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Kris Plachy on Leadership Responsibility: The Coaching Secrets Every Agency Owner Needs

By Craig Pretzinger & Jason Feltman•09/02/2020•7 min read

Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies

Kris Plachy works with leaders who have one thing in common: they are good at their jobs and struggling with their people. They understand the technical side of their business. They can perform at a high level personally. But the moment their success required them to lead other humans, to develop them, hold them accountable, coach them through failure, and build a culture that produces results without the owner's constant presence, something broke down. This is the conversation most agency owners need and very few are having.

The Expert Who Became a Leadership Coach

Kris Plachy's trajectory into leadership coaching is itself a study in the exact problem she now helps others solve. She spent years in corporate environments watching technically excellent people get promoted into leadership roles and then quietly fail, not because they lacked intelligence or work ethic, but because nobody had ever taught them the actual practice of leading.

The failure mode is consistent across industries, and the insurance agency world is not exempt from it. A top producer opens an agency. They are excellent at selling, relationship management, carrier knowledge, coverage analysis. They hire staff. The staff does not perform at the level the owner expects, and the owner does not know what to do about it. They oscillate between being too passive (hoping people figure it out) and too reactive (managing through frustration). The team reads the inconsistency and adjusts accordingly, usually downward.

Kris's coaching practice is built around a direct insight: leadership is a skill set, not a personality type, and it can be developed by anyone who is willing to accept the responsibility that comes with it.

The Responsibility Most Owners Won't Accept

The central message Kris brings to the Insurance Dudes audience is one that makes some owners uncomfortable: when you hire someone, you have accepted responsibility for creating the conditions in which that person can succeed. Not responsibility for their results, they own their own performance. But responsibility for the clarity of expectation, the quality of coaching, the consistency of accountability, and the health of the culture they are operating in.

Most agency owners who are struggling with staff problems are quick to attribute those problems to the staff. The hire was wrong. The person lacks drive. The industry attracts the wrong kind of people. These explanations have the virtue of requiring no change from the owner.

Kris's coaching gets to the harder question: what has the owner's behavior contributed to the situation? Not to create guilt, to create leverage. The owner is the only variable in the team equation that they have direct control over. Changing their own behavior is the most powerful thing they can do to change their team's performance. If they are focused entirely on changing the staff while their own leadership practices stay fixed, they will keep cycling through the same problems with different names attached.

The Four Leadership Practices Kris Returns to Again and Again

Setting expectations in writing, in advance, in specific terms. The most common source of underperformance is not unwillingness, it is genuine ambiguity about what is expected. Owners who say "I need you to be more proactive" have not set an expectation. Owners who say "I need you to make fifteen outbound service calls per week, documented in the CRM by Friday at 5pm" have. Specificity is kindness. Ambiguity is not.

Separating the performance conversation from the relationship. Agency owners who care about their staff, and most of them do, frequently conflate accountability with rejection. They avoid the hard performance conversation because it feels like telling someone they are not valued. Kris reframes this directly: holding someone accountable to a clear standard is how you demonstrate that you take their success seriously. Letting performance slide because you don't want to hurt feelings is how you demonstrate that you've stopped believing the person can improve. Which one is actually kind?

Coaching toward the answer instead of providing it. The owner who solves every problem their staff brings to them has trained their staff to bring them every problem. The owner who coaches their staff through problems, asking questions, helping people develop their own reasoning, staying curious rather than directive, has built a team that can function. The shift from answer-provider to coach is uncomfortable at first because providing answers feels useful and asking questions feels passive. The results tell the opposite story.

Knowing when coaching ends and a transition begins. Not every performance gap is a coaching problem. Some gaps reflect a mismatch between the person and the role that no amount of coaching will fix. Part of leadership responsibility is recognizing this early, communicating clearly with the individual about what you're seeing, and making a clean decision rather than dragging out a situation that is not working for anyone. The compassionate move is often the direct move.

What Kris's Framework Demands of Agency Owners

Implementing Kris Plachy's leadership framework is not a comfortable process. It requires agency owners to look at their own behavior with the same objectivity they bring to analyzing their production numbers. It requires them to accept that their staff's performance is partly a reflection of their own leadership, and that changing the performance means changing their own practices first.

The owners who engage seriously with this material report consistent results: less staff turnover, higher performance from existing team members, and a shift in the quality of the agency's culture that makes recruiting and retention easier over time. Those results do not come from a weekend workshop. They come from sustained practice of the four principles above, maintained even when it is uncomfortable.

What This Means for Your Agency

Start with expectation clarity. Before you address any performance issue on your team, write down the specific, measurable expectation for that role that you believe is not being met. If you cannot write it down with specificity, you have not actually set it, and the conversation you were about to have would have produced defensiveness without direction.

Once you have the expectation written down, ask yourself honestly whether you have communicated it in those specific terms, whether you have created the conditions for the person to meet it, and whether you have been consistent in holding to it when it was not being met. Your honest answers to those three questions will tell you where your leadership gap actually is.

The Bottom Line

Kris Plachy's message for insurance agency owners is the most important one many of them will hear this year: leadership is a responsibility you accepted when you hired your first employee, and meeting that responsibility requires deliberate practice of skills that do not come naturally to most technically excellent people. The agencies that crack the team performance puzzle are almost always the agencies with owners who accepted this responsibility fully and invested seriously in developing the leadership skills to meet it. Kris shows you exactly what that looks like in practice.

Catch the full conversation:

About Kris Plachy: Kris Plachy is a leadership coach and consultant who works with entrepreneurs and executives to develop the people leadership skills required to build high-performing teams. Learn more at krisplachy.com.

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