Stop Asking “How’s It Going?”: Coaching That Actually Moves the Needle

I'm so excited to be here, 'cause I love talking about managing and not just reviewing performance, and I see this all the time, a team that they're motivated, and they're smart, and they work incredibly hard, and then they miss the mark.

Mm-hmm.

And, and nobody can figure out why, and the first leadership thing people say is, "Oh, they needed to work harder, or try harder, or put more in." And usually, that's not the problem.

Usually.

And so Joe, um, let's get to the core of today's topic.

You argue most performance problems are c- often caused by that misalignment, as you mentioned.

What does that look like in the average workplace setting?

You know, I think that's the challenge, because it looks totally normal.

It looks like everything's, everything's on track, everything is going well.

You have team meetings.

You talk about it.

The problem is people are just reporting on status or activities that they've completed, but they're not really talking about what it is they're trying to solve and are they making progress towards that, that island, the vision, the end goal.

So I think that's the big challenge is it, it looks just like normal until it all goes south.

So let's turn over to our audience.

How many of you, raise your hand, that, you know, you feel like everybody put in the effort, there's so much work around this, but when it came to the end goal of that project, you didn't really come to the results that you were looking for, and people were kind of left confused? All right, quite a few of you.

How do...

What does that say when you see that, those many hands?

Yeah, it's, I see it all the time, and, and I see it happen in situations where even the leaders, the coaches, feel like they're, they're right on top of it, because they're really good at asking, "How's it going? How's it going? You good? Everybody good? You're good.