When you want to hold your people more accountable…Either/or thinking is what is holding you back!

If you’re a leader, you may feel frustrated with your players’ performance—some of your team members or or all of them.

Positive stuff you’ve done You’ve met with them—together and individually, explained the goals they need to achieve, and made yourself available if they need any help. You feel that most of your players are pretty well-trained and have adequate experience to meet the challenges they face in their jobs.

You even like most of your team members. You feel you are fair and that they respect you as their boss. You give them some leeway to do their jobs their own ways, and spend most of your time training new people, solving distracting problems, and meeting with peer leaders or upper management.

Tough stuff you’ve done After staying patient for months or even years, you got up the nerve to have personal talks with one or more people who are the lowest performers. You warned them that they need to improve, or else! It was hard getting to that point and it felt very stressful to plan and implement these “crucial conversations.”

Although some of the feedback you bluntly gave, may have led to incremental improvements, you are still not thrilled with the changes made by your most underperforming people. And you have an even more ambitious vision: You’d love the whole team to step up their performance and reach a whole new level of success! Success that distinguishes them in your company and among competitors in your market.

So it’s a puzzle that things are not going the way you want them to…..

What are you doing wrong? You are wondering what else to do. You sense that if you become even more demanding and act meaner, it won’t lead to the results you want. For one thing, you don’t want to double or triple your stress. For another, you don’t want employees to hate their jobs and/or hate you.

A whole new mindset starts with challenging your assumptions You need a whole new mindset about where improvement comes from. One that integrates great relationships with far greater accountability. A mindset that is owned by both you AND your employees. No more either/or, no more “nice guy” OR “tough guy”. You want to lead through great communication AND great clarity of goals. You no longer see rapport and feedback as separate leadership skills. It’s all one path toward shared success!

“A concise and effective tool… It provides context, inspiration, and great actionable content.”

— Mark Holzbach, Creative and Tech Community Connector, Co-Founder, Zebra Imaging