Turning What Your Employees Know into Effective Action
A few weeks ago, I was coaching a sales manager, “Andy.” We were talking about one of his employees, Lisa, who is having the same performance issue that she had back in December. Essentially, Lisa is being an order taker with clients as opposed to being more of a partner/consultant. There seems to be no improvement in this area at all. Lisa is bright, motivated and truly wants to do well at her job. It has left Andy confused. He said to me, “I don’t get it. She knows what to do so why isn’t she doing it?” I asked him, “How do you know that she knows what to do?” He replied, “I’ve told her – over and over and over again. If she just thinks about, it would make sense and would be the logical thing to do.” Sound familiar?
Knowing vs. Doing
There is a massive difference between knowing something and actually doing it. Using Andy’s reasoning, all we’d have to do is tell someone the dangers of smoking and they’d quit. All we’d have to do is to explain the dangers and pitfalls of a diet high in saturated fat and people would change their behavior to be more healthy. Right? Wrong.
There is a brilliant book that talks about this gap, called The Knowing-Doing Gap, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (professors at Stanford who have studied this phenomenon). In the book, they identify many barriers to action and how to remove them.
Room to Learn without Fear
In the example with Lisa above, the gap had nothing to do with her knowledge; she did indeed have the knowledge. Lisa’s barrier was one of the most common ones: fear and a perceived lack of safety. In talking with Lisa, what surfaced is that she was very uncomfortable in her new role. She had primarily been in a service role that was highly structured: the customer would call in, she would take the order and get off the phone as fast as possible. When we talked about this a little more, she confided in me that, while the idea of engaging the customer and uncovering their real needs made sense to her, she felt uncomfortable doing it. She was afraid that she would fail at it. More specifically, she was afraid that her manager would be disappointed and upset with her if she failed.
If you want someone to try out a new behavior, they have to have relative safety to practice and to even – initially – fail. If they don’t have that safe space, the majority of employees will not change. As the leader, you can help your team turn these early “failures” into learning experiences, which will ultimately elevate their performance. Yelling at them, threatening to fire them, or berating them won’t turn them into learning experiences. However, a thoughtful conversation where you get them to think and talk about what happened, what could have happened and what they could do differently in the future, will help the employees learn about their own performance and what they can do to improve it.
Challenge and Support
A basic premise of adult learning is that there has to be a balance between support and challenge if an adult is to learn and grow. Too much support and the employee becomes complacent. Too much challenge and the employee burns out. The leader’s job is to provide that delicate and rewarding balance.
As a leader, how do you – or can you – provide enough support so that your team feels safe and willing to take risks to improve their performance and enough challenge to keep them constantly growing and improving?
© 2011 Bobbi Kahler. All rights reserved. Developing Leaders, Creating Possibilities: Kahler Leadership Group
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