Jim Johnson (day two of his "40 Days of Discipline" series) gives a short coaching message advising leaders to assess situations before reacting to avoid creating unnecessary drama. He uses a client anecdote about a misrouted concern and recommends pausing to ask why, identify causes and participants, and consider coaching or communication issues before making decisions.
Day two.
Hey, guys, Jim Johnson here. I think that's starting to be my calling card, the whole hey, guys thing. And just want to talk to you this morning. This is day two of my 40 Days of Discipline and coaching moments. And I want to talk to you today about assessment and what that means. We end up in this thing of, hey, I want to do an assessment. And we think that's very calculating. We've got all these numbers and scores and stuff like that with us. While that is some assessments that we might do on sales teams and people coming to work for us, I want to talk a little bit more about assessing a situation before it becomes the drama that we all deal with in our businesses. I was talking with one of our clients yesterday, and somebody that worked for him had a problem and didn't go to their direct superior, went to somebody else and explained their problem. And that's where things started to go awry. That problem went to them, the next person over, and then got back to the owner. Owner wanted a meeting. They wanted a meeting with the owner, these two leaders. And the owner made a mistake. Owner made the mistake of going, what's the meeting about? It's about our culture, which is super important to our owner. And this owner then goes, hey, I think we need to bring some other people into this. And at that point, it got to be something a lot bigger than it should have been. So talking about assessment, assessing a situation is super important to the culture of your business and the drama that you may create around a possibly negative situation. Instead of asking what the meeting was about, say, no problem, and go have the meeting, find out about that problem at that meeting. And maybe it's not even a problem. They just asked for a meeting. There was no indication that anything was an issue. And if there is a problem in that meeting, take some time before you react to that. In other words, think about why is this issue happening, what may have caused it, who all is involved in it. But the biggest part is why? Why did this thing happen? Why is this person upset with that person? What events led to it? Is there possible coaching that could have been provided to a leader or young leader that could have helped in that particular situation? Was there a direction from a superior that could have been better to a leader? And so really thinking about these gives you this opportunity to cool off for a second, to let the emotion get out of the decisions you make and start to become the logic that you need whenever you make those decisions. So my advice, take a few minutes each time something comes up to do a bit of assessment before you have a reaction. Hope that helps.
