When I hear that pattern, I know exactly where we are.

Deflection is one of the most common behaviors we encounter in executive coaching. It isn’t always conscious. Many leaders who deflect responsibility genuinely believe the story they’re telling. What they haven’t examined is their own role in creating or maintaining the conditions around them, and more importantly, what they’re going to do about it, regardless of who caused them.

In our experience, coaching has roughly a 50 percent success rate, and that rate has almost nothing to do with the coach or the process. It has everything to do with how receptive the leader is to examining their own role honestly. Leaders who resist that examination don’t just limit their own growth. They limit everyone around them. A team led by someone who deflects responsibility learns quickly that accountability flows downward but not upward. Trust erodes.  Whether a leader has the courage to own their outcomes determines their success as well as that of their team.

There are typically three reasons leaders resist coaching. Some deflect out of arrogance, a genuine belief that the problem lies with everyone else. Others deflect out of fear of what they might discover if they look honestly at themselves. And some deflect out of distrust, a suspicion that coaching has been arranged not to develop them but to build a case against them. Each requires a different conversation, but all three lead to the same place if left unaddressed.

How to move a resistant leader forward.

Turn the conversation toward response, not fault. The moment a leader begins attributing everything to external factors, redirect to what they control. The question is never whether the situation is fair. The question is what they are going to do about it.

Connect ownership to reputation. Leaders who resist feedback often respond when the stakes become personal. How a leader handles adversity, including adversity they didn’t create, is visible to everyone above and below them. That visibility shapes how they are seen, developed, and ultimately advanced.

Name the pattern directly. Resistant leaders rarely hear honest feedback from anyone in their organization. Part of the coaching relationship is creating the conditions where direct feedback can land. That requires trust, but it also requires the courage to say what others won’t.

Recognize the limits of the process. Not every leader who enters coaching is ready to change. When a leader continues to deflect after repeated sessions, the most honest thing a coach or a senior leader can do is name that reality. Continuing to invest in someone who has no intention of examining themselves or changing is going to stagnate themselves and their team.

Coaching works when leaders are willing to do the hardest part: looking at themselves honestly and deciding that their response to the situation matters more than who caused it. That willingness cannot be manufactured from the outside. No matter how much you try, you can’t motivate someone to change.

The leaders who come out the other side of a difficult coaching engagement stronger are almost never the ones who arrived ready to agree with everything. They were the ones who were eventually willing to stop deflecting and start owning, stop explaining why it wasn’t their fault, and start asking what they were going to do about it anyway.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post The Leader Who Refuses to Be Coached appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

We hear some version of this from leaders in nearly every organization. They have done everything the playbook says: communicated the vision, held the town halls, and sent the follow-up emails. Yet people remain stuck, productivity has dropped, and high performers start quietly updating their resumes. Leadership concludes that their people simply do not want to change. That conclusion is almost always wrong.

The problem is not communication. It is biology.

The human brain’s primary job is threat detection. When people experience change, especially rapid or poorly explained change, the brain immediately asks three questions: Am I safe? Do I still belong? Do I still matter? If it cannot answer yes to all three, it shifts into a defensive state. That is not resistance. That is neurology. What looks like obstruction is usually one of four predictable stress responses: fight, where people argue and challenge; flight, where they disengage or leave; freeze, where they go quiet and indecisive; or fawn, where they agree in meetings and resist in private. None of these is a character flaw. Leaders who understand this stop taking resistance personally and start leading strategically.

We witnessed this during a consulting engagement with a regional hospital system implementing a new patient management platform. The project had stalled for months, and leadership blamed the physician staff. The most vocal critic had twenty years of experience and was one of the most respected physicians on staff. His pointed questions and timeline challenges had gotten him labeled as an obstacle. What was actually happening was that he had watched three previous technology rollouts fail, each one creating more work and worse patient outcomes. His brain was in fight mode, assessing threats based on a pattern he had lived before. Once leadership stopped trying to manage around him and instead invited him onto the implementation team, everything changed. His difficult questions shaped a better rollout, and within weeks, he had become one of the strongest advocates for the change.

Understanding that stress response also explains why every significant change follows the same predictable arc, what we call in our book, Leadership is Tough, the J-curve. Change moves through denial, resistance, exploration, and commitment. The performance dip in the resistance stage is not a failure. It is expected. We worked with a manufacturing CEO who had attempted to restructure his production process three times in eighteen months. Each time resistance surfaced, he backed down. What he kept experiencing as “it’s not working” was actually Stage 2, and he had been pulling out just before the turn. When we finally convinced him to stay steady and hold the line, the transformation succeeded. Six months later, productivity was up significantly. He admitted he had nearly quit again at week two.

What exceptional leaders do during change comes down to a few consistent disciplines. They create predictability where they can — being clear about what is changing, what is not, and what is already decided. They communicate more than feels necessary, because silence gets interpreted as danger. They invest in capability before demanding compliance. And they connect change to purpose, helping people understand not just what is shifting but why it matters.

Change will not slow down. The leaders who succeed are not the ones who avoid its difficulty — they are the ones who understand it well enough to lead others through it without losing them.

In Leadership is Tough, Chapter 2 goes deeper into the neuroscience of change, the full J-curve framework, and the practices that move change-fatigued teams from resistance to commitment. If change is taking longer than it should, that chapter will show you why, and what to do about it.

The post How to Lead a Change-Fatigued Team Without Losing Their Trust appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

Then came a 360-degree assessment. The results were not what he expected. His team wasn’t silent because they agreed. They were silent because they had learned that disagreement wasn’t welcome. One of his senior leaders put it plainly: “I stopped offering input because every time I did, he explained why I was wrong. Eventually, it was easier to stay quiet.” The CEO was stunned. He thought he was leading. He was, in fact, eroding the very thing that makes leadership possible.

Trust is the most valuable and fragile currency a leader has. When it’s high, communication is efficient, decisions move quickly, people take ownership, and leaders hear the truth early when they can still do something about it. When trust is low, information gets filtered, meetings become a performance, candor disappears, and silence replaces honesty. Leaders often assume trust is present until results start to suffer. By then, the damage is usually well underway.

Here is the part that catches most executives off guard. Research from the Harvard Business Review found that 58 percent of workers say they trust a complete stranger more than their own boss. More than half. That is not just a discouraging statistic. It is a leadership crisis hiding in plain sight.

So how does trust erode, and more importantly, what does it take to earn it back?

Inconsistency. Not through dramatic failures, but through the quiet drift between what they say and what they do. Shifting standards. Uneven enforcement. Promises that slip without acknowledgment. People forgive mistakes. What they struggle to forgive is unpredictability. When employees can’t read what their leader will value today versus tomorrow, they stop relying on them. They start managing around them instead.

Withheld information. Leaders often justify this as timing — they’re waiting until they have the full picture, until the deal is closed, until the moment is right. What they don’t realize is that employees aren’t waiting with them. They’re filling the vacuum with assumptions, rumors, and growing suspicion.

Not trusting employees. When leaders micromanage, require approval for minor decisions, or withhold authority without explanation, they send an unmistakable signal. And people receive it. They stop taking initiative. They stop making decisions. They stop caring. The organization that the leader is trying to protect begins to quietly hollow out.

So what does rebuilding trust actually require? It starts with a willingness to acknowledge the gap. Not with a speech, but with changed behavior. Apologies without behavior change accomplish nothing. Trust is rebuilt when people see different patterns, not different words.

That means doing what you say you are going to do, consistently, even in the small things. It means communicating sooner than is comfortable, sharing what you know when you know it rather than waiting for a perfect moment that rarely arrives. It means explaining the why behind decisions, not just announcing the what. And it means being honest when it costs you something — taking responsibility publicly, giving credit where it belongs, and admitting when you were wrong.

None of that is complicated. But it requires the kind of discipline that leaders under pressure tend to abandon first.

The CEO in our opening story did the work. He didn’t try to convince his team to trust him. He simply changed what they watched him do. Over time, people started speaking up again. Input returned. The meetings that had become exercises in performance became actual conversations. Trust, which had eroded quietly, rebuilt the same way — one consistent action at a time.

Leadership without trust is just authority. And authority without trust doesn’t scale. The leaders who understand this don’t treat trust as a cultural aspiration. They treat it as a daily discipline.

In our book, Leadership is Tough, Chapter 5 goes deeper into the specific behaviors that build and destroy trust, how to repair it when it’s broken, and what communication has to do with all of it. If trust is a challenge in your organization, that chapter will give you a framework for addressing it directly.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post Why Leaders Lose Trust — and How to Earn It Back appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

His accounting department was a hub of the organization. Everything flowed through it. And while the rest of the business was pressing forward, his department was doing much of its work manually, including entering data into one system and then updating the supply chain separately. When we asked whether there was software that could integrate those processes and eliminate the duplication, his answer came quickly. “We tried that, and it didn’t work.” We asked when that was. “About eight years ago,” he said.

We asked whether it was possible that a solution existed now that didn’t exist then. He shifted in his seat. You could see the discomfort land on him before he had time to respond.

This leader wasn’t obstructionist. He wasn’t trying to hold anyone back. He was operating from a vision of stability that had quietly become a ceiling, not just for himself but for every person on his team and every department that depended on his.

This is a common and most costly pattern we see in organizations. A leader who has been in place for a long time, who genuinely cares about their work, and who has come to see comfort as competence. The problem is that in today’s workplace, standing still isn’t neutral. It’s falling behind. When a department doesn’t grow, innovate, or adapt, it doesn’t just stagnate in isolation. It creates drag for everyone around them. Technology advances and customer expectations continue to shift. The organization tries to move forward, and somewhere in the middle, there’s a team still doing things the way they were done eight years ago because nobody pushed them to do otherwise.

The phrases are always recognizable. “We tried that and it didn’t work.” “We’ve never done it that way before.” “If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” These aren’t statements of confidence. They’re statements of fear. In our experience, most leaders who resist change aren’t resisting change for its own sake. They’re protecting themselves from the discomfort of not knowing, of being the person in the room who doesn’t have all the answers. Confidence and change are more connected than most leaders realize. When one is missing, the other rarely shows up.

The director we coached never made the shift. He retired, and the organization moved forward without him. The department he had built, capable people with years of experience, began innovating almost immediately once the ceiling was gone. That detail should give every leader pause. The question isn’t whether change is coming. It is. The question is whether you’ll lead it or wait to be replaced by someone who will.

How to lead from the front, not from the past.

Make learning a part of how performance is measured. If growth and skill development aren’t reflected in how you evaluate your team, comfort becomes the default standard. Build innovation and continuous learning into performance reviews and into your department’s culture. What gets measured gets taken seriously.

Start with a small win. Leaders who lack confidence around change often need proof before they’ll commit. Find a low-stakes opportunity to try something new, something with a manageable downside and a visible upside. One successful change builds the momentum, and the internal narrative grows and craves even more.

Work on the confidence beneath the resistance. Fear of the unknown is often the real driver of change resistance, not stubbornness. A mentor, a coach, or even honest self-reflection can help a leader identify where their hesitation is coming from and begin to separate legitimate caution from reflexive avoidance.

Map the worst-case scenario. Most leaders who resist change have never fully examined what they’re actually afraid of. When you walk through the realistic worst case, it’s almost always closer to the current situation than the leader imagined. That exercise alone shifts perspective and lowers the emotional stakes of trying something new.

List the pros and cons. It sounds simple because it is, and it works. When leaders write out what they stand to gain versus what they stand to lose, the pros almost always outweigh the cons. Seeing it on paper changes the conversation from one about risk to one about missed opportunity.

The most dangerous leaders in any organization are not the ones who make bold moves that sometimes fail. They are the ones who stopped moving years ago and built a culture around staying still. Comfortable feels safe. But in a world that isn’t standing still, comfortable is just another word for falling behind.

Change or get passed over. The organizations that are thriving have already made that choice.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post Why Comfortable Is not a good thing in Leadership appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

This pattern shows up more often than most organizations want to admit. A leader who genuinely cares about results crosses a line they didn’t know existed, and suddenly accountability becomes control. The two feel similar from the outside, but they look completely different, and they produce completely different outcomes.

Accountability is holding people to a goal. Micromanagement is dictating every step they take along the way. The distinction matters because one builds a capable team and the other builds a dependent one. When leaders insert themselves into every decision point, employees stop thinking through problems on their own and end up deferring. Over time, they stop developing the judgment they need to perform independently, and the leader becomes the reason nothing ever gets done on time.

The irony is that most micromanagers don’t think of themselves that way. They think they’re being thorough. They think they’re maintaining standards. They think their involvement is what’s keeping the quality up. In reality, their involvement is what’s keeping everything else down and bottlenecked. Projects stack up waiting for approvals that only the leader can give. Teams grow frustrated, and the strongest people on it start looking for somewhere they’re trusted to actually do their jobs.

Accountability without micromanagement looks different. It starts with clarity: the employee knows the goal, understands what success looks like, and has the resources to get there. Then the leader steps back, but doesn’t disappear either. Checking in on progress and understanding, not on method. That is a key difference. Be available when questions arise, but don’t hover over every step waiting to redirect. Trusts employees to figure out the path, because that is part of how people grow. As we’ve written about in our work on delegation [link to The Delegation Trap], the goal isn’t to hand off the task. It’s to hand off the thinking.

What the leader we coached eventually came to understand is that their presence in every decision wasn’t protecting the outcome. It was preventing their team from developing the capability to produce better outcomes on their own. Once this leader shifted her focus from controlling the process to clarifying the goal and staying available for support, things started moving, and her team started owning results the way she had intended.

What this looks like in practice.

Set the goal, not the method. Be specific about what success looks like and when it’s due. Then let the employee determine how to get there. Resist the urge to outline every step. If they need guidance on approach, let them ask for it first.

Check in on understanding, not activity. Early in a new assignment, a check-in should confirm that the employee understands the goal and has what they need. It shouldn’t be a progress report on every task completed. There’s a difference between making sure someone is set up to succeed and monitoring their every move.

Be available without being ever-present. Let your team know you’re accessible when they hit a real obstacle. That’s different from expecting them to run every decision by you. Availability is a resource. Constant presence is a constraint.

Watch what you’re actually measuring. If you’re tracking how people spend their time more than whether they’re hitting their goals, that’s a signal. Accountability lives in outcomes. Micromanagement lives in activity.

The leader who came to us was not a bad leader. She was a thorough one who hadn’t yet learned the difference between being involved and being supportive. Learning that difference, being open to feedback, and understanding what accountability should look like, helped the pieces start fall into place.

Accountability is not about being everywhere. It’s about making sure the right things happen, and then trusting your people to make them happen.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

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What the assessment revealed wasn’t in any of the survey results. A senior leader was not held accountable, and the impact of that failure was quietly and steadily filtering down through the organization. People were watching. They were drawing conclusions about what the culture actually valued versus what it claimed to value. And the ones with the most options, the senior performers, the people the organization could least afford to lose, were leaving. By the time we got there, the turnover among senior leaders had already done significant damage. The metrics had missed it entirely.

This is the gap that lies between measurement and understanding. It is not that the data was wrong. It is that the data was incomplete, and the assumption that a satisfactory score meant a healthy culture had allowed a serious problem to go unexamined for too long.

Engagement scores go up, and the assumption is that engagement improved. Turnover drops, and the assumption is that retention is working. Survey results come back acceptable, and the assumption is that nothing urgent needs attention. It comes back to you get what you measure. Metrics rarely tell you why, and they almost never tell you what is building underneath the surface that hasn’t shown up in the numbers yet.

The organizations we see struggle most with this are not the ones ignoring their data. They are the ones who over-rely on it and put a lot of faith in the instrument. They have confused measuring engagement with building it. As we have written before [link to When Engagement Surveys Fail], the survey is only as valuable as what you do with the results. But there is a step before that one that matters just as much: making sure you are asking the right questions in the first place, and staying curious enough to look beyond the score when something feels off.

The HR vice president in our story did exactly that. She didn’t dismiss the data, but she didn’t stop there either. She used it as a starting point rather than a final verdict, and that distinction made all the difference.

Metrics are most useful when leaders treat them as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. A number that confirms something is wrong without telling you what or why is an invitation to dig deeper, not a reason to close the file. The leaders who build genuinely healthy cultures are the ones who stay curious after the data comes in, who are willing to ask harder questions, and who understand that the most important things happening inside an organization often don’t show up on a dashboard.

How to use your metrics as a starting point, not a finish line.

Trust your instincts when they conflict with your data. If your scores look acceptable but something feels off, that feeling is worth taking seriously. In our experience, leaders and HR professionals who sense a disconnect between the data and the reality are usually right. The metric may not be capturing what matters most. A deeper assessment, through one-on-one conversations, focus groups, or a more comprehensive survey, often surfaces the real issue.

Look for what the metric can’t measure. Engagement scores capture sentiment at a point in time. They don’t capture the quality of accountability, the health of senior-level relationships, or the extent to which people believe the culture lives up to its stated values. Build in regular opportunities to gather qualitative insight alongside your quantitative data. The combination is far more useful than either one alone.

Follow the turnover, especially at the senior level. When high performers and senior leaders leave, they rarely do so without a reason. Exit interviews capture some of it, but not all. If you are seeing patterns in who is leaving, treat them as a signal worth investigating before the next departure.

Hold the standard at every level. The accountability issue in our opening story wasn’t invisible. People inside the organization knew it was happening. What they were watching for was whether leadership would address it. When a senior leader is allowed to operate below the standard, the message it sends travels fast and travels far. As we have explored in our work on trust [link to Trust Is Built Through Patterns Not Moments], culture is defined not by what leaders say they value, but by what they are willing to tolerate.

The HR vice president who trusted her instincts over her dashboard did her organization a significant service. She understood something that the most effective leaders we work with have learned over time: the number is not the answer. It is the question.

What your metrics are telling you matters. What they are not telling you matters more.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post What Gets Measured Gets Managed, But Not Always Improved appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

We asked him to walk us through exactly what he had communicated. He did. And the problem became clear almost immediately. He had told the employee what the outcome needed to look like, but not how to get there. For him, that was enough. He was a results-oriented leader who didn’t need a roadmap, just a destination. But the employee sitting across from him was wired differently. She needed context, steps, and a clearer sense of the path before she could move forward with confidence. Neither of them was wrong. They just spoke different languages, and nobody had noticed.

This is a common communication failure we see in our work with leaders. It rarely shows up as a dramatic breakdown. It shows up quietly, as missed expectations, repeated instructions, and a growing sense of frustration on both sides. The leader believes they have been clear. The employee doesn’t have what they need to succeed. And over time, the leader starts to draw the wrong conclusion about the employee’s capability.

The root cause is almost always the same. Leaders tend to communicate the way they prefer to receive information. If they process best with a quick summary and a clear outcome, that is how they deliver direction. If they think in systems and sequences, their instructions reflect that. The style that feels natural to them becomes the default for everyone around them, regardless of whether it actually works. When the message doesn’t land, the response is usually to repeat it, louder or more often, in exactly the same way. What they rarely stop to ask is whether the issue is the message or the method.

The reality is that people absorb information very differently, and understanding those differences is one of the most practical things a leader can develop. In our work, we typically see four styles. 1. Drivers  – they want the bottom line. They process quickly, don’t need details, and prefer direct, efficient communication. 2. Analytical – they are the opposite. They need information, context, and time to process before they can move forward confidently. 3. Supporters – they are relationship-oriented and respond better when communication feels personal, patient, and collaborative rather than transactional. 4. Harmonizers – they are team-focused and creative, and they engage best when they can see how their work connects to the bigger picture. Most people lean toward one of these styles but can borrow from the others when needed, and a leader who can read those preferences and adjust accordingly will get dramatically different results than one who doesn’t.

The good news is that this is a learnable skill, and it starts with curiosity rather than diagnosis.

How to close the gap.

Ask before you assume. When an employee isn’t delivering what you expected, resist the instinct to repeat yourself or escalate. Instead, ask what information they need or are missing. Most people will tell you exactly what they need if you give them the opening.

Match the detail to the person. A person who is a fast pasted drivers need outcomes and space to get there, not the direction on how to get there. While a more process-oriented person will need the information ahead of time to review before they can have a conversation about it. A more relationship-focused person will need more connection, patience, and relevance. Adjusting your approach doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It means delivering the same expectations in a way the other person can actually use.

Watch for the repeat cycle. If you find yourself giving the same direction more than once, that is a signal worth paying attention to. The instinct is to assume the employee isn’t listening or doesn’t get it. The more useful question is whether they are hearing it in a way that makes sense to them.

Check for understanding, not just agreement. A nod in a meeting is not confirmation that someone has what they need. Ask employees to reflect on their understanding of the goal and the path to get there. The gaps that surface in that conversation are far cheaper to address in the moment than after the work comes back wrong.

The employee in our opening story wasn’t a low performer. She was a capable person who had been set up to struggle by a communication mismatch neither she nor her leader fully understood. Once he adjusted how he delivered direction, her work changed. So did his assessment of her potential.

Communication mistakes can be expensive as a leader, and it isn’t that they are saying the wrong thing. It’s assuming that the way they say it is the way everyone else receives it.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.

The post The Communication Mistake Leaders Don’t Know They’re Making appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

In our survey, we have definitely seen a connection between communication and morale. Good communication goes a long way toward fostering a culture where people feel valued, understood, and are engaged. Below are some tips to help you increase morale and communication on your team.

1. Open Communication: When leaders and team members communicate openly, it builds trust. Trust, in turn, fosters a positive work environment where people feel more valued and comfortable sharing ideas and taking initiative. A lack of communication can lead to misunderstandings and the perception of secrecy, eroding morale. When you get new information, make sure that you communicate it with employees sooner, rather than later.

2. Clarity and Direction: Clear communication is vital for any team. When team members understand their roles, goals, and how their work contributes to the bigger picture, they’re more likely to feel motivated and aligned with the organization’s objectives. This is one reason we suggest that managers review their department goals quarterly as a team, as well as with their employees. When employees are clear on their goals, they are more likely to succeed.

3. Recognition: Regular communication and letting employees know how they are doing is also important to your team’s culture. Recognize achievements and provide constructive feedback on a regular basis—don’t wait for their review. Recognizing employees for their efforts helps them feel appreciated. Make sure you celebrate and acknowledge your team’s successes.

4. Have Difficult Conversations: Nothing erodes morale faster than an employee not contributing to the team and a manager who doesn’t hold them accountable. If you want a cohesive team, you need to have tough conversations and hold your staff accountable to the performance standards and meet their goals. Also, the more cohesive your team is, the higher their sense of belonging and engagement will be. 

5. Practice Listening: Being a good leader means being a good listener, at any level of management. Show that you value others’ input by actively listening to their ideas and concerns. This means giving them your full attention, acknowledging their perspectives, and responding thoughtfully.

6. Over Communicate: Increase the frequency of your communication, particularly during periods of rapid organizational change. Tell your employees what you know, even if you preface it with, “Based on what I know today…but it could change tomorrow.” Telling employees what you know, even if it may be subject to change, helps build trust. On the other hand, withholding information erodes trust levels between management and employees.

7. Check In Frequently: Make sure you check in with your staff on a regular basis, especially if you have a pressing deadline or workloads are higher than normal. Checking in to see how they are doing communicates to them that you genuinely care.

8. Hold Regular Meetings: I know no one wants another meeting on their calendar, but if communication is not flowing, holding a quick meeting to check in with staff and gain status updates helps everyone know what is going on and what is coming down the project line. Regularly scheduled meetings are also good for reviewing goals, updates, and communication decisions or changes. 

Effective communication is essential for morale and fosters a culture of trust, clear goals, recognition, and belonging. Implementing the tips above can help you improve the communication and morale on your team as well as lead to high levels of engagement. 

The post Boost Team Morale: How to Reenergize Your Team appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

1. They expect their direct reports to communicate, collaborate, and work well with their cross-departmental colleagues and do not feel they should have to resolve conflict between team members.
2. They are too busy getting the operational parts of their job done and have not had the time to sit down and coach and counsel the employees.
3. Their schedule has not aligned with the employees. 
4. So much time has passed since the accountability issue occurred that the leader feels it would be inappropriate to bring up the problem now.
5. The CEO hopes the employee who is not accountable will resign or retire soon.
6. The CEO does not see the problem as that big of an issue. 
7. The CEO has not been honest and shared their concerns with the executive in the past in one-on-one meetings or their performance review. 
8. The employee is well-liked by the CEO’s board, and every time the CEO has tried to coach the employee in the past, they run to a board member and complain about the poor treatment from the CEO.
9. The CEO and the executive direct report are friends, and they don’t want to hurt the executive’s feelings.

Although each of these reasons sounds legitimate to the CEOs we are coaching, all of them are excuses that undermine both the CEO’s and the organization’s success. 

We have written previous blogs on how to coach an employee and hold them accountable. This blog is focused on the most important reasons why CEOs need to power through their excuses, lean into conflict, and be accountable to hold their direct reports accountable for being a great team player who has a reputation for high-quality, on-time performance in their job. 

Here are six reasons we hope will motivate a CEO or C-level leader to raise the bar on accountability with members of their executive team.

Bad Reputation: There are only two types of reputations. Good ones and bad ones. When CEOs do not hold all their executives accountable, they develop a bad reputation as leaders.

Lack of Respect: One of your job responsibilities is holding all your executives accountable. When you do not do your job, you lose respect. Your initial thoughts may be that the accountable team members are the ones who lose respect for you. You are correct, but that is not all. The executive who is not doing their job does not respect you either. If they did respect you, they would be doing their job and making you look like a great leader.

Lower Results: When the executives on your team are not accountable, the negative results spiral downward throughout the organization. Remember, if you are not holding leaders accountable for executing the company’s goals, the company will not see the results it needs to succeed. 

Conflict Increases: When executives don’t do what they are supposed to, it negatively impacts others in the organization, including the CEO. When people are negatively impacted by an executive who is either not producing quality work, on-time work or being a good team player, you almost always will have others tell you directly or indirectly that you are not doing your job (holding your team accountable).

Unhappy Team Members: No one is happy when a CEO does not hold people accountable. The team member who goes to bed each night knows they are not doing their job and are letting fellow team members down, as well as you and everyone else on the team who must deal with the fallout. 

You Hate Your Job: When executive team members do not do what we pay them to do, and you, as CEO, do not hold them accountable, you are guaranteed to have more long-term stress. When stress continues over long periods, most CEOs start to dislike their job… especially coming to work and looking at someone they are not holding accountable. 

That is it in a nutshell. If you want to have a lousy reputation as a CEO who is not respected, produces poor results with unhappy team members who thrive in conflict and stress and, ultimately, hate your job, then you now know the formula… don’t hold your executive team members accountable.

The post 6 Great Reasons Why CEOs Need To Hold Their Employees Accountable appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

In these situations, the manager has a few choices.

• You can leave your employees to handle it and hope they work out the differences on their own. Sometimes, the employees will do just that and the conflict becomes a non-issue. Other times, both parties can agree to disagree and life goes on.

• One counterpart can bend over backwards to get along with the other employee. Neither party is very happy with the outcome, but the job gets done.

• One employee leaves the organization in search of a company that promotes teamwork and holds employees accountable for working well with each other as a team.

• The manager cannot get the conflict resolved, gets tired of listening to both employees, and fires one or both of them.

• The manager changes the organizational structure so the employees no longer have to work with each other. Designing the organizational structure around personalities is good for consultants, but rarely good for the organization.

As a manager, what can you do? Below are 9 ways to make a positive difference and restore harmony and productivity to your team. 

Communicate the issue to your manager and human resources. Let both your HR team and your manager know that you have two employees who don’t get along, and you plan on meeting with them to get the conflict resolved. You want to notify both HR and your manager because, in these situations, things can change in a heartbeat. For instance, one employee doesn’t like your conflict resolution meeting and runs out of the meeting and goes directly to HR. You don’t want either HR or your manager to be surprised.

Meet with each team member one-on-one to gain their perspective. Meet with each team member individually and work with them on gaining a better understanding of why there’s a conflict, what their role in the conflict is, and what actions they can take to improve the situation and work well together as a team.

Lean into the conflict. Meet sooner rather than later. In these situations, hoping that this conflict will resolve on its own is like hoping that the Middle East is going to be quickly free of strife. Conflict rarely resolves itself. Most often, conflict that isn’t properly dealt with escalates to the point where it can negatively impact the morale and productivity of the entire team.

Hold a future focused meeting. Bring the two employees together and focus the discussion on what needs to happen moving forward for both employees to feel supported by the other employee and work well together as a team.

Set expectations.  Define acceptable behavior. Let each team member know that you don’t care if they don’t like each other. It’s important that both team members understand that one of the most basic competencies of their job is to be able to work together and communicate with each other as team members. If these individuals cannot work with each other as a team, they may not be fully qualified for their jobs.

Stay neutral. Whether both employees involved are your direct reports, or only one of the employees is your direct report, it is important that you stay neutral. When you take sides, you quickly undermine your leadership credibility. If a conflict has escalated to the point where it’s been brought to your attention, then it is very likely that both parties bear responsibility for the conflict.

Document agreed upon actions. One of the goals of meeting with the two employees is to determine what each team member will do to improve communication and teamwork. As each team member says what they will do to improve the condition of the relationship, take notes. At the conclusion of the meeting, send the notes and actions to both team members along with the time of the next scheduled meeting. This documentation serves two purposes. First, it will remind the employees what they have each agreed to do to improve the relationship. Second, you have documentation in place if either employee decides not to follow through on what they have agreed to do, and the relationship continues to deteriorate.

Hire a consultant. When the stakes are high, such as with two executives who are strongly entrenched in protecting their turf, it may be better for the boss to stay out of the conflict resolution, and let a consultant meet with the team members to resolve the conflict. Otherwise, both executives may be angry at the boss for not taking action and supporting their side of the conflict. After the conflict is resolved, a meeting can be held with the boss to determine what each team member is going to do differently in the future.

Meet frequently. After the initial conflict resolution meeting, schedule a meeting one week out to talk about what went well or right over the last week, and where there are opportunities to build even stronger communication and teamwork. When team members know they are going to meet again and talk about the relationship, they tend to work better as a team. If the meeting goes well and the relationship improves after one week, the next meeting can be held two weeks out.

 Employee conflicts can seriously impact the morale and productivity of your whole team. View conflict resolution as a leadership opportunity and take quick action to prevent the conflict from escalating and causing even more damage.

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