12 Ways to “Level Up” Your Team
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“Coaching is giving people the help they need by asking the right questions. integrated into what they're doing every day.”
–Mike Goldman
The Misconception of Training as a Panacea
- Training is often seen as a one-size-fits-all solution.
- It may not reflect real-world scenarios or address individual learning styles.
- Training is seen as separate from work, lacks accountability, and it's challenging to measure ROI.
Exploring Alternatives to Traditional Training
Setting Clearer Expectations: Define explicit expectations and success metrics for roles.
Coaching: Offer personalized guidance integrated into daily work.
Hiring: Improve the team by hiring individuals who elevate the overall skill level.
Cutting the Cord: Let go of underperformers to enhance team performance.
Having Difficult Discussions: Address performance issues directly to foster improvement.
Changing Roles: Reassign individuals to roles that better fit their strengths.
Implementing New Tools: Introduce automation or AI to enhance efficiency.
Fixing Crappy Processes: Streamline processes with clear ownership and accountability.
Stronger Leadership: Develop leaders who can inspire and motivate the team.
Group Problem Solving: Collaborate on solutions to leverage diverse insights.
Accountability: Enforce responsibilities and consequences to encourage improvement.
The Multifaceted Approach to Skill and Performance Enhancement
- Training is just one of twelve strategies to enhance team skills and performance.
- Improving performance is an ongoing process, not a one-time event.
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One of the things I love about doing this show is that the topics come real easy. When I first said, let me do a podcast. It scared the heck out of me that after 15 or 20 shows, I would run out of things to talk about. What I didn't realize is that. What makes it easy and what makes it fun is I just work with my clients.
I work with the leadership teams to do their quarterly planning and do all the work we do and In the middle of working with leadership team, I just jot down a note and go, Oh my God, I could talk about that on the podcast. So all these topics, I think I'm somewhere in the late sixties in terms of number of episodes, not in age.
I'm not there yet. not too far, but late sixties in terms of number of episodes. And the topics just keep coming from work I do with my clients. So anyway, so that's, that's a beautiful thing and, and leads me into, I was working with a client very, very recently, just last week as I'm recording this.
And that client wanted to. Level up the skills on their team. They were growing at a nice clip and came to the realization and accurate realization that in order to keep growing profitably. They needed some additional skills on the team. They needed to kind of up level some of the skills that were already on the team.
And when we were talking about how to do that, of course, people immediately think training. That's the word. What do we need to do to train these folks? And for me as a coach, the word training, it's kind of like fingernails on a blackboard. I just have that kind of visceral reaction to it. And, and training is important.
I shouldn't be negative towards training. I kind of am, but I shouldn't be negative towards training. Training is important. I have certainly gone through some training that have, you know, changed my life, but I think too often we think training is the be all end all with it. We're going to do this event called training and it's going to solve all of our problems.
And I have a number of problems with training. People think of training as. A one size fits all. In other words, you know, we need to, train our leaders. We're going to do a leadership development program, and here's what the leadership development program looks like. Well, there's not a one size fits all to how we learn.
People learn in very different ways. And, and I don't think training effectively, deals. with that. So training tries to be a one size fits all where that's not what we need. That's not the way we learn. That's not reality. Training is not always real world. When you go out and get training on a skill like leadership, And, that's just a good example for me to use.
some of the training, some of the examples, some of the exercises are not real world. I think the best way for us to learn how to be better leaders is to deal with some of the real challenges of, of leading and, and learn along the way.training feels separate. then work. What I mean by that is kind of you got work and now it's time to go to this full day training program or this two hour training program.
And it's something separate from work as opposed to it being in fully integrated in the work we do with most training. There is very little accountability for taking action. You check the box and therefore you've done the training. Good job. There's also little ability to calculate an ROI, a return on investment from the training.
People go through these elaborate training programs and there aren't typically any good measures for whether people are A, using those skills that they trained on and B, if they are using them, are they providing any real return on investment? So when we think about leveling up the skills of an organization, leveling up their performance of an organization, what is what we're really talking about.
It's about performance, not about skills. Skills just allow you to perform at a higher level. I do think training is negative as I'm being on training. Training's part of the mix, but I actually think training is one 12th of the solution.
And, and let me take you through what I think the other 11 are in no particular order, after training number one, number two would be setting clearer expectations.
For your team members, if you want them to level up their skill, level up their performance as a leader, we need to be crystal clear as to what we expect out of people. We need to be clear that in that marketing role, our expectation is not just something like the new website. Live on budget and on time or our new logo looks great.
We're expecting 10 new marketing qualified leads per week, every week. So we need to be crystal, crystal clear on setting expectations. In fact, in the, a methodology I love called top grading in a book called who the a method for hiring that I recommend to anyone that will listen. They, they have a, template and, and a process for creating a job.
Scorecard for each role that lays out the roles and response that the mission of the role, the roles and the roles and responsibilities, the competencies required. And I think most importantly, what are the measures of success for that role? So if you know the first way we talk about to level up a team's skill and performance is training, the second one would be setting clear expectations.
The third is coaching. Again, one of the problems I have with training is it kind of feels separate from work. Coaching is not. Coaching is giving people the help they need by asking the right questions. integrated into what they're doing every day. They have a challenge. They have an opportunity to coach them through it.
Best book I've ever read on coaching people is the coaching habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. So go read that book. But the third way to level up the team, very different than training is coaching. The fourth is hiring. If you need to level up the performance of your team, level up the skills of your team, you've got to be hiring the right people.
And with, with each time you hire, you need to be raising the average, raising the average skill level, raising the average performance, building productivity and building culture at the same time. So when you think about leveling up, leveling up an organization, think about, Better hiring practice. I mean, yeah, hiring practices.
I mentioned who the, a method for hiring early, earlier written by Jeff smart, again, best book I've ever read on hiring. Number five is knowing when to cut the cord on folks that are hurting the team. Folks that either are a poor fit culturally, folks that can't,meet. The productivity KPIs that you've set, they don't have the capability.
If you want to raise the overall skill level of your team, raise the performance of your team. Sometimes that means cutting the cord on underperformers. Let them become a superstar somewhere else because they're not going to do it in your house. They're not going to do it in your company. It's good for them.
It's good for you. You're raising the all overall average of performance on the team. That was number five. Number six is learning how to have difficult discussions. Well, learning how to have difficult discussions and also putting on your big boy pants or your big girl pants and having the courage to have those discussions.
Difficult discussions. There is another podcast episode somewhere. I don't remember the, the number or the date, but if you look up how to have difficult discussions, it's a whole podcast about how to have difficult discussions, but if you want to level up the skills, level up the performance of your team, you need to be comfortable.
You need to be productive in having the difficult discussions to give people the feedback they need to hear in holding people, accountable in ways that are sometimes difficult where you've got to let people know where, how they need to level up and what the consequences are if they don't level up.
So difficult discussions, that's number six. Number seven is. Maybe you've got some people that need a new role within the organization. If you've got someone who is a great culture fit, but their productivity is not what it needs to be, and you're not sure they have the capability to get there, maybe it is a great.
Maybe it's a salesperson that is great. They are the best around at opening up new relationships that building relationships and friendships, but man, they just don't have that. Instinct to, to close the deal. They just don't have, seemingly don't have the capabilities to close the deal. And. Maybe because of that, they're a low performer or a mediocre performer.
Well, if you could figure out a way to change their role to better leverage their strengths and stay away from their weaknesses, like maybe if this person's so great at building relationships, maybe there's a business development role where their goal is to open up new strategic relationships, strategic partnerships, or maybe it's a service role where they're Taking care of clients and keeping those relationships going.
That person can go from low performing to high performing in the snap of a finger. So number seven way to level up the performance, level up the skill on your team is change their role. Number eight is maybe they need some new tools. It could be as simple as your team is doing something very manually that can be automated.
It could be as simple as your team is struggling over generating copy that chat GPT can generate a first draft of in 5%, 1%. Of the time, it could be, there are, there are, there's research or there's decisions that could be made with AI. So maybe it's automation of a process to make it more efficient. Maybe it is using AI to make your decisions or your copy more, more, more, more effective, but think about new tools as a way to level up performance of your team.
That's number eight, kind of related to new tools, but different. Number 10, number nine is create a better process. You might have crappy processes that are in the way from your team leveling up. What are you doing to improve those processes? What are you doing to have accountability, an owner for those processes?
Very often we have accountability for a function. We know who owns a marketing. We know who owns sales. We know who owns finance. But what about the process, the cross functional process of onboarding a new client, onboarding a new employee, launching a new product, launching a new service. Those are typically disjointed processes because there's multiple owners.
Sometimes improving a process is as simple as having One owner with a way to measure success and some motivation and some accountability to make that process more effective. So that's number nine, number 10 way to level up. The performance of your team is stronger leadership. Maybe you as a leader or your team of leaders need to get better at motivating people, inspiring people, communicating.
With people, being more of an evangelist of, of, of the company vision. So number 10 is stronger leadership. When we talk about leveling up skills, we typically talk about what do our direct reports need to do to level up their skill? Well, no, maybe part of it is what do you need to do to become a stronger leader, to create a better environment for them, for your direct reports.
To level up their skill. That's number 10. Number 11 is group problem solving. Whereas coaching is typically one on one group problem solving is it could be within a function, a bunch of people in marketing getting together to help solve problems within marketing, or it could be cross functions. How do we get better at launching new projects, new products, and we're going to get operations together with sales, together with marketing, together with product development.
So group problem solving, a way of brainstorming. where people don't feel like they're in it alone. If you can leverage the brains of six or eight or 10 people instead of just one, then you're going to level up the performance of your team. And lastly, number 12 is Accountability. Can you level up the performance of your team by putting more teeth into the process by doing a better job as a leader, holding folks accountable for making the changes they need to make more importantly, getting the results they need to get.
So let me quickly summarize. What I just said and, and wrap things up. So if you want to level up their skills, level up the performance of your team, there were 12 different ways that we talked about. Number one was training. Number two was setting clear expectations. Number three was coaching. Number four, hiring number five, cutting the cord.
Number six, Having the difficult discussions, number seven, change somebody's role. Number eight, implement some new tools. Number nine, fix crappy processes. Number 10, stronger leadership. Number 11, group problem solving. Number 12, accountability. Stop thinking about training as the be all end all. Of leveling up skills, leveling up performance.
That is one out of at least 12. I'm sure you could think of 13, 14, 15, but on this list, it's one of 12 things. And I would argue it's not one of the stronger ones. Stop also thinking about leveling up skills as an event. It is ongoing and it never, ever, ever. And of course, remember you can't create a company without a great leadership team.
I hope I got you closer there today. Talk to you again soon.