Episode 159: Connect Keynote: Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Turley #podcast #fleetmanagers

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Now let's get into the show. Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley. And today you're going to get to hear from yours truly as we do our continued series recapping the sessions from Connect 2024 that we had this year in Atlanta. Connect 2024, as you'll recall, is our premier fleet management conference. We truly believe it's where every fleet manager should be as they learn lessons from not just how to manage a fleet, but how to lead the people in their fleet, as that's probably the most important job they have. This session that we're going into today is a session that I got from Dave Ramsey at EntreLeadership. And it's all about how to overcome uncomfortable conversations. These are conversations that we typically as leaders tend to avoid because we haven't seen them modeled very well before. And this session really helps give you the framework so that you can have successful conversations and help people truly achieve their potential. I hope you get a lot out of it. This was one of our favorite sessions from the event. It was one of the best reviewed sessions that we had there. And frankly, a topic that nobody really talks about. I hope you'll agree that this is an eye-opener. And frankly, I hope that it leads you to having better conversations, more heartfelt conversations that you're not having right now, so that you can be a better leader and be the best leader that you can possibly be. Without any further ado, here's more of me.

Are we ready back there? Are we looking alive? Well, you guys are all awake. A.B.'s still figuring out— hey, I can hear myself. Do you guys hear me out there? Do I need to come up a little bit? All right, time's gonna stop shouting then. Welcome back for another day of RTA Connects. Coming at you today, we got Sarah coming on later. I enjoyed yesterday. I don't know about the rest of you, but I got some amazing insights. I love sitting in the back. Taking notes as I listen to guys like Facundo, Steve, you know, both of them talking about embracing your stakeholders, understanding their pains. One thing about Steve, you know, he's very humble to admit this, but we talk about the team that we're building here. It all started with Steve 7 years ago. We had him up on stage here at Connect. We had him bring— come in twice. Oh, here I am. I can hear myself coming in now. And as he was part of the company, part of this, he just realized, he's like, this is something I want to be a part of. And he took a chance on little old me in my vision of what I wanted to build. And with that, we talk about culture magnets all the time at RTA. Steve was part of our culture magnet. And all of a sudden people started, well, so let's get— we went to RTA, what's going on over there? And it drew them in. And it drew people in. I said yesterday, all the best minds in RTA or in fleet are working at RTA, and it started with Steve. So I owe a lot to Steve for being part of this team. Let's give him a round of applause. Thank you for joining us. I want to talk today, though, about a little bit different topic. This is something that I took my team to. I've heard this a couple of different times. We got this from Dave Ramsey over at EntreLeadership. Specifically his CTO. And I took my team to this event a few months ago and they all came away just radically changed. I had talked about it, but to hear it from them and the way that they presented it, the framework they gave, 'cause I never really talked about the framework, they said, this is incredible, this is incredibly powerful. And it was something that we've been using, but we've fully adopted now. And so I wanted to share the lessons that we had from that with you. The first, I'm going to talk about two different times that I had in my experience as a leader where, you know, we had to separate from somebody. And anybody who's gone through that experience knows that it's not pleasant. It's usually not easy. I had one, I'm going to call them Frank and Carol, just because that's, we're going to protect the innocent a little bit. I had a head of sales, we'll call him Frank. And just, A, wasn't hitting the numbers, and B, there was some just weird stuff happening around the background, things with, you know, letting reps get away with a lot of stuff. And it was just constant. And so I pulled him into the office one day and I says, hey, Frank, like, this isn't working. Whatever this is, we have to stop this. This doesn't work for me. We need to get better. Are you on board with that? And he says, absolutely. And so over the next, you know, several months, we kind of coached through it, talked through different things, but something was still just not hitting the numbers that, you know, the reps were getting worse in some ways, not with hitting numbers, just like doing stuff, not showing up to work on time, leaving early, ditching when we're out at trade shows. When the cat's away, the mouse will play kind of a thing. And so I had another conversation with him. I said, look, it doesn't seem to be getting any better. How do we fix this? And as we were going through this process, it finally got to the point where I says, okay, Frank, I think I've been more than fair. We've been talking about it. It's still not working. I think I have to put you on a performance plan. He says, yeah, boss, I know I'm trying, but just something's not clicking for me. I think that's the right thing to do too. So I put him on a performance plan. 2 months later, it didn't meet the qualifications for that plan. And we go into a room. But, you know, he kind of knows what's coming. I said, hey, Frank, I know you've tried really hard, but this is going to be the last day today. And we stood up. He's like, you've been incredibly fair during this entire process, and I just want to thank you for that. We shook hands. He wished me luck on the journey, said he was rooting for us. And the crazy thing is that we still keep in touch to this day. That was 7 years ago that I did that. In fact, I just went and had lunch with him last week. Um, that was a time where I got it right, where I had laid it out, I had been super clear, really fair in the process, treated it with dignity, love, and respect, and it worked really well. Now, I tell you is that most of the time, anybody have terminations go that well? Right? That's kind of a dream scenario, but it's one that I've been able to repeat several times. Now, I'm going to tell you another scenario where I really screwed this up. A little bit different time. We had somebody in our marketing department also was really struggling in her role, wasn't meeting the, you know, the technical capabilities of the role. Culturally was very defensive. So anytime somebody would ask her something and I was not comfortable addressing those challenges as quickly as I should have been. So I would talk to her a little bit. Hey, you know, it seems like you're getting a little bit defensive here. But every time you talk to her about that, then the claws would come out and you have to be really careful about it. And I avoided it. And we kept going months with kind of dancing around the issues. Fast forward to, you know, I'm having to make some leadership changes on the executive team. And I'm like, okay, today's the day. I just got to pull the plug. We got to move on. And then she calls in sick. Unfortunately, things were already in motion. I had to call her at home and let her know that she didn't have a job anymore. To this day, I still feel like crap about that because I was thinking about this slide last night. I was getting teary. You can see I'm getting emotional about it right now. I feel terrible for how I handled that situation, and I never ever wanted to do that again. So when I saw this framework, when I had the, the Hard Conversations coaching that I'd gotten, I knew this is something that I wanted to share with others around me. There is a way that you can handle the hard conversations with love, dignity, and respect, and it all comes down to having a framework, a process. It comes down to your preparation and your ability to follow just some genuine principles around leadership. The hardest part of leading people, it's to give what you've never been given. And the hardest thing for you as a leader is to do for others what was never done for you. It's hard to teach people things that were never modeled for you. I was never involved in terminations. I was never involved in how do you let go of somebody properly. Nobody ever coached me on that. I was a young CEO, thought he knew everything, clearly did not. It's hard to understand what was never modeled for you. Interestingly, my dad had a knack for avoiding terminations altogether. When the time came, he couldn't stomach it and he would send in his vice president as the hatchet man. But you take care of this. I can't. And so it was never modeled for me the way that you were supposed to do this. And so I want to model that for you and teach you a framework that you can take home and use and that you can have successful departures. Because it always— it's going to come down to that one way or another. They're either going to leave on their own and retire, or you're going to have to force them to leave. Every employee, you know, I've never seen anybody— I guess you could die at your desk. I did read that article just recently. Hopefully that doesn't happen to any of us, but that's ultimately what ends up happening, right? You either leave on your own or somebody forces you to leave. How do you model that in a way that handles that with the love, dignity, and respect? Firing somebody is the least modeled leadership skill. How many of you have ever been taught how to fire somebody? I got one hand. I can't see anybody in the middle. Sorry. It's the least modeled. It's the one that we don't really talk about. We get some maybe HR coaching or, you know, HR takes care of it. But I can tell you is that if you do this right, you can have lunch with the guy that you fired on Thursday. All right. That's the, that's the kind of thing that you want to build. Why do we avoid it? Why is it so hard to have uncomfortable conversations? Why is it so hard to, to coach people up and to avoid the firing altogether? How, why is it we avoid that? Why was I so terrified to address Carol and say, hey, we need to deal with this situation or your job's on the line? The issue is that great leaders, we don't take pride in creating discomfort in others. Right? We don't take pride in, in making it a painful situation. One of our greatest fears is that we abuse our authority. And so we're resistant. We're hesitant to use it for what it's designed for. We're hesitant to embrace the mantle of responsibility that comes with being a leader. Part of that's because we don't understand the difference between hurt and harm. Okay. Okay. They are not the same. And we don't recognize that sometimes. We're always worried that we're going to hurt somebody's feelings. We're going to step on somebody's toes and we're going to cause irreversible damage. When you understand the difference between hurting somebody and harming somebody, it's going to unlock your ability to go out and have those conversations that you've been needing to have. How many of you right now have a conversation you know you're supposed to be having and you've been kind of putting it off and avoiding it? In your personal life with direct reports. Maybe they're in the room. You don't have to raise your hand. It's fine. Right? But you've been avoiding it because it's easier to avoid. Once you understand the difference between hurt and harm though, you embrace it and you say, okay, this is my job. When we talk about hurt, hurt relates to behavior, right? This is, this is something that somebody is doing. And we're going to address that behavior, right? That's a temporary pain when we do that. Harm, on the other hand, attacks somebody's identity. It's about who they are at their core. And what that does when we attack somebody's identity, it creates lasting damage. It creates a negative tape that they loop over and over and over again that I'm not good enough, that I'm not worthy, that I don't deserve to be loved. I— when you attack somebody's identity, that creates lasting harm. And that's what we're so afraid of doing. We don't want to hurt somebody to the point that it creates lasting damage. It is okay to hurt somebody though, if you have their best interest in mind. I'm gonna say that again. It's okay to hurt somebody if you have their best interest in mind. I would almost even add a caveat: if you're doing it with love, right? We've all had people in our lives, family members, where we've had to have some tough love conversations. Any of you with kids, you have had a lot of these conversations and sometimes it hurts, but it's out of love and it's in their best interest that you're having those conversations. On the other side, it's never okay to intentionally harm someone. When you think about it, when you look at the difference between two sharp objects, both of them capable of harm, both of them capable of hurt, When you think about a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon, they are literally going to pierce your skin and cut parts of your body away from you and hurt you. And it's okay, because why? Because they have your best interest at heart. They want to see you get better. They're trying to treat you and heal you. And sometimes in order to heal you, you have to be hurt, right? Sometimes you have to reset the bone or re-break a bone in order to get to heal properly. And we recognize that, you know, as leaders, we shouldn't be afraid of being surgeons. We shouldn't be afraid of using a scalpel. Whereas you look at the knife of an attacker, and the knife of an attacker is incredibly about their self-interest and their self-preservation. It's about their best interest. Right? And they are meaning to cause you harm and lasting damage in order to carry out their own self-interest. That's the difference between hurt and harm, is understanding the surgeon's scalpel versus the attacker's knife. We can use scalpels as leaders, and yes, it will cause pain, and yes, it will hurt, but that's what we're here for. We are the doctor. One of the principles that we teach at RTA is called speaking the kind truth. At RTA, I say it all the time, we are not nice. Nice is a four-letter word at RTA. We are kind and we are radically candid. I was talking in the hall the other day to somebody and they were hesitant to say something negative about one of the team members. And I said, hey man, hard truth time. It's time to bring out the hard truth. We need to hear it so that we can get better. The truth is what's going to set us free. It's what's going to allow us to grow and become who we were meant to be. When I think about nice, and I explain this to my staff all the time as part of our core values, nice people are selfish. And when you think about being nice, you're worried about how the other people are going to perceive you. Well, I don't want to be seen as a jerk. I don't want to hurt their feelings. I don't want to be that guy. And what you're doing is you're avoiding discomfort, and that makes you selfish. Kindness, on the other hand, is all about the other person. And you're looking at it and saying, well, how are other people going to see them? And how do I help them grow? And if I don't have this conversation with them, who will? When we recognize that, we recognize that kindness is all about service and it's all about how do I lean into this discomfort on their behalf? And that's when we talk about the difference between being nice and being kind. When you hear Thumper and Bambi saying, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. That ain't nice. That ain't kind, right? One of my favorite books is a book from Patrick Lencioni, one of my favorite author of all time, is The Motive. He talks about why did you decide to become a leader? And most of us, we became a leader for two different reasons, right? We either became a leader because of the perks or because we wanted to serve. And I'll tell you is a lot of us are somewhere on that spectrum. We wanted to become a leader because we wanted the power and we wanted the authority and we wanted to be able to make the decisions and steer the ship. We wanted to have the responsibility, but then we didn't want to accept the responsibility that comes with leadership, which is having the hard conversations. That makes us feel bad. That hurts. So we avoid the pain. We're hardwired to avoid pain. Our brain is constantly looking for ways to avoid pain and seek out pleasure. Your whole dopamine system is built on it. And we constantly do that. Yet as leaders, we have to rise above that and we have to be willing to lean in and have those hard conversations. Otherwise, it's not about the perks. You have to be there to serve. Because servant leaders have uncomfortable conversations. When we recognize that, our role then becomes to help the person whose job is on the line. It can't be about protecting your own skin. It's got to be about helping that person. And avoiding the pain that they're about to go through. And serious pain, right? We're trying to help them and coach them up and help them rise above whatever's causing their job to be on the line. We cannot obsess over how uncomfortable it makes us feel. You have to turn outward. You cannot turn inward. One of the other things is you're about to go into an uncomfortable conversation. Don't do it alone. When you go and get help from others, that is not weakness. That is you being a strong leader and asking for help, asking for feedback, asking for guidance, so that you can go in and have the best conversation you can possibly have on behalf of that individual. The one thing I like about this is it helps check against your own biases. It helps make sure that you're not tunnel visioned on something that isn't really that big of a deal, or that you're not missing something else in the periphery. It helps make sure that you don't have your own cognitive biases, confirmation bias, halo bias, recency bias. These are all things that we struggle with as humans because we've been built to teach and recognize patterns. Having other leaders that are not so close to the problem is a check against those biases. The other thing I really love about talking to other people, and we do this as an executive team, is when we know there's a problem that we need to address it, we bring it up at the executive team level and then we hold each other accountable. We're like, hey, you were supposed to have that conversation with Joe last week. How did it go? If we don't know that there's supposed to be a conversation with Joe happening, you could just not do it. But we surfaced that at the executive team level, and now you're accountable to the rest of the team because we're all counting on you to be the leader we're supposed to be. And we'll coach you through it and be like, well, what's keeping you from having that conversation? I don't know. I just really don't want to offend him. He's such a good guy. He's nice. He's kind. We love him. Okay. But you're kind of being disloyal to the company and you're being disloyal to him if you're not telling him the kind truth. I know, I know. All right. When are you going to have that conversation? I'll have it by Friday. Friday comes around. Did you have the conversation yet? No. Okay. Why don't you two go into a room right now and you're going to go have that conversation? That's accountability. That's peer-to-peer. And this is not me doing this, by the way. This is the peers. Right, this is James talking to Jacob or Jacob talking to Ryan. This is the executive team holding each other accountable. So I'm gonna go through the next several minutes and we're gonna talk about the model, right? This is the model that we learned. I can't take credit for this model, but I can say that we've adopted it and it works. And I have used it and the proof is in the pudding. I don't know how many of you have dinner with people that you let go of. You heard Steve yesterday talk about laying somebody off from State of Georgia, and then that ended up getting him hired at Coca-Cola, one of the best jobs he's ever had in his career. The uncomfortable conversation. Again, this came from Brandon Wachko, the CTO from Ramsey Solutions. When you do this, you use the process to make the conversation fair, right? It helps you make sure that you're being fair to the individual, that you're listening, and that you're there to help them get better. When you use the principles, you're going to make the conversation loving. You do this with care and respect and kindness so that they know that they— you have their best interest at heart as you talk to them. And then you're going to use the preparation to make the conversation dignified. A lot of us, we think that, oh, okay, well, I'm just going to go in there and I'm going to wing it and hope for the best, right? But we don't realize is that you do not rise to the occasion You fall to the level of your systems, your training, and your preparation. And that is a cold, hard truth that a lot of us, our ego gets in the way and we think we can just wing it. And that's not fair to the individual across the table. They need your best. So you better be bringing your best. You had better prepare with that in mind is how do I make sure I have the best conversation possible for this individual to get their best outcome? When we talk about the process, the process is going to cover 5 steps. I ain't got time to do all 5, so I'm going to cover a couple of them lightly. I'm going to do a deep dive though in the ones that are most pivotal. And that's the first contact, the emotional firing, and then ultimate termination. Because those are the ones that we avoid most. In between both of those, you have coaching, and then you have the performance improvement plan. We talk about principles. When you use these principles, you can make these uncomfortable conversations loving, right? When we talk about being clear, I say all the time, to be unclear is to be unkind. You owe it to them to bring your clarity. Being clear means getting specific and honest and down to that last 10% of truth, right? Don't just stop halfway and say, okay, I already know how this is going to go. Get down to that last 10% of truth. Understand their truth. Understand their perspective. Focus means limiting the feedback. Don't go in there and start bringing up all this other past stuff. Don't try to, you know, boil the ocean. Focus means limiting feedback and you keep the conversation short. Too many times we get afraid of having conversations because we've had bad ones. And bad ones go something like, hey, I need to have a quick 2-minute conversation with you. And an hour later, you're still talking about all the grievances that they have and all the grievances you have. And it just becomes this big, wheelie, unwieldy mess. Focus. Limit the feedback. Keep it short. Honor and respect the team member. It makes the environment safe and it builds rapport, right? It helps you make sure that they feel comfortable and they're open to the feedback and open to the coaching and open to the process. That's fair, dignified, and loving. It— when I talk about preparation, the dignity of the moment is going to be entirely tied on your preparation. Your ability to prepare for the conversation, to get ready for it, to get your ducks in a row, to keep it dignified instead of evolving into a massive emotional mess, is going to come down to your preparation. Your ability to keep calm, to speak calmly, clearly, is going to come down to your preparation. It's okay to go into these conversations with a written plan. Sometimes I think we get it in our heads that the great leaders, they can just walk in, have a hard conversation today, and then go on and do another one tomorrow, and they just can fly it off, right? It just, and it just speaks so beautifully. It's okay to go in, especially if you're not good with thinking on the fly. If you think a little bit slower. Have a written plan and it's okay to read off of it. And you can even be vulnerable and be like, hey, I want to make sure that I'm as clear as possible and that I'm being super fair with you. Do you mind? Like, I'm going to read this because I want to make sure I don't mess it up. It doesn't make you look foolish or weak. It makes you look prepared and caring. I care so much about you. I don't want to mess this up. This moment is too important in your career, in your life. For me to screw this up. And I want to make sure I'm— that I'm getting this message across the right way, that I'm saying what I want to say and not something I accidentally say. Does that make sense? Yeah.

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I'm not going to do a yes or yes. That's an old trick and I don't like it. 5-step process. Let's dive in. This is the meat and potatoes, right? So this is a very tactical session and I want to give you something you can take away. The deck will be available. If you have notes, you want to take notes, hit it. But the 5-step process, we're going to go through the first step, which is first contact. The first thing I want you to know is it's not about what you preach, it's about what you tolerate. So if you see a problem and you let that problem continue going, you are the problem. All right, it's not the employee, it's, it's you and your inability to just say something. All right, so if somebody comes strolling in and they're late and you let it go, and then another day they come in and they're late and you let it go, and it's bothering you, and you're avoiding this first conversation, what you're doing is you're setting the standard. The standard is that it's okay to be late. And so you have to step out of that moment and say, whoa, okay. As soon as it happens, hey, everything okay today? All right, this is not a formal thing. It's just you quickly address, just, you know, notice you're a few minutes late today. Um, anything going on at home? Help me understand what's going on. Really quick. That's a little drive-by. That's not even, I'm not even call that first contact. Your willingness to address it though now sets in their mind that he's noticing, right? She's paying attention to me. It's not about what you preach, it's about what you tolerate. If you have been letting it go on, well, now it's time to go first contact. Or if you've addressed it and it just seems to not getting any better, now it's time to step it up into the first contact. Use this framework. I'm gonna give you several steps where I build out our script. And you're going to see how it all comes together. The first thing when you schedule a meeting and you bring somebody in, right, or you even if you just pull them aside real quick, if you've done the preparation, your first meeting, you have to set the tone immediately. How many of you have been called into the boss's office and the first thought in your mind is, am I getting fired today? We had somebody, we were going through, and I don't remember how long ago this was, maybe a couple years ago. And I don't know if this was me or if it was another manager, but I heard this story later and it made me laugh because I was like, oh, yep, I know exactly what that was. They come in, they get called into the boss's office, and they're talking for 20 or 30 minutes. And the whole time the employee is just like, am I getting fired today? Okay, any minute he's going to drop the bomb that today is my last day. 20, 30 minutes goes on, and that's the only thing he's hearing. Okay, am I— nope, I'm not fired yet. I don't know what he's saying to me, but I'm not fired yet. The amygdala has taken over at this point. It's fight or flight response, right? And it's just waiting. It's not listening to a dang word you're saying because it's just waiting for the magic moment when you say today's your last day. What you have to do at the beginning of conversation is you have to set the tone. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to establish the intensity. When we say establish the intensity, is this a casual conversation, potentially uncomfortable, pretty difficult, or likely emotional? This is not going to be easy for either of us. It sets the tone immediately. Hey, just a quick casual, you know, quick casual conversation, quick conversation, not a big deal. Hey, we're going to have to have a potentially difficult conversation here. It sets the tone immediately. What you're doing is you're staging the room so that you can have a conversation. You're staging, you're getting the minds ready for this conversation. The very next thing out of your mouth has to be to address the elephant. No one's losing their job today, or your job is potentially on the line. The very first thing, right? Quick conversation. Don't be worried. Nobody's losing their job today. Sigh of relief. Now the amygdala says, okay, I can go back. Prefrontal cortex comes back into play. Now I can do rational thought and I can understand what you're saying to me. I can listen with intent and I can actually make changes. Right? So address the elephant immediately, no matter what conversation you're having. If you're giving somebody a raise, which is what happened with this individual, we were giving him a raise and the whole time he thought he was getting fired. We probably could have led with that. Right. But we didn't. I don't know why. Again, I think it very well could have been me. Right. But nobody's losing their job today or, you know, your job is very much on the line. The next line is going to be suggest the outcome. What are you hoping to achieve with this conversation? I learned something from you. We exchange perspectives. Is this something that, okay, we're going to coauthor new expectations together? Clearly, I haven't been very clear in my expectations. You have a different understanding of expectations. Let's come up with new expectations that actually meet what we're supposed to be doing. Or you learn what must change. And the next thing you're going to do is estimate the duration. Is this a short conversation for a few minutes? Ah, or is this maybe a little bit longer? I don't think it'll take more than an hour. So, you know, we should be done here in about 45 minutes, just as I learn and understand from you what's going on. All right. Is this going to be a few sessions? Where I've seen some, you know, like let's say this is a technician and they're struggling with some basic PM inspection stuff. Well, over the next several weeks, I think I'm just going to kind of shadow you and let's talk through and I'm going to coach you through this process. So I make sure you're doing it right. Or is this going to be ongoing conversations that we're just going to be constantly talking to each other about this problem? So what you do is you put those things together and this is what your opening line can sound like. Josh, I just, I want to have a potentially uncomfortable conversation with you. Look, nobody's losing their job today. Okay. I just want to maybe exchange some perspectives, help me understand the situation. Uh, cause I don't think this will be, take more than a few minutes to talk through so we can understand one another. You've immediately addressed the elephant. You've set the tone. You've said what the expectations are and what you're hoping to get out of this conversation. How much more open are you if your boss comes to you and has that conversation with you? That's their opening line. Right? Maybe it puts you on a, like, potentially uncomfortable, sounds like there might be something here, but nobody's losing their job today. Okay, I can take a little bit of breath. Now I can approach this with an open mind. The next sentence you're going to do is you're going to focus on the problem. We're going to fix this. We're going to figure out where it came from. Right? Was this just a gut feeling? Y'all been around that? Walking around somebody, there's some bad juju, negative energy, whatever you want to call it. You just get a feeling like something's off. I want to get to the bottom of that. Uh, maybe there was observed behavior. You saw them doing something. You watched them come in late. Uh, you saw them having a bad conversation with the, you know, the Deputy as he was dropping off his vehicle, right? Or maybe it was a complaint, a complaint from another department, a complaint from a customer, a complaint from their teammates, or it was an accusation. You know, something a little bit more serious, right? This is an anonymous accusation or this is a, you know, a potentially job-ending accusation. Clarify the scope. How big is this? Was it, you know, one person? Is it the immediate team who's affected? Is it the wider team that's saying this or everyone's noticing this, right? How big of a problem has this become? How frequently is it happening? Is it happening once? Is it sporadic? Is it happening often, too frequently? And then you're going to take all that, you're going to define the problem concisely. The problem is XYZ. Simple, simple, right? As clear and concise as we can get it. Do not make this into a big long flowery statement because all that is is you avoiding pain. Short, sweet, to the point, just as sharp as a scalpel. You're not trying to stab them, you're just trying to Cut the skin open a little bit. So this is what your second line then looks like. A few members of your immediate team have complained about how often you're late starting your shift. I've observed this as well, and I just wanted to discuss it today. I'm assuming there's something happening to cause you to be late so often. Right away, I'm assuming positive intent. I'm trying to make sure that they're not on the defensive and we can have a constructive dialogue about it. All right, but I've set the tone, I've set the scope. I've talked about where the issue came from. You know, your teammates are complaining and I'm observing this behavior as well. And what's the desired outcome from that? What's the impact? Why does this matter? So your third line is going to talk about the impact this is having on the team. You're going to describe the effect. Is this causing confusion, stress, distrust? Is it making the environment unsafe? You're going to highlight the severity, right? Which means, is this like yield sign kind of behavior or are we like full emergency lights, flashing lights situation, right? And then your third line says something like, this creates a lot of stress on the team and it has some serious red light vibes, whereas they have to scramble to cover for you all the time. You put that all together, you're opening dialogue in this conversation, going to go something like, hey Josh, I want to have, it's going to be potentially uncomfortable conversation. No one's losing their job, so don't worry about that. I just want to hopefully exchange some perspectives to help me understand the situation. I don't think this is going to take more than a few minutes to talk through and understand each other, but a few members of your team have really been complaining about how often you're late to start your shift. I know I've seen that same behavior as well. I just wanted to discuss it today. I'm assuming there's something going on. That's causing you to be late so often. It's creating a lot of stress on the team and it has some serious red light vibes as they're scrambling to cover for you when it happens. Preparation leads to dignified conversations. How would you feel if your boss came to you and that was the first opening line of their conversation? How many of you have had a problem where you've had something that you wish somebody would have told you about? All they had to do was just take the time and have a quick conversation with you and address a potentially uncomfortable conversation to help you get better. Or would you much rather ignore it and then find a pink slip on your desk on Friday? I think we'd all rather address the situation. The framework helps you get over that initial hurdle of I don't even know what to say. We've just given you the script on how to address that problem. Once you kind of go through the conversation and you exchange perspectives, you're checking for understanding. What are your thoughts on this? You talk through it. Do you feel like I understand your perspective? Have I heard you? What are you going to do now to address the problem? One of the other things I like to do is we call it sharing the table metaphor, right? Which means right now I'm on your side of the table and I'm here with you and we're going to work through this together. Or maybe this is serious enough, serious enough that, look, I'm on your side of the table right now, but I am considering standing up. Maybe it's even more serious than it's like, look, this is a serious problem. I'm still on your side of the table, but I am standing right now and I'm about ready to go to the other side of the table. And we're gonna have a very different conversation if it gets to that point. Right? Or this is crossed entirely way too many lines. I am now standing firmly on the other side of the table. And we are— we're having a very different conversation now. Right? So I share that table metaphor to let them know kind of where I'm at positionally and related to them. Am I side by side or am I opposing them? If I'm here to coach them, hopefully I'm starting with a side by side conversation. At the end of the conversation, you're going to commit to an action, right? You're going to get clear on what you're committing to do. What are the next steps? Is this your problem to fix as the employee? Do we both own part of the resolution? Am I going to facilitate coaching sessions with you? Maybe we've got a tech that's not doing very well on the PMs or they're missing things. And so I'm going to go through, maybe do some knee-to-knee coaching, some hand-over-hand, but we're going to facilitate the coaching. Or are we going to meet again to discuss this later? What's the timeframe? How long do they have to get this thing fixed? Set the next check-in. Am I going to initiate this? Are they going to initiate this? Is it within the next 30 days, next week, before the end of the week? And so your final line is going to be, hey, I'd like to be clear on next steps. We both agree you're going to fix this issue in the next 30 days. I will follow up at the end of the 30 days and we'll see how it's going to see if any other steps are needed. Are we clear? Let me know tomorrow. We do a quick safety check. Let me know tomorrow if you felt any part of this conversation was unfair, unsafe, undignified once you've had time to kind of process it. All right. What do you guys think? Straightforward. How would you like your boss to be that clear with you? Why would you treat your team any different? If we would like to be treated this way, we have to model it for others. All right. All right. Next step in the framework is coaching. Coaching, very similar to first contact. You're going to go through and just say, hey, all right, we're going to continue to train, address problems as they come up, walk through them. I do, you know, we'll talk about like a weekly or monthly frequency where we're spending time with them. And you got to think about yourself as a football coach on the field and not the referee that's throwing flags every time they do something wrong. Right? You are not a traffic cop. You're a coach. You're a mentor. You're there to help them get better. Not to catch them doing stuff wrong. So I do practice drills. We'll review their work together with customer service people. We'll review calls or review emails. Salespeople, we might review demos. In a technician environment, you know, you're probably going over and watching their workflows or, hey, well, why did you do this instead? And you're helping them with their job, not ready to throw a flag and catch them doing something wrong. Alright, so you go through that process and hopefully it's fixed the problem. Most of the time that's going to fix it. You're right. You address the problem, you coach them through it, they rise up and they become an amazing employee, amazing individual. You're helping them live up to their potential. Sometimes, though, it doesn't work out. You get to the point that you have to do an emotional firing. This is where diplomacy has failed. Now, what do I talk about when I mean emotional firing? That means we're not going to fire them at this point. But we're going to go through all the emotions as if we were. The key is, is that understanding they still control their fate at this moment, but you're going to go through all that roller coaster without firing them because that's the hardest part. Usually we avoid firing people or terminating people because of the emotions. Well, we're going to get that out of the way first before we have to fire them, before we have to go down the route of a performance improvement plan. Before we go into that conversation though, we have to solicit feedback. This is where we don't go it alone. We get perspective from other people on our team. And so we ask questions to them like, in your eyes, is this person changing? Are they curious? Are they kind of trying to figure it out? Are they defensive about the situation or are they totally insubordinate? Right? How supportive are they of their own change? I'm gonna clarify trajectory. Do you see them getting better? Is it resolving itself or is it getting worse? I'm going to quantify that perceived urgency. How do you see them? Like they really care about this. There's a shared sense of urgency. Or do they kind of seem lukewarm? They're, you know, they know they need to change, but they're not quite doing it. There's no urgency at all. They don't care. Or they're just indifferent. They're ready to be fired and they're just waiting for you to do it because they're too chicken to quit. Benchmark their reputation. How do other people see them in your team? Is it healthy? Do they have a good reputation in the team or the org? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Or is it almost unsalvageable at this point? Like nobody trusts this individual. They don't care about them. They don't want them here. They're toxic. They have no reputation with the team. So you gather all that feedback and it helps you just clarify, okay, am I on the right here? Are we ready to move on? You recap that, and the first line of the conversation is gonna sound just like the first contact. You're gonna establish the intensity. But I will tell you, if you're at the emotional firing standpoint, casual is off the table, right? This should be a potentially uncomfortable conversation, a very difficult one, or likely emotional one, depending on how intense your coaching sessions have been, right? If you've been really clear and you're ratcheting up the intensity in the coaching sessions, then the emotional firing could just be potentially uncomfortable. But if you haven't been super clear in the coaching sessions and really intense about them, this could be likely an emotional one. It's like, hey, I know we've been coaching, but this is not working. You have to address the elephant right away. Again, if you're doing an emotional firing, your job's on the line. No one's losing their job today is off the table. Your job is now on the line. We're getting really clear about this. And I'm going to confirm the investment. How many meetings have we had? When did we have them? When did we do our first conversation? And when was this supposed to be resolved by? Right. You're just recapping the situation so far. As we review their progress, we'll say things— we're going to say this. We're going to say, look, I don't want this to become adversarial. So I've also gathered the feedback of several other leaders in the organization. This way it makes it not just about you and they're not going to argue with you. Because they know that others are seeing the same thing. And so it takes several arrows out of their quiver. The natural response is going to be to get defensive about it. Then we're going to say this. This is our dignity line. Because I respect you, I'm going to be direct. It's time for you to make a hard decision. It's not time for me to make the hard decision. It's now time for you to make the hard decision. You need to decide if you want to keep trying or if you're ready to move on. Here's what those options look like. Option 1: If you decide that you want to keep trying, we'll need to do a formal performance plan. It is extremely difficult. There's zero wiggle room for expectations. We've been working at this for a while, and I'm not sure that you can do it. If you decide to move on, we can offer you a severance right now. But in order to receive the severance, you're going to need to sign a separation agreement. This is an emotional firing. This is what it looks like, right? Option 1, we can keep going at this, but it's going to go into a formal performance plan. I'm not sure you're going to make it and you're not going to like the outcome because that's, that's the road we'll eventually have to fire you in that case. Now, occasionally I will option or offer an option 3. If I have a key role, a critical staff position, and I can't survive without them. And we kind of do like a prolonged buyout. And I'll say, option 3 is you can keep working, but you need to start looking for another job immediately. I'm going to start looking for your replacement. And then at the end of 30, 60 days, no more than that, by the way, do not let that drag on to 6 months. Um, when we find that replacement or you find a job, whatever comes first, then we'll offer you a severance agreement at that time, right? As we help each other transition into this next stage. Sometimes with executives or with other key leadership positions, I'll offer that as well. Again, just to help make that path smoother and to make it crystal clear that we are not going to continue with the status quo. During this, we're going to check for understanding. I know this is emotional. Can you tell me what you've heard? And hopefully they say something like, yes, my job is on the line and I need to decide if I want to keep trying or if it's time for me to move on. Then we're going to close that conversation. We're going to say, okay, we're not letting them finish out the day, by the way. If we have an emotional firing discussion, they're going to be charged up. We're going to send them home for the rest of the day and we're going to say, please leave early today. I want you to think about your options. I will reconnect with you tomorrow before you come in. I'd like to hear you, how you'd like to move forward. We have that conversation and then they can go home and they can think about it. And then tomorrow they're going to come in and they're going to let me know. Option 1, they're going to keep trying. Option 2, I'm going to take the money and run. And if they're smart and they can read the tea leaves, which option do you think they'd take? 2. Now, every once in a while somebody surprises us. And they're going to pick option 1. And that's where you as a manager, your job just got a lot harder. Right? This is now where you have to go into formal performance plans. You have to create a plan and the PIP needs to make sure that it restates the problems, that it restates all the steps that you've taken so far. You restate expectations and restate the consequences of failure. Notice I'm saying restate, restate, restate, because you should have already been clear about all of this leading up to the emotional firing. The PIP is just formalizing this plan. Now, we've been coaching, coaching, coaching. Now you're going on a formal PIP. It's time to move on. All right. And then you're both going to sign that. So it's binding. Now, obviously, your HR is going to— you're going to want to get them involved at this point. Hopefully you've gotten them involved ahead of time. You're either CCing them on emails, putting it in their employee record as you've been having the coaching conversations, but you're definitely involving them by the time you get to emotional firing. And then they probably have a PIP template for you to use. But that's where we go from ours is we have a PIP template. Everybody goes off of the same template and they all have to fill in these 4 sections. All right. I'm going to get to the last step and then I'm going to turn this over here. Termination. Number 1 thing that a lot of us forget to do when we terminate somebody is bring our wingman. Some of us, we always know we have to have 2 people in the room. But then we don't really use the second person at all. And that's a huge missed opportunity. If we have somebody and they decide to take option 2, take the severance, or they decide, you know, they get to the PIP, um, it is just not working. These are what your talking points are going to look like, right? You've made the decision. It's time to terminate this individual. You're going to set the tone immediately. Notice there's no checkboxes on this one. This is going to be a potentially emotional discussion. As you know, a PIP has zero wiggle room for expectations, and unfortunately you did not meet those expectations. The decision has been made that today will be your last day. 3 lines and I've already said what I need to say. This is going to be a potentially uncomfortable conversation. As you know, a PIP has zero wiggle room for expectations and you did not meet them. The decision has been made. It's final. There's no negotiating. There's no pushing. You have had every chance in the book to do what you need to do. The decision has been made and it's now out of our hands. The decision has been made. We will offer you a smaller amount of severance. Typically when I do the emotion, the option 2 for emotional firing, that severance is usually a little bit bigger. But then as I've now gone through the work of doing a PIP and you've extended your stay at this company by another 60 days and it still hasn't worked out, The severance now on the back end of that is going to be a little bit less, usually the less, however many weeks it took to get to this point. I'm going to check for understanding again. I know this is emotional. Do you understand what is happening right now? And the only thing that they should be able to say is, yes, I'm losing my job. If you've been crystal clear, that's what they're going to say. All right. And then this is your last line. So all you do is you come in and you have 3 or 4 lines. And then exit stage left. So-and-so, right? So if I was in the room with James, I would say, James is here to answer your questions about what's next. I think it's best if I step out while you discuss those details. I wish you the best. You shake hands and you walk away and it's done. The reason why you step out of the room is because they, they have associated that negative decision with you and they need to be moving on to the next thing, which is talking about severance, picking up their things, and all that. You don't want this to turn into a big emotional back and forth. That is not dignified, right? Our dignity is going to come from following the process and having and being prepared for the conversation. So then you hand it off to your wingman and these are their points. Now, usually your wingman might be HR. Hopefully it is, or it's going to be somebody else in the shop, but they're just going to say is HR is going to call you up. They're going to schedule a time to privately clean out your desk, transport your tools. Whatever it is that you need to get. Do you have anything essential back at your bay or at your desk that we can go get for you right now? I am not giving them the option to go walk back into their desk and walk back into the pit and cause a big old scene. I will go get it for you or I'll send somebody to go get it. Right? HR will then set up a time to discuss things like the severance, the health benefits, the separation agreement, all the formal stuff. I'm not going to do that right now. I'm going to tell you that later we're going to do that. Do you have any questions? It's our policy. And I'm going to just let them know, like, what's our policy? Well, we're going to shut off email access. The key fobs won't work. We usually do that during the conversation. So as soon as they go into the room, we fire off to IT and we kick off a whole process that shuts down all that access. And then we give them a couple of minutes. We say, you're welcome to sit and collect your minutes here, collect your thoughts for a minute. But then when you're done, I will escort you to the parking lot when you're ready. Right? We're not doing a perp walk. We're not walking them out in front of everybody. We're just, we actually usually do it towards the front of the building. So it's not a big scene as they walk by. And then it's done. When you do this right, your terminations, your coaching, everything along the way, you're either going to make an incredible impact on somebody's life where they can finally live up to the potential that they deserve. Or you're going to have amazing experiences with employees that you've had to let go, and you can go out to dinner with them years later. And then there's going to be a whole lot of in-between. And I'm not going to lie to you, tell you some fairy tale that every termination goes flawlessly and perfectly. But I will tell you is that at the end of the day, you can get a text message that says, I want to thank you for handling that process with love, dignity, and respect. I wish more people would handle it like you did. The process and the principles and the preparation will— if you do it right, it'll hurt, but it will not harm. If you're looking for more resources on how to have these conversations or more frameworks, I've got some books I recommend. I love The Motive from Patrick Lencioni, Radical Candor from Kim Scott over at Google, No Rules Rules from Reed Hastings. And then EntreLeadership from Dave Ramsey has a good section on performance coaching. These books have been really helpful for us and how we framed our things. And I can't tell you how important it is for us as leaders to go in and invest the time in learning how to have these conversations, to take the stigma out of them, and to embrace our role as servant leaders to help everybody live up to their true potential. That's all I've got for you today. Hopefully that was helpful. Was that helpful? All right. We hope you enjoyed the show.

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