Coaching a Direct On Relationship Development - Part 2

0:00Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, Coaching a Direct on Relationship Development, Part 2 of 2. As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we are now certified by Proudy You. The questions this guest answers are, how can I coach a direct on building relationships? Can I coach one of my better performers? How much time and energy does it take to coach one of my directs? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening.

0:59in the same room as serious managers for two days of unfiltered conversations. We look forward to seeing you in Los Angeles October 6th and 7th. For more information, visit manager-tools.com forward slash mconference. That takes us then, folks, to step number two, which is collaborate to brainstorm resources, again, for these relationships. And now we've got a goal. So we need to decide how we're going to get there. And one of the great things about the manager tools coaching model is that we as managers do not need to be good at what we're coaching in order to coach someone else on it. To Mark's point, we're not the trainer.

1:42We're not the teacher. We're just there to keep them on track. We're just there. The accountability. We're the accountability buddy. Someone else, something else is teaching them a thing, thus saving you, again, more time while also helping them learn. Yeah, you know, we don't have any ads in our casts, right? We tried that. If you've been listening for five years, you don't know this, but 15 years ago, we tried ads because we could probably make$100 ,000,$150 ,000 a year with ads. But you know what? Our audience hated them. So we don't have ads. We have public service announcements for our conference and so on.

2:20But for instance, let's suppose that you want to coach one of your directs on being ready to become an effective manager. One of the things you could do is define effective managers as builds relationships, gives performance communications, coaches their directs, and delegates, right? And we would say one of the tasks would be attend an effective manager conference, even if you're not a manager yet, right? And then, by the way, the other thing in that week would be, and write me a three or four paragraph summary of what you learned, and then let's talk. And then maybe the next one would be, and let's, I'm not giving you the exact details here, but you can see the theme.

3:03And the next one would be, and what can you do to start practicing those things now before you're actually a manager? One of the problems with becoming a manager, particularly for your top performers, is nobody teaches us stuff but us. and they become a manager and they've never done any of it. Yeah. They've never even run a meeting for having to say. Yeah, because we're terrible at delegating too. So there's that. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So how do we do that? Okay. How do we figure out what resources we might use? And by the way, keep in the back of your mind, the resources you might choose to learn something might be different than your directs.

3:45Yep. All the collaborate bit. Right. Whose resources are going to be more valuable? Probably your directs, even though certainly you want to set an example and contribute some. So the way we do that, creating some resources that our direct can start learning and actioning is by jointly brainstorming resources that direct could use to become more effective at this skill relationship development that we're coaching. Part of our coaching plan will include finding out what resources are available and availing ourselves of them, as Maggie would say, without even knowing which one is best. Don't worry about thinking there is a best one.

4:24It's one of the fundamental problems of professionals. They don't want to take any action because they assume everybody else knows what the right answer is and they don't know it. Folks, nobody knows what the right answer is. So just take some action, start moving toward the Emerald City. And then as you get results, you'll say, oh, that one wasn't any good. We'll do something different. So if we don't do it this way, then every manager is limited to coaching on what he or she knows and is confident of coaching other people on. That means exceptionally limited coaching opportunities for managers and directs.

5:01And suddenly our organization is limited enormously in what it can grow towards and become. So the brainstorming step is designed to broaden your thinking. And while yes, in some rare cases, you will actually be a trainer. Maybe if you were doing meetings, you'll come and you'll watch me run a meeting so you can experience that. And that might be you being a trainer. but look, you don't need to train your people to be a good manager. If that was what we were training on, you could send them to the effective manager conference. In this case, with development, with relationship development skills, you don't need to teach them everything you know about relationships.

5:40That would take a long time for many of you. On the other hand, you could send them to an effective communicator conference, or you could have them read a book like how to win friends and influence people. Or you could have them talk to people who mentor them about how how they work with relationships, all that kind of stuff. Exactly. And folks, it would be completely normal in a manager tools coaching engagement to have a task, not a DBQ goal, but a task of reading a book that brainstorming suggested might be helpful only to discover it's not helpful and that spending time reading that book was a total waste, if you will.

6:19It's possible. Yeah. And this is a hard concept for managers to grasp. We all seem to want silver bullets, quick and easy, one shot, just tell me what to do. But you're different than me. I'm different than Sarah. Sarah's different than you. Mike's different than you. Your director's different than you. The next director's going to be different, and so on. The absence of silver bullets doesn't eliminate our professional obligation to grow the skills of our folks. Or we think that everybody else knows the right answer. And they don't, folks. They just don't. It's the biggest lie I think that so many professionals tell themselves.

6:55Oh, I look around. Everybody else seems to be okay on their face. Their face seems calm and collected and cool and whatever. So they must know what's going on. They don't. They really don't. There's no right answer. Nobody else knows it. Exactly. So now we need to brainstorm again these resources. So the way we do that is by collaborating with our direct and engaging in a simple brainstorm. Now, we've got tons of podcasts on brainstorming. We recommend that you follow our guidance in the Brainstorming Podcast. And what that means is you take two minutes to come up with a list of potential resources you think might be helpful to your direct in learning and doing this new or better skill.

7:40Just two minutes. No more. Yeah. And look, take to the next level. It's 2026 we're recording this. For coaching someone on relationship skills, we might brainstorm with Claude. We can't imagine us or our direct coming into the meeting without a list of resources based on an exchange with the AI tool of choice. Now, here are some examples of the kinds of things, let's say Sarah was coaching me on relationship development, that we might brainstorm in a two to three minute period, right? Google, that's my favorite one always. No, Google, always Google. It may be in a couple of years. AI's new, right?

8:19But in a couple of years, it's probably maybe Claude or... ChatGPT. ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, right? Google, disk profile, Myers-Briggs. We're not a fan, but maybe you and your direct are. That's fine. Sales training, Amazon Books, Dale Carnegie, podcasts, mentors, good relationship builders we know, the Never Eat Alone book by Keith Ferrazzi, and again, How to Win Friends and Influence People, the book. And again, I would remind you again, if you're worried about not coming up with a big brainstorm list, don't worry about it. If you have only five, you can pick one or two to get started on in your first week, okay?

9:06And if you don't know any more than that, You're fine. But if you want more, email us, customerserviceatmanager-tools.com, and we will be happy to send you a much longer list from some other person that we've actually been paid to coach. And we came up with all kinds of resources they could use. Exactly, folks. when it comes to brainstorming, the idea here is to go for volume, not accuracy, which again, runs counter to what many managers want, which is that silver bullet, which of course does not exist. In terms of brainstorming, we're not looking for that one right thing. We're looking for a list of possible things, thinking that in there, there's probably one or two, three, maybe four things that are going to collectively get us to where we need to go.

9:56And it's dumb for us as managers to assume. We're going to know exactly how to improve someone else in some skill that we may not ourselves be very good at in. And we're going to do that in a straight line, sharp as a tack, just move in that direction. There's no way. There's no way. You don't know. They don't know. We're working on this together. I'll tell you a funny story about this. when we first put out the coaching model, it's been 20 years ago, maybe even 21 years ago, we had done a podcast. Mike and I had recorded a podcast and somebody who knew us from the military wrote me an email and said, Mark, I can't believe you didn't use this example.

10:42Like what? You know, I wrote back, there's a great example. I can't believe you didn't use it. And they were teasing me. So I had to write back, what are you talking about? He says, well, you and Mike were both artillery officers in the army. Managers and directs probably, when they think about coaching, they want a rifle shot, a single shot that hits the target, right? You're aiming at the target, you hit the target. But a better analogy is artillery. In artillery, when you are first given the coordinates of target, you figure out how much powder it's going to take and you aim the gun and elevate the gun or the howitzer or whatever, the cannon, where you're calling, and then you shoot.

11:19But there are all kinds of variables, temperature, humidity, wind, bad calculations, whatever. And the first command that an artillery battery gets when they're shooting at a target is not hit the target. It is adjust fire. And you shoot a shot and you see where it lands. The forward observer sees where it lands and then sends back corrections to the battery. And the first one may be long, the second one might be short, third one might be left, and it wasn't until the fourth one that you actually hit your target. And that's the kind of mentality you want. You're not trying to be a sniper that's hitting your target on the first time.

12:00Perfect shot. You don't need that. You don't. Be willing to try something and see what works. With the general rule that don't start spending money right away by sending people to classes. Yeah, that's the thing. Immediately send them on conferences. And I don't want to make this about our conferences, but don't make your first thing in terms of coaching somebody on something that you think we teach at one of our conferences. Don't spend money on them. Make them show you that they're willing to labor professionally for six, eight weeks showing you that they care about this and they want to try to get better.

12:36By the way, when your rec goes through this, they're going to be weeks that things don't go so well. Yeah. Folks, don't bury them in negative feedback. don't do it. Yeah, you can give some negative feedback, but you can tell them, look, we're in this for the long haul. What human endeavor started out perfectly and stayed perfectly the entire way? Oh, I know the answer is none. So, so it's okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we take a couple of minutes and write down everything we think of in our brainstorm. Maybe one sticks out, maybe one doesn't, doesn't really matter. Brainstorming folks says anything goes, including, if you listen to our brainstorming podcast, the phrase peanut butter, which basically means if I say peanut butter, if Sarah and I are, Sarah's coaching me and we're trying to figure out what resources I can use, Sarah or I can say peanut butter.

13:29And we will write that down as a legitimate reason, a legitimate tool, because we're not in the business of judging the validity of any of the ideas. We want to think about volume, as Sarah said. And so we're not going to be critical of any ideas. So somebody writes down, somebody says peanut butter, we write it down. And it may mean something to them that they'll explain later when we're talking about the resources. So now we have a goal for helping our direct with relationships. We've listed three of them, something we're going to measure them against in four to six to eight months. and we have a list of possible resources they could use to develop themselves.

14:11Now all we have to do is put it into a plan. Yeah, exactly. Folks, keep in mind that at this point in coaching, this direct and us as managers have spent no more than 15 minutes, both on preparation and in the one-on-one, where we've set a goal and brainstorm resources together. together 15 minutes and we're already this far we're already creating the actual plan yeah so let's talk about creating the plan how do you create a plan to coach someone in relationships you take one or more probably just one the first couple of weeks take one or more of those resources that you brainstormed and you create one week one week one week of deliverables from the resources.

15:00Now, why do we say one week? Because you're going to see them again next week in your one-on-one. Your one-on-one can be where 99 % of the collaboration and the discussion occurs in your coaching of one of your directs. Yes, they're going to be actioning these things through the week, but the one-on-ones are your checkpoint along the way getting to where you want to go. The idea here is just get your directs started learning and developing their skills. You do not have to know the overall master plan for the next 16 or 24 or 48 weeks when you start. Remember the yellow brick road example, five bricks at a time, like five days a week.

15:42I had somebody say to me once, why did you choose five? And I said two reasons. One, it was small. And two, there are five days in a week. You give them five tasks, they do the five, and then we meet again, and then we give them another five. Simple. Simple, exactly. Exactly. So here's some examples of turning resources into relationship development coaching deliverables. And just to make it simple, we don't know what day you're listening to this podcast on, but we're going to assume today is Tuesday, the 1st of August, 2026. And we're going to set a date for the end of this coaching engagement.

16:18The goal, that is the 1st of February, 2027. And let's assume we're in a meeting at 10 a.m. Yes, it matters. Okay. So here's that list. It does, yeah. Send me a list of the top five best-selling or most highly rated professional relationship development books on Amazon by 3 p.m. today. Next, send me a list of the Amazon receipt for the book that you purchased by 2 p.m. tomorrow. That is the 2nd of August. Then, send me a picture of the book on your desk or on your Kindle by the 5th of Friday. Nope. By Friday. Friday, the 5th of August at 3 p.m. And then ultimately, send me a three-sentence summary of chapter one of your book and do that by the 8th of August at 2 p.m.

17:11Yeah. Now, as you might imagine, I think you guys can figure this out. Can you guess what the next deliverable will be? Right? It should be pretty obvious. it's going to be send me a three-sentence summary of chapter two of the book you bought and expensed by Tuesday, 9 August at 2 p.m. or 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. or whatever. We only went this far because on Tuesday next week, we're going to have our next one-on-one. That's when we'll review our direct progress and set out new deliverables for the next week. Now, you'll notice that we're giving them deliverables. We shouldn't have to wait until next Tuesday in our one-on-one to find out whether or not they did it.

17:59Because the start of all of these deliverables, what makes them deliverables and not tasks is the task of reading the book or buying the book includes the phrase at the front, send me. So what we want, if Sarah's coaching me, she wants to get a daily email or a text message or a Teams message or a Slack message saying, I got the book. Here's a picture of the book, or here's my list of five books or whatever. You don't want to wait and then discover next Tuesday that she's not done any of them. Because that means she not only didn't do the task, but she didn't send you the status of it being completed by the deadlines.

18:41And there were five deadlines, I think, in the examples that Sarah mentioned. Exactly. And not only does each start with send me, each deliverable also has a date and a time, which sends the right message about urgency and about priority management. So folks, for the record, if your direct consistently fails to accomplish their deliverables, you got to stop coaching them. You can't drag someone over the finish line. This is their change. This is not yours. All motivation is self-motivation. I mean, the pain associated with dragging them along while they do it, you might as well just do it your dang self, frankly, at that point.

19:19It's going to be more effort-filled and they're not going to learn the right lesson. Your natural communication style works for about 25 % of the managers on your team. The other 75 % need you to communicate differently. And they're not going to tell you that because you don't have the framework to explain it. The Effective Communicator Conference teaches you to read behavioral cues and adapt in real time so every conversation with every member of your team actually lands. For individual managers and full leadership teams, for more information, please visit manager-tools.com forward slash ECC.

20:03Okay, let's take another brainstorm item and give you another list of potential deliverables for the next week. Now, again, it depends on your assessment of your directs capabilities, whether you could double them up, right? We wouldn't recommend having 10 deliverables in one week for anybody but your very best directs. Maybe a good general rule is for top performers trying to get to the next level and, for example, a promotion, you can give them more than five deliverables a week. But for those whose coaching engagement with you is based on a deficit in performance, no more than five deliverables a week is probably all they can take.

20:43But I want to ask you something, folks, let's go back to that list that Sarah walked down, okay? Send me a list of the top five bestselling books on Amazon by 3 p.m. today. How long does that actually take? I would argue it takes two minutes. You open your browser, you go to Amazon, you type in relationship development and then you say sort them by customer review or by best selling or whatever and then they send you an email it takes them more than five minutes and they can do that in the course of a normal work day and they can accomplish the objective by the time send me a list of the amazon receipt well you have to buy the book right so that takes what amazon makes that minutes right and then they gotta send you an email or text message or a slick right yeah send me a picture of the book on your desk well they have a phone they take a picture of the book that got that arrived screenshot if it's kindle right screenshot yeah exactly and a three-sentence summary of chapter one send me a three-sentence summary how long does it take to read chapter one and that's actually a good point mark when i think about that one i think that a uh a deliverable this formatted that way immediately.

22:00And folks, if this doesn't happen immediately, then maybe say something as the manager, but immediately ought to make that individual know, hey, I should be reading, I don't know, running meetings for dummies, not Robert's Rules of Order. You know what I mean? You don't want to pick a textbook as your first resource. If you're going to be planning on reading about a chapter a day, it should be something with a chapter size where you could read one a day, right? I think there's an embedded hint in there about the complexity of that book. Yeah. And I can't think of very many things that the average manager in a successful organization could coach his or her direct on that requires a textbook or a complicated, detailed, I just don't see it.

22:56So choose simple stuff. Yeah. Because it's not the reading that will make a difference. It's the implementation of the learning from the reading that will make a difference. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So folks, let's assume that we went through this brainstorming exercise for, again, relationship building as we're coaching today. And let's say the idea we chose then from our brainstorming list was mentors. I'm going to now turn that idea into some deliverables. So first, send me a list of five possible relationship mentors by the 2nd of August at 3 p.m. Send me the results of outreach efforts to three of those five mentors by the 3rd of August at 2 p.m.

23:39What does it take? It's an email. It's a Slack message, a team message. It's 10 minutes. It's 10 minutes. Exactly. If that. Send me the name of one mentor you chose to work with by 5 August at 1 p.m. Yep. I mean, there's a little bit of thought into that, but the email itself is 30 seconds. But it's implied and it's pretty simple. The thought is not complex. Yeah, exactly. Or if you use the new app that our good friend Graham Cochran turned me on to called Brain Toss, you can just say it into your phone. It'll send you an email right away. Love that. Send me a confirmation of a first meeting with your mentor by 8 August at 10 a.m.

24:19And then send me the results of your first meeting with your mentor by 11 August at 2 p.m. Yeah. By the way, let's suppose they choose a mentor and the mentor is horrible. That could happen. The book could be horrible. It could totally happen. Yeah, the book could be horrible too. And after like six weeks, they say, I'm not learning anything. Or this mentor's, I can't get on his calendar. I can't get on her calendar. Or they don't know anything about mentoring. Exactly. I don't think they've ever built a relationship before. Yeah. That's okay. You're like, okay, that didn't work. It's fine. It's fine.

24:57We're exploring something new here. The idea that we have a perfectly curated, perfect plan, and it will go like water flowing down a clear mountain stream is ludicrous. You're going to have those moments and just say, well, okay, that didn't work. We'll try something else. It's totally fine. Trust yourself in this process. Don't worry that your deliverables aren't good enough. None of us are very good at new processes. Trust that the reps you'll get with your direct will make you and he or she good at it. In fact, for high performers wanting to get to the next level, it's not uncommon for them to start coming to your coaching sessions, listen to this now, during your one-on-ones with next week's deliverables already worked out.

25:44And in the beginning, we collaborate on the first week, maybe the second week or the third week. But for an above average performer, you could say, okay, your first task this week is to come up with your deliverables for this week. I want you to start charting your path. We don't need to collaborate on this. This is basic level one thinking. It's not that hard. And I think you said this earlier, Sarah, it's entirely possible that they're dragging their feet. Yep. And after four to six weeks of dragging their feet, you say, hey, listen, do you want to do this or not? Right. This is the process.

26:19I'm giving you a process. I'm meeting with you every week to talk about it. And you're dragging your feet. You're not doing this stuff. Let's not do this. Let's not have this frustration, this friction, this tension. Now, to be clear, if you're not willing to do this, the benefits of what would happen at the end of a successful coaching process cannot be something you deserve or that you want and you're frustrated you don't get. If you don't do the work, you're not going to get the reward. And look, I get it. You may be too busy. Things may be difficult at home. It might be summer vacation. You're a single parent.

26:52And those are legit reasons. but you can't eat your cake and then have it too so you can't not do the work and then say but i still want credit as if i did the work when you didn't do the work right that's exactly it i mean i don't i can't even remember back to the beginning of this podcast already um but if the idea here is they need to build better relationships to be considered for promotion for example it's also folks as the manager your responsibility to let them know we can stop this and you can not be excited about it. And unfortunately, when that next promotion comes up, you're not going to have the relationships you need to be considered for that role.

27:32So you can stop and I'm happy to let you stop. I don't, I'm not going to drag you along, but this is what it means. If you decide, I don't want to learn this now and that's okay, but you don't get to get mad that you didn't want to learn it. And then you didn't get the promotion that you needed to get there. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. That's exactly it. Okay. So that takes us then to the last step, which is step number four, where your direct acts and reports until their goal is accomplished, which is, folks, the easy part of coaching. Yes. For you, it's the manager.

28:05Yeah, it's for us as the manager. Exactly. We're on cruise control now. Our direct is just acting on the planned steps and deadlines and reporting to us, both during the week and through their deliverable reporting. and then obviously during their one-on-ones with us as they achieve the steps. And we either keep on the path of the resource they're working on or add another resource because that one has run out or proved ineffective or we're just adjusting. They're just going down the road now. Yeah. So for instance, maybe week one, they get a book. Week two, they read the first two chapters. Week four, they read through chapter six.

28:45Week eight, they start meetings with potential folks with whom they want to build relationships, or they go to a disc training like our effective communicator conference. They learn how to read other people's profiles, which is, I've said this before. In fact, I was at Powder earlier this week with Eric Woodruff, their head of, he's CIO and CHRO. And I actually told them when they were asking about relationships with the directs, the single most important thing I ever learned in my professional life. Now, folks, to be fair, this is coming from an engineer. I don't naturally like people. The most important thing I ever learned was DISC.

29:22The idea that I had to modify the way I communicated with other people based on where they are. I'm a fairly assertive and forceful communicator, but if I'm talking to somebody who's reserved and I continue to be forceful, I'm not going to build as good a relationship with them. I've got to tone it down. I've got to slow down. I've got to maybe not look them in the eye as much. I've got to use more emotional words rather than linear words or words like effectiveness and efficiency. I might have to use words like teamwork and putting one's heart into one's effort. You have to be willing to change.

30:02So I mentioned that to Powder and people came up to me afterwards and were like, really? You can learn how to communicate differently with different people? Because I've got a bunch of different people on my team. I said, yeah, I'll tell you again, it's the most important thing I ever learned. So if you learn to read other profiles, they can learn your direct, if your direct learns how to read other people's profiles, they can give you input on what others' preferences are and how they intend to engage with them, which will help them strengthen any relationship they have. Yeah, exactly. And folks, just one more plug here for, you can do all this and it's not going to be laborious.

30:39We're doing And all of this during our one-on-ones, we can coach everyone on our team in 10 minutes a week. And it's not going to take us additional homework or project planning or all these cycles, an hour a week with each person we're coaching. It doesn't work that way. And then ultimately, the very last piece of what we need to do as it pertains to a coaching engagement is when they achieve the goal, celebrate. when we reach the deadline without a celebration because we've not met it we move our deadline again we don't punish failure here we remind ourselves that they're further along and that is good particularly when we're only here spending a few minutes a week on it and if they've moved the dial then it's better than they were before yeah all done in our one-on-one all done in our extra time or effort involved.

31:33Yeah. Okay. So I'll take the summary this time. Folks, coaching is straightforward using this manager tools coaching model. You don't have to know everything. You don't have to plan everything and you can do it in 10 minutes a week. Actually, after the first week, it doesn't take 10 minutes. And when it comes to relationships, there are a lot of folks, both top performers and those who could be struggling, who could use help with those relationships, perhaps for different reasons, but help from you coaching them nonetheless. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We hope this one helped you. Now, help us help others and tell your friends.

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