Attitude Supplemental

Supplemental coaching is a way to enhance direct coaching by utilizing various methods such as reading, watching videos, observing others, getting mentored, and establishing peer-to-peer relationships. It can be especially effective in improving attitudes and actions. Examples include a sales rep who engaged in random acts of kindness, read positive books, and journaled about positive things. Another example is a leader who started and ended meetings with motivational videos and encouraged his team to engage with another department. These strategies can accelerate talent development and improve relationships. Coaching should focus not only on tactical skills but also on attitude, and supplemental coaching is a valuable tool for this purpose. Now, remember, supplemental coaching supplements your direct coaching. Now, whether you're coaching an individual or a team, supplemental coaching can be reading a book, watching a video, observing others, getting mentored, setting up peer-to-peer relationships. Supplemental coaching, again, is when you are physically not present. When it comes to attitude, you are going to need everything possible to accelerate someone's decision to improve their attitude as well as their actions. Supplemental coaching is a positive and great way to accomplish this. Now, going back to the sales rep Ryan shared, he was at 71% of goal, his learning project was a random act of kindness every single week. We also had him reading the Chicken Soup books by Mark Victor Hansen. And what we also had him do was journal positive things that other people did. And I said, you know, I really want to pick your brain. Who else do you think is exhibiting some positive tendencies? Now, by observing and journaling, as corny as that sounds, what it does is it trained his mind. It conditioned his eyes to look for the good stuff. He was conditioned to look for the negative stuff. And so what happens is, with the learning project and having conversations and him doing random acts of kindness, and then observing and acknowledging other people, and then reading these positive, inspirational, motivational stories by the Chicken Soup books by Mark Victor Hansen, guess what happened? His mind started to become more positive. Now, does it become this all-in cure? No. Yet it accelerates the talent development. So let me share with you another example of this. Every single week, we had a team, and one of our leaders at one of our client sites would do this. He would end and start every meeting – I should really say he started and ended every meeting with a motivational video. And he always said, I want to start positive and end positive. And he would then ask one question. I want everyone to come in next week with an example of something you did for that other department that will knock down the bricks off of the wall of this thing called our silo. And he was coaching his team to be more engaging with this other department where they were having some challenges. He said within about 90 days, the relationship was dramatically different. And he said, you know what was funny? He said, I was doing this. The other team was not doing this. He said, yet through our thoughtfulness, they started to reciprocate doing random acts of kindness. And it sounds corny and cliche, but those are the things that we tend to need to coach to. See, often when we coach, what are we coaching to? The tactical thing. Remember, you have to coach the people who do the tactical things. There's no greater way to do that with attitude than supplemental coaching.