A lot of managers tell me that the hardest thing about managing is that they don't know how to talk to their employees in a way that works; in a way that is authoritative but doesn't make them feel like a jerk. And so what a lot of managers do is they make the mistake of trying to build rapport with their employees by talking about personal stuff. They spend all their time rapport-building around personal matters. For example, "Hey, how was your weekend? I understand you got a bike. I was thinking about getting a bike." Blah! Blah! Blah! If you want to talk about that stuff, go out for a beer after work!

Managers who spend all of their time building rapport by talking about personal stuff will have things go wrong with the work and then they need to deal with that. And they turn from being Mr. False Nice Guy Friend into being Mr. Jerk Boss. They come in and chew the person out, maybe. All of a sudden they are Mr. Jerk Boss. And then when the problem goes away they go back to being Mr. False Nice Guy Friend again. And so Mr. False Nice Guy Friend starts to seem like a fake and Mr. Jerk Boss seems like a jerk and loses credibility.

What a lot of managers struggle with is coming up with a way of talking that is somewhere in the middle that works. We call that talking like a performance coach. I look at the best managers in the workplace today and they talk like performance coaches. They're authoritative, but sensitive. They're pushy, but they have a way of talking. You see there is so much talk in the workplace, but there is not enough talk about the work. And what it really means to be a performance coach is you are the one who is focused on performance. If you are the manager and you want to manage like a coach, you have to be the one who is focused on the work. You are the one who talks about the work. You are into it. And every person expects that you are going to talk to them about their work on a regular basis, in vivid detail.

Here is how a coach talks. A performance coach focuses on individual performance. A performance coach describes in detail what a person's performance really looks like so that person can have a vivid evaluation of what they are actually doing. And the most important thing is a performance coach spells out concrete next steps in vivid detail. "Here is exactly what I want you to do next." And if you become the person who is always talking about the work, about each individual's work to each person, in a way that works for that person, giving them a real candid evaluation of what they are doing, and pointing them to concrete next steps -- that's how to talk like a performance coach and that is a way of talking that works. And it is neither Mr. False Nice Guy Friend nor Mr. Jerk Boss - it's somewhere in the middle. It's where you should be.