EMMA: [00:00:00] today we're going somewhere a little bit different. We recorded an episode on hiring recently, and we have had so much incredible feedback from that one episode that I am giving you what I think is the next step from that episode. Normally on this podcast, we're talking to the woman who's running her business solo, or maybe she's got a VA and a bookkeeper, and she's figuring out how to grow. But today's episode is for the woman crossed a different line. You've got a team. Maybe it's two people, maybe it's 10. Maybe they're employees, maybe they're subcontractors, maybe they're casuals that you bring in when the work demands it, any of those things. [00:01:00] Whatever the shape of it, you are now responsible for getting work done through other people. And if you're anything like the women I coach this exact moment, probably finding it harder than you thought. You're tired. picking up things that aren't yours to pick up. I know. We've all been there. Wink, wink. I need some emojis. we get into it, I wanna give you one statistic that I think sets the scene for this whole conversation. Gallup Strengths found that 82% of managers received no formal leadership training before they stepped into their role. 82%. So if you're sitting there feeling like nobody handed you the manual, kinda like having a baby, right? You are correct. They didn't. Most people leading teams today are figuring it out as they go, is exactly why this conversation matters and why we don't hear this conversation enough. And if you're wondering why the work isn't getting done [00:02:00] the way you'd do it, oof, and somewhere in the back of your mind there's a small voice going, " It would be faster if just did it myself" , I wanna talk to that voice today. Grab your cuppa. Let's go. Whoop. You see, long before I was running my own business, I spent years as a senior human resources leader.
I sat at executive tables. I coached managers who'd just been promoted into their first leadership role were drowning. in rooms where performance was being discussed and people's careers were being decided. Scary, but true. I watched brilliant technical people get promoted into leadership and absolutely flounder, not because they weren't smart, but because nobody had ever taught them that leading people is a completely different job to doing the work. I think it's also important here to say that organizations still don't have this right. reward the work but not the leader [00:03:00] who gets the work done. no feedback? Well, sucks. But the people doing the work, they get the feedback, right? And here's what I learned in those years, the thing I want you to hear today. People don't underperform because they're lazy or they're difficult. They underperform because someone hasn't been clear with them Clear about what's expected, clear about what good looks like, clear about what happens if it doesn't get done. Almost every people problem I have ever worked on, and I mean almost every single one, traced back to a lack of clarity at the start, a lack of a regular conversation in the middle. that's the lens I'm bringing today, years of HR plus lived experience of building my own team in my own business, and both of those things have taught me some of the lessons that I'm going to share today. P.S. I don't always get this right. There is a concept that has been around since 1999. [00:04:00] And I promise you it still applies today.
It's called Who's Got the Monkey? was an article in the Harvard Business Review, and it's one of those pieces of writing that just doesn't age. Ken Blanchard, who you'll know from The One Minute Manager, later co-wrote a follow-up to that original article called The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. Get your mitts on it. And his point was very simple. He said most managers are doing their team's work for them, and then they're complaining about the fact that they don't have time to lead. Ouch. He found that managers were spending so much time on monkeys that didn't belong to them They had almost no time left for the three things that actually matter: setting clear goals, giving praise, and redirecting performance. Here's the gist. every problem, every challenge, every, " Hey, boss, have you got a sec?" moment is a monkey. Your team member comes to you with a monkey on their back. [00:05:00] start chatting about it, and the monkey jumps off their back and lands on the table in between the two of you. And here's what happens nine times out of 10. By the end of the conversation, you, sucker, have picked up the monkey, and now it's on your back. They walk out lighter. You're sitting there with another thing to do. How did it happen, right? 20 years ago, the article said that this was about power and status. Leaders wanted to be seen as problem-solvers. Today, it's a bit different. Today in my coaching... in my experience coaching women in business, up the monkey because we care. We don't wanna seem unhelpful. We don't want our team member to feel overwhelmed. We wanna be a good boss. We wanna be liked. So guess what we do? We keep collecting the monkeys and then we wonder why we're working until 9:00 PM and our team finished at 5:00. Am I right? I know you're nodding along. See, [00:06:00] Blanchard's was beautifully simple. He said every monkey needs two things: a next move and a check-in. So when your team member brings you a problem before they leave the office or the Zoom or your Slack chat, you agree on what their next step is and then...
and when you check back in. The monkey stays with them. You're not abandoning them. You're coaching them, and that's a big difference, right? And then people own their shiz. I promise you this works. I want you to do something for me this week. Sit down and write out every project, every priority, every piece of work happening in your business right now. Then next to each one, down who actually owns the result, not who's helping, not who's involved, who owns it. And if your name is next to most of them, you've got a monkey problem Now ask yourself two questions. How many of these monkeys [00:07:00] shouldn't be mine? And what can I take off my back today and put back where it belongs? Number two, what's actually stopping me from delegating? Because in my experience, it's usually one of three things. you don't trust the person to do it well, or you haven't been clear enough about what done looks like, or you genuinely believe it's faster you to do it. And I'll tell you now, all three of those are solvable, but only if you're honest about which one is yours. Are you feeling me, ladies? One more thing. If you've only got food for a few monkeys, which ones are you going to feed? Which projects do you let go of or delay so you can actually properly resource the ones that matter? That's a leadership decision. Nobody else can make that decision for you, nor should they. And if you want to get results through other people, and I mean consistently and sustainably without burning yourself out, [00:08:00] there are three things you have to do. Just three. I've taught this masterclass and I've used it myself for decades and I can tell you this works, but you got to practice it. Number one, we need to establish expectations. Number two, we need to coach regularly. And number three, we need to create accountability. That's it. simple. Easier said than done, I know. That's the whole model. Clarity at the start, conversations in the middle, and accountability throughout Don't worry, I'm gonna break it down for you. you've ever read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, you'll notice this mirrors his three core practices: one-minute goals, one-minute praisings, and one-minute redirects.
Three minutes in total. Set clear goals, catch people doing things right, and redirect when they're a little bit off track. three pillars, just dressed up a little differently. The principles haven't changed in 40 years because human beings, we're still human [00:09:00] beings, right? Here's what I want you to understand.
These three things are a cycle, not a one-off. It's not linear. You don't establish expectations once at onboarding and then never revisit them again. You don't have one performance review a year and call it accountability. I see you. You don't coach when someone's struggling and ignore them when they're flying. news is not good news. And here's the bit that catches a lot of women out, especially women who lead with care and heart and all the things. is a natural tension between caring deeply about your people delivering results. You don't have to choose. The best leaders I've ever worked with do both. They care fiercely, and they hold their people to account. that links those two is regular, intentional coach-like conversations. Let me walk you through each of these three. I really want you to get this. Gallup has been running a [00:10:00] global engagement survey for decades, and one of the 12 foundational questions, the one they call Q01, is simply, " Do you know what's expected of you at work? And only about half of our employees globally can strongly or do strongly agree with that, which means the other half are somewhere on the spectrum from a bit unclear to absolutely clueless. And here's a stat that should stop you in your tracks. Gallup found that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, 70%. That means the biggest single factor is in whether your team is engaged, doing great work, and sticking around isn't the pay, isn't the perks, isn't the office. you. It's the leader. Do you need a second to digest that? Half of the workforce doesn't really know what they're meant to be doing now, you [00:11:00] need to ask yourself honestly, " If I asked every person on my team to write down what they get paid to do, their list match mine?" In my HR years, I did this exercise with leadership teams over and over. I'd ask the manager to write down what they thought their direct's report's role was, then I'd ask the direct report to write down what they thought their role was. We the two lists. never matched. once in 20 years did they perfectly match. Sometimes they were wildly different. And that gap, that's the mismatch between what you think you've communicated and what your person actually heard. And that is where most performance problems are born, in that gap. So here's your first piece of homework. I want you to have what I call a role and relationship conversation with every person who works for you. It doesn't matter if they've been with you for five years, five weeks, [00:12:00] five days, doesn't matter Doesn't matter if they're an employee or a contractor, you sit down and you go through a few different things.
One, what are the duties and responsibilities of the role? Two, does great look like? Three, does success look like in the next 90 days? Four, are your strengths and how do you use them? Five, do you need from me to do your best work? Six, how do you like to receive feedback? Seven, what's getting in your way? You do this once a year minimum. it any time a role changes. You do it every time a new performance cycle starts, and you do it with new people in their first two weeks, not three months in when they're floundering. I promise you, the discomfort of having this conversation front [00:13:00] is nothing compared to the discomfort of having a performance conversation six months later because the expectations were never really clear. Ladies, are you picking up what I'm putting down? I wanna share a story from my HR days. I had a leader come to me. Let's call her Lucy. She came to me, and she was so frustrated with one of her staff members. Missing deadlines. When they did turn up, the work was subpar, and Lucy had to redo all the work, and then it was late for her boss, which made Lucy look really bad. Lucy came to me wanting to have a performance conversation and fire the person. Surprise, surprise. Now, that conversation with just that data would have led us to fair work and in the courts, right? And also, it would not have been fair on the individual. So instead, I said to Lucy, number of questions, but I said, " Did you allocate the task in a way that the person understood?" And then I said, " How do you know the person understood? Did the person know the deadline clearly? Did you check in as they [00:14:00] were going along to make sure they were on track? Did you give them feedback along the way?" You can see where this is going, ladies, surely. And I'm sorry to spoil this story this is what a very busy Lucy did. She grabbed the person for a meeting, asked her to do the task, gave her an end date that was 24 hours before Lucy had to submit it, left the person to it assuming that they knew what they were doing, and then was a little bit peeved when it didn't all come together in the end Instead of doing what Lucy should have done, articulated the brief, had the person respond to check for understanding, asked if the person had what they needed to get started, a deadline, a week out, then agreed the steps in checking in with this person. Simple? Mm-hmm. Easy? Not so much. that's what we need to be. And once Lucy and I had this discussion she went back to the person, face-to-face, by the way, [00:15:00] and asked what happened. She led with curiosity. The person said that they got what they could get done, had emailed Lucy a bunch of questions for her to answer, and Lucy hadn't got back to them. So they assumed no news was good news and kept going along their merry way until the time came to submit. They thought they'd done a great job. course they had. Do you see how we as leaders can make up a narrative about poor performance when this was actually about Lucy and how she handled the initial briefing, and not leading the poor person? Now, we could say, "Yeah, yeah, but the person could have asked for a meeting," or, "That's unfair because they could have done A, B, or C." But the reality was that Lucy was responsible for getting results through this person, and she did not set them up for success This is a really easy fix if Lucy just follows a process from now on, which to be fair, she did, right?
She did. [00:16:00] So we've established expectations. Now what? Now guess what? You're a coach regularly, I wanna give you a framework I use with every leader I work with because it stops the whole I don't know what to talk about problem. There are like five conversations leaders need to be having. They sound like a lot, and you're probably already having most of them, so don't stress. The difference is whether you're having them intentionally accidentally. are accidental, but we'll just tighten that up. Here's another stat for you. Gallup found that when employees feel supported by their manager, they are 53% more engaged. only 29% of employees say they actually trust their team leader. Whoa! There's a gap there, and the gap is filled with conversations, regular, intentional, coach-like conversations. That's it. the whole secret. This might be why I'm a good [00:17:00] coach. Who knows? So here are the five. Number one, we've talked about this, role and relationship conversation. just covered this. Once a year or when something changes or a new task assignment, something a little bit bigger, that's the first one. Tick, we've got that. Two, Quick connects, five-minute unscheduled in-the-moment chats. How you doing? What do you need from me today? Et cetera, et cetera. These are wildly underestimated, especially if your team is remote or your contractors are working from their own homes, right? Quick connects are like glue. That's how you stay close enough to spot a problem before it becomes, you know, a performance issue. three, check-ins, scheduled check-ins. the diary, usually fortnightly or monthly, 30 to 60 minutes, and this is where you go a little bit deeper. How are your priorities tracking? What's getting in the way? What support do you need? This is not a status update meeting. This is a coaching conversation, [00:18:00] helping them identify what it is that they need without you giving them the answers. Number four, fourth conversation is developmental coaching. Some leaders block out specific time for this, maybe quarterly, to talk about growth and development separately from the day-to-day. My recommendation is that you use a coaching style in all your conversations. But if you've got someone who's growing fast or someone who's struggling, dedicated development conversation is, mwah, chef's kiss I reckon anyway. five, progress reviews twice a year. This is where you, like, formally sit down, and you go look at things, how things are going, they're tracking against expectations that you set at the start. here's the rule I want you to write down: If there are any surprises in a progress review, you've failed as a leader in the months leading up to it. soon as you tell someone that, that you've got some feedback, they shrivel up and die. So if we can have those conversations, awesome. If your [00:19:00] team member is shocked by the conversation or the feedback you're giving them, that's actually on you, not them, because it means the conversations in between weren't happening or you weren't honest enough. We need to be really honest Now, here's the bit that I think catches a lot of leaders and a lot of business owners out. leaders have the first conversation, the kickoff, the goal setting, and the last conversation, the review, but just not enough in the middle, and that's where the gap is. That's where performance problems hide and they grow. One more thing Gallup found that I think is fascinating, employees who strongly agree that their leader communicates effectively are 73% less likely to feel burned out. 73%. If your team is exhausted, before you assume it's the workload, ask yourself whether they actually know what's going on, whether you've been communicating clearly, because clarity reduces burnout. that [00:20:00] simple. I want you to rate yourself out of 10 right now, just 10 being I have a regular rhythm with each of my people, I'm present, I take a coaching approach, I hold them accountable, one being I avoid those conversations wherever I can. No judgment, don't have to hand it in, but where are you on that? And if you were just one or two points higher, what would be different? What conversations are you avoiding? do you need to be a little bit more consistent with? That's your work this week. Like, pick one person and lean in. Now, to the bit that women in particular, in my experience, struggle with the most, accountability, their feet to the flame. And here's the thing I learned in my HR years. Setting up expectations without holding people accountable to them is worse than not setting them at all what you've done is taught your team that standards actually don't matter, that what you say and what you accept are two different [00:21:00] things. And once that gap exists, it's very difficult to close. And Gallup, data backs this up. Only 20% of employees say their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do great work. 20%. Which means 80% of the workforce is being managed in a way that does nothing for them or actively makes things worse. Oh my goodness 28% of employees who quit their jobs say it was because of a poor relationship with their manager. So more than one in four people walk out the door because of how they were led, or in this instance, not led. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of money re-recruiting. What makes an effective progress review or accountability conversation? I know that's your next question. I am onto it. is specific.
You're talking about actual work, actual behavior, and [00:22:00] actual results. You're not talking about vibes, not I feel like. It's two-way. You're asking more than you're telling. working? What's not working? What is it that you need? It's honest. You're not softening the message so that the person walks away thinking, um, everything's fine," actually it's not It's tied to what you agreed at the start.
You're going back to those expectations and measuring against them. You're not moving a goalpost. will hate you if you do that. And it covers off both the what they're doing and the how. What did they deliver, and how did they go about it? Did they live the values? Did they treat people well? Did they take ownership, right?
The what and the how. It's really important. And here's the question I want you to think about: How do you hold people accountable for the way they show up, not just what they [00:23:00] deliver? Because in small business especially, the way someone behaves matters as much as the work, don't you reckon? One person with a bad attitude sink the whole energy of the team. And if someone isn't living your values, you have to name it kindly, clearly, early. Not three months later, not when you've finally had enough and you're about to blow a gasket. Yes, that does happen. I wanna tell you about Jackie. She had six direct reports, and she was in a customer-facing role, and so was her team. of the values in the organization is we respect all. Vague, but work with me. Uh, she noticed on a couple of occasions that one of her staff was speaking badly about customers to their peers. She'd already addressed it with this staff member through a feedback framework, still it persisted. Jackie let it go on a little longer than she cared to admit she heard them on the phone to a customer. That did [00:24:00] not sound great. She took a listen to the call and several others and realized that this person had not been upholding the behaviors that she expected, nor the values of the organization. She had a very serious conversation with them, and they decided that this person would leave the organization. Jackie got out of this super lucky. I have seen scenarios drag out months over time. just did what she needed to do. She stayed true to the values and had multiple conversations with this person. One rotten tomato can ruin the whole crop, especially in small business. Especially in small business. let me bring all this together for you. to get results through your team, so you reduce the monkeys on your back by putting them back where they belong with a clear next move and a check-in time. establish very clear [00:25:00] expectations, role by role, person by person. You have five different types of conversations on a rhythm that suits your business. accountability by coaching regularly, not by waiting for any kind of annual review. And underneath all of that, you care deeply and you deliver results, both, not one or the other The women I coach who get this right, their businesses don't just grow. become genuinely enjoyable to run because they're not the bottleneck anymore. They've got a team that knows exactly what's expected, gets coached regularly, and is held to a clear standard. And the leader, the leader gets to actually lead instead of being head down, bum up in the work. We've all been there. The women who don't get this right, oh, they stay stuck. They keep collecting monkeys.
They burn out, and eventually they either lose good [00:26:00] people or they shrink the business back down because it got too hard. I do not want that for you. here's what I want you to do this week. Number one, do the monkey audit. Write down every project and who owns it. honest about how many monkeys you're carrying that aren't yours. That's number one. Number two, pick one person on your team. Book a role and relationship conversation with them. Say Emma sent you. Not a quick chat, sit-down. And number three, yourself out of 10 on how regularly coaching. commit to being one point higher next month. Just one. We don't have to go from 1 to 10, just one little point higher. That's it. Three things. Don't try to overhaul everything at once. If this episode landed for you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me an email at emma@emmamcqueen.com.au or come and find me on Instagram or LinkedIn, all the things, and tell me which monkey you're putting [00:27:00] back this week. I love the messages, and I get to read all of the messages. And if you've got a friend who's just stepped into leading a team or who's running a small team and feeling the weight of that, send them this episode. I reckon it might just help. We need to talk about this stuff more, not less. Until next time, you be you, boo. Speak soon
