On a monthly-or-so basis, the Barrel partners and I watch videos from a leadership course called Admired Leadership. Our Team Leads also watch these together as a group. One of the recent videos we watched was called Confront Poor Performance with a Request for Information. It really stuck with me.
The idea is that instead of giving an employee feedback, the manager creates a request for information that requires the employee to address the feedback. For example, rather than a manager repeatedly telling a salesperson to do more outreach, they ask them to review their call log daily. The bet is that the mere act of doing will improve the employee's performance and create results.
I appreciate the inward focus of this approach (for the manager) and how effective it can be at helping an employee grow. It's also a great way to identify gaps within a company's processes and systems.
In many ways, our process for reviewing client accounts each week has been an invaluable "request for information" to keep everything on track. The act of Account Leads having to report on status each week and the Barrel Partners checking in with each other has improved performance across the board.
It's been fun looking at where this can apply and experimenting with my direct reports and their teams.
This post originally appeared in Edition No. 101 of my newsletter. Subscribe here.
Monday, August 15, 2022
