#45- Hands Down THE BEST Advice You Will Get on Keeping Property Management Teams Engaged, Motivated & Accountable
Before we get too far, I want to make the bold claim that this mini-workshop will change your life. I say that with 100% confidence because the information you are going to hear today from my business coach and mentor, David Bonney of Hire to Fit, changed my life when I first heard it two years ago.
Once you find the right team members you are now faced with the challenge of keeping the team motivated, engaged and accountable. I have to confess, I wanted this to be a “set it and forget it” part of my business. I subscribed to the false belief that the right people would inherently know what they needed to do and stay self-motivated. But this wouldn’t happen and I’d find myself frustrated repeatedly.
2020 has presented a new set of circumstances and I’ve heard from so many property managers that they are struggling to keep teams motivated in the midst of the pandemic. Can you relate?
If so, I know you’ll really benefit from this mini-workshop.
In this session you will learn:
Why easing up on your team might be counterproductive
What your leadership style is - dominator or protector
How to offer the right amount of challenge and support
How to have weekly one-on-ones with your team to drive the results you want
How to progressively escalate conversations (without emotion) to address barriers
SNIPPETS FROM MY CONVERSATION WITH MY BUSINESS COACH, DAVID BONNEY, OF HIRE TO FIT.
Leading Your Property Management Teams During a Pandemic
In unusual times like this, there is no playbook. Our people are getting impacted by what is going on in the world whether we think they are or not. So as leaders, we need to be able to be there to help them through these difficult times.
Initially, the tendency may have been to ease up on our teams because of all the uncertainty and pressures caused by the pandemic. It came from a great place of trying to be helpful. What I've actually found is that this was useful for about a month or so after the pandemic began. Eventually, everybody needed to get on with their lives and everybody did. But what happened is when the expectations were relaxed, it created a vacuum in their mind that allowed them to continue to be inundated by the pressures and stresses of their life, instead of being able to have the sanctuary of work where they can go back to and focus on creating a bigger impact.
So the first thing I would say is, let's make sure that we're still pushing our teams to hit the absolute highest levels possible that the group can hit, based on whatever it is that they need to be delivering for the business. We don’t need to push in an aggressive way, but we need to push in the sense of asking the questions: How can we step up our impact on the lives of our residents? How can we improve what we've been doing in terms of response time or how we're addressing issues or whatever it might be?
We keep our focus on continuing to improve - in getting the team focused on the impact they are having on our residents and the community, so that they can get their minds off of all of the noise that's out there.
The great thing about impacting others is when we're focused on impacting others, we're thinking less about ourselves. And when we're thinking less about ourselves, we are engaging in less drama, we're engaging in a lot of activities that actually fill our cup up. The emotionally draining environment now becomes one that is actually filling people's cups up and they're more energized when they come into work.
Work becomes their sanctuary.
The Support and Challenge Matrix That Will Help You Be a Better Leader
As leaders, we need to figure out how to offer up equal amounts of support and challenge to our teams. When we do that, we become liberators for them.
Leadership is the ability to lead people to outcomes they wouldn't normally be able to achieve.
The only way to lead people to outcomes that they wouldn't normally be able to achieve is by liberating their talent, their potential, and their capabilities.
The analogy that brings this to life is exercise. You need to have equal amounts of challenge on your muscles and physique to make sure that it's breaking apart so you can grow back stronger. But you also need nutrition, rest, and hydration to ensure that those muscles can come back stronger.
It’s the same with our leadership. Where are we creating the strain and challenge? And then, how are we also going to provide the support to ensure that they are continuing to grow through that challenge and not feeling dominated?
Leadership Styles: Which one are you?
The way that this breaks down psychologically is every leader is either a protector or a dominator.
The Protector:
When leaders find themselves offering a high level of support and a low level of challenge, we refer to that in the matrix as a PROTECTOR. You overly protect your team which starts to create entitlement. If they don't get the results, then at certain points you get frustrated and now there's mistrust. If you're a protector, it's great to have that awareness because now you can ask yourself the question, “What am I not saying that needs to be said?” I'm having this conversation with somebody and I'm not challenging them and I know I should be. You know that they should be growing in an area and you're just choosing not to engage there because you're afraid of whatever their response might be.
Protectors wait too long to have critical conversations. By the time they're ready to have the conversation, they're already frustrated and the other person has no clue that anything is going on. A protector tells themselves that they have the best intentions. You don’t want to rock the boat or upset the harmony. But when you get down to it, most of the time the real reason a protector doesn’t speak up is that it’s about them, how they feel or don’t want to feel having that conversation.
The Dominator:
If you have high challenge and low support, you fall into the DOMINATOR quadrant. That’s where there is a lot of challenge, but little to no support. When we are overly focused on what our employees aren’t doing and forget what they have accomplished, that creates a culture of fear and manipulation. On the dominator side, you escalate the conversation too quickly. So the protector waits too long, the dominator comes in too quick.
With my teams (David), I'm a self-proclaimed, recovering dominator. That awareness alone of me knowing, "Ah, okay, I'm going to challenge people subconsciously. I'm going to challenge them a lot." Well, now I need to start asking the questions, "How can I support you better? What can I do to support you with all of the challenges that I'm giving you to ensure that you have what you need so that those muscles can grow back and you can get stronger?"
To know where you’re at in the matrix, that awareness allows you to ask yourself a different question or your team a different question. It will give you the ability to now easily bring you over into that liberator quadrant and dramatically improve your overall leadership.
If there's too much challenge without support or too much protecting without challenging, either way, it will create distrust and that's not going to be a healthy team.
Coaching Your teams to success with the coaching Progression Checklist
Opportunity to get even Better
The best way to address this is with the coaching progression checklist, and I’ll walk you through my process.
First, I always want to make sure that if I'm their leader and I own this, I've got to bring up the opportunities that they have to grow. If I'm already saying something's an issue, that means that I'm either coming in too quick, or I haven't spoken up fast enough or early enough.
Everybody has opportunities to grow. If I care about my people and I want them to grow, I want to look for those opportunities that they have to grow and then I want to point those out to them.
"Okay. We've got an opportunity to grow here. Here's what I'm seeing. You're doing great in these areas. Here's the opportunity. Let's go ahead and start working on that."
Explore Barriers
Once we’ve talked about opportunities for growth, if that doesn't change and it's significant enough, then we want to say, "Let's explore barriers." What we can expect is we're going to tell somebody that there's an opportunity to do things differently and they're not going to get there immediately, so we need to explore the barriers.
Example after a team meeting where an employee repeatedly gets negative:
"Hey, there's an opportunity for you not to go down this route and get negative," and start to take the conversation into these areas. We get into another team meeting. They do it again. "Okay, what happened? Let's explore this. We already talked about it. Why did this happen?" They may say "Well, I just get so frustrated and it's just because of this and it's just because of that."
Now we can really examine it and isolate the reasons why it's happening. When we explore the barriers, now we're allowing them to understand what is more subconscious behavior for them. We're now allowing them to look at it, to get it right in front of them so that they can better start to recognize it. Then if it happens again, they can choose to respond differently.
Escalating Awareness
Now, if it still doesn't change, we get into a third conversation where we escalate awareness.
"Hey, this was an opportunity, but now it's becoming an issue and I want to be clear about that. You continuing to bring this kind of energy into our team meetings isn't doing anything for anybody. It's just frustrating everybody. This is an issue and we need to get it corrected."
The language transition there is really, really important for protectors. What I see there is that they still shy away from the language and they don't explicitly say that this opportunity has now become a problem. And because they're not explicit about it, the person still isn't clear how severe the issue is and they're not aware of how close they are from potentially having to depart the company.
I really recommend we get into some documentation there. Not just for HR issues, but so that we can be clear. Am I clearly communicating to them what I'm seeing and what I expect? In writing, we can see if we’ve done that clearly. Ensuring that they affirm what we’ve documented and they understand expectations gives them the best shot possible at doing what is necessary to stay a part of the team.
On the other side of it, if they read it and they're kind of like, "This just isn't my bag. I don't really want to deal with this anymore." Then great. We can now have that conversation, which is a lot easier than, "You're a bad person. You're not doing this right. You're not doing that right." Now it becomes, "You’re right, this isn't the right fit for you. You could do this but you don't really want to, and that's okay. Go find a company that's more aligned to your values and how you want to work. You're still a great person."
I want to talk about opportunities, barriers, and issues as quickly as we can because I want you to be able to go in and internalize and figure out what was actually happening. If you wait a week to have that conversation, they can't self-analyze because remember - what they're doing makes sense to them. Everything everybody does only make sense to them. If it didn't make sense to them, then they wouldn't do it. So they're doing it for a reason. Unpack it right then and there to get clear on why they do it, the triggers, and what will be done differently.
Our job as leaders is to fight for the highest possible good in those we lead. If my team member wants to be on my team and wants to be in the company, I'm going to fight like heck to make sure that they can be. And one of the ways that I do that is making sure that I am clear with them this is what I'm expecting. If you do want to be here, this is what we need to do.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse
The last thing that I would say on this is I think it's really important for us to make sure we keep our fingers on the pulse of our team. We don't know what's going on. Again, like we've said before, somebody's mother just got COVID and now they're experiencing difficulties and the stress is just out of control, but they don't want to say anything because they're worried about people thinking that they have it or whatever it might be. Or somebody's spouse just lost their job. And again, they don't want to necessarily talk about it because it can be an embarrassing thing.
During this period of time, things can change for people pretty quickly. So the pulse is so important and that's where I definitely encourage weekly one-on-ones with your people. Just have that time with them dedicated every single week to have a one-on-one in the way that I always recommend. I call them high-performance one-on-ones because they're one-on-ones that drive great performance.
The way to start a one-on-one is always, “Barbara, how are you doing?” And just shut up and just let them start to tell you how everything is going. And if they only talk about work, say, "Okay, great, but how are you doing? How is everything else going?" And just shut up and let people talk and open up because as soon as you ask that question and you're quiet, what happens is they will start to tell you what's top-of-mind for them and where they're focused. "Oh, I'm having a hard time. We just had a baby, I'm not sleeping. This is going on, that's going on. It's really, really hard. I thought this was going to be a lot easier or our first child was never..." Whatever it is, "Oh, okay, great. I didn't even realize that was a problem."
Now I can start to understand on a weekly basis how you are feeling, what's going on in your life. And when you start that way, and do this consistently, you'll be able to notice when something's off with your team - even if they don’t tell you.
We didn’t hire employees. We hired human beings. And if you think you hired an employee, then just know that you're going to get employee type performance out of them. If you hire the whole human being, you're going to get human performance, which is far more powerful than an employee who's checking boxes and working from 8:05 to 4:55. You're going to have people dedicated to the cause and dedicated to the team and loyal. And it's really important.