Episode 8 - Develop Your Employees Continuously
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[00:00:00] Lauren Marie: Welcome to The Integrated Leader Podcast. I'm Lauren Marie, and I'm with my partner in business and in life, Loren Kutsko. We are the founders of Kutsko Consulting, an organization that enables human collaboration by providing the right data and technology to lead your people.
[00:00:20] We are introducing a learning program for leaders called the 8 Dimensions of a Healthy Team. As a leader, management and coaching is something you need to be doing every single day, so why not be excellent at it?
[00:00:32] In this eight part series you will be introduced to the basic principles to engage, grow, and align your team for success. It's simple, but rarely is it easy. If you want to reflect on the current status of your team as you listen along, we have a free assessment at teamhealthscore.com that will give you a baseline of where your team stands today.
[00:00:53] You can also learn all about our other products and services like hiring assessments, individual coaching, group coaching and certifications. Thankfully, there's a growing awareness in many organizations about the benefits of Emotional Intelligence and the importance of self-reflection. More and more executives are discovering the impact that these have on the multiple bottom lines they are accountable to scale. Business is personal, so let's be good at it.
[00:01:19] Loren: Welcome to the team development episode of our integrated leader podcast.
[00:01:25] Lauren Marie: Our goal today is to define what team development is and discuss why having it on your team impacts your people and your bottom line. Let's get started.
[00:01:34] Oh, we are, we are recording the last episode of our first season and we have learned so much. We have made so many mistakes. We have talked about them. We are collaborating together. It has been a joy.
[00:01:50] Loren: This is the team development episode and really needed to include in the eight dimensions of a healthy team that people need to always be learning. They need to develop in order to grow, they need to grow in order to care about what they're doing. We all need this. And it's up to the leader of the team to create an environment where development happens and is incentivized.
[00:02:14] For the purpose of this episode, we've defined team development as how committed each person on the team is to growing and getting better. People need to grow and develop, or they will die. And it's up to you as the leader to help them set goals that they are incapable of achieving unless they develop and then to support and coach them while providing the time and resources they need to develop themselves.
[00:02:41] When top performers want to improve, they hire a coach. This is very common in sports, and it's also critical in business and organizational leadership. Leaders and managers need to be good coaches.
[00:02:52] Lauren Marie: What's the difference between a manager and a coach?
[00:02:55] Loren: Coaching is a skill. A manager is a role. So a manager manages people and you don't have to be a good coach to be a good manager. That's just, that's your title. But in order to be a good coach, coaching is a defined skill that you need to develop yourself and not every person needs to be good at coaching skills.
[00:03:14] But coaches need to be good at coaching skills and managers need to be good at coaching skills. Individual contributors can be good at coaching skills, and those are great skills to develop if you want to manage someday.
[00:03:23] Lauren Marie: I feel like this is the lesson in math about the square and the rectangle and which one is the square in which one's the rectangle?
[00:03:29] Loren: Yeah, you're right. Because people throw these words around all the time and no one really knows what they mean, but coaching has been defined by the international coaching federation. As a particular skill in a workplace context, everybody knows what a sports coach is, you know, we're starting to see these other things like a life coach yesterday, they're in the Arizona Cardinals game and we heard them talking about a mental conditioning coach. Coaching is a really important role. And when I imagine it, you know, I imagine the baseball cap and the whistle on hat the coach is wearing. He's not a player, but if he weren't there to assemble the players to help the players develop, to put the players in the right position, then the team would not gel.
[00:04:10] It's a very important position of someone that understands the goal and is accountable for the big goal, but doesn't actually have any power during the game to do anything about it.
[00:04:21] Lauren Marie: That's different than a manager because.
[00:04:23] Loren: No, I don't think it is. Coaching is like the verb.
[00:04:26] Lauren Marie: Use it in a sentence, please. A manager is a role on a team when they have people whose performance they're responsible for. Good managers coach their employees. It's the verb. The skill you develop.
[00:04:39] Lauren Marie: Okay. So some managers dictate. Yeah. Some managers ignore, Some managers coach.
[00:04:47] Loren: There you go. Ah, that's great.
[00:04:49] And that's, that's really insightful too, because one of the core definitions of the coach is the asking of questions. Coaching skills, when you have them is partially being good at asking questions. Do you know how to ask questions of your employees to help them figure things out for themselves?
[00:05:06] What you're doing is you're asking the question. That's helping them think of their own answers to things. When we're talking about development, the coach and the coaching process is to give the employee everything that they need for the development process to happen.
[00:05:20] But you can't develop them. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, they say.
[00:05:26] Lauren Marie: Well, then I want to be a coach.
[00:05:28] Loren: You are.
[00:05:32] Lauren Marie: Loren! Because I want to help people understand who they are. But I can't make them.
[00:05:39] Loren: Right. I mean, imagine so many different contexts where we have this.
[00:05:43] Right, like a famous example I always think of is like Oprah has a coach. What the heck is Oprah doing that she needs a coach? Well, she's running a business, she's running an empire. She doesn't always know how to do that. Sometimes she knows how to do that, but she needs someone next to her or down the path from her cheering her on, right?
[00:05:59] The coach isn't Oprah. It's not the coach’s empire. It's Oprah's empire, but Oprah still needs a coach. Right? That's a funny example with like a celebrity who's got a writing career and an acting career and a talk show and a magazine and all these things. Right. Well, think about our good friend, Brandon, who one day decided he wanted to be an Ironman triathlete. He hires a coach. I actually might be able to download the steps off the internet of how to train for the Ironman. I probably could go do this with a bunch of random people that also are trying to train, but I'm going to hire a coach and that coach, they're not going to run the race. It's not their time.
[00:06:35] They're not going to get the time I'm going to get the time. I'm the runner, swimmer, and biker. But I need a coach to challenge me and push me when I don't want to go anymore and help me tone it down and rest when I want to keep going but I shouldn't and who probably has other people that they've coached to do this in the past.
[00:06:51] And so they have this breadth of experience, but they actually might not even be as fast as me. I may be a better athlete. They may be a former athlete who got hurt. It has a lot to do with experience and knowledge, but the skills that a coach has are around coaching. And the skills that the person being coached has, can be different skills.
[00:07:12] Just because the coach can coach doesn't mean the coach can do… In a lot of cases it means that it means they have done, but they're no longer doing.
[00:07:19] Lauren Marie: It reminds me of my kids when they are like, yeah, my coach can't even run. They're asking me to run a mile. They can't even run a mile.
[00:07:29] Loren: And it's a super common thing that kids say about their sports coaches and then employees say about their managers and it's actually a, cultural norm that needs to be fought against to some degree because there is this mentality that at work, your worth is your productivity. And it's difficult to define productivity in coaching.
[00:07:53] Right. But it's actually okay for managers to only manage. They don't need to spend time delivering tasks. If they have 10 employees and those 10 employees are as productive as they'll ever be because of how good their managers at coaching them, then they're going to be far better off as a team with the manager not having any task responsibility.
[00:08:15] Lauren Marie: The task responsibility is keeping the complexity organized.
[00:08:20] Loren: Yeah, and incentivizing people and rearranging people in the org chart and giving people goals and redefining the goals and having quarterly objectives and key results and reviewing those and changing the goals. And updates right, like…
[00:08:31] Lauren Marie: As we are talking about coaching, I just want to give a little shout out to Kliff Kingsbury, head coach of the Arizona Cardinals that is now seven and 0 and what he's doing with the talent on his team.
[00:08:45] Why, what do you mean by that? Because he has got really great individual contributors, like the best…
[00:08:51] Loren: The most primadonna people in the whole world, highest paid…
[00:08:56] Lauren Marie: Big egos, big, big talent. And he is synthesizing that he is getting everyone on the same page and pushing them towards this mission while utilizing each of their strengths.
[00:09:10] And adapting to each of the teams that they're coming up against and changing course.
[00:09:17] Loren: It does feel pretty impressive after our seventh straight win in the 2021/22 NFL season.
[00:09:25] Lauren Marie: Right. I mean, he is doing something incredible, especially in the development of Kyler Murray over the past three years. Yeah.
[00:09:33] For all of our out-of-town listeners, so sorry.
[00:09:37] Loren: I feel like people out of town have heard of the Arizona Cardinals.
[00:09:40] Lauren Marie: They have this year. The other thing that Kingsbury has done is that he has come in and with the help of other people on the team like managers is that they have developed something. It wasn't this way three years ago. They're working hard to increase their performance and to get better and better each year.
[00:10:02] And so some people let go of the team. Some people get brought on the team and that change is constantly happening. I think a lot of managers think it needs to be awesome right now. And that's why I brought you here is to be awesome. Well, JJ Watts is awesome.
[00:10:18] But without the coach synthesizing things, he's never going to be integrated into the team play.
[00:10:24] Loren: Totally. And no, it's a, it's a great example of being able to somewhat zoom out a little bit and get the perspective of… we're going to try to win the super bowl four years from now. It doesn't have to be this season.
[00:10:36] This is a rebuilding year. We use sports a lot when we talk about the seasonality of work and a coach that has a finite number of seasons, when they get to build a team and they come in and certain players are there and they add players and remove players and trade players, and they are building the team.
[00:10:54] Everybody knows what the goal is. You don't bring a championship home, eventually, you're not gonna stay here. The goal is very clear, but it doesn't have to be right away, like you said. And if you're leading a team, if you've just become a leader of a new team, you might need to be able to understand all the assets and liabilities on your team and start the work of moving them around in the organization and hiring new people and letting people off the team.
[00:11:18] So that five years from now is when you're going to win.
[00:11:20] Lauren Marie: The other image I got when you said you have a limited amount of seasons to play as a coach is, this is going to take me a minute to explain, if you want to be a great farmer, you can grow a crop 30 times, at most. You have a finite amount of seasons to be the best potato farmer you can be.
[00:11:37] And each year you should be knowing more about your soil and your seed stock and the weather and controlling the controllables the best you can, so that when you are 28 years in, you have some of the best potatoes that Iowa could possibly grow, because, and I feel like you do that by understanding what's at play.
[00:12:03] And I guess it made sense to me because our job at Kutsko Consulting is to help you understand what's at play in your team. We help you understand what your soil is like, what the seeds are like, we have objective data to help you analyze so that if you're in your third year managing and you want to be the best manager coach, you can, 28 years from now, we have tools to help you understand.
[00:12:30] Loren: Yeah, absolutely. No, there's, there's great metaphors there. We’re the trainers and the doctors on the sidelines of the football team, but we're not the players and we're not the coach.
[00:12:39] Just to bring us back to the Development, what we're doing here is how do you do this as the leader.
[00:12:43] And you will create a plan to develop each person on your team. That's what we're going to equip you how to do in this episode and the accompanying chapter of the book and workbook. One of the things that we want to do is kind of break from the mold of employee development being something that is, something that happens like once in awhile.
[00:13:03] So lots of teams do annual performance evaluations and that basically amounts to their entire employee development plan, is once a year, we're going to sit down, we're going to talk about how development is going. Probably talk about whether or not you're going to get a financial raise and change your compensation.
[00:13:18] Talk about how your goals went for the past year and talk about maybe what your goals are for the coming year. That's just frankly, not enough. People are showing up every day to go to work. This is the thing that they're going to do the most of anything else that they do in their entire life. And they desperately want to get better at it, even when they don't know that they do, they must and creating an environment where growth is part of it is the topic of this conversation. We want that to be continuous. We want people, Similar to a football scoreboard and the statistician's and the reports that come in the news the next day, after a football game, we want the employees to know exactly how they're doing all the time and for them to not be doing as good as they could be.
[00:14:03] You don't want to give people goals that they can hit all the time. You want them to feel like they need to stretch. Whatever job it is that you're managing, you need to turn into scorecards that can be passed or failed, won or lost and that you can improve on, and you want that to happen continuously. One of the things we've talked about before is the weekly one-on-one and the weekly team meeting. We've talked about having a very clear, defined purpose and using objectives and key results to do that. We want to start from the top down. Once you've got that purpose, the big goal for the whole team needs to cascade down so that each individual on the team has goals, that when they accomplish their goals, they influence and impact the team goal. You'd be very surprised how few teams have this. Basically, we were talking a second ago about how a lot of managers like to get on the field and play instead of staying off the field and coaching.
[00:14:53] And one of the things that they often do is they consider themselves the only person who's working on achieving the team goal and everybody else there, all the players, all their team members are there to assist them or to take the things off their list that they don't really feel like doing. That's a more challenging organizational structure to do this kind of thing in if that's the mentality that you have about the people on your team.
[00:15:15] Lauren Marie: I have a hard time with a few things that you're saying.
Loren: Like what?
[00:15:19] Lauren Marie: Don't you think some people don't like to be measured or that metrics have been weaponized against employees? Okay. Absolutely.
[00:15:30] Loren: I mean, we just talked about a second ago, like if you have a football coach and they do seven seasons and they haven't gone to the Super Bowl, You're fired.
[00:15:38] But that actually, but like you said, knowing you get 30 seasons out of this as a farmer, like that's clear, that's good. That's freeing to know. That's a life-giving thing to give people metrics, to know what they're held accountable to, because the fact of the matter is at work, not at home because we're not talking about families or churches, right, we're talking about at work. We are here to do something. We're here to accomplish something. We're here to win the Super Bowl, perform the symphony. Like there is a pass and there is a fail. So you can't apply metrics to these other contexts that are not about that. In the environment of a football team, it doesn't make sense to keep a failing football coach.
[00:16:27] Lauren Marie: I agree with that.
[00:16:28] Loren: And that coach wants to know that…
[00:16:31] Lauren Marie: Ahead of time, you have four seasons.
[00:16:33] Loren: Right and with football, everybody knows, right? Like this is how long you get.
[00:16:36] Lauren Marie: Right. So I guess as an individual contributor on a team, how do you not weaponize metrics and how do you make it clear as you roll these out, what they are, and what they're made for? It's made to motivate and hold accountable, which you both need, but it's not to weaponize.
[00:16:55] Loren: Yeah. I mean, I'm not really sure what you mean by weaponize. What is the weapon metaphor that we're using? We're not at war. Like what we're doing here at work together is voluntarily choosing to work together on the same goal. And that goal has built in metrics and definitions of success and failure.
[00:17:15] I feel like you're maybe approaching it from a different thing. Like it's not, that's not a surprise. Everybody knows.
[00:17:23] Lauren Marie: If you have a poor manager it’s a surprise.
[00:17:24] Loren: If you have a manager who hasn't listened to the eight dimensions of a healthy team and gone through the purpose chapter and the accountability chapter and the trust chapter and the clarity chapter, and you have what you just said, these unclear things that's very dangerous.
[00:17:37] And what other bad managers do is they show up one day on their helicopter and they go, you haven't been doing your job and you haven't been doing your job for 18 months and I need to ask you to leave now. And that's all I'm going to tell you, because I talked to my attorney before this conversation and my attorney says, if you give them a reason, then they can sue you for the, having the wrong reason.
[00:17:57] If you don't give them a reason, then they can't sue you because this is a right to work state. So it's horrible management leads to the weaponization of metrics. Metrics are not the problem. Bad managers of the problem.
[00:18:11] Lauren Marie: Thank you for clarifying that. Because data is neutral.
[00:18:16] Loren: Data is just, it's just the facts, just data, right? Did you catch that ball inbounds or out of bounds? It's just what happened.
[00:18:24] Lauren Marie: Good. Okay, can we talk a little bit about how and why you need to demand stress?
[00:18:30] Loren: Demand stress?
[00:18:35] Lauren Marie: “Critical need for employee development plans: demand stress from poor poorly planned workloads.”
[00:18:40] Oh, it's not, DEMAND STRESS! It's demand stress, one of the seven types of stress is demand stress, and demands stress is when there's an incongruency between the demand and the effort, the effort required and the demand. So when people are feeling weaponized by their goals, it's because there's demand stress.
[00:19:01] Like I don't have what I need to accomplish these goals. These goals are too big.
[00:19:04] Lauren Marie: How do goals get set that are too big?
[00:19:07] Loren: In a safe environment, big goals are really good, right? Stretch goals. We don't want people to be at a hundred percent. We want them to be around 70 to 80% because we want them to actually feel engaged by the fact that, I'm not quite there yet. There's more to do. We're working towards this goal, but I think in an unhealthy context, like you're describing, you can have, certainly, a situation where goals are created without the collaboration with the employee. And they're put on the employee and they're put on the employee in a way that they're never going to be able to achieve them.
[00:19:39] Because if they look at their psychometric assessment results, they'll know, oh, you don't have what it takes to do this. Some of those things being things that you can grow in, but you still don't have them, then it's my job as the manager to give you those things. And that's what we're talking about in this development episode. Let's talk about that process for a second. What is the process for developing somebody? We follow the Manager Tools coaching model, which has four simple steps.
Step one: collaborate with your employee to set a goal
Step two: collaborate to brainstorm the resources necessary to grow
Step three: collaborate to create a plan to grow, and
Step four: the direct report acts and reports on the plan.
And this is in the manager tools, podcasts on coaching and this is in The Effective Manager book by Mark Horstman.
[00:20:29] Lauren Marie: You're really breaking down the steps of an expectation, to where I start I'm like, ah, just do it. I don't do a good job of that at all. I jump. Because I know what to do. And I want you to just know what to do. And I don't take the time to sit and drag on about all the things that we need to do.
[00:20:53] Loren: Hmm. Interesting so tell me more about that sensation. Cause I have a feeling, a lot of managers that aren't doing, this are feeling a similar sensation to the one that you just mentioned.
[00:21:03] So what, when I, when I take something that's so simple, this like just do it into four steps, you feel like that's just one step. Yeah, let's pick an example. Do you have something in mind?
[00:21:13] Lauren Marie: Yeah, I need to like slow the time down or expand the time on that idea because you're right. Manager Tools is right.
[00:21:22] To get something done well, we need to make explicit all of those steps. I don't know why, but the example I have in my head is I used to be a Wrangler and the goal was to have 30 horses ready and saddled, fed, to receive trail rides by let's say 8:00 AM.
[00:21:39] Loren: Great, great goal. Very clear. Yeah. It's got numbers all over the place, right?
[00:21:43] So any clear goal needs to have numbers. Your goal had a very specific when number of 8:00 AM and it had a very specific number of horses at 30, and you guys knew through your training what “ready” meant. Right? So it's very clear. 30 horses ready for the customers by 8:00 AM.
[00:22:00] Lauren Marie: But then you walk in, you get there early, you get on the fourwheeler and it doesn't have gas.
[00:22:05] So you can't go round up the horses. Yep. Oh, so I need gas in there every night. The person who closes needs to put the gas in here for me in the morning, or I'm not going to be able to get it done in time. Right. Or we realize yesterday three girth straps broke and they were not replaced. Now we're down to 27 horses.
[00:22:23] I don't know. Is that what you mean?
[00:22:25] Loren: So I think in a development context, I think what you're highlighting is in order to have a development conversation, we have to set a goal. There has to be something we have to be able to see that we're not achieving something. And that goal has to be specific and measurable and attainable and realistic and time-bound, right? It's gotta be a SMART goal. And when you have that goal, many things can get accomplished. So what you're describing is there could be numerous business process changes that need to be made, right?
[00:22:53] It could be that we need to start making sure we fill the gas tank in the fourwheeler the night before, and that's a business process. That's a different goal potentially. But the first step is to just have that clarified and it's written down and everybody can see it. And you are saying that you had that.
[00:23:12] So moving into a space where now we're discovering that a particular employee isn't good at something that's contributing to us missing this goal consistently. Right? Now I'm tracking something, everybody knows about it. And I'm seeing, as I look back across the past two weeks, there are 14 mornings when we could have opened at 8:00 AM with 30 horses ready.
[00:23:32] And we only did it 10 mornings and we don't, we don't want to be at 10 out of 14. We want to be at least 12 out of 14, that's our goal. Right. Then I started looking into why well, is it about the gas tank? Is it about the girth straps? Is it about Lauren Marie's ability to round them up?
[00:23:47] Right. Is it an ability issue? Because it could be highlighting this problem in all kinds of different areas, but when you determine that it's an employee ability issue. And I need you to come and tell me what the example is, but like, what's something that contributed to that, that each of the Wranglers could get better at?
[00:24:02] Lauren Marie: They could saddle the horses faster.
[00:24:04] Loren: Okay. Right. So the speed of doing one of the tasks could be something that you can improve through practice. Right? Right. Once you've identified this and I'm now talking to my employee, I'm saying, Lauren Marie, you know, we're at 10 out of 14. We really want to be at 12 out of 14.
[00:24:19] The other employees, as we're talking about, this are saying that we think it's about how fast you're doing this task that you're responsible for. I need you to get faster, now we're even breaking down to a specific task, collaborating with the employee to say, okay, I want to be able to do one of these things in under 10 seconds.
[00:24:35] Now we've together, come up with a goal. I didn't come up with a goal on my own and give it to you. We worked together to collaborate on the goal.
[00:24:43] Lauren Marie: I think though, some of the things that happen to me when I get the whole goal of have 30 horses ready by 8:00 AM. And I come in and the gas tank isn't full. I assume that's my fault that I didn't get there early enough to have the gas in there.
[00:24:57] Loren: Well, that can come out in the conversation. Then maybe you're, as you're talking about with the team, you're brainstorming and you're going, oh, it's not a buckling time issue. It's a night before issue, it's showing up earlier issue. You weren't…
[00:25:11] Lauren Marie: As a manager, as a coach, you want to get at those types of questions.
[00:25:16] Instead of, if you have employees that are automatically gonna assume it was their fault, cause that's what I would have done.
[00:25:23] Loren: Yeah. But I mean, assuming it's your fault as an employee on a team, is better than you know, shifting the blame to somebody else. I guess that's not a bad answer. If you come to the conclusion as an employee yourself, that you need to get better at something and you take it upon yourself to get better at that I mean, that's, that's really good. I think what we're trying to do is talk with the leaders and say, do you have clear goals in the first place? If not, go back to the purpose chapter and set really clear goals. Does everybody on the team know them? If not go back to the episode on clarity and cascade the goal throughout the organization.
[00:25:56] Now we're talking about development, you've already got these goals clear you're working together. The team has a safe environment where they're talking about weaknesses. The issue is now, can we get it from 10 to 12 out of 14? Now we're brainstorming on what's the goal, what resources are available to do this? And we're, we're just, we're doing this in a collaborative environment.
[00:26:14] Lauren Marie: Right, in a non-anxious way. Right. Cowboys can be anxious.
[00:26:18] Loren: I bet.
[00:26:19] The four steps in the manager tools coaching model are:
Step 1: Collaborate to set a goal,
Step 2: Collaborate to brainstorm resources,
Step 3: Collaborate to create a plan,
Step 4: The direct report acts and reports on the plan. (the first one that doesn't have the word collaborate to start it).
[00:26:41] A big part of what they're trying to say is that it's not just up to the employee to be good at things. It's not just up to the manager to dictate the goals and then tell people that they're failing. Although that would be a great step compared to a lot of the managers we work with who don't even know what the goals are or tell their employees anything.
[00:27:00] They just like, hide, don't have one-on-ones and then wish that employees would just do their jobs. So collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. Let's set the goal together. Let's brainstorm the resources to achieve the goal. Let's create a plan together, but then I'm the manager. It's not my job to do the plan.
[00:27:17] I cannot grow your ability to buckle the buckle buckles things.
[00:27:23] Lauren Marie: What's it called? Fasten the girth strap. I don't even know if that's…
[00:27:25] Loren: Right, like, I can't do that for you. If that's taking you 20 seconds and we all set a standard together that it's five seconds. I can't as the manager come in early, stay late, practice, doing it a hundred times in a row with a stopwatch.
[00:27:39] Like the stopwatch is the resource coming in early. And staying late are the resources, the plan is to practice this a hundred times a day for a hundred days until you're better at it. Like we can brainstorm all of those things together, but actually doing it is up to the employee.
[00:27:53] Lauren Marie: I think I often feel, in the work environment that it is, not collaborate with the goal. The goal is given, and then there is no plan to accomplish the goal. I'm expected to just do it.
[00:28:07] Loren: Yeah. I think that is extremely common.
[00:28:08] Lauren Marie: And I'll do whatever it takes to get it done to the best of my ability and then fail when they didn't provide the hay to feed the horses.
[00:28:18] Loren: And that's step two, right?
[00:28:22] We have to assume, we're going into this assuming that there's resources that you need in order to develop. And one of the major resources is time. Is there time in my work schedule for me to develop? Managers have complete authority to give time. They can also pay, they can incentivize, they can, you know, in a lot of cases, like, employers are paying for higher degrees of higher education. In order to learn this thing that you want to develop, we're going to, you have Arizona State University send us the bill. We'll pay, and we'll give you the time to go to school because it's so important to us, for you to be developing.
[00:29:02] There's time resources, there's money resources, and then there's resource resources. So the stopwatch costs a little bit of time, right? I mean, it costs a little bit of money. There's even just, you know, other resources like books and support groups and communities of practice and educational sessions.
[00:29:23] So there's just all kinds of resources. Some employees that you talk to might be like, oh, well, now that we have both collaborated to discern that this is a goal, I just need a half hour a week and I learn through podcasts or reading blog posts, or can I have 25 bucks to get a book from Amazon, right? So sometimes you find out like now that I've brainstormed a goal with you and the employee feels like this is okay to talk about a goal that I'm not hitting, that we want to hit someday.
[00:29:49] Now let's collaborate on the resources. It's actually not going to take that much time or money. We just hadn't gone through step one yet. Right? It's a $25 book. It's a half hour a week on the clock to read it. Or this is so important. I want you to take as much time as you need to, to read this book this week.
[00:30:05] Your coworkers, Sally and Jennifer and Tony and Mitch, will take the tasks off of your plate this week, because we're all in this together and you need to grow and we're going to give you the week just to read. So we've collaborated on the goal. We've collaborated to brainstorm those resources, and then we've collaborated to create that plan that I just mentioned. Your coworkers are going to take the tasks off your plate. You're gonna put your head down and focus on following this plan this week, absorbing these resources.
[00:30:35] Lauren Marie: Yeah, that's good.
[00:30:36] Loren: And I think for our low C listeners, they're probably experiencing the same thing.
[00:30:40] Like what do you mean? You don't know what to do. I know what to do, figure it out, do it.
[00:30:50] Lauren Marie: But it is true that people don't understand.
[00:30:54] Loren: And have you set aside enough time and created an environment of safety where they will tell you? It's okay to ask questions. You don't understand your job. You don't know what your goals are. Great, now we know. Let's talk about it. We have 30 minutes together every week. We'll figure this out in no time.
[00:31:13] Lauren Marie: Yeah, that's good. What's next?
[00:31:16] Loren: I guess the last thing we want to say in this episode is just that we've talked a lot in all eight of these episodes about doing weekly one-on-ones with your direct reports for 30 minutes. And in our model, which also comes from the Manager Tools one-on-one agenda, it's a 30 minute one-on-one. The first 10 minutes, they're set by the employee. The second 10 minutes are set by the manager and the third 10 minutes are for development. So there is a set place in the agenda of every weekly one-on-one. Most one-on-ones will actually take more like 15 minutes for the employees agenda and 15 minutes for the manager’s agenda, and that last 10 minutes of development time will get pushed out, but we really want you to take responsibility as the leader of your team to make sure it doesn't get pushed out every single time. Make sure that at least once a month, as part of your continuous development plan with all of your employees, you're talking about the future with your employees.
[00:32:18] So you're having a weekly one-on-one. And at least once a month, you're reserving the last third of that meeting to talk about their development and growth with them.
[00:32:29] That's how you make development a continuous process on your team. Add in quarterly OKR reviews. And now you've got a whole system that's adjusting every 13 weeks. Instead of maybe once a year, we'll remember we need to do this.
[00:32:44] Lauren Marie: You mentioned earlier in this podcast that we are a little bit like the doctors or the trainers, as our role as consultants and coaches. And if you think of the doctor, it's someone you don't really want to see. I don't really want to see my doctor. I love my doctor, but I'm going there because I have a problem.
[00:33:06] And before I go to the doctor, I'm always asking myself, am I getting enough sleep? Am I drinking water? Am I eating food that's good for me. Am I moving my body? Am I stressed out about something? And I go through a little bit of a checklist before I call to make the appointment. And it's almost as if you, as you were talking, there are a few things you can do as a manager to help you stay healthy as a manager before you call us.
[00:33:35] Listening to this podcast is one of them, but are you having 30 minute one-on-ones each week with your direct reports? Are you having weekly team meetings? And are you making the implicit explicit for your employees and taking the time to talk to them? Are you able, at least once a day, to be vulnerable with one person on your team? If you start doing those things, you're well, on your way to not having to see us.
[00:34:01] Loren: Yeah, that's great. I mean, I do like to think of us as not only the emergency room doctor. With the painkillers cause we are that definitely. But we do also like to play a wellness coach sort of role to then have you look towards the future. And I think there is a lot in our medical system that is about responding to problems and fixing broken things.
[00:34:26] And so we do those things, but there are definitely practices that you can put into place right now as a leader to begin to grow a healthy team, the same way that you have things in your schedule as a physical body, that you need to do to stay healthy and maintain health and pursue wellness.
[00:34:42] Lauren Marie: We do want to do a lot of preventative care and we have tools and resources available to help you succeed.
[00:34:49] Loren: The personal trainer and the physical therapist and the emergency room, all at kutskoconsulting.com. We have created an entire quiz that only takes a couple minutes at teamhealthscore.com so that you can self-assess the health of your team today.
[00:35:06] We wanted you to just quickly be able to evaluate, how's it going? How am I doing as a leader? How's the culture of my team? It's self-reported so you can get a quick read and then schedule some time with us to go through the results so that you can get an understanding of what you, as the leader of your team need to grow your team in.
[00:35:25] And that's at teamhealthscore.com
[00:35:28] Lauren Marie: It's an incredible tool that you've developed.
[00:35:30] Loren: Thanks.
[00:35:32] Lauren Marie: You're welcome.
[00:35:33] Loren: We like solving problems. Thanks so much for being with us today. We have enjoyed having you with us so much for all eight of these episodes and the 8 Dimensions of a Healthy Team.
[00:35:40] Lauren Marie: If you have made it this far in the podcast, how can we support you? What have you learned?
[00:35:46] Loren: Thanks for listening to The Integrated Leader podcast. My name is Loren. This is Lauren Marie, and it is a pleasure to partner with you on this journey towards team health.
[00:35:55] Lauren Marie: Goodbye.
Lauren Marie: Thank you for joining us today. We are thrilled to have you here. It's important to remember that as with all learning, just having the information does not automatically lead to transformation. We can give you all of the analytics and methodologies, but team transformation will not happen without you incorporating new behaviors into your leadership practice.
Listening to a podcast without beginning to practice better management is a lot like learning about exercise without moving your body. Starting anything new will feel awkward and funny at times. This is normal and doesn't mean you should stop. Discomfort is a sign that it is working and that your brain is getting stronger. Stick with it.
Commit to trying our methods for eight weeks to six months and then observe and see what's next. See you next time on The Integrated Leader Podcast.
