Coach employees to coach each other
McNeill’s passion for helping other people isn’t like a surgeon performing brain surgery. Instead, he’s more like an ever-accessible first-aid kit, mending his employees’ daily bumps and bruises.
“We’re all about helping people, and part of that definition is coaching and mentoring folks, helping people grow and learn,” he says. “And people grow and learn probably more from making mistakes than from success. So what we’re trying to do is find these little teachable moments.”
While annual evaluations can check employees’ general progress, more meaningful lessons are spurred by everyday behavior. McNeill watches employees interact with each other and with customers to find opportunities for adjustments.
“It is more often outside of the formal evaluation process, where we have opportunities to take a manager and say, ‘I was in that meeting that you led the other day; how did you feel the meeting went? What went right? What didn’t go so well? Here’s what I saw.’ Every day there are lots of opportunities.”
During his rounds one morning, for example, McNeill noticed a nurse struggling to communicate with a patient’s family. So he pulled her aside and asked her to switch roles, imagining herself as the family and considering how she would like to hear the news.
“Part of our job as leaders is daily helping find those coachable moments and act on them,” he says. “And frankly, the sooner you can act on those moments, the more meaningful they are.”
But you can’t spot every opportunity for improvement, nor do you have time to tend to every employee. So encourage managers to step in and coach each other and have them do the same with their employees.
Pay attention to which employees tend to socialize together in order to pair up employees who are already comfortable with each other. Then encourage stronger employees to offer insight to their struggling colleagues.
“If you can have someone that you trust and who is not threatening help you along or at least ask the right questions, make you think about it and weigh one approach over the other, those are the best moments,” McNeill says.
He guides employees through the conversation in three steps. First, ask how your co-worker feels about the decision he or she made and whether he or she would have done it differently.
“We’re always asking the question, ‘Now if we had that one over to do again, how would we have done it better?’” McNeill says. “And I think that that kind of nonthreatening discussion leads to a lot of growth.”
Second, pull examples from your own experience to illustrate a different scale for measuring the options. Explain not just what you did, but why you decided to do it.
“Say, ‘Hey, you know, here’s how I kind of sized it up. Here’s what you might have said instead,’” he says.
Finally, ask for feedback to make it less like a confrontation and more like a conversation.
“Say, ‘Well, what do you think? What are the pros and cons of that approach?’” McNeill says. “And so, in a way, it’s more intellectual and didactic than confrontational.”
These conversations aren’t necessarily about correcting behavior with the right answer. They’re more about opening employees up to other perspectives.
“Having robust discussions about the different approaches we took in certain situations leads to a lot of enlightened thinking,” he says. “A lot of it, too, is just developing the experience and judgment that you can apply. What we’re trying to do is just elevate our fund of common sense and judgment, and we do that by spending a lot of time talking to each other about stuff that’s happened.”
Because other employees could be struggling with similar issues out of your sight, don’t let teachable moments become isolated incidents. McNeill takes examples back to his executive meetings for them to share with their teams, as well.
