3 Levs of Change Cheat Sheet

When coaching, we often want quick changes, but that's not how it works. Giving feedback during the effort stage can either inspire or erode effort. As they progress, we need to pinpoint specific improvements so they know what to repeat. This leads to sustainable results. Simply telling people to improve without acknowledging their challenges doesn't work. We need to guide them through the process of change. One of the toughest things when we coach is we want things to quickly change, and it just doesn't work that way. Let me give you an analogy. Think about a Little League baseball player. Think about that player where they get in the batter's box, they don't lift the bat off their shoulder, his or her parents yell, get the bat off your shoulder, and in that moment, that child is going to make a decision, do I want to keep playing baseball, do I even want to get back in that batter's box? That type of feedback can erode someone's effort. So when you go through the three levels of change, which are effort, progress, to result, at the effort stage, reward their effort, acknowledge that they're there, thank them for participating, and that will build the behaviors to continue. Then when they get to the progress stage, you want to pinpoint things specifically where they're progressing. Sometimes people don't even know where they're improving, and then you're going to gravitate into this thing called sustainable, predictable results. One of the most common workplace situations is a sales leader getting in front of a group saying, you know, we need to get our sales up. That's rhetorical. Of course they know that, yet we have to realize that people have challenges, they have opportunities to improve, and people go through the process of change, effort, and progress to result. Now, if we only give constructive feedback in the effort stage, we have to ask ourself, are we inspiring or are we eroding effort? When we're in the progress stage and we don't identify progress, they won't know what to repeat and continue to improve. And that will erode us to leading to this thing called predictable, sustainable results.