How To Hold Your Team Accountable Without Micromanaging – Sean Glaze

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08/15/2022

Show Notes:

Sean Glaze believes that staying coachable is extremely important, especially for a leader who wants to continue improving and enjoy better business results.

If you are thinking of ways to improve morale, trust, and engagement of your team? You might need to work on your culture first. Our guest will tell you all about it.

Sean is a Leadership and Teamwork Speaker, an Author, and a Teambuilding Facilitator. He helps leaders build more positive and profitable team cultures with improved communication and accountability.

Through his engaging conference keynotes and interactive teambuilding events, Sean inspires teams and leaders to start thinking differently. Thanks to his 20 years of coaching experience, Sean gained a wealth of knowledge and founded Great Results Teambuilding to share those lessons. He also published four books where he shared some powerful insights for team growth and leadership.

Sean believes that staying coachable is extremely important, especially for a leader who wants to continue getting better and enjoy better business results.

In this episode of the Think Business With Tyler podcast, we talk about how to stay coachable, what are the five key elements of healthy work culture, the importance of holding your employees accountable, and finally, how to build trust at the workplace.

If you want to get more tips on how to improve your workplace culture, make sure you tune into this episode to hear what Sean has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Sean Glaze

💡 What he does: He’s a Leadership and Teamwork Speaker who helps team leaders build more positive and profitable workplace cultures.

💡 Noteworthy: As a successful coach and educator for over 20 years, Sean gained valuable insights into how to develop winning teams – and founded Great Results Teambuilding to share those lessons.

💡 Key Quote: “You can’t hold somebody accountable without clarifying expectations. That’s just cruel. Again, to be unclear is to be unkind. You’ve got to make sure they know what’s expected before you can have those accountability conversations.”

💡 Where to find Sean: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Stay coachable. Being coachable is one of the most valuable skills that you can have, especially when you’re still at the beginning of your career. And that “coachability” factor is the secret sauce to the success of your business. But staying coachable is equally important to continue developing your business and climbing the entrepreneurial ladder. Sean is a big believer in staying coachable and committing to self-growth. He explains,

“Ultimately, I think the number one thing that I learned early on is it’s really important to stay coachable. That’s actually the last book that I just published, but it’s a huge thing because I think we all start off coachable and we reach whatever level of success that we’re at because we’ve been coachable, but at some point, we kind of get complacent.”

What are the five key elements of a healthy work culture? You know you have a healthy work culture when your employees are happy and productive. The employee turnover is low, and your team actually likes coming to work and providing meaningful work. Sean shares five key traits of a healthy culture: goals, relationships, expectations, accountability, and appreciation. He explains,

“When I first started off as a leader, I was really good about goals and expectations. I was very clear in terms of being organized and having a system […], and I was an absolute failure when it came to really emphasizing one-on-one connections and relationships with my team that allowed me to set those goals and to hold them accountable and there was a whole lot more resistance because there wasn’t the relationship.

And toxic cultures, to get back to answering your question, I think, are those that lack or fall really, really short in one of those five areas or more.”

Accountability is key. Despite what some people think, holding your employees accountable is not the same as micromanaging them. Accountability actually means putting trust in your team and letting them take responsibility for their work. It means giving them freedom and trusting that they will handle that responsibility. Sean explains why you need to hold your employees accountable. He says,

“I’m not doing you a service by neglecting to hold you accountable to the things that are going to make you better. As a coach to a player, I’m not helping that player by not correcting their shot technique. I’m just making them a worse player and they’re not going to be better, have other opportunities in the future if I don’t have those difficult conversations. It’s the same way with leaders and their teams or even teammates and their coworkers.”

Trust is a three-legged stool. Trust has always been at the core of every successful business. Now that the remote work model is becoming more predominant, we hear about trust and accountability even more. But trust is a complex concept. And it’s not something you build overnight. Sean refers to trust as a three-legged stool. He explains,

“As you think about the impact and the need that hybrid and remote work is going to place on leaders, I think building trust is a huge issue and is going to be something that’s very important for teams and organizations to focus on because trust is not just a familiarity with somebody.

Trust is a willingness and a feeling of safety. And I think that there’s three things that contribute to trust. I kind of talk about it in my keynotes about trust being a three-legged stool and people will put their weight on you if all three of those legs are strong. If not, they’re going to hesitate.”

Top Quotes

“The most important conversation I ever had as a coach was after I looked in the mirror and realized the person staring back at me was the one responsible for making things better. And when I began to focus on changing me and took responsibility for the impact I was having on the organization and the culture and the program relationships, we as a team got a whole lot better.”

“Whether it is in person or remote or hybrid, absolutely, there is the possibility of a culture or a team becoming toxic, and I define a toxic team as one that is unhealthy because it’s lacking one of five essential elements.”

“It’s not talent, it’s not personality, it’s not ability that’s going to determine oftentimes somebody’s success. It’s, are they engaged? And engagement is kind of like culture. If culture is the behaviors that are repeated in your organization, a really simple definition, engagement, the best definition I can give is engagement is how much you care about the results that you’re contributing to. The issue is I think sometimes we don’t connect the dots for our people.”

“Coaching, I think, is different from mentoring, ‘cause coaching is oftentimes how can I use questions to draw out with my curiosity and help you to find the answers that you need to find? So your insights become the catalyst for your action. I think mentoring is a little bit of coaching peppered with ‘Here’s my experience. This is the process or the system that I’ve built that I know you can plug yourself into and get out the other end being 10 times, 20 times more successful and accelerate your growth.’”

“Confidence is thinking you can help. Arrogance is thinking you don’t need help. And I think that the progression of a leader starts with maybe a little bit of false confidence, that is really arrogance. That arrogance needs to eventually transform into humility, and humility is being willing to ask for and accept help.”