As a leader one of your most important roles is Performance Coach. And by far, behaviour change is THE most challenging aspect of performance coaching for team members. To adequately acknowledge the need to change your behaviour, you must be compelled to search for, examine and question those unconscious assumptions you have buried deep in the recesses of your mind. You must challenge the prevailing patterns you have acquired and formed over time and life experiences, and replace them with more positive, effective and productive thought patterns. This is truly why so much coaching and counseling is ineffective in bringing about internal and lasting change to employees with behaviour problems.
At this stage of the process, most employees will say whatever they think is necessary to get out of the counseling session and do whatever is necessary to keep their jobs. They modify their behaviour to your expectation until doing so becomes too much of a burden. The stress arises when their modified, external behaviour is not in alignment with their internal understanding of how they choose to act and how they choose to see the world around them. Once that burden becomes too hard to bear, they revert back to following their internal drivers (old patterns) and their toxic behaviour returns to the workplace.
When this pattern emerges with an employee, the only question remaining is how long you will continue to invest time in someone who poisons the work place. Firing often isn’t necessary: Our practical work experience suggests that when problem employees get the sense that you are serious about accountability and workplace behaviour, they will exercise their freedom of choice and decide they do not want to work for an organization where they are consistently held accountable and called out for their attitude and behaviour.
Conventional thinking would have us believe we should be spending the majority of our time trying to “cure” the ills of our problem employees at the expense of investing that time developing the skill and talent of our middle and high-level performers. We need to challenge this thinking and have the courage to replace it with a model that focuses on developing and exploiting the skills of our high performers while mitigating the detrimental behaviour of the problem employee. Building a culture based on individual accountability will eliminate recruiting and retention problems and gain the respect and appreciation of loyal and productive members of the organization.
At the heart of accountability is the skill of Positive Presence™ — an innovative thought model connecting workplace behaviour to emotional energy and provides a systematic, programmatic methodology for equipping leaders with the knowledge and understanding necessary for developing and sustaining the behaviour skills indicative of a culture of accountability.
A fundamental principle, what one might call a natural law, is that people choose to act and behave based on what they believe to be true about how they see the world around them. Neuroscience research substantiates this claim. The human brain functions in a pattern recognition system. Patterning is phenomenally strong and we create a “confirmation bias” to accept outside inferences and influences that match the patterns we have created for how we choose to see the world in which we live. 
Throughout the college football season, we can glean many valuable leadership behaviour lessons that are so applicable to the work we do at The Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership. 
If you are a senior leader, you have to ask yourself, how committed am I to real change in my organization and what am I doing to create that change? Senior leaders create strategic vision and objectives for the organization. Leadership development is most effective when the efforts of its leaders are connected to those strategic objectives that indicate the business priorities of the organization.
Go online, stroll through a bookstore, attend another training workshop or seminar and you will see that the topic of leadership is everywhere. We talk about it in political terms, business, sports, and tax-exempt organizations. People are captivated and confused at the same time by the concept of leadership and the essential elements that produce a high performance leader.
One of the key characteristics of influential leaders is their ability to stimulate volition in themselves and among their followers. They do this by creating a sense of urgency, living a life with purpose, and pursuing excellence. When you choose to take this step in your leadership behaviour, you will see profound impact on your resulting outcomes, goals, and objectives.
Influential leaders almost always are highly dissatisfied with ‘status quo’. They are unwilling to allow preventable pain and suffering to continue needlessly. They are unwilling to waste precious resources and to settle for second-rate productivity and financial performance. Volition enables dissatisfied leaders to make a choice to bring back emotional meaning and purpose to their work.
What makes people, who possess knowledge about what they need to do to actually improve their performance, alter and change their behaviour? The answer is volition- a purposeful, intentional choice.
Relationships, by their nature, require constant and consistent tending. The quality of care you put into these relationships translates into either a negative or a positive experience. That is, the other person perceives every one of your interpersonal exchanges and interactions as good or bad, supportive or unsupportive, trusting or untrusting, positive or negative, safe or unsafe, and so on. If you behave poorly during an interpersonal exchange with an employee, that experience is considered negative and the other person’s brain registers that encounter in experiential emotional memory (EEM); conversely, if you conduct yourself well, that experience is counted as a positive EEM.
The greatest of all leaders understand that methods, tools, technologies, protocols, and systems do not achieve results. People do. Therefore, it is people not processes, with whom organizational leaders must form a long-lasting, positive, emotional connection. This connection is actually a physical connection in people’s brains and is what ultimately determines the success or failure of the leader specifically and the organization as a whole.