At the experienced age of 60, I decided to take up barrel racing. It's a competitive event where you ride a horse in a clover-leaf pattern around three barrels. Your score is based on the time to run the pattern and you lose points if you touch a barrel, knock one over, or fall off your horse.
One of my struggles was that I could never keep my balance in the saddle — which, as it happens, is pretty important. I rode six horses, worked with five trainers, used four saddles, over three years, went through two riding stables, and probably a partridge in a pear tree.
Kelly's Approach
In early 2019 I met Kelly, a 26-year-old trainer. She'd been around horses for about 18 years. A couple of years ago Kelly had been kicked by a rearing stallion. This broke eleven bones in her face and caused her to lose her sense of smell, but not her love for life or horses.
Kelly always saw the good in my efforts. Throughout any lesson, she would tell me, "I love that you did this! Was it perfect? No. But I'll take it over the alternative!" She never asked me to be excellent on the first run. What she was looking for were the small wins and the bringing together of all of the components. Then, just when I thought I had it all together, she would add another layer.
Kelly stopped me and had me stand straight up in the stirrups. "Looking good," she said. "Now, sit straight down where you are. Good. Notice that you are not touching the front or back of the saddle? Use your ab muscles and keep that position while you ride."
That one simple tweak has fixed many, many issues.
The Leadership Lesson
As a leader, manager, or supervisor, you are also a coach and a mentor. Kelly's title is "trainer," but she became my coach and mentor. A coach shows or tells people what they want them to do. A mentor asks questions until the student comes to their own realization about what is right.
The best supervisors and managers are coaches and mentors. They look for the one thing that can improve an employee's performance. They dig deep to see what the core problem is, then they work on that with the employee.
Whether it's pipefitting, lifting heavy loads, loading pigs into a pipeline, moving heavy iron on a drilling rig, lighting a torch, cutting wood, communicating with others — whatever your people are doing, there is always one thing that can help them improve.
Once they have learned and practiced that "one thing," there will be another "one thing." And another.
Getting the best out of people isn't a goal — it's a result. It's the result of working together observing, asking, listening, coaching, and mentoring.
The best managers carefully and consistently observe their people in order to find one thing they can work together on to improve employee performance right now. If you have a manager or employee struggling, look for the one thing that is the root of their problems and work on that. You might be surprised at how other issues fall away and how rapidly they improve.