Self-Directed Performance Coaching, with Roger Connors [Episode 858]

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Roger Connors is a 4x NYTimes and WSJ bestselling author. In this episode we talk about his latest book Get a Coach, Be a Coach. Roger believes that outdated, old-school, one-on-one professional coaching models make effective coaching scarce, expensive, and hard to justify for the masses. It works for a few, but not for the many. What’s the answer? Roger proposes a new model for coaching called Self-Directed Performance Coaching.

Podcast Transcript

Andy Paul: Roger. Welcome to the show.

Roger Connors: Thank you. Good to be with you.

Andy Paul: Yeah.  Where have you been hiding from the storm?

Roger Connors: Working from my office a lot. So the good news about zoom is I don’t have to fly any everywhere anymore. I can just zoom in. That’s great.

Andy Paul: Do you think that’s gonna be a permanent change for you? Cause you’re out meeting clients.

Roger Connors: I do think there’s a pivot here happening and something of a hybrid model is going to occur, but definitely will probably be zooming more than I ever thought I would.

Andy Paul: And good or bad

Roger Connors: I think there’s good to it. I think the the ability to get around quicker have more impact that the digital interface offers is great. I don’t think a hundred percent of that is good. I think there’s some stuff that only happens when you’re face-to-face and I’m looking forward to that returning.

Andy Paul: Yeah. The thing I find interesting about a lot of them evangelism, if you will, about, Hey, we can do everything virtually is. Yeah. This technology didn’t emerge during the pandemic. It’s been around for years with zoom adoption was increasing where people were using it more frequently, but if it was such a good idea, why didn’t we all do it beforehand?

Roger Connors: That is a good question. And I do think in my industry, organizations are going to be thinking twice about bringing everyone together, the cost, the amount of time, energy, effort, resources involved in doing that. It’s going to happen less frequently. And everyone’s wondering, why did we not think about this before?

So I think there are some positive pivots that are happening and we’ll end up with a hybrid model. That’s probably more effective.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s. Yeah. I think companies do a lot of things without, and we’re going to talk about this in the conversation, but they do a lot of things without. Yeah. Seeing if there’s a return on doing it,  what’s the value like sales kickoff meetings,  what’s the value of getting everybody together to bring in a high price speaker, to talk for, people like me actually, and you to talk for 45, 50 minutes, which people promptly forget everything they spent or they said

Roger Connors: I was just going to say, I think too, that  we are creatures of habit and we fall into practices. We tend to like to annualize whatever we do it once it works, we think we should do it again. And I think becoming more deliberate and conscious about, okay, what are we doing?

Why are we doing it? What’s the impact we want to have. That’s what’s happening now. This is causing everyone to be rethinking, is this effective? I think what will emerge. I’m actually excited because I think what will emerge is a new model of distributed work that will be more effective in the long run and will have better impact that harder.

The harder part of that will be organizations trying to figure out how do we maintain culture in a distributed work model. But I think that’s going to be a positive.

Andy Paul: Yeah.  Why do you think that’s the case? Not that I don’t think it’s going to be the case. Just certain realities I think are, or we’re going to confront with this, but how do you think that will be a net positive?

Roger Connors: I think the, I won’t call it work from home, but work from anywhere philosophy is going to be a differentiated advantage for organizations that offer it, because I think this. Millennial generation, particularly it makes up half the workforce. Now three quarters of the workforce in five years has a preference towards that model.

It’s Al it also lends to more self-directed work environment, which again, that demographic likes. So I think it’s a coming of age for this new labor force that was going to happen at some point. This just accelerated.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I guess the question rises in my mind is, yeah, we can have a large fraction of our workforce say, this is what we’d prefer to do. mean they’re not good at it.

Roger Connors: I agree.

Andy Paul: And so that’s, I guess the open-ended question is, or open question for me is I think back, and I’ve had this conversation with other people recently, it’s Yes.

We’re gonna talk about this with coaching and today’s episode, but having a conversation with a gentleman yesterday about, you hire for coachability in this virtual environment, I said, okay, that’s great. But yeah, I remember opening offices and hiring salespeople overseas and in Europe and Asia and so on and putting people in sometimes transferring people from home office over to those offices to work. And we spent a lot of time thinking gosh, do they have the emotional intelligence, the resilience, do they have the self-sufficiency none of it’s really directly related to coachability. There’s these other factors? And it’s  we just surf. Wholescale saying, look, just relocate yourself. Start without regard to whether people can work in those environments or even want to.

Roger Connors: It’s interesting, I think back to my most effective office hours, quote unquote, or when I’m on an airplane flying somewhere. I used to just, and I’m sure you’ve done the same thing. You save your work for the plane. Because you’re in an environment where you’re not being interrupted. You don’t, the phone’s not constantly ringing. There’s not, ad hoc meetings happening all the time. So there is that piece of it that allows people to be more productive. But I do think there’s a skill, a new skill in a distributed work, remote work model that people are going to have to learn.

But they’re there.

Andy Paul: And what’s the new skill

Roger Connors: I think part of the new skill is the ability to stay connected. So number one, one of the skills is to stay focused, right? So there’s a lot of distractions. Just like there are on the office. There’s a lot of distractions in the home office at number two is the ability to stay connected when you’re not in a connected work environment.

So I think those two kind of play against each other, but are both important to master.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, it’s very interesting. All so let’s are relates to what we’re going to talk about today and in some regards, and I think we’ll touch back on some of those themes as is, we’re going to talking about some topics from your latest book, get a coach, be a coach. And this whole topic of coaching is gosh, more and more.

Talk is being talked about it. I think we still have issues, people trying to find what coaching is versus mentoring. And we’re gonna talk about that. But you stake out at least in the first part of the book and I guess consistent with the second as well, but is that, Hey, you stick out the position that companies are just never going to step up to the bar to provide the type of coaching that people need.

Thus. We really are put the onus on the individual to take the initiative and do self-directed performance coaching as you call it.

Roger Connors: That’s right. What we’re seeing today is organizations typically provide the executive coaching, which is the deep dive with the subject matter expert. Multiple sessions, big commitment takes, it takes a lot of money, time, energy, and effort to pull that off. And of course that becomes a constrained resource. They can’t do that for everyone. But our argument is not just that it’s, they can’t do it for everyone. It’s not the most effective way to do it for everyone. And when we distinguish and differentiate coaching and mentoring and coaching, there is a difference between executive coaching, which is this deeper subject matter expertise, deep dive, and peer coaching where it’s more bite-size on demand, real time and skill based. It’s just the information I need to know now to take the next step. So there’s when we talk about coaching, which there are different kinds of coaching and we would differentiate those two.

Andy Paul: So here’s some of the confusion in the sales world and this is, a sales podcast and the confusion is one is people talk about coaching, yeah, it’s this desirable thing, because we’re going to help people grow and develop through coaching, help them learn how to sell.

But the reality is a lot of coaching is just deal coaching, let’s go through your deals and let’s decide how we’re gonna get those as opposed to how do we help this person? Achieve at a higher level and perform at a higher level. So there’s that. And then we’ve got the whole mentoring thing, but I feel like a little bit in the book is because I think in this context of sales is that we were letting employers off the hook awfully easy, because I think that, yeah, if as long as we’re structured, the way we’re currently structured, That organizations gonna be loath to make the investment that they need to scale coaching, but you yourself talk about in the book, is that yeah, you quote, at least one study with huge returns, average returns in terms of doubling a performance in a large fraction of cases. And if that’s the case, then the expense of coaching is nothing. Even in sales where they, once I shows that, the effect of uplift from coaching or the uplift average uplift from effective one-on-one coaching is 18% improvement in performance are that’s easy for me to say today is how fair it gets 18% improvement. You’re foolish not to invest in coaching. The return is obvious

Roger Connors: Yeah. Oh, I’m sorry.

Andy Paul: Yeah, and it would be, use the 88% average percent experienced these near doubling of results as like why we’re letting companies off the hook. If that’s the uplift you get, they could pay for it and earn a return on it.

Roger Connors: Exactly it makes no sense. Not to. In fact, the cost of coaching approaches zero on a per capita coaching basis, meaning the more we coach each other, the lower we drive our cost for coaching experience. And it almost approaches zero in a peer to peer coaching environment.  Every sales leader is implementing something that they’re trying to do to increase the performance of the sales organization.

And sometimes it’s formal sales training, sometimes it’s other initiatives, but without coaching, what happens is that, that Ebbinghaus effect happens, which means within about two days after hearing it. Whatever it is, we retain about 12% after about 30 days, it’s down to 2%

Andy Paul: The forgetting curve, right?

Roger Connors: So what you have to do when you add coaching to that equation, it’s an accelerator that causes people to really get what they need. And here’s the other idea behind it.  When a sales leader is trying to make things happen in their organization, they’re focusing on kind of the learning component. Like how do we get people to learn this new skill, do this differently, whatever it might be focused on the strategic initiative. And then there’s the performance part of it, which is out in the field. We’re practicing, we’re getting it done, which some of that mentoring you talked about happens, but coaching brings those two together. The learning and performance wheels overlap each other. And so we’re coaching to perform and that’s an accelerator for any sales organization. That’s trying to get stuff done.

Andy Paul: Yeah, and I agree, but so here’s my take on it is, and I’ve been doing this for a really long time managing teams and so on, but we seem to reach this point where Yeah, we haven’t fundamentally, despite all the technology that’s floated into the business and sales in particular, haven’t fundamentally changed how we manage and develop people in the last a hundred years.

Yeah. If you look at typical sales organization, VP of sales, you got director, you got frontline manager managers, dada. But if you look at every other performance, not every other, but if you look at, I use the example of professional sports organizations, these are performance-based professions, just like sales.

And when you look at the way they’ve staffed those organizations, They have these increasing use of these very specialized coaches. And yeah, as I think, as you certainly will know is performance. It’s not just one thing. It’s a combination of attributes mindset, skills, behaviors, have it, we go down the list and.

I find it interesting. These other organizations that are performance-based have taken a completely different tagline from business, which is look, we’re going to bring in experts to work with our people in each of these areas. Whereas we’re going to keep using and sales. We’re just going to keep using, we’re assuming that this VP of sales, we promoted him or her, that person must be this mythical figure that possesses all this knowledge about how to effectively motivate people and know mindset.

  And they don’t have that. So I’m wondering is why let’s get back to the theme. I’ve talked before about letting companies off the hook too easily, is that yeah, I certainly buy into the idea of self-directed performance, coaching and advocate that, but I think in addition to that, companies need to just completely rethink how they coach performance.

Roger Connors: Totally agree. In fact, a kind of two ideas with that. One is in our research, we found that there’s actually three types of coaching engagements that happen between people and organizations, a type one is what I call a pick your brain. And it happens in 15 minutes or less type two is get some coaching. It’s maybe a lunchtime it’s no more than an hour kind of visit. And a type three is more of that deep subject matter expertise. Dive, will you be my coach? Multiple kind of engagements. 85% of the coaching that occurs happens in type one and type two 65% in type one. Maybe it’s pick your brain. So what does that mean? It means what people are after is that bit of information I need to take the next step. It’s not this deeper dive which needs to occur 13% of the time it happens. But it’s just this quick idea. So one thing we teach organizations is we use what we call our skill index and it goes from zero to 10. That’s the name of our companies are at a 10 and it’s, what’s your skill on this area? I’m a six, I’m a five, I’m a 10, whatever it might be. And a 10 of course is a master. And we invariably, particularly with sales organizations,

Andy Paul: Got a lot of tens, right?

Roger Connors: You know what?

It’s funny because we’ll say, look, if you learn how to play golf, what do you want to teach? And yet, and then variably. Everyone’s going to say tiger woods. I want the master teaching me how to play golf. And actually the research has shown that recency can be more effective than expertise at helping people take the next step.

And so what we found is that a level up coach rather than a master coach is actually more effective in these bite-size pick your brain kinds of experiences where people only need to know what’s needed to take the next step. If I’m a two. Mike, my best coach is going to be a three. It was someone who was just there.

They just experienced, they could empathize with where I’m at, the frustrations, how they worked through it, who they talk to versus a 10 who it may have been 20 years since the last time they actually experienced what I’m describing. So that level of coach could be really beneficial to organizations.

Andy Paul: Right one. And so one of the conflicts that exist in sales these days is that again, due in part to fact, we have Newport technology in the space and it’s creating more data and more requirements for reporting quite frankly. And mantras find themselves yepulled and in lots of different directions to report on the data, analyze data, to so and so forth.

But the thing that suffers is coaching and my. Experience. And also some informal surveys I’ve done over the years is that the point you just made as people primarily learn how to sell? Oh, sorry for this apprenticeship model. Where yeah, they go pick somebody’s brain and it’s not company provided training and the like.

And something that gosh, coaching is such an important aspect of this. As I asked the question, other than your own experience, what’s been the biggest influence on your sales development. It’s always been a coach or I’m, first frontline manager, so on, but in a coach role and company provided trainings, always at the bottom.

It’s okay, we spend all this money on sales training every year, billions of dollars, mostly focused on the individual. Why don’t we just take all that money and teach people how to coach.

Roger Connors: Well, and the resources there, we are, it’s interesting when I, if I sit down with the average sales leader and say, okay, look, I we go through the exercise and they hate it by the way. So we go through this exercise and say, okay, listen, we’re going to list your skills. And so they get to about five or six and they’re done like, okay, I’m done.

You’re not done. You just started Oh shoot. So we say, what look what about pricing in the marketplace? Is that a skill? And what do you what’s required, then they go, okay, I get it. So we start going and if I facilitate it, I’ll get them to 60, 70 or 80 skills. Easy. No, no problem. And so then what we do is we still can’t now let’s talk about what we call your coach, ready skills and a coach rating skills, a skill where I’m both willing and able.

I’m sufficiently competent and most people feel like they need to be a five on a scale from zero to 10 to coach someone else. So if I’m about a five or more on that skill, and secondly, I’m interested, like I, that’s such an interesting to me. I’d like to coach someone on it. I could get into that.

So what we find is the average person has 10 coach rating skills. We call it the 10 X rule. That they can coach someone on. So let’s say you have a sales organization of 300 people and they can each coach on 10 different things. That’s 3000 coaches you have in your organization. They’re all around you.

They’re your peers. And when I say peers,  multi-directional, non-hierarchical meaning, the leader can coach someone, as frontline sales person, it doesn’t matter. But that idea that we have 3000 coaches and the question is, are we putting that to work? So that real time as people need help getting stuff done, they can get that help.

Andy Paul: Yeah, why it’s interesting because the thing that’s somewhat problematic about that, and you alluded to it just so with just our generational talk earlier, is that. Yeah, like the the Gallup polls, like polls, salespeople, fairly survey salespeople fairly frequently, they find the number one reason for turnover and it’s a 55, 60% site.

It is lack of development opportunities presented by a manager, so they’re getting no value from the person they work with. And I think they don’t see that. Hey, there are source of value because they’re not receiving any value. And I think it makes that peer coaching things problematic. I don’t think that, I think that happens.

Yeah, because through all of our collaboration tools, Slack and so on, but it’s certainly not formalized.

Roger Connors: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think it also changes the role of the team leader. So a sales leader for their team,  call it there’s two different kinds of sales team leaders. There’s the always on leader and there’s the connector manager leader. The always on leader, what it looks like is someone comes in and says, Hey, I’ve got this problem.

And they go into problem solving mode. They immediately start trying to solve the problem, trying to work it through and feel that they have to have all the answers. They feel the third job to solve the problem. The connector manager leader, which Gartner sent a lot of research on this shows that employees of the connector manager leader are three times more likely to be high performing.

The idea is a connector manager leader. Doesn’t feel it’s their job to solve the problems. They feel it’s their job to make sure the problems get solved. And so they’re connecting. Team members with people who have the expertise, knowledge, experience, the level up kind of experience so they can get the answers there.

If I, as a sales team leader, I’d rather have someone come in and be rather than saying, here’s my problem. Why do you think I should do? I’d rather have them coming to me saying, Hey, I had this problem and we’re trying to work it through. I’ve talked to three different people and gotten this coaching.

What do you think. And now I am in the position to coach the coaching, pay attention to that. Do more of that. Gee don’t worry about that. So it’s a different leadership style. When you do engage the peer-to-peer collaboration.

Andy Paul: Yeah.  It’s closer informed to the one. I’m a huge believer in his Michael Bungay Stanier, the coaching habit which is much more about me. My job is to teach you how to solve problems. I can be the connector as well, but part as part that’s part of helping learn how to solve problems.

And I think that’s, for me, that’s as a coach, that seems like the most essential role in the development of the person, at least in my experiences. Yeah. Yeah. If I can help you learn how to solve these things and think about how to solve and think about, what’s really important to you in getting this done, then you’re probably ahead of the game and perhaps developing yourself.

To become a good coach.

Roger Connors: And the value added that it’s not just getting people to, be self-directed in their learning process with regard to that. It’s then also realizing we have resources all around them that they can tap into to get coaching on the things that they’re challenged with. We actually have this model called coaching triggers and it’s five conditions that we’ve discovered that these are the places where people ought to have the instinct to think coach.

So if I’m in a sales organization and I’m doing something for the first time, I gotta be. I gotta be thinking coach, like where’s the learning others have gone through that can help move me forward more quickly. If I’m stuck with a customer, with a client, with a circumstance, I should be thinking coach, if it’s something strategic, if I’m trying to accelerate it, speed it up.

Or it’s a crush goal, I wanna, I have a stretch goal that I want to attain. These are all the times when you should be thinking coach and have the instinct to reach out and get coaching. And by the way, since most of the coaches are like 15 minutes long, then I could have multiple coaches for something I can reach out and get three different people.

Coaching me in a very short period of time to get ideas and experience and transfer knowledge transfer that’s needed.

Andy Paul: Yeah. My thought when I was reading that part of the book was agreeing a hundred percent, but yeah, become more problematic in our current environment, especially if we’re going to be more work from anywhere because so many of those conversations were the. Yeah, I’m just walking by your cubicle or I’m walking by your desk or your workspace or whatever, and the very spontaneous type things that happen which some have become more planned by necessity when we’re remote.

Roger Connors: Yeah. And so one way we’ve solved that is we actually created a digital software product that actually matches people. So you can be anywhere in the world. And you list what it is you’re trying  to work on. We call it your MIT, your most important thing you need coaching on. And and you can list that and hit the button and boom, your coaches.

These are the people that return to you that the algorithm says, these are folks who could be your coach, consider reaching out to them, and then you manipulate the software to, to reach out. So you need some way in a distributed work model. To take the place of those after meeting, before meeting water cooler in the hallway kinds of conversations with the digital approach is one way to do that.

Andy Paul: Yeah one things, again, I’m a huge believer in the self directed performance coaching and self directed learning, but quite honestly, we have a problem with that. And sales, is that not enough? People take advantage of these, especially in today’s world, where there’s so many resources available to help you do that increasing number just in the last year in response to what’s going on.

And part of that is, is interesting to hear what you’re seeing companies do in this regard is that part is yeah. Companies aren’t subsidizing it. No, there’s this expectation that you need to invest in your own success. And it’s yeah, but maybe what are you stepping up to do company? And I’ve seen. So I started this, I think companies should provide stipends to people to take advantage of, online courses and other things that are being provided by resources outside the company.

Are you seeing that?

Roger Connors: I think so. I think we’re seeing that more, it’s not a great learning model to just throw a ton of resources. As someone say, here are the 150 things you can refer to.

Andy Paul: I know you got to scan it. You gotta vet it and so on. But assuming that the managers and team goes through the work in vetting, here’s the range of things you can use and there’s gonna be accountability built into it. And I’m sorry, I should’ve make clear, but yeah, you just can’t do an open loop, but

Roger Connors: So my comment was, and no, I totally agree with that. And I do think organizations need to foster a culture and environment where they’re supporting this notion of being self-directed in the learning process, but. Think the key thing is having, when you’re reaching out to get coaching, it helps you figure out what do I need to focus on and which of those resources should I tap into?

It’s interesting. We, when we watch people we, when we started our content creation, part of this business, we did about 15 focus groups over about a year and a half. And we watch people engage their coach. We said, just go ask your coach for help. Yeah, it was crazy how ineffective that was.

People were wandering, they were unclear. The coach had to ask a hundred questions. They could figure out what’s going on. So we created this model called the ABC’s of coaching and it’s real simple. So what people do is when they’re engaging their coach and you’ll see why I’m sharing this in just a second, they engage your coach to say, here’s my MIT that I’m working on.

Andy Paul: The most important things.

Roger Connors: That’s right. Here’s my most important thing I need coaching on is breaking into this new market in pitching customers. So whatever it might be.

Andy Paul: Cause you don’t dress it specifically in the book, but it’s, I think a lot of people, as you said, most people don’t understand what the most important things are. So they really need coaching to understand what are the most important things that they need coaching on.

Roger Connors: Yeah, I think there’s truth to that. I think, where we think we help with that is this coaching triggers model. You’re doing something for the first time, stuck strategic accelerator, crush it. You need a coach like that’s by definition. If you’re doing that, you need to coach.

We actually talked to one high-performing team in an organization about 40,000 people. There were 20 people on the team, 18 responded, and we asked them, how often are you meeting one of these five conditions? Believe it or not.  The numbers were something like 23, they were stuck on 23 things.

Cumulatively, there were 30 things they’re doing for the first time 37. They want to accelerate in all in those five conditions. There were 170 coaching conditions that team had in their normal workflow as they’re working through it. So the problem isn’t do I have enough things to, as you’re implying, I think, are there enough things to need coaching on.

Andy Paul: Why that’s what I was talking about. How do you identify the things? Because yeah, first of all, these things should align and you talk about, this is your book, these things, this is your most important thing should align with the organization’s goals. And yeah, I understand the triggers part, but I think these overlay, the trigger it’s okay, what are these.

Two three, four things that are my most important things that I absolutely need to learn master become proficient in whatever, over the next X period of time.

Roger Connors: So when we talked earlier about a connector manager leader there’s four roles that they play in our thinking that’s to Knight, coach connect and lead. And the coach role that they play is to coach. MIT’s exactly what you’re talking about, making sure that, we’re focused on MIT’s most important things that really do give us traction, move us forward and make a difference.

Andy Paul: Yeah, people are thinking about, okay, how do I identify the things that are my most important things is I think it’s really like a sort of classic gap analysis that sales people should be doing all the time with their prospects, which is where am I now? Where do I want to be an expert at a time?

And what are the challenges that are preventing me from getting where I want to be to, from where I am, to where I want to be.

Roger Connors: And then we say run that if you identify several of those, the average person has 13 coaching triggers. So we say run those through the urgency filter, where are the looming deadlines? Whereas there’s a high visibility in the organization high collaboration needs. Those are some of the things that help you as well as urgency.

Kind of break those down and we usually say don’t have more than two. You should have two things that emerge as what we call your most important things. You need to get coaching around and you go pick those off,

Andy Paul: Yeah, it’s thinking about that in the context of the what the Eisenhower grid, they call it in their quadrants. Same with the urgent versus important,

Roger Connors: Right?

Andy Paul: Fits in that almost.

Roger Connors: Yeah, for sure. And then when you do go engage your coach, I was saying that we S we’ve seen that process be fairly ineffective. We call it informing the ask. So what we suggest people do is  we created this thing called the ABC’s of coaching, say here’s what I’m working on.

I’m a two on a scale from zero to 10. I want to be a five by the end of September, I’ve read a book called pitching new customers. That’s where I’m at. So immediately a coach in 30 seconds. Can either say I’m not the right coach or here’s someone else that could coach you, or let me ask a couple more qualifying questions or just begin coaching, but it cleans up that experience on why that’s important is if we’re trying to create a coaching culture in your sales organization, which by the way, we think is the right way to do it.

The focus is not just on coaching is creating a coaching culture where people are willing to do two things. Number one, they’re willing to raise their hand when they need help. And number two, people are willing to respond and offer help when asked. And if a sales leader is really clear, that’s the culture they want.

They have to send the message, the signals and the experiences that cause people to believe that, Hey, doing something the first time I raised my hand, it’s not going to be seen as I’m giving up, but that’s what we want to have in the organization is that kind of behavior that becomes really important.

Then you create a coaching culture. Where people are having these quick exchanges that are clean, efficient, positive. And because of that, we want them to breathe palatable.

Andy Paul: Yeah, and I love that idea. So I got hung up on a couple of things. Not necessarily thrilling it to your book but back to the beginning part of our conversation is, yeah. I think we agree that, mantra shouldn’t necessarily be coaches or be the only coach. , you’re watching the show.

Billions. Okay. So I think every sales organization of any size should have a Wendy. that’s a specialist, specialized coach, you’re talking about performance-based organization is. The return is probably very clear. Again, small startups can’t do this, but as any organization and they cite sales organization, I don’t know, a hundred, 200 sellers, whatever is why not start bringing on people to do the specialized coaching, that address specific issues that the self-directed stuff just won’t be able to address.

Roger Connors: Thanks for that, for sure. We call that type three coaching. And that’s the right model though.  The most effective model is you have the foundation of a coaching culture where it’s peer to peer and multidirectional, non-hierarchical. That’s 80% of your coaching. That’s layered by a layer of executive coaching and coaching.

You’re talking about specialized subject matter experts that put in another 10% and then layered on top of that is another 10% of mentoring, true mentoring, real mentoring that’s happening. And that combination in our mind is the best way to get traction in creating a learning performance model.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I think that’s a good way to, to say it learning performance model and yeah, I call it a learning culture, but yeah, self-directed companies, unfortunately just aren’t. Capable of these days of thinking about how to structure that in that context, I think. But in a, the model you described yeah.

Present provide some hope.

Roger Connors: Yeah. And we’re finding that people are highly responsive to this, that everyone’s getting it, that look creating a collaboration model today in a distributed work environment, particularly where we have remote working. But in a, in that kind of a a business model business setting, we’ve got to find ways to connect people meaningfully.

That contributes to getting things done. And so  we’re finding that this is not a hard sell particularly when people realize that the assets they already have, can just be utilized more effectively, that the knowledge, the experience, the talent that people have deploying that more, more consciously, more deliberately, more efficiently can really enhance results and in a sales organization, no question about it.

There’s. What the best knowledge comes from the people who just did it. That level of coaching concept is absolutely critical in that environment.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I absolutely, I’m not skeptical of that. I, I. Think about my own experiences and experience with people I’ve worked with is there’s always some learning by osmosis, from peers. But there’s also, some people have done some surveys let’s say about presentation skills and sales and the thing that was in the conclusion I drew from this report that was. Yeah, surveyed, I don’t know, fewer than a thousand sales people, but still pretty significant was the general attitude was yeah, from each of the responses. I was like, yeah your presentations are boring

Roger Connors: Yeah

Andy Paul: Okay. And it’s okay, that doesn’t really lend itself to start peer coaching. If you think everybody else’s stuff sucks.

Roger Connors: Sorry, go ahead.

Andy Paul: I think that’s just an interesting dynamic that plays in there as people when peers are coaching, when they don’t know how to coach is you get opinions and advice.

And I think that there’s a limit to how helpful some of that becomes, I think learning from your peers, by watching them in action is much more effective way to do it.

Roger Connors: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. In fact, I think peer coaching has been largely a big fail. In many organizations because of those dynamics. And so is it the fact that Pierce can’t coach or is the fact that we’re going about it the wrong way? Our view on it? It’s when we like to say in our organization, we don’t certify coaches.

We certify learners on how to get the coaching they need. And so we some of the curriculum, the things we talk about, our training helps to teach learners. We not coachees. We don’t like that word,

Andy Paul: Right learners. I like that.

Roger Connors: Helps empower them to get what they need when they need it. And by the way, that’s also, like with the software, for example, we’re able to differentiate learners, there’s reviews on learners.

You can verify skills. So now when you start optimizing on peer coaches, you start thinking, okay, are there differences between peer coaches are some better than others? That’s different topics. And all of a sudden, now the software can start differentiating. What’s good. What’s not as good.

And that helps to make that pure coaching experience more efficient, more successful.

Andy Paul: Not very interesting. Alright. Roger, thank you so much for joining us.

Roger Connors: Thank you. Really appreciate it.