292: Tailoring Your Coaching as People Grow; with Andrew Rios

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 292 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Andrew Rios to talk about tailoring your coaching as people grow. Today I’d like to welcome back Andrew Rios to the show. Andrew, it’s been quite some time since we last spoke. Lovely to meet you on the podcast again. How are you?

Andrew Rios: 0:41

Oh, I’m doing. I’m doing great. Um, yeah, Charlotte, it’s been two years, close to give or take a month, two years. So much has changed.

Charlotte Ward: 0:51

Yeah, so much has changed. I suppose in that vein, yes, I mean, so much has changed in every respect. But in that vein, would you just do a quick reintroduction? Let everyone know who you are, where you are right now. What’s changed?

Andrew Rios: 1:04

Yeah, yeah. Currently, currently in the home office garage. Physically, that’s where I’m at right now. I think um, since last, you know, who am I? Uh support leader, many, many years of experience out there. I’ve been lucky enough to be in different verticals out there, uh, based in Southern California. When I say different verticals, I mean, you know, business to business, business to consumer, you know, um green technology, wearable technology. And now I’m selling telecom a few big circles back in my career. So started my career as one of those field techs out there, pulling cable in buildings, installing routers and switches, making sure we got to the internet and their the right domains and servers. Uh when it was just VSL was the highest thing you could kind of get for those that remember. Um yeah, currently, right now, uh head of customer experience over at uh Cityside Fiber down here in Orange County, bringing fiber internet all the way to the home so people can continue working from home and stream all those streaming services.

Charlotte Ward: 2:01

Wow, wow, that’s awesome. We we do want to uh keep keep people um enabled at home for as long as possible, right? I think we I think we had a uh a brief discussion about another possible episode of going back with a topic of going back to the office. So um as a as an ardent homeworker, I’m I’m definitely looking forward to having you back uh on the podcast in a very short space of time to talk about going back to the office as well. I know you recently returned to the office a little bit, haven’t you?

Andrew Rios: 2:32

But yeah. Yes, as last we spoke, I was one of those remote employees. And then as luck would have it, all the the stars aligned, and I’m kind of back in an in-office situation, and that was a transition. So, like you say, it’s a whole conversation onto its own.

Charlotte Ward: 2:46

But that’s for next time. Yeah, we’re talking about something else today, aren’t we? We’re talking about coaching and and really specifically um coaching for like different experience levels in your team or even coaching longer term and helping people grow and coaching to the level that’s appropriate for the person you are actually coaching, right? We’re talking about experience level levels here and you know, life experience, professional experience, uh, and how people grow differently along that journey and how you need to adapt your coaching to it. Did I summarize the topic today relatively well? Is that where we’re going?

Andrew Rios: 3:22

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were we were having a catch-up talk, you know, after all this time, we started talking about what’s going on, what have you been doing? I think a big chunk of my life uh involves now coaching youth sports, right? So I coach my older boy, his uh flag football team, his soccer team, and his basketball team. And I’ve been doing it now quite a few years, enjoy it year-round. A lot of benefits to it, of course. But one of the things that you and I talked about was the similarities and differences. I think I used the phrase, man, I’m a better support leader now that I’ve been coaching these eight, nine-year-olds with the adults that I get a chance to work with and you know, sharing some of those stories. But it got us talking about that that, you know, there’s different types of coaching for for different people. You gotta coach them where they’re at, coach them where they want to go. Um, and I think one of the things that I’ve really that’s resonated with me recently is and and don’t coach them where they don’t want to go. Uh one of one of the analogies that I was chatting about was um, you know, I’m on one of the soccer teams, you know, some of the kids for them, it isn’t about winning the game. Uh, it’s just part of being part of the team. Hey, I get to come out here Tuesdays and Thursdays and run around with peers and run, and win or lose, it’s all good. Saturdays we’re together in this uniform. And and that’s their escape, maybe. That’s as much as they want where there’s the other kids out there who want to be pushed, right? So the same thing translates into what I started really thinking about is you know, teams that we as support leaders go into inherit, right? We’re inheriting a team that’s already put together, and you you want to coach them and lead them and and and how different it is to do that, right?

Charlotte Ward: 5:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s really interesting, first of all, just to hear you talking about bringing that sort of personal experience and those personal lessons that you’ve been learning as a coach outside of work in a completely different environment, bringing them back to the work environment. And I I just listening to you talk about that briefly, I was pondering how many kind of life lessons I bring into the work environment. I I hear when I’m when I’m talking to my own team, I hear myself unpacking some situation with the kids or something. Like I don’t teach sport teams, just to be clear, I’m just a parent. But but you know, I we homeschool stuff like that. So, you know, coaching a different way, education in a different way, helping people grow in a different way, and and like how I’m quite often bringing anecdotes and and you know, unpacking scenarios at work because I think it’s relevant, and I’m just trying to decide if it’s just me that thinks it’s relevant or if it’s actually helpful. I hope and think it’s helpful.

Andrew Rios: 6:08

You know what, Charlie? It’s so funny that you say that because I believe it is. And you know, one of the things that I’ve done, and this this is kind of a translation, right? With the with the I would ask the team, hey, and I really would that make sense? Did you did you hear, do you agree? Do you not agree? And and kind of run through it, because that’s how I was talking to the youngsters after a drill. Did that make sense? Do you know why we’re gonna do that? Do you know why we don’t want to kick it that way? Do you and I found myself one of these out, maybe it was on one of my runs or talking to my therapist or my mom or someone. I was like, why don’t I just ask them the same question then? And I think it’s because we believe, oh, they’re they’re adults. They’re of course they they assume, of course they’re good, of course I just asked them once and they’re good instead of when you feel it, digging in a little bit more. I think that got me a little bit comfortable with that, especially as you’re really trying to get the sense of where the the team is at at the moment as a whole and individually.

Charlotte Ward: 7:10

Yeah, yeah. And I I also think, you know, there’s uh there’s that that kind of, you know, checking in that that you know, that kind of um mirror it back to me kind of uh do you understand language that you’re talking about there is really useful. Um both for the you know in inverted quotes youngsters on our uh on our professional teams, uh, you know, people at the start of their career, and by youngsters, I’m not talking, you know, kids out of high school. I’m like really into their 20s, you know, or first five or ten years, we learn such a lot in the workplace. Whatever whatever whatever age you begin that five or ten year journey, like we learn such a lot, right? And I think that there is um there’s a sort of level of exposure that comes somewhere around the mid-latter part of that first decade or so, where in my experience things change quite significantly. You know, you’re not a kid anymore, but it’s our job to bring people to the other end of that phase of their professional life, right?

Andrew Rios: 8:22

Yes, uh, it’s relate relatable, right? You tell those stories about your family with your team because you you want to be relatable. You’re trying to be relatable and you want them to relate to you that we all have lives outside of this. And you know, we talk about that various generations of experience on your team, you might have, you know, and a team that I have, I have various levels of experience, right? They’re at different places. And it’s almost like some of with the the young, the earlier ones in their career, right? They’re they’re still finding um out what it is that they enjoy about certain roles, uh, what they don’t enjoy about it. They’re finding out about the the harsh realities of California laws. They’re finding out about the harsh realities of company rules that you know maybe in a previous organization or it was a little bit different. So you kind of have to go, you know, no um be relatable, right? So you only talk about you say that you talk about stories with your about your family, with your, you know, co-workers. Same thing here. I’ll tell them about an Uno game we had and I had to talk to Santiago a different way, or how Paula, my partner, stepped in and did this and took control. And just as I’m telling a story about how we want to talk to our customers. Or the real important, not the real, not the real important thing, but the the thing that I like to really make sure is resonated around the team as a whole is that you know, we’re all going through our own journeys in this world, in this life, at different phases, different energy levels. Let’s keep this environment that we’re creating here one of, you know, positivity, honesty, candidness, and understanding, and then relatable. So I encourage everybody to share those kind of stories within each other. That’s what we’re doing as leaders indirectly when we do that, right?

Charlotte Ward: 10:06

Yeah, totally. And I I think it sort of my confidence in doing that, and I would say that my experience of other leaders’ confidence in doing that grows over time as well. You know, I thought when when I was one of those kids in the first decade of my career or so, it was just all work. Like I would just talk about work, I would talk about the data, I would talk about the process, the customer, the ops, everything, except what was what actually was uh a whole other side of uh you know my col my my personality, my approach to the world, my approach to problem solving, which was fed and fueled by my non-professional life. And I I really tried to keep those two very separate. And I think certain things broke that down, time broke that down, uh, you know, remote working broke that down, and uh an exp, you know, just experience uh like it going through the understanding myself that actually I’m I have experiences and opportunities to relate, as you say, um, both in the telling sense and in the understanding sense, to tell these stories and paint a picture, because pictures say you know, much more than you know, uh a document in my experience. Like you you can give someone a policy or you can you can say this is this is when it goes what it looks like when it goes well, this is what it looks like when it goes less well. And you know, here we we stay on the rails and over here we fall in the ditch or whatever, you know. Like you can make I I have a story recently about falling in a ditch, which I was telling the team. I I actually fell in a ditch. Um no, oh no. I survived, it’s fine, but but like it makes it memorable. It you know, they they they can it gives them anchors, right? It gives them things that really stick. These are the sticky stories, the sticky lessons, I think.

Andrew Rios: 12:07

Yeah, and I’m it it it crosses too, you know, Charlotte, it crosses so much because you know, I’ll I’ll talk about uh work failures with my eight, nine-year-olds. And I’ve also become more uh uh storytelling with them too, you know, uh where I make a mistake because I’m very I’m very hard on them, right? As the coach, when you’re disciplined, you have coaching life lessons, things like that. Um, but then you know, when I make a mistake and it’s clear, I don’t try to hide from it or go, oh I’m I’m I’m perfect. So I want to tend to think coach is perfect. And I there was an example last week where I looked at them all, middle of the game. I just said, I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I blew it, I did not know, I lost track of where we were. And then I looked at them all of them. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for saving me. And they were just looking, and you know, maybe it didn’t resonate there, but I think those are those same stories I flipped back to the team that you’re you know, you’re growing and coaching is not being afraid to to show that same level of vulnerability. And earlier in my career, I did it. Right? I was I had the answer. I had the answer, right? Or no, it was the right answer, even it was certainly not the right answer. You know, I’ve learned to use that as a as a as a strength, as a story. Right? Hey, here’s when I made a decision, went wrong, here’s what I learned from it. I tell some of those stories, right? Or pure, pure failure and miss and what I learned from them.

Charlotte Ward: 13:39

Yeah. I like and and what you’re modeling is is is sportsmanship, it’s all of the things you want to see in in the kids you’re coaching. And I think you know, the the same is true like when we look at coaching from a a coaching tactic um such as like modeling um behaviors and calling out behaviors that we’d like to see repeated. Um I think that’s really strong when people are at the beginning of their journey, right? Because I don’t know, I don’t I don’t know how many people uh how many listeners uh listeners I’m gonna offend with this, but uh I’m gonna say it anyway. Like we’ve heard we’ve heard this whole kind of notion in the media in the last decade or so about how 20s is are the new teens, 30s are the new 20s, all of that, you know, and and how and actually like how to some respect how the teenage brain continues to grow into the 20s, right? Um I have a teenager at home and I do recognize certainly in him, um, he’s probably not listening, so I can say this. Um certainly in him, like that kind of self, that self-righteous belief almost that that you’re talking about, which is I have an opinion, it needs to be heard, I’m probably right, you’re gonna listen to me, and uh we’ll take this, you know, my viewpoint all the way through to the end of this conversation, and then I’m gonna leave. And my viewpoint is the only important one. That’s how my teenage, it’s it’s it’s teenage egocentricity. He’ll grow out of it, right? And I think there’s a certain amount of development that we see people go through like into their 20s professionally. I think some of that carries through. And uh, you know, I’ve seen this over and over again in my kind of leadership years of like the last 20 years or so, where you sort of see youngsters at the start of their career come in and you know, they’ve got they’ve they’ve come come out of university or whatever, they know their they know their stuff um for that level of experience, they know their stuff, but there’s that kind of I I I believe I’m right. I believe this, you know, that okay, you like who’s this old old guy or old woman trying to tell me like about the world, right?

Andrew Rios: 15:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 15:52

Do you know what I mean? Like, I why should I apologize to a customer? That kind of thing, right? You know, um, so we we we want to give them our experience, and uh you need to do that in a way that’s palatable uh in to them in that frame of mind, in the same way I have to talk to my teenager in a certain way, otherwise it’s gonna uh you know, otherwise it’s gonna be words. Um, but but what’s your experience there, coaching for the very young who are perhaps actually a little bit resistant to it?

Andrew Rios: 16:22

You know, oh man, I’m I’m glad you went down that that path there because what it is is um and it’s gonna sound very maybe basic, maybe cliche, but I I give them time. Well actually what I’ve learned from doing that with the youth, what I’ve learned where I started coaching to now is at the very beginning, the very first practice we have as a team, when I do the introductions, right? What school do you go to, what grade are you in? Have you played before? What are you excited about? Kind of a thing. And then you you look at your and I start teaching, I start the culture right then. So I’m set modeling it right off the bat, and I’m making sure the parents see. So this is what I learned after my first few seasons. It’s like, oh, get the parents in early, like right away. Set their expectations to then help with the kids. So it’s it starts there, and then it becomes very like, this is this is I’m coach real, this is how I talk, this is what practice is gonna be like, here’s this, here’s why we’re doing this. And when we make a mistake, we’ll make a mistake because of discipline or or we think this is recess, and I start to go through my this is not school, this is not recess, this is this, then we will run. Right? And I start telling the jokes in front of the parents, which are I get paid the same whether we run or not. Either way, Baba. So I set those expectations, and then what I do that very first practice is watch them. I try not to rein anything in that very first practice. I’m watching them taking little notes on each each player, the words, not about their athletic ability. I’ll note that just by watching them, but how they react in a drill, how they talk to each other, you know, which one’s standing on the line, which one’s not, and then I’ll start to learn how to speak with them. Right? Okay, this person is going to need to get everything off their chest before they eat before the ears start to listen. Right now, the only and I use that analogy, the mouse is gonna work first.

Charlotte Ward: 18:31

I mean, this is my teenager. He has to do all the talking first, and then I say, All right, kid, now here’s what I think.

Andrew Rios: 18:39

And it’s the same thing, okay? Now, you know what I’ve done though, and it’s the same, this is where it translates to the the adults, if you will, right? The the more experienced person in life. Do you understand why? Do you hear do you have any questions? Right? Tell me in with the kid, you can say, okay, I say like this, repeat back what you heard me say, and then we can kind of work through it. With an adult, that sounds a little bit more like you’re talking to a kid, but you’re talking to a human. I found it says, okay, so um if you had to go back and do this ticket again or have that conversation with the customer again, what would you do? How would you do it? That’s kind of my way of doing that with the peers.

Charlotte Ward: 19:23

Yeah, it’s the same reflection, just uh in a more professional adult context, 100%. Um, I want to um I want to touch on a couple of things because I do want to get us to the more experienced folk as well. Um, if we’re talking about you go through those patterns, you grow people, they get out of that kind of highly egocentric place, and they learn to work with you. They take the feedback on board over the course of months or years, depending on how long you work with them, and you grow them into that kind of more mature contributor. Um, there is a point, you said something early on, which I I is uh it really resonated with me, really struck a chord. You talked about harsh realities, and uh I I think there is a point where you take people on that journey and suddenly the harsh realities aren’t the harsh realities anymore, they are just uh entry-level facts, you know. It’s like I understand that this it’s understanding that this is the ecosystem I am actually working in and am part of and not and am not the center of, you know, and I think that’s the that’s the professional growth over that first five to ten years, isn’t it? Um you can contribute, but you aren’t necessarily at the center of it. And the harsh realities, I think, is something that I love um about leading leaders. Uh, you know, I actually love leading through leaders and managers because frankly, you can be even harsher. You can say, look, this is the budget. You know, we’re not getting any more people. Like you can you don’t you don’t have to take people on that not location, it’s just what it is. Like now let’s talk about how for the growth for them, it’s not about learning about learning that harsh realities exist, they know they exist. It’s about learning how to how to manage inside them.

Andrew Rios: 21:20

Yeah, deliver the message, yeah, be a sounding board.

Charlotte Ward: 21:24

Yeah.

Andrew Rios: 21:25

Uh but know that’s the message.

Charlotte Ward: 21:27

That’s and actually, and actually, those people don’t even need to be line managers themselves, right? They can just be your more senior engineers, your more experienced people that you naturally lean on a little bit, and uh and because of that experience level, you’re more transparent with you don’t have to spend so much time kind of molycoddling and taking them on the journey because they’re all they’ve already been on the journey four times, you know.

Andrew Rios: 21:49

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 21:53

Yeah, exactly, exactly. How do you um do you think this is just uh, you know, um A matter of like time and the kind of the school of hard knocks, as it were. Do you just have to go through this merry-go-round a few times before you accept that the harsh realities are just facts of life? Or is this something we can coach to a little earlier?

Andrew Rios: 22:15

You know, oh man, this I’m I may offend people with this comment. I think it’s I always look to previous leaders, right? Attitude reflects leadership, right? I think if if a a certain behavior was enabled and allowed, then that becomes the norm. That becomes your norm. So if you were allowed at your previous uh place of employment to come to work late, right? And and kind of that flex that quote unquote, right? Flexibility, I guess. Um, then when you go to another organization and that’s not the expectation, the norm, it could be a harsh reality like, wait, wait, it’s not all no, every place can be different and will be different. And I think that that so I I always look back to previous. And as part of uh well, we’re talking about inheriting a team, but that’s kind of some of the mentality that you start to have and look for when you’re talking to people, coaching them, it’s like, okay, how do they see this? Right? Do they see it this way? Do they see it this way? Okay, why? What I take even more time to understand the why. Where did that come from? Was it a previous place? Was it because that’s the book they read? Is it because this is their first job and the one previous was a had nothing to do with being putting your time sheet in on time or you know, working a certain amount of tickets in the in the work day. Um yeah, it it you know, we gotta take that as our I don’t want to say opportunity, but we gotta take more time to assess how we’re gonna deliver that um the truth of the reality, right? Because someone’s gonna take it better than someone else, someone else that might not take it. And we might have that sense already and go, okay, this is only gonna go down the road so far. What does that look like?

Charlotte Ward: 24:07

So I um I think it’s I think it’s a really interesting point you raise actually, because I think that expectations should be deeply connected to a why, why we’re doing something. But I don’t think that the uh like I mean you talked let me let me say, I think that you you talk there specifically about that in the context of you know, expectations not being being met and wanting to understand where it comes from, more in the case of inheriting a team or someone’s joined your team and you haven’t got that history with them. But what I think has been really interesting for me historically is like there have been occasions where I’ve spotted that disconnect in expectations somewhere down the line when someone’s been on my team for quite some time. And it’s surprised me that they haven’t understood what you know, the why from earlier on, from two years ago when we started doing this, or five years ago when we started doing this, or eight years ago when we started doing this. And somewhere, the somewhere the why got lost, and I just hadn’t realized it.

Andrew Rios: 25:13

And that happens. I think you know, we have to be forgiving of ourselves as support leaders when that happens. I want to I want to say that right away because that’s the first thing I think about is it happens, right? You can do a retro on why or how, but I like to, I’ve been finding my time more these days, last five, three, four years, saying, okay, it happened good, got a sense of, okay, how do we problem solve that moving forward? What’s the growth here, either for that individual, for me, for the process, right? And I think the couple of times that it happens, and you know, I’m putting myself in your shoes with those, but also some recently, it’s because maybe I held something too long or deprioritized it too early, right? And didn’t didn’t delegate it out to someone. Now, that could also be a ripple effect of maybe I didn’t know who to, maybe I just lost, maybe there was too many fires going on. And it’s just more like, okay, let’s get it back on track. Here we go. Um, yeah, because sometimes you know that that happens, even with high performers.

Charlotte Ward: 26:16

Yeah, absolutely. You make assumptions, right? You you assume that you’re gonna have to like you’ve made a decision about uh, you know, an operational change or a process, you know, a direction for a certain bit of support or a structure or whatever. Um and so the expectations are gonna be this going forward, and you might spend a lot of time with the youngsters on your team who are, you know, who you know will need the extra work. But like you make the assumption that the guy that’s been working for you for five years just understands it because he’s been working for you for five years. Um you do need those checkpoints, you just need to do them in a different way. And and I think it can be assumption-driven in terms of like assuming people are there with you. I think there’s sometimes I mean, I’ve been guilty of like the kind of drop the message and head off and do something else, like that we’re changing this, off we go, you know. Um, and like there’s all sorts of reasons, but um, but it does happen. Sometimes we we miss people along the way, and they aren’t always the new people.

Andrew Rios: 27:21

No, and I I found myself in and and with that one, it’s more another harsh reality on the leader side that I’ve gone through is it does go, you’ve been doing it almost 30 years now, dating myself, right? It’s but it change does take a little bit longer. Yeah, right. It does. I think that people talk hundred-day plans, 90 day plans. I’m like, no, it’s like 150. I know you’re you really have to, you know, where those days you think you can coach this, you think you coach it up here, you could drop it, let it, and think it’s gonna no, it’s it it’s not. And I think that’s where I use a phrase sometimes with with anything in leadership and coaching is um and I heard it from a basketball collegiate coach many, many years ago, and it was um it’s not the players that change, it’s the coaches that do. And they went into describing it as players are gonna be players, kids are gonna be kids, teenagers are teenagers. Like we’ve talked about that, right? Who has to adjust to that? Because that changes, right? They’re just still gonna do what they’re gonna be, but it’s just gonna be different as the world evolves, technology evolves, things evolve. The coaches are the ones, the leaders, the coaches, the parents are the ones that have to really evolve and change with the times. And that means sometimes really knowing it’s gonna be a little slower. Yeah. It’s gonna be a little bit and be better at managing up, which is probably a whole nother conversation as well. But that means managing up because you might not be hitting expectations as set or that you thought you could hit, or you might have to really set harsh realities and truths up based on what you’re working with.

Charlotte Ward: 29:07

100%, 100%. Um, there is another topic there for sure. Um, but coach, I’m gonna um ask if we can take a time out on this one because I think we all need to go and have a bit of a think about how we evolve as coaches. Um, and uh as always, it’s been super fascinating to spend time with you, Andrew. Thank you so much for coming back.

Andrew Rios: 29:29

Oh my God, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Looking forward to the next one. And thank you. Thank you very much. Welcome back to you too, Charlotte. Glad to have you back.

Charlotte Ward: 29:38

Yeah, it’s good to be back. It’s good to be back. Uh, thank you so much again. Come back and talk about uh inheriting a team, going back to the office, uh, all of those things. There’s so much to cover. I look forward to it. Thanks again. I’ll talk to you soon. That’s it for today. Go to