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Questions to guide employee performance conversations

In this episode of the Small Agency Talk Show, Brad Farris of Anchor Advisors shares five questions he recommends that you use when having performance improvement conversations with team members.

Patrick Rogan of Ignition HR and Chip Griffin of SAGA provide their feedback on these and make some suggestions of their own to help agency leaders better handle these difficult conversations.

You will learn some do’s and don’ts when it comes to getting the right results while continuing to encourage your team and foster a positive work environment.

Key takeaways

Brad Farris: “I want to be on [the employee’s] side of the table, right? I want to be cheering them on to success, I don’t want to have an adversarial type of conversation, I want us to be together pushing the performance forward.”

Patrick Rogan: “By having this conversation, we’re giving this employee every opportunity to be successful. And that’s the issue. And we need to think of that as our as our mindset going in. My job as an agency owner is to give each of my employees the opportunity to be successful.”

Chip Griffin: “I think more often than not, with these conversations, there is some shared responsibility for solving it, whether you haven’t given enough training or guidance, or the resources information that they need to be effective.”

Brad Farris: “When we’re asking these five questions, this isn’t something that’s come up once, right, it came up once, you said something about it, it came up another time, you said something about it. Now you have a pattern of behavior.”

Patrick Rogan: “I think by not having the conversations, not being in touch, not giving every opportunity for success, you do perpetuate a problem by default. And that’s no good for anyone.”

Chip Griffin: “The key is that anytime you do something out of your normal behavior, you’re now escalating it in the employee’s mind. And so you have to be conscious of that.”

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Small Agency Talk Show. I’m Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. And I am delighted to have with me two very regular panelists, some good friends and folks who will have some lively conversation. I’m sure especially if the you know, pre show conversation means anything and I and I suspect it does. So I’ve got Brad Farris of Anchor Advisors and Patrick Rogan of Ignition HR. Welcome to the show, guys. All right.

Patrick Rogan 

Thanks for having us. Yeah.

Chip Griffin 

And for folks who have been living in a cave, haven’t seen any episodes of the show. So they haven’t yet had a chance to meet either of you. Why don’t you give your 30 second description and where they can find you online? And we’ll start with you, Brad, because you’re in the middle.

Brad Farris 

Alright. I’m Brad Farris, and my business is Anchor Advisors, we help agency owners to grow from a million to 5 million. And if you go to Anchor Advisors.com, that’s probably the best place to learn more about us.

Chip Griffin 

Fantastic, nice succinct clear positioning, I love it more agencies need to be able to do it that way. Patrick, how about you?

Patrick Rogan 

Hey, Chip, so my business is Ignition HR, been around for about six years, I help organizations with their people challenges, a lot of my work is in the compliance area, a lot of work in the talent space, essentially, if there are people challenges, I’m the person to help.

Chip Griffin 

Excellent. And that’s a convenient segue to the topic today. Because we’re actually sometimes we force Patrick to talk about non talent related questions, because he’s adept at it. And and he can come, but today, we actually get to be in his sweet spot, but not with something he wrote, something Brad wrote on LinkedIn. And we’re going to be talking about a challenge that a lot of agencies have, which is dealing with an employee who maybe needs a little bit of help with their performance. How do you give them the nudge? How do you deal with the fact that you know that you’re frustrated with what you’re getting from them, you’d like to get more, but you’re not quite sure how to get it. And so Brad, you tackled this on LinkedIn, just in the last week or two?

Brad Farris 

I did, because the thing that I see most often is people not having any conversations about performance. And so…

Chip Griffin 

Or any conversations, period, right? This is a fundamental problem. And it’s why I harp on you got to have a one on one with all your employee reports, every week without fail, if you just if you just start talking to your employees, that’s a good start. It’s a good start. But you’ve got some guidance to help them have a more intelligent conversation.

Brad Farris 

I felt like if I put some a framework around it, it might make it easier to start having these conversations. And I actually stole this framework from Roy Rapoport who had a Medium post that it did a really good job of kind of laying out these five questions. And each one is kind of one step further along, in helping your team member to understand their responsibility in improving their performance, right, we want the responsibility to stay with the team member. And the other thing that I think is important here is that I want to be on their side of the table, right? I want to be cheering them on to success, I don’t want to have an adversarial type of conversation, I want us to be together pushing the performance forward. Does that make sense?

Chip Griffin 

It absolutely makes sense. And I love how you position it that way. Because if you treat your employees as if it’s a parent child relationship, and, and you’re there to punish them when they do something wrong, or to ground them, or those kinds of things, which a lot of managers particularly, you know, less experienced ones, or ones who may not have seen as many thing. They that’s they’re not and even some senior ones who’ve been around a while, have that instinct that in fact, one of the questions I get asked periodically by an agency owner is how do I hold my team accountable for their actions? And they don’t mean like, give them responsibility? What they mean is, how do I like punish them in some fashion when they don’t do it right. So I love that you’ve turned the table here. And you’re putting this in the place of thinking about the employee and what they need to hear in order to be effective.

Brad Farris 

Yes. And that’s that’s exactly what we want. We want. We want them to hear what they need to do to be effective. So the first question that I want you to ask is, I’m noticing this problem? Do you agree that this is a problem? Frequently, we see things that are a problem, and the employee doesn’t even realize that the problem exists. And so first, we want to have some agreement that there is a problem that we need to work on or toward or to alleviate in some way.

Chip Griffin 

So, Patrick, I think getting that agreement with the employee that there is a problem is important. And isn’t it? I mean, it’s partially about making sure that you’re also listening to what the employee says, because you may think it’s the problem. Maybe it really isn’t, you know, and or maybe the problem is something slightly different. And so this needs to be an honest dialogue, and not just you saying this is a problem. Do you agree? I want the answer to be yes, right now.

Patrick Rogan 

Right, exactly. And also, I think it’s important to frame this particular part of the conversation in not the problem itself. But what are the ramifications of the problem? So this is what’s happening. And I think this is what’s driving that. So let’s talk about do you agree that this is what’s driving that? Because sometimes we get that wrong. Every once in a while. And I think I love the way you start the conversation, Brad, because you it’s asking a question, let’s clarify this is this. Is this what the problem is, but let’s have before that let’s, as long as we both agree that the result that there’s, you know, whatever is contributing to the problem, we can figure out but there’s a bigger problem that we have to solve, because either our client it involves our client or our staff or something like that. That has to be fixed.

Chip Griffin 

Yeah. And I think, Patrick, you’ve touched on something important there. I think it’s important when you’re having this conversation, that the problem that you’re identifying shouldn’t be specifically what the employee is or is not doing, right. It’s the outcome of it, right? Because because now you’re not having a conversation so much about you’re not doing the right thing. And instead, it’s about here’s, here’s what’s not happening, or what is happening, how can we address that and they can start to hopefully see it as separate from an attack on them, which is, which is part of the problem, a lot of performance conversations, is immediately the employee gets their back up. And it’s like, no, no, no.

Brad Farris 

Yep. And that really segues nicely into the second question, which is, do you want the problem resolved, there are a lot of times that it’s a problem for me. But it’s not necessarily a problem for the team member. And so by adding in that context of you know, this thing that’s happening is having these consequences? Is that something that you would like to see resolved, hopefully, you’re enrolling them, again, staying on the same side of the table, in getting to a common outcome.

Chip Griffin 

Right, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I particularly like that you’re, you know, you’re you’re thinking about what, what the change is going to mean for them, and not just for you, because if there’s nothing in it for them, why would they? I mean, they’re presumably, they’re rational actors, and they’re not going to do something that’s not in their interest just because you like it.

Brad Farris 

Right. And oftentimes, we’re asking them to do either change, which nobody likes change, or perhaps put out more effort, do something extra or different. And there needs to be a reward for that, right? I mean, there needs to be some reason that they would want to do that. And so seeing how that is impacting the rest of the organization is hopefully, something that would motivate them to change. Right. So the third question is really helping them to see their responsibility. And the third question is, do you see that you have a role in the ongoing problem? Sometimes employees feel like they’re a victim of the system. You know, well, this is it, I had a terrible brief. And so I created this crappy piece of content. And so helping them to see that they have a role and a responsibility in improving the outcome. Now here, to Patrick’s point, we might have this wrong. And there might be more systemic issues that are that are coming to the fore here. But even there, this team member has a role in helping to fix that or to promulgate the problem.

Chip Griffin 

So I want to cheat a little bit here, because I’ve seen all five questions. And so So I would like to have you introduced question number four, because because I would argue that you should actually ask question four, before you ask question three.

Patrick Rogan 

I agree.

Brad Farris 

I understand that. So question four is, what would you suggest as potential resolutions to this problem? And so you’re right, that if their answer to that is that they’re taking responsibility, then you’re you can kind of skip Question three, right. But somewhere, we have to tie it to their responsibility.

Chip Griffin 

Correct. But I, I always like, and Patrick, I’ll be interested to hear your take on this. I know you’ve had a lot of these conversations and coached a lot of people through these conversations over the years, it to me, instead of starting out by asking them, you know what their role in the solution is just asking, you know, how they would suggest solving it, whether it’s a process change, or a resource change or something that they do, I think the more that you can give them, not just ownership of the problem, which you’ve sort of kind of started to do by coming to them with it, but now you’re giving them ownership over the solution. And they may say, Well, look, the real issue is that you’re not giving me the space to do this, or you’re not giving me the hours to do this or something like that. So, So Patrick, I’m curious about your take because of your experience.

Patrick Rogan 

Yeah, I do. I do like I like both of questions. Um, what do you see as your role I would make that a little bit more open-ended, you know, but that’s, that’s a little thing. I do like the problem solving piece. So we’ve agreed this is a problem. And maybe it’s a symptom. So what is the problem that’s that’s driving this? But I do. I do think it’s important that once we’ve identified so maybe there’s something I need to do. As the agency owner, I got that. So this is what I commit to. Yeah. What do you what do you commit to? Because we both need to get this to a better place. And at that point, it’s like, how could you not say, oh, yeah, I’m going to triple check my work, or I’m going to make sure we meet the client deadlines, or I’m going to make sure the creative aspects are there. So that you know, there it pops in the client’s eyes, you know, it, like, how could you not contribute to that, at that point, are you going to say, well, you know, what, you know, that’s really beneath me, you know, as the agency owner, you should do those kind of things I’m doing, you know, just – they’re not gonna say that, you know.

Chip Griffin 

And I think more often than not, with these conversations, there is some shared responsibility for solving it, whether you haven’t given enough training or guidance, or the, you know, the resources information that they need to be effective. I mean, if if it’s truly just that the, the, the employee is inept, and there’s nothing you can do about it, well, this, this isn’t the conversation to have, you should just be having the termination conversations instead. So for the kinds of problems that I think this is suited for, there is likely to be that need for multiple people to work together to find the solution and implement it.

Brad Farris 

If I could bring in an example that just happened this week with one of my clients that they were delivering creative to the client. It was, you know, it was it was okay. But during the presentation, they found themselves kind of tap dancing to try to explain why it wasn’t really the thing that it needed to be. So they were doing a post mortem. And, and the creative teams were like, Yeah, we didn’t really understand the brief. And the, the agency owner said, When did you not understand the brief? And they said, when we first read it. Okay, so what’s your responsibility? If you don’t understand the brief the first minute, you don’t go create something right, we need to get you to the point where you where the brief makes sense to you? Right, right. So that’s where that question was really helpful in that conversation. See, then, exactly what the problem was.

Chip Griffin 

Right. But but but to that point, I mean, I think there is the shared responsibility now that now that I know that as the agency owner, or leader, I need to make sure that I’m proactively asking, you know, after they’ve had a chance to look at it. Is this clear? Does this make sense? Because, I mean, sometimes you have team members who are uncomfortable saying, Hey, I don’t get it, because they think I ought to know, right? It’s like the, you know, the kid in class who’s afraid to ask the question, because he doesn’t want to look silly or stupid, right? Sometimes you have this with team members, too. So if you detect that might be an issue, take away that problem by just asking the question yourself, even though you feel like this is stupid, I shouldn’t have to do this.

Brad Farris 

Mm hmm. One thing as I’m talking through this with you guys, one thing I feel like I should have added to this was before you start, ask yourself the question, How am I complicit in this problem? Right? Because nine times out of 10, you hired that person you trained them. You’re the one that’s, that’s setting up the systems and processes right? You have complicity in this. And so if you haven’t worked through that for yourself, before you enter into this conversation, then it’s gonna get all tangled up when you get in the middle of it, right? I mean, it kind of turns the table at that point, like, wow, you you know,

Patrick Rogan 

I would even go a step further. And in terms of expectations of the employee, I have like, like three buckets that I have, like one is, this is something that’s actually beneath your level. So you so should have nailed this, I’m really concerned that we’re having this problem. The second bucket is, this is what we expect you to do. I mean, this is in your normal area of responsibility. So let’s talk about how do we get this better. And then the third area is, so we gave this to you, because it was a stretch, and we knew it was a stretch. So we don’t expect you to be perfect, but let’s talk about getting this to a better place. And I think how you handle each of those should be very, very different. Because you kind of from an expectation perspective, I think all three of those are worth the conversation. But obviously, if it’s the first one where it was something just should have hands down been taking care of, obviously, how you approach that should be a little bit different than a stretch, you know that? You know, we thought we’d see what you can do. You got 80% of the way there. Let’s talk about how do we get that additional 20?

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, and I think it is so important to look at your own role in whatever the problem is. And understanding is, as you say, Brad, your complicity in it. And I think, you know, part of the bigger picture is you need to create that environment with your team where they understand that they can make mistakes as long as they’re learning from them. And that needs to be an environment where you’re not focused on consequences, your focused on solutions. If you do that, then you’ll you’ll be able to have these conversations much, much more openly, and and hopefully achieve the results that you’re looking for. The other thing that I think I would say, in addition to, you know, what’s your own role in this particular problem is pause for a beat and ask yourself, Is it really a problem? Because a lot of times, I see owners in particular, who just don’t like the way something is being done, it’s not being done exactly the way they would do it, or exactly to the standard that they have. And so I think it’s really important, particularly before, you’re going to have this kind of a difficult conversation with an employee, make sure that what you’re talking about really matters. And that it’s not just that this is a personal preference of yours or something, you kind of just a pet peeve or something like that, make sure it really makes a meaningful difference to the business.

Brad Farris 

And that’s why I framed that fourth question as what would you suggest this potential resolution? Because that business owner may have the perfect answer in their head, but if we put it to the team member, oftentimes, what they come back with is fine, or even better.

Patrick Rogan 

 Or better. Yeah, right.

Chip Griffin 

Exactly. Exactly.

Brad Farris 

And so leaving it for them, rather than me trying to impose my perfect scenario.

Chip Griffin 

Well, the thing is, as an owner, we shouldn’t know the answer to all of these problems, right? Because if we do, it means we’re probably a micromanager and we’re going way too deep into what our team members are doing. Because there’s that happy balance, you need to know enough. You can’t just have them going off and doing their own thing without any guidance or oversight. But if you know, really specifically, exactly what needs to change, you’re probably so into their business, that you’re not able to focus on a lot of the other things that you should be spending your time on.

Patrick Rogan 

Yeah, and we’re, by having this conversation, we’re giving this employee every opportunity to be successful. And that’s the issue. And we need to think of that as our as our mindset going in. My job as an agency owner is to give each of my employees the opportunity to be successful. Now, obviously, and Brad, you started with this it is it when we’ve identified that it is the employee’s problem that needs to be fixed, that the employee must own that. But as an agency owner, my job is to do everything I can to make that work. I’ll just caveat that with within reason. Because there is a continuum out there, right, you know.

Chip Griffin 

But we can attach that to probably everything we talk about with clients, right? It’s always within reason.

Brad Farris 

I do see people who are going beyond reason sometimes to avoid firing someone. I feel like that’s a trap people fall into.

Patrick Rogan 

Yes. All the time. Yes.

Chip Griffin 

I mean, I think we would all agree, at least based on the conversations I’ve had with both of you in the past, yes, that most people don’t fire soon enough, in almost every case.

Brad Farris 

The first minute you think I’m gonna have to fire this person, you should start firing them. That’s, that’s the moment.

Chip Griffin 

Right. You’re late to the party.

Brad Farris 

Everybody else has already decided.

Chip Griffin 

And if you are the one in 1000, that’s not well, then you probably have other management issues you should address.

Brad Farris 

Even the most direct of my clients has trouble with firing people. I mean, I think that, like you said, I’m not sure it’s one in 10,000 that fires people too fast.

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, yeah, it is a very small number.

Patrick Rogan 

I do see extremes every now and then where when you get the when you get the whole story, and many times it will, it will go back years, you you sometimes have to really hold yourself back from asking the question. And why is that person employed here? Seriously.

Chip Griffin 

And that’s when you hold the mirror up. It’s because of you.

Brad Farris 

How are you complicit? I didn’t fire them the last three times we had this conversation.

Chip Griffin 

I don’t want to turn this Friday conversation into let’s go fire people.

Brad Farris 

No, no. We only fire people on Monday, we’re not gonna do that on Friday.

Chip Griffin 

But if anybody has someone they’d like to fire, give me a call I love firing people. We’ve talked about this on the show before.

Brad Farris 

Last question that you need to ask is, are you confident that you can follow through these suggestions and resolve the problem? So again, making sure that they’re taking responsibility that they have what they need in order to resolve the problem, and probably setting up some sort of check in, you know, let’s check in on this at our one to one or, you know, if you’re having these kinds of problems, here’s where you can go to get some help with that. But making sure again, we want to stay on their side of the table. Do you have what you need in order to make the situation better?

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, and I think this goes back to the the mindset that Patrick was talking about earlier, from a management perspective, you need to view your role as the manager as the owner, that you’re there to knock down obstacles to provide the resources for your team members. And I think a lot of these problems, they don’t come about because you don’t have the right mindset, but they get worse. And they, they tend to stagnate because you’re not on a regular basis, trying to figure out how you can help and making sure that your employees understand that you’re there as a resource for them, you’re not there, you know, to just throw tasks at them and give them consequences when they don’t accomplish them. And, you know, go through a checklist of where’s this stand? Where does that stand? You’re there. In fact, one of the questions I typically would ask my employees in a one on one is, what can I do to help get something unstuck? Right. And a lot of times, it was something was sitting on my desk that I hadn’t approved or hadn’t given the guidance, 90% of the time, 90% of time, someone else within the organization hasn’t given them what they need, either as far as guidance or resources, it is then my role, you know whether or not, I’m the overall manager and owner, or just, you know, a parallel manager to just go to that person say, hey, my team can’t get this done. Unless I have this, it might be the client, you might have to go have it on it, because a lot of times clients are the problem. I know, we don’t want to say this. I know,

Brad Farris 

The clients don’t give us everything we need?

Chip Griffin 

 You know, as it turns out, Brad, sometimes or maybe more often than not, clients are not giving the agency the information they need in a timely fashion. And then we go and blame our team members, when they’re being asked to turn something around in less time than they really need to do it. And so in those cases, we need to work with the client and say, Look, you got to give us two days to work on this, you can’t just call up and expect us to give it to you 30 minutes later. And if you do, you’re not going to get the results that you want. And I’m not gonna hold my team member accountable for that.

Patrick Rogan 

But you mentioned at the very beginning, having regular meetings and being in touch, I think that that’s critical. We talked a little bit earlier about one of the things we see and I see a lot is a decision has taken too long to take place. I see that a lot. The second thing I see a lot of is not enough conversation has happened to address the problem. And I think those two are related. I think by not having the conversations, not being in touch, not giving every opportunity for success, you do perpetuate a problem by default. And that’s no good for anyone.

Chip Griffin 

Right. And that’s why the communication is so important. Because if you go through this list of five questions, and it’s, you know, at this level of detail, it’s probably a separate conversation just about this, as opposed to something as part of a one on one, if it’s risen now to that level. Two things, one, first of all, that employee should not be surprised by this conversation. If when you outline what the problem is, they’re like, I had no idea. Well, now you’ve had a massive failure in your communication. And so you need to be addressing that. But it really a lot of this should be going back to things you’ve already been talking about, as far as you know, we’ve tried this, or we’ve tried that, you know, that’s why we’re focused so tightly on this right now, because we really just need to resolve this once and for all. And it’s, I mean, I really do strongly believe that if more managers had these regular one on ones it would solve, or at least help to address maybe not solve, help to address so many of these issues before they come to a checklist conversation.

Brad Farris 

That’s a helpful framing Chip, because I think when we’re when we’re asking these five questions, this isn’t something that’s come up once, right, it came up once you said something about it, it came up another time, you said something about it. Now you have a pattern of behavior. It’s you’re addressing a pattern of behavior. And that helps a lot with the some of the squirrely questions where the employees like, well, that came in late or you know, I was sick that day. Yes, I understand there can be one off problems, right but this is something that’s happening consistently. Right. And so this is why we’re addressing this and in a more serious conversation than just a casual.

Chip Griffin 

Right. And so, I mean, Patrick, you know, how do you have a sense from the and we talked, talked a little bit with some levity about firing people. But how do you follow up on these five questions and work with a team member? And how do you reach that point where you say, this is just not working? We need to do something else?

Patrick Rogan 

Sure. So first of all, 99% of the time, my experience is that’s not where this ends up. 99% of the time, there are good, solid conversations. I think these five questions are a good guide. I particularly like number five, we can come back to that. But I think you know, we’re talking about realistically now, the 1% or 2%, it’s a small it’s a small piece. Having said that, when we’ve had these conversations we have put the building blocks in place that if we do need to do a separation which is what we’re talking about now. We have logical steps to do that. So the conversations start, they should increase in severity. So, you know, we talked about you are confident that you can follow these suggestions and resolve the problem. My favorite number five, next conversation is so there’s still problems. We talked before about you thought you had a fix… What’s going on? Why is that not getting done? We can then say, okay, so this is a serious problem. Now we’ve had multiple conversations, it may impact your, your employment, if we don’t get this fix. So let’s work together and fix it. At this point now, you know, we’re kind of at the end, you know, so I do recommend having something in writing. I, you know, a lot of people say, Well, don’t don’t bother doing the written performance plan. I’m an advocate of that. Because I would say, in the neighborhood of 20% of the time, which isn’t a huge number, but it’s significant when they see it written, which is no different than what’s been spoken. Like it’s the power of the written word it like there’s some epiphany and like, oh, yeah, this is a problem. I need to fix this. I have seen that fix it. And at that point, then we’re at the termination search, if it doesn’t get done there.

Chip Griffin 

So and I guess I’ll push back a little bit on that.

Patrick Rogan 

I knew you would. Let’s get him out.

Chip Griffin 

Well, first of all, you know what I think about performance improvement plans.

Patrick Rogan 

I know, you hate them.

Chip Griffin 

 I think performance improvement plans are stupid. Just put together the termination paperwork, if you actually call it a performance improvement plan, it’s over, done. Stick a fork in it move on.

Brad Farris 

At that point, you’re not on the same side of the table. Right? Once you get the improvement plan?

Chip Griffin 

Right? Yeah, performance improvement plans, written warnings, all that kind of stuff. I mean, there are there are industries where I think some of those things may make sense. In an agency world, I don’t think they do. But I do think one of the things here is this framework works for, you know, problems that you know, that are more tightly focused and easier to address and not necessarily job threatening, but still need to be addressed. And it also can work for those big ones, I think the bigger ones, you absolutely need to document in some fashion. Like, again, I wouldn’t call it a performance improvement plan. But memorialize a conversation in the email or something like that it’s fine to there are times where you can still use this framework where I don’t think you necessarily need to do that. Because at that point, you’re, in some respects escalating it once you put it in writing. And so I think you need to use some judgment here is, you know, is this something that that needs to be solved, and we need to address it. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to go to a termination. And that’s when you need to document if you’re not going to go to a termination based on it, I probably wouldn’t go to that level. Because you’re…

Patrick Rogan 

I agree with that.

Chip Griffin 

 making a mountain out of a molehill. But I think the framework still works for those smaller, narrower things that still need to be addressed. Which is what I love about your framework, Brad, to bring it back full circle, right?

Brad Farris 

Yeah, one of my clients came up with what I thought was an innovative solution to this, especially in COVID times, she, when she does her one on ones, she opens up a shared Google doc that’s on the screen with them while they’re talking. And is just taking notes on the conversation as the conversation goes. So Martha agreed to this. I agree to this, Martha agreed to this, I agree to this. And so she’s just taking notes for her own purposes in the Google Doc, but it’s shared with the employee. So they’re seeing it and they can add their comments also. And so if you had this conversation, and you got to the point where you’re saying, you know, this could affect your future employment here, type that in there, because it’s just what you do all the time. And so because it’s your normal course, it doesn’t have that escalating effect, but it does have the effect of seeing it and writing and having be really serious. And so like that, I really like that as a method.

Chip Griffin 

Yeah, I mean, I’m not a giant fan of that approach to meetings, generally. But if you’re already doing it, then this is a perfect way to do it. I mean, I think that’s the key right, is that anytime you do something out of your normal behavior, you’re now escalating it in the employee’s mind. And so so you have to be conscious of that. And so if you’re going to do it differently than you normally do, know how it’s going to be received on the other end, which is what we started talking about very early on in this conversation, put yourself on the employee side of the table. And that goes right on through any follow up you have from this conversation. But unfortunately, that’s bringing us to the end of our time. But fortunately, we did manage to cover everything in your five questions.

Brad Farris 

Shocking, honestly!

Chip Griffin 

And a little bit more! You know, when we’re discussing this in advance, we thought maybe we’d have some challenges getting it all in and certainly we could continue going on for quite a while about performance related conversations and getting the most out of your team. And I’m hopeful that we’ll have an opportunity to have you both back on the show in the future and cover some of those as well. Or maybe some other topics that get us all agitated. You just never know. But with that that will bring us to an end of this episode. I would encourage urge you to check out Brad and Patrick at the websites they mentioned earlier or find them on social media because they have lots of great insights beyond what they’ve shared over the last 30 minutes. If you’re interested in watching the replay of this, or any previous episode of the Small Agency Talk Show, just go to small agency.tv. And of course, it is now available as an audio podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform. So just search for the Small Agency Talk Show and you can subscribe that way if you’d rather listen in your car on your exercise bike or wherever you want to consume this content. And that will bring to an end this episode. I hope you all have a great weekend. Patrick and Brad, I hope you guys have a great weekend and I look forward to seeing you all back here real soon.

Brad Farris 

All right, have a good one.

Patrick Rogan 

Take care.

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