity so that they can't become socially lazy.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, that's what I've noticed a lot as I've seen the trajectory of this over time is everybody was trying to do the same way in a different format. And now, breaking that down into two hours, the Zoom rooms are a huge improvement to have the conversations and to have the trainer drop in and out and check in on progress. You can actually make it very interesting.
Craig P. Anderson:
I wonder though, Lou, from your perspective, if you're going to break it up, let's say it's a full day training, you're going to break it up into four two-hour blocks. How much over time would you try and get all those four two-hour blocks in?
Lou Quinto:
Craig, that's a great question. What I would say, if you were going to do it into modules, I would say the maximum would be one month apart. The shortest would probably be two to three weeks apart. Because if you get past 30 days, people are going to forget what they learned in the first module, particularly if it carries over to the second module. This is my livelihood. I think I've used the expression before, March 15th, someone took my professional calendar and like an Etch-a-Sketch just shook it and said, "Okay, here's your calendar." And for someone like me, who's been training for over 35 years, I've resisted webinars for the longest time. Primarily for that reason, Jamal, is that I was very conscious of what kind of impact that computer based learning was going to have.
Lou Quinto:
I've learned. I've had to turn on a dime and I've taken and made recommendations to my clients that, that full day program you want to run, not going to be a full day program. We're going to break it up into four two-hour modules and we're going to do it over a period of three or four months.
Craig P. Anderson:
Excellent. Very good. All right. What's our next question, Lou?
Lou Quinto:
Okay. The next one comes from Laura in San Mateo, California. I laughed when I read this one. It says, "At the start of our remote workforce in March because of COVID, Zoom meetings were efficient and productive. Meetings started and ended on time and people were engaged. Seven months later, I've noticed that we've fallen back into the same bad habits that existed when we had in-person meetings. Lou, Craig, what can I do to restore the efficiency and productivity we enjoyed in March and April?
Craig P. Anderson:
Well, this goes back to probably my favorite idea, which is you've got to be intentional about it, right Lou?
Lou Quinto:
Got the word in.
Craig P. Anderson:
I got it in for this episode. But what we really need to think about here is that there is that tendency to kind of shift back to the norm. Everybody was like, "This is great. We can stay focused. I have fewer meetings, more efficient." But now we've gotten kind of into the lazy old habits of, "Oh, we can just kind of drone on forever." [crosstalk 00:10:20]
Lou Quinto:
It's that pendulum swing that you always talk about where we went over so far and now we're coming back toward the middle and trying to, as you said, get back to normal.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. So I think a lot of it is pushing back on the idea to say, "Hey guys, let's go back to where we were. Let's get these skinny down." At least you're looking at a timer on your clock or at least there's a clock on your screen, probably when you're going through. Pay more attention to it, go back to some of our old, I know we talked about meetings, having good meetings, our episode on having efficient meetings. It's a great place for you to start and share that with the members of your team and say, "Hey, let's get back to where we were. Let's get ourselves back to getting these things skinny down. Let's get on, get what we need to do and then move on to get our work done."
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. And Laura, I'll just reiterate, I'll condense what Craig just said. Get back to the basics. Get back to the basics meeting. Start on time. You have a starting time, you have an ending time, you have a facilitator, you have a timekeeper, you have an agenda. Don't let people on their Zoom meetings just show up with the name in a black box and you can't see them. Make it mandatory where they have to be visually present to everybody. So that this way, you know that you have their full engagement because they're not working on something else while they're going through the meeting. So that this way they're accountable. And that's what you really need to have is make them accountable.
Lou Quinto:
So get away from the black boxes with just the names in the middle of them, make sure all cameras are on. Create ground rules for all of your meetings, but go back to the basics.
Craig P. Anderson:
And just mash that mute button for the person who won't quit talking, and you'll be fine.
Lou Quinto:
Don't you dare do it to me right here now.
Craig P. Anderson:
Next time. All right. Very good. So here's our last question that we received from Bart, from Sydney.
Lou Quinto:
Sydney, Australia.
Craig P. Anderson:
Sydney, Australia. Yeah. Not Sydney, Indiana, I guess.
Lou Quinto:
Is there a Sydney, Indiana? I didn't know that.
Craig P. Anderson:
I don't know. We'll have to find out. If anybody wants to write us and ask us a question to dig that one up for us, that would be even better. So here's a question from Bart, "Going into 2021, there are a lot of unknowns and we are undergoing our strategic planning period. How do you recommend putting together a 2021 plan that won't fall apart two months into the new year? What do you think Lou?
Lou Quinto:
Well, if we had the correct answer to that, we wouldn't be doing podcasts right now. We'd be in Florida on a beach somewhere. No. This is, I think, and Craig, you and I have discussed this not only with our clients, but with our personal businesses as well. You've got to skinny down everything you're talking about and you need to be very focused. So you need to be focused on what are our services? What are the products that we're delivering it? Who are our specific clients? And you need to deal with more of what you know, versus being afraid of what you don't know. If you can look at your products, you look at your services and ask yourself, become innovative by saying, "How can we do these more efficiently? How can we become more convenient? How can we do these more effectively?" So that this way, what you're doing is you're utilizing those resources that may not be as broad and as vast as you once had, but coming into 2021, they could be a little bit skinnier also, but you're using them efficiently.
Lou Quinto:
So go back to your services and your products and look at those, deal with those. And I'm not going to say, Craig, I know you're probably thinking, rip up the old playbook and throw it away. I'm not going to get there, get, us into an argument. But at the same time, you don't want to rip up, you want to focus on what are your key leverage points in your business and focus on those key leverage points and identify those issues or areas that I like to refer to as business issues, which are holes in the boat. That if you don't fix this, the boat sinks. No matter what else you're doing, the boat's going to sink. So that this way you're focusing just on those most significant issues that you need to deal with in your business. So in creating that 2021 plan, Bart, you've got to go back to your basics and you've got to expand it from there.
Craig P. Anderson:
So, different take. What I would look at, Bart, is, look, you got to have a plan. Imperfect action is not a bad thing. You've got to take, and we've talked about this, the best information you have right now, the best set of assumptions you can make and put that into your plan, lay out, what are our objectives for next year? This isn't some kind of blanket pass to say we don't have goals anymore. What are our objectives? What are the strategies? Do we have to adjust any of our strategies to try and maximize our ability to hit our objectives and what are the projects we need to focus on? Where do we need to put that focus? And get those all written down with timelines, with assumptions on when revenue's going to hit and when expenses are going to hit and all those things.
Craig P. Anderson:
Now, we don't know what's going to happen. We can make the best case knowing where we're at right now. But if you have a plan where you've laid all these things out, you have a yard stick to measure against. So if things start to go awry again, here's your opportunity to say, "Okay, well we thought we'd be here. Now we're here. What do we need to do? Where do we need to adjust? If this is the impact and we think it's going to go this way, what do we need to adjust now?" So you can start to see these things coming, so it doesn't hit you as a big surprise. So what I'm recommending to my clients, is, no, we have to have a plan. Let's put the plan together because that will tell us where we're trying to go.
Craig P. Anderson:
But just like when you're on the trip from, for us, Indianapolis to Orlando, you don't anticipate running into traffic. You don't anticipate the accident or the construction. So you go around, you make the adjustments and then you reassess where you're going to end up and change your timeline. That's what you're going to have to do here. But if you don't have it written down, if you don't have that plan, you're not going to know where you're going. So that's where I'd go, Bart.
Lou Quinto:
Okay. Very good. All right. Well that was fun, Craig.
Craig P. Anderson:
It was.
Lou Quinto:
And I would definitely encourage any of other listeners or watchers that if you have a question or you want something to answer, I think that we should make this something that we do every four or five weeks where we just go to the mailbag and just do a quick fire, here's a question, what are the answers and deal with it that way. But I think we had four pretty good questions, especially since three of them specifically dealt with the COVID and then of course your favorite and mine, the coaching one.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah, absolutely.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. Bravo for coaching.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. That's right. Way to go, Janice and she gets the award for coaching this week. And it's great to see we've got people listening from as far away as Australia. Good to know that as well.
Lou Quinto:
I hope they understand us with our Midwest... Well, you with a Midwestern accent, me with a Jersey accent.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. That Jersey accent is problematic. We'll see.
Lou Quinto:
They probably get the Sopranos in Australia. So they probably [inaudible 00:17:29] that accent.
Craig P. Anderson:
That's right. And yeah, we don't have a Sopranos version in Indiana. Very good.
Lou Quinto:
That's called future farmers of America. Isn't it? Isn't that the Indiana mafia?
Craig P. Anderson:
That could be. So what are your key takeaways today, Lou? You got any big takeaways from our Q&A segment?
Lou Quinto:
Yeah. In just looking at the mailbag, you can see that people are concerned. They want, and again, it goes back to almost the answer that I gave with the training. They're very focused questions. We're all thrown into this COVID situation and that focused question of, look, I'm trying to do this, but how do I do it so that I'm not wasting or using up way too much time? Looking at things like the training. The training become very important. I know initially into the couple months into COVID, everyone was like, "Well, we're going to do a lot of up skilling during this downtime." Well, here it is November, we're still in the downtime. But yeah, I think focusing, and again, I think with all four of our readers that submitted an email, it shows that they're trying to do the best they can and they need help in bite-sized pieces as opposed to an entire training program. So I appreciate that. That's my key takeaway.
Craig P. Anderson:
Yeah. I think for me, all these show is we're not out of the woods yet and we're going to have to continue to be pretty flexible on how we approach things and be thinking through, thinking ahead, planning ahead and then doing the best we can with the information we have. That's really the only choice you have. This isn't forever. It's for now. How long for now is, we don't know yet, but we know it's not forever. So, think about your plan, do what you can to get your employee's needs met. And all these themes with remote work, we've all learned. Trainers have learned how to be more effective. Coaches have learned how to be more effective. We're all getting better at this.
Craig P. Anderson:
So, I think 2021 is going to be a little bit easier than 2020 has been in some ways, because at least we think we know what to expect. We'll see. So very good. Thanks Lou. Good job. Thanks for bringing up the idea of doing the mailbag. I think that's a lot of fun. I'm glad we got some questions. So as always, it's a great way to close us out today.
Craig P. Anderson:
So if you enjoyed the content you saw today in our mailbag episode, please share, like, subscribe. Especially if you have one of those dry presenters who need some up-skilling. So like, share, subscribe this with your friends. And if you subscribe, that way you'll always catch our new episodes, which always drop Thursday mornings at 9:30 Eastern. You can also find us on all your favorite podcasting platforms. We've got a lot of traffic on the podcasting side. So clearly people would much rather hear us then look at us, but we still appreciate that opportunity.
Lou Quinto:
Yeah, and I wore a tie too.
Craig P. Anderson:
I know. Yeah. I've just gone to full work from home now. At any rate, very good. So, until next time, I'm Craig Anderson.
Lou Quinto:
And keep your hands washed. Keep your distance. I'm Lou Quinto.