Coaching Sustainable Performance

SUMMARY

There’s a lot of burnouts going on around the world right now. People are feeling more stressed, tired and disengaged. The presenteeism statistics have gone up in the latest Gallup poll, where people are actively disengaged in bigger numbers and looking for other places to work.

The quiet resignation has now got a lot noisier. People are reassessing where they are and what they're prepared to give just to earn an income. It's an epidemic across the globe right now, and with attraction and retention being in the worst place that it's been for a long time, this is creating more problems for you as a leader. Therefore, it's heaping on more stress for you.

This isn't just about helping your people and building those relationships; there are also some gems in there for you. Just because you’re the leader, it doesn't make you exempt from having all these challenges.

This week, I want to talk to you about how you, as the leader, can lessen this problem for yourself and your people by helping you understand how to coach sustainable performance.

When I talk about performance in the 9 crucial shifts, in the professional area of leadership I talk about a shift from high performance to sustainable performance.

Today is about taking people on a journey but ensuring they've got enough energy to be who they need to be in every area of their lives.

If you do that as a leader, that's going to create sticky teams where people want to stay because they go: “This is an environment I want to work in. This allows me to be who I am in every area of life. It's not just about swapping hours for dollars and giving my pound of flesh. It's a more holistic approach to my well-being.”

So, getting that for yourself first and making sure that you understand what it is to sustain your performance and how you need to look after yourself and exercise self-approval and self-care, and all the things we've talked about, is the first step.

The second thing you need to do as a leader is have a shift in your thinking from performance management to performance coaching.

Coaching sustainable performance as a leader and then having that as something that everybody looks after each other with means that your team is going to be able to be who they need to be to get you where it is that you need to go in this fast-paced, ever-changing, super VUCA world.

So, shift one is to move away from having a performance management methodology to one that is more conversational and relational, one that helps the individuals and, therefore, the collective to move forward together in a healthy and sustainable way.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around all things relationships and leadership by helping you learn how to build a deeper level of trust with your team.

I'll see you then.
 

TRANSCRIPT

Are you finding it more challenging to keep your people engaged? Sometimes, they're not turning up to work, and there's a lot more sickness going on around the world.

Well, that's pretty common right now, and burnout is on the rise.

What I want to do this week is talk to you about how you, as the leader, can lessen this problem for yourself and your people.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue our conversation around these relationship management competencies by helping you understand how to coach sustainable performance.

There’s a lot of burnouts going on around the world right now. People are feeling more stressed, tired and disengaged. The presenteeism statistics have gone up in the latest Gallup poll, where people are actively disengaged in bigger numbers and looking for other places to work.

The quiet resignation has now got a lot noisier. People are reassessing where they are and what they're prepared to give just to earn an income. It's an epidemic across the globe right now, and with attraction and retention being in the worst place that it's been for a long time, this is creating more problems for you as a leader. Therefore, it's heaping on more stress for you.

This isn't just about helping your people and building those relationships; there are also some gems in there for you. Just because you’re the leader, it doesn't make you exempt from having all these challenges.

Before we get into this, you need to understand about this shift.

When I talk about performance in the 9 crucial shifts, in the professional area of leadership I talk about a shift from high performance to sustainable performance.

Pushing yourself long hours, like working week in, week out, month in, month out, year in-year out for a long period, is not sustainable.

What you need to do as a leader for yourself, and then modelling and teaching it to your team, is to shift the mindset around that. You also need to make sure that you understand that sometimes you are going to need to work at that high-performance level and that you need to maintain a healthy brain and body balance so that you can sustain your performance over a long period of time.

The reason most people burn out is they just keep giving to a point where the finite resource of their energy dissipates, and so they give up.

That's what it's all about today.

Today is about taking people on a journey but ensuring they've got enough energy to be who they need to be in every area of their lives.

If you do that as a leader, that's going to create sticky teams where people want to stay because they go: “This is an environment I want to work in. This allows me to be who I am in every area of life. It's not just about swapping hours for dollars and giving my pound of flesh. It's a more holistic approach to my well-being.”

So, getting that for yourself first and making sure that you understand what it is to sustain your performance and how you need to look after yourself and exercise self-approval and self-care, and all the things we've talked about, is the first step.

The second thing you need to do as a leader is have a shift in your thinking from performance management to performance coaching.

Performance management is all about managing people and people do not want to be managed. They do not want to be told what to do and fall in line with a set of guidelines and rules. That's not how most people operate.

We manage the process, but we need to lead people.

Doing a yearly sit-down with people, ticking boxes, and telling them what they've done well and what they need to improve on is not the way that a leader works in today's world. Being a great leader in today's world is about having that regular relationship of check-ins to make sure that everything's going okay, not waiting until it's too late, where people are just being judged on their performance for salary reviews and all these things.

No one wants performance appraisals:

No one wants to do them, and no one wants to receive them.

They're a negative environment as it is.

What you want to do is to shift your thinking from performance management to taking people on a journey of support and accountability, which is all about coaching.

When you look at that, you learn how to have coaching conversations and how to be a mentor to people. What you can do is make sure that you look for the signs that you have a conversation about well-being. You also need to make sure that you help people to set boundaries. When you do this, you are passing the baton of the things that you are taking on yourself.

It's not a matter of being perfect before you start helping others. It's about having casual conversations that tell them things that you are doing that are working well. It's about being present — looking in and making sure that they are setting healthy boundaries for themselves.

It's very refreshing to see, around the world now, large organisations that are cutting off people's access to emails out of hours. They're setting an environment where people are not able to damage their health and well-being by being plugged in all the time.

All these are great, however what's really going to work is a leader who fosters an environment where everyone looks after everybody, where everyone's got your back, and everyone has that accountability to speak the truth into people's lives in a loving and caring way.

As a leader, to coach another person's performance is a key and critical skill.

I'm not expecting you to do what I do. This is what I do for a living. If I were to try and do what you do, I would give it a go, and I wouldn't (perhaps) be able to do it all that well. It would be something I'd have to learn over and over with repetition, just like I've done as a sustainable performance coach.

But it's about just the little things, the one percenters that help people to sustain their performance. It's about being able to pull people in and tell them things that you're noticing.

It's about setting and fostering a culture that says: “If I see somebody that's working too hard or working long hours and pushing themselves for too long, then I'll speak up."

Coaching sustainable performance as a leader and then having that as something that everybody looks after each other with means that your team is going to be able to be who they need to be to get you where it is that you need to go in this fast-paced, ever-changing, super VUCA world.

So, shift one is to move away from having a performance management methodology to one that is more conversational and relational, one that helps the individuals and, therefore, the collective to move forward together in a healthy and sustainable way.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around all things relationships and leadership by helping you learn how to build a deeper level of trust with your team.

I'll see you then.