No-Nonsense Leadership

Nadia van der Vlies

No-Nonsense
Leadership

How to Become an Effective Leader, Manager and Coach

There are plenty of books and theories about leadership. What these rarely describe, though, is HOW to manage effectively.
This book fills that void.

No-Nonsense Leadership helps you adopt a confident, coaching leadership style. Coaching leadership is a surprisingly effective leadership style. Your employees will take more responsibility, allowing you more time and energy for important management tasks. This book helps you recognize and bypass your reflexes and pitfalls, and teaches you coaching skills and easy-to-use conversation techniques. The practical pointers and countless real-life examples in this book enable you to immediately put it all into practice. You will soon notice that you are getting more out of your people – and out of yourself.

Nadia van der Vlies is the co-owner of the NONONS training institute. She has held management positions at various organizations, develops leadership programs and trains managers to become more effective by adopting a coaching mindset.

‘Instantly applicable in my day-to-day work. Highly relatable and a must-read for any manager who wants to save time and get the most out of themselves and their team.’

Joris Herremans, Manager Digital Grandvision Benelux

‘This book is an engaging combination of self-reflection and useful stepping stones.’

Hugo de Koning, founder Young Capital

© 2019 Nadia van der Vlies, Amsterdam

ISBN:

Paperback: 978-94-92004-80-2

E-book (Epub): 978-94-92004-81-9

E-book (Kindle): 978-94-92004-82-6

Original title: No-nonsense leidinggeven. Hoe je effectief coachend leidinggeeft (Amsterdam: Boom, 2018). Translated from the Dutch by Erwin Postma, Malaga.

Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam

Interior: André Gubbels, AG-Freelance-dtp, Groningen

Photo author: Silviya Sobaci Photography, Amsterdam

This edition published by Warden Press, Amsterdam

Ebook production: booqlab.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

wardenpress.com

Table of contents

Introduction

1 No-Nonsense Leadership

1.1 Mature Leadership

1.2 The Mature Model in Communication

1.3 The Mother, the Macho, and the Mole

1.4 Dealing with Needs for Help

1.5 Summary

2 Leadership Skills

2.1 Situational Leadership

2.2 Taking Ownership

2.3 Keeping Your Eye on the Bigger Picture

2.4 Conversation Skills for Mature Leadership

2.5 Summary

3 Leader, Manager, Coach

3.1 The Roles of Leader, Manager, and Coach

3.2 Summary

4 Leader

4.1 Leader: Conveys the Mission, Vision, and Strategy

4.2 Leader: Knows and Shares the Company’s Values

4.3 Leader: Motivates and Inspires

4.4 Summary

5 Manager

5.1 Manager: Translates Vision into Goals

5.2 Manager: Monitors and Reviews Results and Behavior

5.3 Manager: Assesses and Adjusts

5.4 Summary

6 Coach

6.1 Coach: Encourages Others to Find Their Own Solutions

6.2 Coach: Facilitates the Development of Others
(Who Are Not Aware of the Coaching Need)

6.3 Coach: Facilitates the Development of Others
(Who Are Aware of the Coaching Need)

6.4 Summary

7 Reflexes

7.1 What are Reflexes?

7.2 Common Intervention Reflexes in Leadership

7.3 Intervention as a Choice Instead of a Reflex

7.4 How to Deal With These (Sometimes Awkward) Reflexes

7.5 Summary

8 Tricky Situations

8.1 Transactional Analysis

8.2 TA in Interaction

8.3 A Passive Employee

8.4 A Defiant Employee

8.5 A Moaning Employee

8.6 A Popular But Underachieving Employee

8.7 A Poorly Performing Employee

8.8 A Top-Performing Employee

8.9 A Sickly Employee

8.10 A Stressed Employee

8.11 An Emotional Employee

8.12 Quarreling Employees

8.13 Handling Your Own (Difficult) Manager

8.14 Summary

Bonus 1: The Truisms of No-Nonsense Leadership

1. To reflect = to learn

2. TheAnswer to most questions is ‘let’s talk about it’

3. If you have something to say, say it; if you have something to ask, ask it

4. If you work hard, the other won’t have to

5. New behavior is acquired by doing, doing, and doing

Bonus 2: Glossary

Acknowledgments

Literature

Introduction

This book is intended for anyone who leads, manages, and coaches people or wants to know more about leading, managing, and coaching people, regardless of whether you are just starting out in a leadership role or already have years of leadership experience under your belt. I have taken widely accepted theory on leadership and psychology and translated it to everyday real-life situations.

My personal drive behind writing this book was that I myself would have liked to have had this kind of reference material when I started out leading teams. When, after over ten years in leadership, I entered a coaching program and learned that you can give others the responsibility to solve their own problems, it dawned on me that this is something that every manager should know. It ultimately inspired me to become a trainer myself, and it is why I enjoy training managers so much. I let them discover for themselves how to use coaching skills to get more out of their employees, and how to get their employees to take more responsibility. Taking more responsibility boosts employees’ development, and it saves managers time and energy.

In the same way as we deliver trainings at NONONS, this book is practical, accessible, and clear. To illustrate my points, I use real-life examples from my own experiences or examples shared by managers I had in training groups, to make it much more relatable. You can instantly apply everything you read in this book in your day-to-day work, and perhaps even beyond your work life.

By no-nonsense leadership I basically mean ‘let’s not overcomplicate things.’ There are plenty of books and theories that define leadership, but these books seldom describe HOW to actually do it, how to lead, manage, and coach people effectively. I know first-hand that many managers out there are looking for guidance and tools for effective leadership. How do you go about it, how do you get your employees to do what you want? And what do you do when things don’t go your way? How do you address that and still make sure your employees stay motivated? ToAnswer these and other questions, I will start by looking at personal leadership, at the impact your behavior has on your employees. What works and what doesn’t. What pitfalls to watch out for (Chapter 1). After that, the focus will shift to leadership skills (Chapter 2). I will describe the three different managerial roles of leader, manager, and coach (Chapter 3), detailing the duties, responsibilities, and skills that go with each of these three roles (Chapters 4 to 6). However, no matter how well you have got the theory down, your intervention reflexes can still get in the way (Chapter 7). In Chapter 8, you will read all about tricky situations and difficult employee types. Finally, at the back of the book, you will find a quick rundown of the truisms of non-nonsense leadership, as well as a glossary.

The basic goal of this book is to empower you, in all three of your roles, to choose your own behavior. To become aware not only of your attitude and the way you communicate, but also of the effects it has on others. And for this awareness to make you an even more effective leader, manager, and coach.

This book set in the context of management practices at organizations where managers are responsible for the performance of their teams. However, I do realize that there are also organizations these days that are switching to self-management, where the role of manager has all but disappeared. In practice, this means that all employees need skills you normally see in good managers, as employees in self-managing organizations need to challenge each other on behavior, assess each other’s performance, and motivate each other. If you work in such a self-managing organization, you can read this book to explore which management duties and skills you would want to develop.

If you are committed to getting started with the insights and guidance from this book, you will find the assignments at the end of each chapter a great help. They will enable you to test your understanding of what you have just read and help you put it in practice. I realize I am stating the obvious, but the more time you devote to it, the more mindful you will become of your pitfalls and reflexes. And if changing proves tough going, you can always hire a coach or take coaching leadership training!

I hope you enjoy reading this book.

Nadia van der Vlies

NONONS Courses, Training and Coaching

Warning: you may be taken aback by some of the things you read about pitfalls and reflexes, because you recognize them from your personal experience and realize that you have walked into these pitfalls and had these reflexes. Perhaps reading this book leads you to doubt yourself and think, ‘Am I doing it right?’ Rest assured, it means you are on the right track. If you want to change, the first step is to get to the stage of conscious incompetence (see Section 6.3).

1 No-Nonsense Leadership

This first chapter is about giving your employees responsibility. Using a model that I have branded the Mature Model, I will show you the pitfalls you might encounter as a manager. Some of these pitfalls you may recognize, and some may loom larger than others in your day-to-day work. The fact is that you will be a much more effective manager if you are mindful of all these pitfalls and know what you can do to steer clear of them or get out of them. Let me start by explaining what I mean by ‘mature.’

1.1 Mature Leadership

The word ‘mature’ takes us into the realm of ‘adults.’ My Mature Model is loosely based on Transactional Analysis (see Section 8.1), which distinguishes three different roles: the parent role, the adult role, and the child role.

In simple terms, the parent role is when you place yourself above the other, feeling that you have to take care of the other or tell the other how to do something. Section 1.3 will go into the parent role in greater detail, including different versions of it, such as the ‘mother’ role and the ‘macho’ role.

In the adult role, you take a slightly more detached approach to the situation, which allows you to identify what is going on between you and the other. This is when you take responsibility for yourself and assume that the other will be able to do the same. In other words, you believe that the other is capable enough to be able to perform his or her task and self-manage. This is what I call a mature attitude.

This mature attitude enables you to adopt a coaching leadership style. Just like a coach, you communicate with the other from a position of equality. You are not making yourself more important than the other, but not less important either. This means that you are able to help the other develop, as you make them personally responsible and empower them to come up with solutions. However, it also means that you honestly say what you think, feel, and believe.

What Does That Look Like, Mature Communication?

Imagine a co-worker comes to you with a problem and tells you she has no idea what to do. You, however, know exactly what she needs to do, and you help her on her way. Or imagine your manager asks you to write up a memo and you immediately say ‘OK’. Later it dawns on you that writing memos is not part of your job description.

This chapter will show you that you have a choice. It will show you how to be driven less by must-dos or ought-to-dos. You can choose what to do. To get to that point, you need to detach yourself from the situation, because distance creates perspective.

The Core of a Coaching or Mature Leadership Style

By a coaching leadership style, I mean managing in mature mode. You have a choice. You can help your employee, but you can also decide not to. You can give pointers or comments, but you can also quiet. Having a mature leadership style means that you are able to reflect on the situation and make a conscious choice as to how to respond and what to do. This is when you align your behavior with what you think is needed or what would work for your employee, while always considering what is best for you, what is best for the other, and what is best for the company. It is communication based on equality, realizing and tapping into what is going on between you and your employee, which you are able to pinpoint in the here and now.

1.2 The Mature Model in Communication

When communicating with an employee, there are various possible positions you can adopt. If you want to take a coaching-based approach, you will do well to communicate from your mature position, as equals. That being said, this is far from easy to do. The Mature Model (see Figure 1.1) identifies three well-known pitfalls for managers: the macho role, the mother role, and the mole role. In an ideal world, you, as the manager, stay in mature mode most of the time. And you make a conscious choice to switch to the mother, macho, or mole role as and when required by the situation. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with these roles, the problem is that you (subconsciously) slip into them too often. And that is when they become pitfalls. In this chapter, I will offer stepping stones to help you consciously switch between roles. It will empower you to deliberately adopt certain behavior instead of responding on autopilot based on your usual reflex.

To establish a relationship of equals and help your employee take responsibility, there are two things you need to be able to do:

Figure 1.1 The Mature Model

1. show empathy, take your employee’s perspective, basically feeling with your employee without judging

2. not shy away from truthfully telling your employee what you have seen, what you think, and how you feel. This is all about addressing things that may be painful or sensitive

As soon as such talks become difficult, managers often tend to slip into a pitfall, sympathizing too much or being overly blunt or judgmental. The Mature Model shows how this works and what the effects are.

The Two Axes

The model is made up of two axes: the axis of empathy and the axis of being open and honest about what you see, think, and feel. A high score on both axes means that yours is a coaching mindset, which makes you a mature manager.

Many people think that a coaching leadership style and/or coaching itself is all about listening, regular uh-huhing and nodding to show that you are interested and going along with whatever the other has to say. Nothing could be further from the truth. True, a coaching manager needs to be a good listener and be able to truly engage with the other. You basically need to be able to get into the other’s head, so as to make your employee feel free enough to share his or her doubts and insecurities, to show vulnerability. A good coaching manager stands shoulder to shoulder with the employee, on the same level, without judging. But it is at least equally important to be able and dare to confront your employee. If you truly want your employee to develop, it is essential that you dare to challenge your employee on certain behavioral patterns. Behavior that you have seen from your employee in dealings with you or in interaction with others. In mature mode, you not only address behavior you have seen previously, but also behavior in the here and now, behavior your employee is showing during the conversation.

One of my employees likes to talk a lot, and she often fails to get to the point. I’ve noticed in myself that I sometimes dread talking to her. She told me once that she has ambitions to move into a senior role and would like to be consulted more by her co-workers. In a meeting with her, I explain what effect her excessive talking has on me, telling her that my mind tends to wander off. My tone in telling her this is friendly and not judgmental in any way. I’m telling her this to help her in her development. Friends and co-workers are unlikely to be this forthright with her about this. They will simply tune out and think about something else. Or they might joke about it with others.

Drawing her attention to this issue in an open and honest way is simply part of my job as a manager. If it leads to my employee realizing what effect her long-winded stories are having on others, she can become mindful of it and change her behavior.

The Manager’s Attitude in Mature Mode

• Equal. You believe that you and your employee are equally entitled to feel comfortable. Your communication style accommodates both your and your employee’s preferences.

• You are unbiased. You always try to keep your judgments to yourself. You show understanding and empathy.

• You dare to address what is happening in the moment. You are open and honest about what you notice and experience during the conversation with your employee. For example: when the conversation proves to be tough going, or you notice that you are getting irritated, you just come straight out with it. Or when you notice your employee’s attention is drifting off, or your employee is overly modest, you openly share these perceptions with your employee. And you, ideally, do so in the moment, or as soon as possible after it.

• You exude self-confidence. You do not have a tendency to make yourself smaller than the employee. By that I mean that you do not efface yourself or adapt to your employee too much, but that you instead chart your own course.

• You are open and vulnerable. You do not have a tendency to make yourself bigger than the employee. You are open to other opinions and are functionally vulnerable. You do not hide the fact that you are not all-powerful and all-knowing, as you are only human, with doubts and concerns like anyone else.

• Investigative and inquisitive. You respond to resistance or hesitation with questions. You investigate the reasons behind your employee’s behavior. You seek better understanding of your employee and try to figure out how to achieve more effective and engaging collaboration.

• You inspire trust and are trusting. You take responsibility, show a sense of direction in how you intend to get to where you want to go. This inspires trust and lets your employees know that they can rely on you. And you share responsibility, which shows that you have faith in your employees’ talent. You give them space and freedom, so that they can take responsibility and grow.

• You do not look for employees’ appreciation. You are not out to be liked by your employees. You want contact as equals.

In a coaching mindset, you encourage your employees to self-manage. You teach them to deal with problems themselves so that they will not need your help next time. This way, you are making the most of your employees’ potential, while stimulating their growth.

1.3 The Mother, the Macho, and the Mole

The theory sounds great, but in practice you will not always manage to stay ‘mature,’ especially in the face of something that affects or irritates you. Those are precisely the moments you are likely to fall into one of three common pitfalls for managers. In the following, I will describe what it looks like when you walk into one of these pitfalls, what effect it has on your employees, and what beliefs may have created the pitfall in the first place.

The Mother

A well-known leadership pitfall is to slip into the mother role. I call it the mother role, but men and women are both equally likely to walk into this pitfall. It is the tendency to immediately switch to helping and problem-solving mode. This is a reflex of telling an employee how to deal with something, or of comforting an employee or helping an employee put seemingly difficult issues into perspective. What this boils down to is that wanting to help others does not make you a good manager. This is perhaps the most important and hardest part of a coaching leadership style, to let go of the idea that you always have to help.

Employees who are unable to do something or who get stuck will feel powerless and sometimes behave accordingly. You can see it in their faces, or they might even express it verbally: ‘Can you help me, I’m lost.’ Whenever an employee comes to you with such a request for help or you see the frustration in someone’s eyes, your initial reflex will generally be to lend a helping hand. It just feels so natural. When someone says ‘help,’ you help. Humanity is based on being nice and helpful to others. Without giving it a second thought, you give tips and advice. And you delve right into it, telling your employee, ‘Here’s what you should do,’ or by asking a leading question such as ‘Have you tried to …?’

The Effects of the Mother Role

‘What’s wrong with good advice?’ you might now think, ‘What’s wrong with the mother role?’ First of all, giving advice rarely works. After all, your advice is your take on another person’s situation, based on your own frame of reference. If you, for example, have just read a book on assertiveness, you will suddenly see unassertive people everywhere. You perceive the other with yourself as the guideline. So, whenever you think you are helping your employee with advice, your advice might just be way off the mark. Your employee’s life differs greatly from yours, as does your employee’s background, upbringing, fears and beliefs.

Imagine this: you tell a friend about a problem you have, and she instantly starts to tell you what to do, but you have already tried everything that she suggests. You have been grappling with the problem for some time, so you know much better than your friend what does and what doesn’t work. Having this kind of conversation feels tiresome, and it may even irritate you. This is exactly how your employee may feel when you start giving tips and advice off the top of your head. Your employee may start arguing with you, raise objections, or sometimes seem to go along with what you are saying, while meanwhile disengaging internally. ‘But my advice is always so good!’ I can just hear you say right now. Well, that actually only makes it worse. If your advice is indeed good advice, you are basically stealing your employee’s thunder. You are not giving your employee the

opportunity to autonomously find a solution and you are only confirming your employee’s sense of incompetence. Your employee’s creativity and problem-solving capacity are not challenged. Perhaps your employee actually enjoys not having to think about a solution, which is equally counterproductive, as it makes your employee dependent on your advice. You are then training your employee to think that whenever he or she has a problem, the manager will solve it. As a result, you will be swamped with work and your employee ceases to grow.

The basic effect of the mother role, therefore, is that it breeds passive employees. It will make employees shirk responsibility, in the knowledge that you will be taking that responsibility away anyway. Basically, you will end up making your employees lazier and more passive, which is precisely what you do not want.

Why You Slip Into the Mother Role

• I am important, and my employees need me

The mother role often gives you the rewarding feeling of being needed and doing your duty as a helper. I recognize that from my personal experience. For years, I solved employees’ problems for them. Whenever they were unhappy in their jobs, I would rearrange tasks and keep talking to them until things improved (or seemed to have improved). After such talks, where I solved all kinds of problems for them, I always felt extremely useful and fulfilled. Thanks to me, my employees got the help they needed, or so I thought. In actual fact, however, I was only pushing employees into the child role, making them dependent on me. My employees never had to think for themselves, and therefore never learned to think for themselves. They continued to do what they had been doing all along - evade the problem and pass the buck.

Daphne, a participant in one of my training programs, tells us that she has a co-worker (Jason) whom she feels has temper issues, and who once shouted at another co-worker. When this latter co-worker told Daphne about this, she was shocked. How dare he! He had never been this rude to Daphne, so she decided to go talk to him and make it clear that she doesn’t tolerate this kind of behavior.

Was that the mature thing to do? No, it was Daphne slipping into the mother role with her co-worker and the macho role with Jason. The mother role prevents her co-worker from building up more resistance, as she only learns that whenever someone crosses a boundary with her, all she needs to do is go to Daphne. This employee is not learning how to effectively handle unacceptable behavior. When Daphne realized this, she realized that despite her good intentions in protecting her co-worker, she was actually depriving her of the opportunity to grow.

Question: What should Daphne have done for a mature response?

Answer: She could have asked how the co-worker experienced the situation and what she would want to do about it. She could have asked, ‘Has this happened to you before? What would you want to do about this situation? What would you want or be able to do?’ In short, she could have let her handle it herself.

• I want to be liked

Helping someone boosts my likability. Besides, it feels easier to quickly help out employees who are stuck by telling them how you always handle the same situation. As a result, it is not only a desire to be important, but also a desire to be liked that pushes you into the mother role.

In mature mode, on the other hand, you do not automatically help, but you ask questions first. You assess the situation before you decide whether or not you want to help. You ask, for example, why your employee is struggling in this particular situation, or what the various options are. When I give training to managers, the first thing they always say in response to this is, ‘But that’s not very nice, is it?’ Our basic idea is that it is nice to help someone who is stuck by taking over responsibility for the problem. You are then slipping into the mother role and saying, ‘I’ll write that email for you.’

A possible way to suppress this reflex is to remember that you are then only helping someone in the short term, while stifling their long-term development. So, it may seem nice to hand your employee the solution on a plate or do your employee’s work, but it is a short-term solution and actually rather selfish, because you adopt the mother role to feel better about yourself. Personally, I was rather taken aback by this realization, as I had always felt so good in the mother role. I simply wanted to be nice.

• I want to make a difference for others.

Another reason why managers slip into the mother role is that they are very committed to helping their employees in their personal and professional development. When employees stagnate in their development, or are not making progress quickly enough, mother-style managers tend to want to do something about it. They put more effort into it, come up with suggestions on how to grow faster or get a promotion.

Many managers, and that includes me, have at some point pushed employees toward a certain career move, or offered them ready-made development goals to pursue, always with a view to speeding up their development. But what you are then basically telling an employee is, ‘What you came up with yourself is not good or not good enough.’ You are taking responsibility for career development off their shoulders and putting it onto yours.

One of your employees regularly says that he is ready for a new career move. You want him to make that career move and you have done everything you can to raise his profile across the company. You had him work on an international project, you regularly mention him to the general manager, and you give him the opportunity to attend conferences. However, you are also seeing that he is not seizing these opportunities. He has co-workers take care of presentations, he underachieves on the international project, and he doesn’t go to any of the conferences, claiming that he’s too busy. It is beginning to irritate you, and you get tired of the whole situation. When this employee came to you complaining about his lack of career opportunities, you slipped into the mother role. But despite your help, he keeps complaining and takes no ownership of his career development. In fact, he even challenges some of your suggestions (‘Nobody ever meets anyone interesting at these conferences anyway’).

Question: When you want him to take more responsibility, what should you do?

Answer: Confront him respectfully with the fact that although he says he wants to develop, you are not seeing him take any steps in that direction. And that the effect this is having on you (as his manager) is that you are getting irritated. (See also Section 5.2 on Respectful Confrontation.)

When is it actually a good idea to choose the mother role?

Is the mother role always a bad idea? No, it isn’t. Sometimes, it is indeed important to take care of employees. Not out of some reflex, but as a conscious choice. When an employee has ended up in a crisis situation, for example, or when an employee is sick or exhausted and momentarily unable to make decisions or has lost grasp of the situation.

I once had an employee who was going through a messy divorce. Despite that, he kept his head down and worked hard to make a deadline. He had stress symptoms and I noticed that others started to go easy on him. After a while, he started to make mistakes and not do his job as well as before. That’s when I made the conscious decision to adopt the mother role, telling him to take it easy and that I wanted to discuss with him what he was and wasn’t going to do over the coming period.

The Macho Role

A second pitfall for managers is ‘the macho.’ You may recognize this one from your own experience as well. Macho managers are great at telling it like it is, expressing whatever they see, think, and feel, but not so great at showing empathy. They will say exactly how they feel about employees’ behavior, without taking employees’ feelings into consideration. Machos have something to say about everything, ranging from how others do their work, how seriously they take their job, or how they are developing.

The Effects of the Macho Role

As soon as you feel a judgment coming on or actually express one, the foundations of the coaching mindset will dissipate. The other will then feel your disapproval and take your response as criticism. When you feel a judgment coming on, your curiosity will instantly disappear, and you become unable to take the other’s perspective. All sense of equality will have disappeared from that moment onward, and so the other will cease to feel secure enough to show vulnerability. Your employee will then be less inclined to share the reasons behind certain behavior.

Like the mother role, the macho role pushes the other into a child role (or keeps the other in a child role), simply because you adopt a judgmental superior position, making the other feel small and criticized. This may manifest itself in well-adjusted and obedient behavior, with your employee doing exactly what you tell or ask your employee to do, like an elementary school student who has just been told off by the teacher. Experienced managers will probably recognize it, situations where you feel that your employees follow you unquestioningly, but do not think for themselves. This is often the result of the macho role.

There is also another childlike role that an employee may adopt, the rebel role. Instead of obeying, the rebel resists. I have seen myself do it. When a manager gives me too many instructions and always knows best, I quickly tune out and think, ‘So you think you know everything, why don’t you do it yourself!’

If your employee has been pushed into child mode - regardless of the kind of child, obedient or rebel - your employee will not take responsibility. The effect of macho leadership is, therefore, that employees get scared or obediently do as you say. They disengage or they rebel. Either way, not the kind of employee you want on your team.

Mark, a participant in my Coaching Leadership course, has an employee, Liam, who is constantly behind in providing figures. He always hides behind excuses and blames others. Liam passes the buck to his co-workers. Mark is uncomfortable with the situation, because it has gotten out of hand. Mark has had it with this situation. In the macho role, he says to Liam, ‘Don’t keep passing the blame to others, it’s so unprofessional. Just take care of it! Cut the excuses!’

Question: When you want him to take more responsibility, what should you do?