THE LEAFLET

September 05 2024

meetings as tutoring: bias to action, try it now, for resistant coaches

TUTORING: BIAS TO ACTION

I’d like to start getting more concrete about how to treat meetings more like tutoring sessions than office hours. 

When someone I’m leading asks me for advice, I almost always start by asking myself, “If I were in their situation, what would I do?” How great would it be, though, if this person already knew what I would do in their situation and could thus solve the problem without my assistance! 

This is the key insight: Your team grows their capacity the more they can guess how you would act in a given situation. The purpose of meetings, then, is to teach them how you think.

In other words, whenever people I lead ask for help, in addition to solving the problem at hand, my goal is to improve their ability to answer the question for themselves, “What would Ben do if he were in this situation?”

How can you teach your team to think like you? Practice this skill! Starting today, develop the following habit: Every time your direct report asks you for help, first prompt them to guess what you’ll say.

They’ll often get it wrong — in which case you’ll need to correct them — but over time the people you lead will get better with more experience guessing correctly.

Read the rest here.

“LET’S TRY THAT RIGHT NOW”

You know that delicious moment in a meeting where your teammate exclaims, “Ohhhhhhhh, cool! I think I get it!” What do you next? 

Five magic words: Let’s try that right now. 

As soon as you lead someone to a moment of insight, immediately practice applying that insight. What do math teachers do once their class derives some new understanding? They immediately assign kids 5 problems to practice this new idea. Running meetings with a quick insight-to-practice loop harnesses all of these same benefits: It helps your teammates to iron out the kinks of implementation, it makes it more likely they’ll retain the insight, it deepers their nuanced understanding of what to do, and it allows you provide good micro-adjustments to their implementation. 

Spending meetings this way will create success spirals for your team. There is a ton of leverage to be had in helping someone to actually accomplish something where they’ve previously been stalled. The likelihood of them doing it again in the future goes up, given the muscle memory of doing it well with you. And it makes it much more likely that they succeed on their own the next time they face a somewhat similar situation.

Read the rest here.

FOR RESISTANT COACHES

Why switch meetings to be less like professor office hours and more like high school tutoring sessions? The answer is partially driven by my observation of how many leaders 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.

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson on mission, goals, and values:

A mission explains why your company exists. Your long-term goals outline what your company hopes to achieve. Your values, or principles, establish the culture that enables you to work toward those goals.

Writer John McPhee on mountains:

Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them.

Fabulist Italo Calvino on cities:

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric