more on tutoring: for resistant coaches

As I’ve argued, most meetings I observe are like professor office hours — a tremendous amount of information exchanged in a well-structured way — when the most effective version of a meeting is more like a high school tutoring session. In other words, they dramatically improve the performance of your direct report.

Why make the switch? It’s remarkable how many leaders I talk to feel both (1) personally over-stretched, and (2) unsure of how to continue developing their most excellent employees. This is a great problem to have as a pair! Your meetings (especially with top-performers) can be repurposed to build their capacity to take on more parts of your job. Ask yourself, “If this person were to take over my job today, what would be missing?” Any answer that comes to mind becomes fodder for a development goal, with meetings serving as your chief vehicle for skill-building toward those goals.

How might you spend meetings in this way, given other pressing needs of meetings (i.e., all the things you typically do to fill your time in meetings, which still feel important)? At least 60% of all minutes spent in meetings should be spent directly aimed at making direct reports better at their jobs — building their capacity — not exchanging information.

A prompt that I find useful for uncovering development goals to set: “Suppose I took a truth serum just before a meeting and couldn’t help but give completely bald, unmediated feedback to this person. What would I say?” Any answer that occurs to me is a skill I need to help this person build. Name that skill with them. Identify concrete steps (“So by next meeting, you should have….”). Then, collaboratively, identify all of their needs (new skills, support, and otherwise) for accomplishing that.

-Ben