Why Coaching Application Bridges The Gap Between Learning And Performance

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Chapters

• 1:13 Why Training Fails Without Follow-Through
• 1:55 Defining Coaching Application
• 2:25 Conflicting Messages After Training
• 3:02 Change, AI, And Skill Shifts
• 3:40 Leaders On The Spot About AI
• 4:56 Trust, Messaging, And Hard Truths
• 6:34 Upskilling, Reassignment, And Readiness

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

For 34 years, I have actually trained leaders on how to coach, and I'm going to be very transparent in this podcast episode, and this is going to focus on something called coaching application. Now, that seems like a very vague, ambiguous, maybe even a nebulous term. Let me explain what it is. If somebody goes to a class, and let's say they go to a class on negotiation skills, what happens afterwards? We don't ask that question enough. Now, my friends in training, I think, will agree with me a thousand percent. Training reinforcement has been the missing piece. But what is that specific missing piece? It's coaching application. Let me give you an example. I brought up negotiation skills, and I was in an organization many, many, many years ago. And there's a reason I bring that up. And I remember the vice president of sales saying to his sales staff, no, no, no, no, no, don't worry about this, just focus on this. Give guy actually really enjoyed mentoring and coaching, but actually had undermined the training. Now, the mindset of the sales reps were, well, do I apply what I was trained on or do I not apply what was trained on? The coaching application has created a state of confusion. Recently, almost exactly the same conversation with negotiation skills, but this was with a customer service leader. And the customer service leader, she told her staff, the thing I really want you to focus on is this. Well, we were told this in training. And the director of customer service said, no, no, no, no, don't worry about that, and discounted the training again. Now, I want to be very clear. Good people does not mean that they were trying to undermine training. And see, what we have to realize that we're probably in what I think we'll call the AI revolution. People's skill sets are going to have to change. Now, we have all talked about this as thought leaders. People don't like change, they fight change. You know, when we get these people raise their hands, oh, I love change. They're very, very rare for those people who really mean it. So, what do we do? What do we do? How do we focus on change that's coming, that's happening, upskilling, developing new skills? That cannot just be a training endeavor. So if using AI or negotiation skills and someone goes to training, they're not going to have an unlimited amount of time to go to training. It just defies logic. But then when they go back to the team, they go back to their leader, something happens or it doesn't happen. And that's the bridge to performance. And the bridge is coaching application. I've said it for 34 years. I've never changed. Number one, people will tell you, I don't have time to coach. You don't understand our industries. I get it every single day. And I always laugh at that. And I don't laugh at the people, but I get where people are coming from. Yet I say, well, how do you hire replacements if you don't have time? Of course there's time. You're choosing not to use the time. The real reason people don't coach is they don't know what to do and say. I want to give you another example. In the last probably three months, and I wrote an article probably two, two and a half years ago, on this question was coming. This question is coming. Is AI going to replace my job? The manager, the leader is on. They are on the stage, the lights just turned on, they're bright. Are you ready? Are your fellow leaders ready? Now I'm working with a very good coach, and I mean a really good coach. And he said, No, AI's here to partner with us. I understand your concern. He showed a great deal of empathy. And so I put him into a private breakout session in one of our cohorts. I went in there and I said, What do you think you said and what do you think they heard? He said, Well, my intent was this. And I said, Do you want to know what I thought I heard? That AI was not going to replace my specific job at all, if ever. And he said, Is that how it came out? I go, I think so. And we had this great conversation, great coach, by the way. And even him, someone who role plays and practices and really prepares for his coaching conversations, said, That wasn't my intent. I said, I know this is going to get really tricky. I want to share with you an editor of a newspaper. Literally told his people, no, your jobs are not going to be replaced. Two weeks later, the ownership said you need to lay off a couple editors. Guess what happened to everybody's trust to that person? Oh, by the way, he was telling the truth. He did not know that he was going to be laying off people two to three weeks later. Ownership told him to. So what's happening is that coaching application is critical. What we say matters, how we say it, the questions we use, the tone in which we speak, everything matters. Recently I was talking to a receptionist at a client site, a long-term client site, and she said, Yeah, I'm going to retire in five, six years. And I asked her, and I know her well, and I said, Do you need to wait five, six years, or could you retire now? She goes, No, I really need to wait five, six years. I said, Okay. We get into a conversation about AI. She goes, Oh, I'm not gonna even bother. Now, I will tell you, I'm not commoditizing if you happen to be a receptionist. I said to her straight out. I said, you schedule appointments. She goes, Yep, you answer phone calls. Yep. I said, I'm gonna say something to you that's going to offend you because I care about you. She said, okay, what's that? I go, I can rebuild that job function in five minutes for$5 a month. I am not commoditizing your skill set. What I'm saying is ownership could have choices. Look at Salesforce.com. They just replaced all their customer service people with agents. Now they're hiring people back, which is also making it interesting. So the marketplace is going to be volatile. And when I said that to the receptionist to her credit, and I prompted her, no pun intended, go learn ChatGPT. Just play with it. Six months later, her job was changed. It was basically eliminated. They were going to have an agent do it. They reallocated her to another division because of her willingness to learn. She didn't even have the skill set yet. So the key is our leaders have to be able to apply coaching. What to say, what to do, having continuous conversations to upskill and develop uh not only new skills, but uh foundational abilities to navigate change. Honestly, are you ready? Are your fellow leaders ready?