Inside Scoop

Image: Edwin Malet

In my previous startup lesson, I talked about people you should fire ASAP. To boil it down, you should only fire people who have one of these three hard-to-fix problems:

1. Terrible teamwork skills
2. Slow or unwilling learner
3. Low commitment to the startup

These are the only three reasons I would send somebody on their way; for almost anything else, there’s a solution:

Coaching.

Note that the list above does not include “doesn’t have all the skills to do the job”, “did something I didn’t like”, or even “poor cultural fit”; while these can sometimes be deal-breakers, in many cases, a good coach can help the person improve their skills or change their behavior enough that they do perform well. (Within reason of course!)

I learned this quite by accident. At the age of 21 I was supervising a team of up to 8 HTML developers as a first-time manager. I knew that I didn’t know a lot about management and mostly worked by instinct, while I feverishly tried to educate myself in my (minimal) spare time. Luckily, I stumbled upon a great book called Coaching for Improved Work Performance, which has been the single biggest influence on my style as a manager.

Many of the randomly-selected business books I read back then (chosen because the title sounded like something I ought to know) where filled with interesting theories of little or no practical application for a line-manager like myself. Or worse, they were long treatises on brown-nosing as a way to get ahead. (Not my style.)

By contrast, Coaching for Improved Work Performance sets out all the main reasons an employee might not perform to your expectations. None of those reasons are “the employee sucks.” Instead, there’s a long list of questions that managers can ask to find out what caused the problem:

- Does Employee Know Performance Is Unsatisfactory?
- Does Employee Know What Is Supposed to Be Done?
- Does Employee Know How To Do It?
- Does Employee Know Why It Should Be Done?
- Are There Obstacles Beyond Employee’s Control?
- Does Employee Think Your Way Will Not Work?
- Does Employee Think His Or Her Way Is Better?
- Does Employee Think Something Else Is More Important?
- Are There Positive Consequences to Employee for Performing Appropriately?
- Does Negative Consequence Follow Performance?

…etc.

The first job of a coach is to create a shared understand within the team re what must be done, when, how and why. The second job is to train all team members so they have the skills to execute. Third to monitor performance so they can give exactly the feedback team each member needs at the appropriate moment.

A surprising number of people who are fired for under-performance or for being a ‘poor fit’ actually have issues covered by the first four questions on the list: either they don’t know their performance isn’t good enough, or they’re not sure what, how or why they should be doing things. When that happens, the problem isn’t really the employee; it’s the manager’s lack of coaching skills.

Being a good coach has many benefits. When I first read the book and started applying the techniques in it, I was quickly able to improve the performance of my whole team. In a chaotic web-development shop, we consistently beat our deadlines by so much that it compensated for delays caused by under-resourcing in the design team and minimal management of the programming team.

Even better, asking myself these questions every time something wasn’t done to my expectations made me a better manager. It trained me to be clear and explicit about exactly what’s needed; to know my team’s skill level so I can assign tasks that are just a little beyond it; and to give everyone enough background info to understand why their tasks matter.

(Hope everyone here The Wardrobe Channel more-or-less agrees with that )

No doubt the book resonated with me at least partly because my major in college was psychology, so I ‘get’ theories centered on one-on-one or small-group interaction. However, the more important thing is that the coaching techniques work: it wouldn’t be a favorite if they didn’t!

Coaching seems to be much trendier now than it was when this book first came out: even top executives have coaches to help them improve their performance. But unlike some of the management fads that come and go, this is one with real substance.

If you’re not yet a great coach, but you’re trying to manage a startup, it’s probably time you learn to be one.