Roll For Insight

Tag: motivation

  • You Can’t Coach Effort, But You Can Sure Kill It

    You Can’t Coach Effort, But You Can Sure Kill It

    One of the biggest lies people tell in leadership is that you “can’t teach work ethic.”

    And sure, effort isn’t something you can program into someone. You can’t flip a switch and make someone care, but what most people miss is this.

    You can kill effort.

    You can take someone who shows up motivated, who wants to do a good job, who takes pride in their work, and you can snuff that fire out with the right combination of disregard and betrayal.

    I once worked a job for a company that said they ran their business like “one big family.” The job was pitched as “just like running your own business.” They made it sound entrepreneurial. Empowering.

    Spoiler alert. It was not. 

    I was running a route, managing deliveries, and dealing with customers. One day, I got a call from a client who ran a grimy little bar-and-grill in a small town. The kind of place where the floor is sticky before it opens and the menu is mostly deep-fried regret. He was furious about a bathroom supply listed on his invoice. It was something that was billed weekly but only replaced monthly. Standard stuff. But this guy lost it. 

    I was nowhere near his town that day, but I explained that I’d make it right the next time I was out there. That wasn’t enough. He wanted immediate resolution, even though there was no actual problem beyond his inability to read a billing cycle. 

    What did the company do? 

    They sent someone out immediately. Not because it made sense. Not because it solved a real issue. But because the guy yelled loud enough. Just like that, my plan, not to mention my credibility, got tossed out the window. 

    By the time I showed up the next week, the guy was emboldened. He treated me like I owed him something beyond the service I already promised to deliver. I do work for my customers. That’s always been my mindset. But I also expect to be treated like a human being. What he expected was submission.

    I drew a line. I told him that whatever game he was playing with other vendors wasn’t going to fly with me. I called my manager and said I was done with the stop. The customer was harassing me, and I wasn’t going to tolerate it. 

    At first, they said all the right things. “We’ve got your back.”
    Then a few days later, my manager wanted to “talk it out.”
    Then came the plan. We’d all meet together.
    I siad fine, but the guy needed to apologize to my face. That was my line. 

    Cue to the next week. I show up at the stop. No manager. I call him.

    “Oh, we handled it already,” he says. “Everything’s good.”

    Everything wasn’t good.

    I was standing outside a business where I’d been treated like garbage, expecting support, expecting a boundary to be honored. Instead, I got, “We talked it out without you.”

    That was the moment the job broke for me. 

    I kept working there for a while, but the switch had flipped. I stopped going above and beyond. I stopped trusting leadership. They’d proven that a customer’s comfort mattered more than my dignity. And no amount of company slogans or empty praise could put that fire back in me. 

    That’s what people forget about effort.
    It’s not a resource you extract.
    It’s a gift people give. Until they realize you’re not worth giving it to.

    So yeah, you can coach effort. But if you’re careless, you can absolutely kill it. And when you do, don’t act surprised when your best people start looking for the door.

  • Coaching Isn’t Telling People What to Do. It’s Getting Them to Want to Do It.

    Coaching Isn’t Telling People What to Do. It’s Getting Them to Want to Do It.

    There’s a moment every coach hits, whether you’re working with a cyclist, a new trainee at the warehouse, or a kid learning to ride for the first time, where you realize that telling people what to do doesn’t actually work.

    You can write the perfect training play. You can explain the science. You can point to the numbers. But if they don’t want to do it, none of it matters. And if they do want to do it, half the time you could’ve said anything and they still would’ve figured it out. 

    Coaching isn’t about commands. It’s about buy-in. 

    I’ve seen it in cycling. I’ve worked with riders who had all the gear, all the tech, all the data, and none of the fire. They’d show up. They’d half-commit. They’d blame the plan, or the weather, or their FTP not climbing fast enough. And I’ve also coached riders who had old gear, chaotic schedules, and a million excuses not to try, but they wanted it. And they got better because they chose to. 

    I see the same thing at work.

    You can walk someone through the process a dozen times. You can demonstrate. Quiz them. Repeat yourself. But until they understand why it matters, and until they decide to care, you’re just noise in the background of their day. On the other hand, if you make them feel like their success is their own? Like they’re growing, not just following directions? They lean in. They start driving the process instead of being dragged by it. 

    Motivation doesn’t come from authority. It comes from belief.

    Belief in the task. Belief in the outcome. Belief in themselves. 

    That’s the difference between managing and coaching. 

    Managing is making sure boxes get checked. 

    Coaching is building the kind of mindset where people start looking for boxes you didn’t even ask about. 

    I’ve coached riders who hated intervals until they realized how strong it made them feel at the top of a climb. I’ve trained employees who didn’t care about safe loading procedures until it was tied to making sure they got home uninjured to their kids. You have to connect the task to something that matters. 

    Coaching isn’t “Do it because I said so.” 

    It’s “Do it because now you want to see how far you can go.”

    And sometimes that’s the most humbling part. Because when you coach well, they don’t need you forever. They get stronger. Smarter. More confident. And eventually, they start coaching someone else. 

    That’s not failure. That’s the goal.