A lot of the advice that passes as good ideas, if implemented properly, actually backfire. This is the thing. Remember I said with the Jeter conversation, maybe they actually gave him feedback before and he was defensive about it. There’s a justification for why they’ve been avoiding it. But maybe, and I would say highly likely, let’s say that actually happened, it was the way they were doing it that created the defensiveness. But they concluded, well, it’s not what we did. It’s his defensive response. It’s obviously him. Yeah, it’s obviously him. It can’t be me. You know what I mean? And this is the thing. This is what I said. When we look at all these case studies we’ve analyzed, it’s always them to some degree, but they have a blind spot around it. So for example, one of the things that so many of the… We’re like the aftermarket for this particular coaching methodology. One of the things that thousands of leaders that we have trained, have been trained in before we’ve trained them and had to untrain them from this is question-based coaching. You see it in the things called the GROW model, the ROW model.
Basically, what a lot of managers these big companies are learning is, So, Josh, you work for me. Listen, first rule you have to understand, when I’m being trained by, I shouldn’t tell you what I think. I certainly should never tell you what I think you should do. You’ve got to discover that for yourself because if you could figure it out for yourself, then you’re going to be more bought into it. And so what I’m going to do, Josh, is I’m going to ask you questions. Josh, let’s say you were doing it. Josh, what do you think about X? And do you think you could do this better? And what about this? And never, ever revealing any of my cards. There’s something valuable in that that it’s good to get other people thinking versus us always having to think for them as their managers. Because we want our people to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. These questions could be helpful. But part of developing people, sometimes sharing our perspective, our experiences. If I’m now not allowed to share my perspective, my experiences, my insights on the current situation, if this person has a blind spot, then all I’m doing is interrogating them at the end of the day.
What we sometimes see is that the people being inflicted with this questioning methodology, they like it for a time because the manager is being less intrusive and more hands-off. It’s like, Okay, I get to do what I want. That’s some comfort. But eventually, all the competition is avoided. But eventually, the dissatisfaction with it, the engagement score is go down, and the performance of the people goes down, too, because they’re being left too much to their own devices. It could have been that they were taught something that simply didn’t work. Jeter had response, and they blamed him, and it justified their further avoidance.
