Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris Lorenzo and welcome to this week's Thoughtful
Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership and leave
us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, we're going to be
diving in a little bit deeper into the Monday episode that just aired a few
days ago, which was part three in our four part series on you know,
overcoming dysfunctions on a team to make it, you know, more high
performing. On Monday's episode, we talked about a lack of commitment being one
of the reasons why a team might not be high performing, and the feedback
that we got from our our listeners was that they wanted to know more about
what they can do as leaders to kind of spur more commitment from their people
when there doesn't seem to be that. And that's it's a really tough one
because it's not a universal answer for all people, Like some people need different
things than others, and a lot of it really depends on what the goals
are of your people, and so it's it's it's not just as simple as
you know they want to move up because they might necessarily want to move up.
They might have different goals than your goals. And I think a lot
of times when leaders fail at this, it's because they project their own goals
onto their people and they think, well, if this is what I want,
then this is what my people want. So if I get treated if
I want to be treated this way by my boss, then this is how
I'm gonna treat my people because they clearly want the same things as me.
And oftentimes that kind of doesn't even land and you without the commitment that you
need from your people. So this is it's kind of a touchy subject here.
No, I agree. I think that there's elements of this that when
in the context of high performing teams that you know, I think that there's
the surface idea of like we say, like commitment rah rah, Let's go
like, are we committed to this work? Yeah? Do we want to
do a great job? Absolutely, let's be the best okay, And like
there's this overall element of kind of the cheerleading commitment piece of this. But
when you start to pull back these layers of commitment. We talk a lot
on this podcast about helping people with you know, professional and personal goals,
and I think that's really what we mean when we say personal goals, like
do you really understand what people are trying to achieve in life? Do you
do? You do you understand like what they are, what drives them,
what motivates them, you know, why, why do they work hard?
Why do they want to have success at work? What do the things they're
looking to achieve? And when you start to find these things out, I
think that is very helpful in understanding people's level of commitments and and you know,
to themselves, to their families, to to their growth, to their
you know, success later on in life, whatever that might be. But
I think as leaders, these are the conversations that I think are really helpful
in helping to connect some of the dots for people to like, how does
my you know, how how does my professional work or my job help to
inform the things I want to get in life? And how and how do
do these things you know? Connect? And I think in theory we would
all say like, well, yeah, if you work hard, do a
good job, you can get you can make more money, you can have
more of this, and then than by kind of by proxy, you should
then be able to you know, purchase a house have some nicer things,
maybe get a new car, like these things are going to happen, but
sometimes we don't take the time to really have the dialogue around what are those
things and how do they connect, and how do you stay motivated when times
get tough, and how do you stay you know, committed to yourself and
to the work when things aren't as easy as they were before. I agree
with that. I think the tie in between that level of commitment that you
might be asking of your people and what they see in it for themselves,
it can be harder to to kind of fit those two together if you are
dealing with people or if people are reporting to you who don't necessarily have a
clear line of sight to what they want. And I think and oftentimes because
of the you know, we talk about how there's this h there used to
be this huge separation between your work life your personal life and you leave your
leave your your baggage at the door, and you come in and you do
work. And that was the thing, you know, twenty years ago,
and and slowly and over time it's been we've transitioned to this. Well,
if you if you want to be a good leader, you can't expect your
people to just leave their personal life at the door. They're one person and
they their personal life comes with them and it can impact their performance at work.
And if you, as a leader just expect them that, expect that
to go away, then you're gonna have a bad time because they're not going
it's not going to go away. They'll just have it impact their performance and
you'll never know, you know why it's happening. Um, if we're in,
if we've agreed that that is important to acknowledge the fact that we're not
leaving our personal life at the door, and that and that we are one
individual, then that the next logical step would be too As a leader,
you need to dig into whatever that is, whatever those things are that is
that motivate that individual or that lead them to believe that they are in a
place that they should be to do their best work. Because nobody, nobody
wants to spend time doing anything half asked. Nobody wants to They would rather
not be doing that thing. It's just it's who we are as individuals.
If we're doing something half asked, it means that we don't really want to
be doing it at all. And the half asked is I know I still
have to do this, so I'm going to do it anyway, but I
don't really want to be doing it. If we want to do something,
then it will show in what the work is because we will be committed to
doing it. And if your people are not trying to move up within your
organization, like genuinely, they just look at this as a stepping stone or
they you know, this is kind of like a means to an end.
That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be or can't be committed to getting the work
done at a high performing level. It just means that you, as the
leader, have to do some work to dig into what would make them want
to do that. And they will never want to do it for the organization
air quotes. They'll want to do it for you as as their leader,
if you have set the stage for that happening. And so what I want
to ask you, Lorenzo, is if you ever had a situation where you
had a person who you knew they had it in them, You knew they
were capable of doing it because you've seen them do it, but because they
didn't look at themselves as having a future with your organization, they just you
have found up having a really hard time getting them to go to do anything
above just whatever the minimum was, and you had to kind of dig into
to figure out what was really motivating them and what could kind of turn the
tide on that so that they looked at it as they were committing to you
and not the organization. So I want to ask you that, but my
first I want to give it up towards one of our sponsors. All Right,
Lorenzo, when did you have to kind of dig deep and you know,
find find some way of motivating an employee or or to get them to
commit when they weren't necessarily trying to move up within the organization. I think
it's happened to multiple times in really two different ways. I think there's the
commitment around just you know, wanting to do good work or great work.
I think, and maybe I come from a different school of thought on this,
Like I don't see it as a requirement for people to have to want
to move up like in an organization, Like I just don't like I think
that the disconnect happens when somebody says, maybe I want to move up in
the organization, but then I also am not wanting to do the work like
I don't have the motivation. So that's kind of how I see that.
It is like the assumption, let's play an assumption of I want to continue
to build my career, whether that's you know, to become full time,
to get a promotion, to have a different level of responsibility. But if
we play in the context if that's what I want, but then I'm not
maybe showing the behaviors or I'm not committed to doing a level of work that
either prepares me for it or makes me the best possible candidate. Because that's
another thing that can happen is that we can have multi people that want a
role um, but then we have to make decisions on who the best person
is for the role. So in those cases where I've had that conversation with
people, UM, that's where I've had to ask the connective questions to say,
like, let's just pull all of this back right. You're saying you
want this role, so first just just tell me why. What is it
about the role? Is it the is it how you spend your day,
is it the work that you do? Is it the element of responsibility?
Is it the compensation? Like it could be any of these things, but
like let's just start with you know what, what about this role is it
that you really want to have? Now, let's say, well why,
and we getting kind of like the practice of the five whys. Why is
that important to you? Why do you want that? And really what we're
looking for is like, well, how does this help you as a person?
Like look what's in this for you? And like what are you looking
to achieve maybe outside of work as a result of doing this, like like
you know, like talk a little bit more about that. And I think
just really having that open conversation with somebody, I think it's it's it's you
know, there's there's two outcomes out of it. And I would say that
eighty to ninety percent of the time, the outcome is having a conversation where
I'm helping someone connect the dots of their personal goals, their personal aspirations,
what they want to achieve and why it's you know, like like like doing
well at work or pushing themselves to to bring more or to learn and to
grow and develop, like how that helps to inform their personal goals. And
like I said, eighty to ninety percent of the time that conversation happens,
some of those connections are met and people say, I understand, and that
makes sense to me, and you know, I'm going to, um,
I'm going to you know, look to to to show up in a different
way so that I can achieve that goal that I have at work. UM.
And again not that not that eighty nine percent is successful. I'm just
saying that eighty ninety percent of the conversations are in that positive way or in
down that direction. The other ten to twenty percent, I think in that
conversation we tend to uncover that maybe this isn't the right work that they want
to do because the personal goal or the thing they want to achieve, or
the life they want to live, or just the thing in general that they
want out of life is not something that the job, the role, the
industry, whatever, is going to help them get there in the way they
want to. And that's okay too, because I think that that's important to
have that conversation sometimes when we see people that may not be motivated. And
again we're we're talking about high performing teams here, but I think in a
high performing team, you need to know these answers for every single person on
the team. Because when it gets tough, that's when they need to lean
into it. But I think it's just as important that we have the conversation
with people where it ends with you know what, like maybe this isn't the
right, you know, direction for me, And then I get to say,
but that's okay, because like, as long as you're willing to do
the work or good work here or great work here, you know you're able
to meet expectations, that's perfectly fine. While you figure out what it is
that you want to do or the direction that you want to go. And
as long as you're doing good work here, I'm all in in helping,
whether it's my network, whether it's perspective, whether it's plugging you in with
other people, like like, I will be more than willing to help you
get to that other thing that you want to accomplish, so long as you're
doing good work here. But then we can, we can. We don't
have to spend all this time like trying to figure out how do you give
you know even more, or how do you fully commit to wanting to move
your career that might happen, that might happen as a result of you doing
good work But I think this should really really important conversations to have and and
to make sure that we are we're both moving in the right direction and that
we're really clear on the goals that we're looking to try to achieve together.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think I think where a lot of
times this gets lost though, and I think the leaders that do this well
are the are the ones who have managed to make it clear that high performing.
High performance is not above and beyond. High performance is not doing doing
more work than what is being asked of you. High performance is what is
being asked the team is. The team needs to be a high performing team,
and and people doing only work that they're not committed to will not get
you to high performing, which means the expectation that the expectation of the role
is a commitment to whatever that work is. And if there are employees who
are showing up, who are doing work that it's clear they're not committed to,
that doesn't mean that they're doing you know, like we talk about doing
the bare minimum. Well, the bare minimum is being a high performing team.
That's what is the expectation. And if and if a person is doing
what is expected of them, then you will have a high performing team.
And so if you're a leader, it's just so important to make sure that
you like you owe it to the people on your team who are committed and
who are doing good work, who are who do want to be members of
a high performing team, to make sure that everybody on that team is also
committed to doing that as well. And if they're not, then that's fine,
but they need to be moved off. They moved out of the team,
as opposed to being allowed to do less than committed work simply because they
believe that committing to the work is somehow more than what they're being paid for,
more than what they signed up for. And so if you can,
if you can make that tie in that that is the minimum, the minimum
standard is what will get us to be a high performing team. I think
that you can go a lot further with that. Yeah, no, I
appreciate that. I think the you know, just to add a point to
that, I think that it's important to also, like we've talked about the
different ways in which this kind of builds on for a high performing team,
you cannot start here. You cannot start with saying, oh, congratulations,
everyone, we are now a high performing team because I said so, right,
and if you're not committed to being a high performing you can't be here
anymore. That's not that's not going to get you. You need to do
the first steps right to get to the point of then saying, as a
result of the fact that we are high performing and we want to maintain the
consistency that we have in our performance, we have to commit to one another
that this is the body of work that we want to do when we move
collectively together. UM. So I just want to add that a little bit
of a caveat because I think it's important. Um if especially if people are
like hearing this episode first before the other ones, yes, to think like
you cannot start here and then say like this is the new bar. Um.
The only time that you can do that is if the if, the
if the results and if the behaviors are well below an expectation, you can
say this is the expectation, um at the bottom of where we want to
be, and then we're going to go up from here. But you can't
make that mistake, because I've seen that happen, and that can it can
get dangerous very quickly, right right. If you're if you're taking over a
team that is woefully underperforming, then then there could be a minimum standard that
they have to reach in order to just kind of, you know, stop
the bleeding whatever that is right, and and then that could be expected that
that could be expected where you have objective results on paper. I don't think
that's necessarily high performing. That's just we want to show that this that we're
not that we're not the boat's not about to sink here. That's different.
Once you get to the level where the boat's not sinking anymore, then that's
that's the next step, which is, Hey, now, as a leader,
this is what I'm committing to you. Let's talk about what your goals
are. Let's commit to this. But yes, that has to be done
first. If you were doing that, though, you owe it to your
team to be able to ask that in return of everybody on the team.
If you know that you're doing your part as a leader, you can ask
that of your team and you have you have an obligation to do that absolutely,
And with that it brings us to the end of this episode. This
is hacking your leadership. M Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.