Getting Your Team Or Clients To Give You A 3 Inch Putt

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie Chenell, and welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today, I'm going to tackle the big problem with teams and maybe sometimes clients. It depends. The question, did you Google that before you asked me? In other words, uh, are you being lazy and coming to me and asking me for help and support because you want to outsource your brain or because you actually really need help? And this question came from one of my private clients. Because he's starting to ask himself as he builds his team, what is reasonable for my team members to do on their own, and how do I actually get them to come to the table with more versus just asking me because it's easy, right? And you can kind of tell sometimes, even as if you're a coach, you can tell when clients, they, they don't really want to think. They want you to kind of give them the answer, and it— you're a coach, so you're supposed to help them find the answer, not necessarily give them the answer. But sometimes it makes sense. It's This is hard. Okay, and then we have also AI entering the chat here, so there's a lot to unpack. And there's also sort of a stereotype of some of these like obnoxious coaches that, you know, are actually— they actually pride themselves on telling their clients like, did you Google it first? Like, did you Google that? You know, there's Google for that. Although now we could probably say, did you ChatGPT it first? Which doesn't sound quite as cool as "Did you Google it yet?" So if you find yourself as a coach or as a leader of a team and you're not sure of the line, "Let's do this together." Okay, so let's start with the fact that Google is now kind of being usurped by ChatGPT. So the culture of Google or ChatGPT at first, I think, is still a solid baseline for clients and team members. Like, if they can't do at least the initial work to kind of think through what their thought is, what their question is, then that to me is a sign of laziness, right? So you can teach your team members, hey, when you bring questions or when you bring ideas or when you bring thoughts to a meeting, like, work out the rawness of them with ChatGPT first, right? Like, get the question as dialed in as you can, even if you don't have like a proposed solution, get the question dialed in because this is like the baseline. And now that ChatGPT is basically in everyone's phone, you can do this in 2 seconds. You can even with voice mode now, you can just like talk out your messy idea or your questions and you can ask it to help you create a better question. Okay, so that's like the very, very like minimum. Now, there are strengths and there are weaknesses when it comes to both Google and Chat. And I think we all know the weaknesses of Googling things, and we know the strengths because we've had Google for a long time. But if we're talking about Chat, right? Chat is instantly available. It is a great start for brainstorming, and it does a lot of back and forth. It can also do deep research if you have the deep research function in your plan. So it can gather all kinds of sources for you. But let's talk about the weakness, because that's more important. The confirmation bias in AI is crazy. So if you have ever worked, you know, extensively in ChatGPT or any of them, you'll notice that they oftentimes reflect back what you want to hear. And that's because they're fundamentally designed to be helpful. And so as long as you're not saying something completely baseless, right, if it's an opinion or it's an idea it's going to like, it might like strategically like optimize it, but it's not going to be like, that's a crappy idea. You know, like I, I've never had chat come back to me and be like, that's a terrible idea, don't do that. So there's a very strong confirmation bias. So if you do not understand that, you might get a little too big for your britches, or your team member or your client or whatever might get too big for their britches and be like, well, this is a good idea and chat said so. Well, Okay, so you really need to understand that where AI's limits are, because unless you are actively asking for it to fight or debate or give you the opposite, right? So you have to tell your team members this, that there's limited understanding of nuance and it really struggles with complex strategic decisions without a human. So if you're asking your team or your clients to leverage Google or Chat know that this is where it's going to fall down, okay? And it could, it could even like cause you a little trouble, right? If they come back and they're like, well, me and chat worked this out and chat thinks it's a great idea, you know, now, now you got— now it's two against one, you know. Um, so human expertise really matters. And I think as leaders— and I don't want to talk about coaches and consultants right now, I want to talk about leaders— leaders, sometimes we forget that not everybody is a visionary, not everybody is always like an A+ player, and that people need management, and that's okay. That's not actually a sign of failure. I mean, that's why management was born, was because people need help doing their tasks. They need help understanding what's important and what's not important. And you might get A players like that, that really understand that and are able to move quickly, but more likely than not, you're going to have several people on your team that need that. So it really is important that you as the leader bring your intuition and your judgment and your strategic insight and help them understand, like, okay, that's actually not that important. This is the important part. So I've used this example before. I heard it from somebody else, this idea of the 6-inch putt. Right? And it is a golf term. I don't play golf. My husband plays golf very poorly, apparently. And the idea is that you want to get the ball 6 inches from the hole, and then you just like putt it in. It's an easy, it's easy to get it in, right? Once it's 6 inches from the hole. So when you ask your team, hey, make this a 6-inch putt for me. Let's say you're having a meeting. You want them to get it as far as they can get it so that all You have to do is give a yes or a no in, in that form, right? And so if you think about this, I'm going to think about it in my work, right? So let's say I have a Funnel Gorgeous team meeting and we have an issue with, uh, some churn in our software. Okay. And we, we notice our churn is going up. And so the not 6-inch putt from my team would be, hey, churn's really high. You know, we got to deal with this. Okay, you're basically bringing the problem, and you could have at the very least brainstormed with chat about what might be causing that problem, right? And chat would come back with some ideas. Maybe it would take you on a side quest, maybe not, but you'd go through, you'd look at the data, and then maybe you could propose some solutions in chat, like what could be some options. So if she does that and then she comes to the meeting and she says, okay, The problem is that we're seeing churn, and here are a couple of proposed solutions that we came up with. You know, option 1, option 2, option 3. That's a 6-inch putt, right? Because now I'm listening, you've done all the work, and now I'm like, okay, I think we should go with option 1. A 3-inch putt is where they do all of that work, they come up with the options, they have the plan for each of the options, and they have decided that they think option 1 is the best and they need a thumbs up, that's a 3-inch putt. Okay, and so what you can do is you can think about the things that your team comes to you with, and you can think like, what is not even close to a 6-inch putt? Like, what does that look like? What does a 6-inch putt look like, and what does a 3-inch putt look like? And then you can actually explain to them that, give them a tangible example in your, you know, in your market, and then encourage them. Give them the warning that if they are using AI, that they need to be aware of the bias. Okay, really, really important. Um, and that when they are asking for proposed solutions or examining the problem, that they need to directly ask chat to give them the opposite opinion, right? Debate the opposite opinion. It's one really easy way to kind of like nip that confirmation bias in the bud. Now, when you're a coach or a consultant, things are slightly different because people are paying you to answer questions. Now, that does not mean that you have to accept the total lazy brain. You know, if someone comes to you and says, you know, you're a business coach and says, I don't know how to grow my list, what are some lead magnet ideas? That's a little— it's a little lazy, right? And maybe they just don't know. So we're going to take the moral sting out of the word lazy and just say it's, you know, uninformed. And you can give them an opportunity to say, here's the process that I would take to brainstorm lead magnet ideas, you know, using chat or Google or customer research or whatever it is you do. Kind of explain to them, say, I want you to go through this process. I want you to do this. I want you to come back with a couple ideas and tell me which ones are the most compelling to you and why. At that point, it's now a 6-inch putt, and now the coach or the consultant can come back and say, okay, I think this one's really good. I think this one's not so good. They can explain why. They might be able to look and say, listen, your thought process here was really good, or you know what, your thought process kind of got off track because of X, Y, and Z. And that is a 6-inch putt. And a 3-inch putt with a client would be they would go through that whole process, they'd create the lead magnet, and they'd have you review it, right? And so just kind of making these milestones for yourself will really help as you're training clients and team members to get the most out of what you do. And I'm gonna, I'm I wanna leave with this. A lot of times I think people have used this idea, the 6-inch putt or the 3-inch putt, as a way to say, I don't wanna do a lot of work. I want you to do the work and let me not do the work, right? So there's like an implied sort of assumption there that the 6-inch putt and the 3-inch putt is putting more of the onus on the client or the team member. Now, With team members, that's oftentimes the goal because if you have underperforming team members, you need them to take more responsibility. With clients though, you know, it's a— well, depending on the arrangement, you definitely don't want them to feel like you want as little interaction as possible. So it's really important that you're generous with your education. So when someone doesn't give you a 6-inch pot or they don't give you a 3-inch pot, it's important for you to explain why it isn't and what the process is so that you are empowered. I mean, I guess you do that for team too, so that you are empowering the person to understand why this is not far enough along yet to have a meaningful discussion. Also, you know, with coaches and clients, you often have a limited time that you can discuss things with people, right? Whether you do Zoom calls or even if you do asynchronous, right? If they, if they spend 5, 10 minutes talking about something that they could have done all of that work. You could have used that 10 minutes or that hour-long Zoom call way more effectively, and you could have gotten actually much deeper into the work had they done that pre-work, right? And so, you know, for me, like, I'm a coach and I have people on Voxer. So the, the more that I can help people empower them to like see these projects this way, then they— when they do come to me in Voxer, they're getting the best of the best from me and they're not wasting, you know, a day's worth of Voxers on just kind of sorting out the problem. So I hope that's helpful. I hope that, um, makes your team meetings more effective, your coaching and your consulting more effective. I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.