1.  Do they respect you

Why are you giving advice to this leader?  Is it necessary to help improve their performance?  Do you have a stake in their success?  Does the leader trust your motives, your interest in their success, and your knowledge about the subject.  Do they have reason to believe you have some expertise in the subject?  The confidence the leader has in your genuine concern for them, your expertise about the subject, and your common interest in their success will greatly influence their willingness to listen and act on your coaching guidance.  Do you have the authority to enforce negative or positive consequences for this leader?  If so, you can get compliance even without the above considerations, but you will get much better and longer lasting results if the above are all true.

2.  Have they bought into the quantitative assessment of their performance and agree with the feedback?

If the measurements show the leader’s performance is very good, employees buy-in easily; so if you are getting disagreement, we can assume the measurements show performance shortcomings.  However, the measurement tools have been carefully built over a long time to be resilient.  They come from extremely diverse observations and this diversity provides extremely accurate placement.  The absolute number may not be perfectly accurate to the decimal point, but the ranking information is accurate and reliable.  Receiving this news, if it is bad, drives a person through the stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.  Respect this process but be firm.  Use hard metrics to verify the measurements and accelerate the process, but be tactful and kind (Please see the 5 Stages of Grief)

3.  Do they agree with the qualitative assessment regarding the upside benefits of improving and the downside consequences of not improving?

The next step in this process is to gain buy-in.  Change is difficult.  Do you have the evidence or experience to justify your prediction of a better future state if the leader undertakes the change you expect?  Does the leader agree that if their performance changed, the results would be better for the entire organization?  Do you have authority to enforce the consequences, or do you have access to the authority structure in your organization to enforce the consequences of refusing to change?  Have you done this employee counseling in the past with known outcomes?  Do you have access to a system that has taken these actions in the past?  There is no reason to be defensive about measurements.  In order to perform and improve, all organizations must measure their current state to understand their starting point.  Success Profiles, Inc. can provide you with examples from thousands of other organizations and many leaders and their results.

4.  Are they willing to prioritize the improvement initiatives at the top of their to-do list

Are they “winning by losing slowly”?  When they mis-prioritize taking action to address your feedback to where progress is inconsistent and not a driving daily activity is a form of passive aggressive behavior designed to avoid change while not appearing to fight your instructions.

5.  Are they willing to devote significant time every day to improvement initiatives?

Change is difficult work.  Until a new behavior is ingrained into a person—and even harder, an organization’s—behavior, it must be constantly practiced and reinforced.  As the leader’s coach, you must recognize the necessary behavior and monitor that steps are being made—especially early in the process when the performance is not deeply established.

6.  Are they willing to create a written plan with a specific timeline and hard target milestones

It can be difficult to receive and accept this feedback, make the changes it requires, and especially difficult to get an organization to continuously make progress towards fulfillment in this new direction.  A written plan with specific commitments and interim milestones to confirm progress at controllable intervals is an important step in confirming progress.

7.  Are they willing to consistently measure their performance

This step is important, especially if the change is difficult or complex.  Changed behavior is, by its nature, not easy and the temptation will be to rationalize.  Comparing subjective assessments with hard metrics is a strong way to fight this tendency.  Taking measurements minimizes forces objective assessment about actual progress.

8.  Are they willing to meet often with their coach for feedback and progress checks

Has the leader truly accepted the feedback and the change it requires?  Sometimes any change is good, but usually we want highly targeted change.  Frequent feedback ensures the change is positive, on-pace, not meeting unexpected problems and producing the desired outcomes.

9.  Are they willing to go public with their challenges and progress?

Sharing with strangers is an acceptance of the limitations of past performance, commitment to the new path of continuous change, and public commitment to a different outcome.  It reinforces the personal commitment, the commitment to the boss, and the organization, and is public reinforcement of the message of change being communicated to all employees by both word and action.   It demonstrates a long term commitment to continual change.  It signifies a lack of ownership of any place in the performance journey but rather ownership of a willingness to always continue to keep trying to improve. It is also a mark of professionalism and maturity.

10.  Are they willing to seek additional feedback and/or coaching from others regarding your initiatives?

There are many ways to give the same message.  Often reinforcement of the feedback can make the message stronger, and in some case, it can reveal insight by coming from a different source or by using different words, or for a completely unknown reason.  Allowing, or even encouraging a leader to get additional feedback, gives the leader a chance to assimilate information from multiple sources and make s the information more resilient in their mental arsenal.   It also can generate additional questions for you.   This opportunity to gain added insights into the questions the leader has improves and accelerates the change process and results in better outcomes earlier.

What’s your Coachability?

Take the Coachability Assessment and identify your level of coachability (Page 1) or a colleague’s level of coachability (Page 2)