Episode 4 | Developing Leaders
In this cast Why you must be a developer of leaders. Several years ago, I was having coffee with the CEO of a major brand. We were talking about leadership development and I asked him, so what is it that you do in your organization to develop the leadership capacity of your direct reports, you, the vice presidents in your company? His answer was astounding. He said to me, well, I expect them to have that already. We do training of our frontline employees and the technical aspects of how to do their job, but that's pretty much it. I didn't progress the conversation any further with him, because it was really clear that we have a different view on the need to develop talent. And I want you to think about this with me for a second. What if there isn't enough talent out there in the first place?
Where does it get develop? iIf you're not honing the talent of the people that you're bringing into your organization, where are you going to get them from? It's such an important question. There's, there's a concept that gets a lot of cynical play called the Peter principle. And the idea is that in many organizations, you get promoted to level of incompetence. So you keep getting promoted out of one position. You perform well, get promoted, perform well, get promoted. The challenge with the Peter principle is this, that the skills that were necessary that made you successful at one level are not the same skills that are needed at the next level. In fact, what happens is if you look at the skills model of leadership, we've got technical skills, we've got interpersonal skills and we've got conceptual skills. And as you move up within an organization, the dependence that we have on the technical skills decreases the amount of, of need for us to focus in on our interpersonal skills, never changes, but this other piece, these conceptual skills become critically important.
And in case you're wondering what I'm thinking about when I say conceptual, think vision of the organization, think systems thinking and how processes work and how you integrate new people and culture and all of those aspects that are more intangible. All of that is conceptual in nature. And by the way, I'll give you a foreshadow of some future casts. Problem solving is highly conceptual. And if you don't get the conceptual side of problem solving, chances are your leaders are not solving problems. They're putting band aids on problems. So the Peter principles just really, really important idea that we need to wrap our heads around because if we promote people for the wrong reasons, we're going to create mediocrity. In fact, we're not just going to create mediocrity, we're going to embed mediocrity in our organizations. I also want you to think about this other idea, luck cynically, I've thought a lot about luck.
And it seems to me that in many organizations or many individuals who get promoted into leadership positions, they were just lucky. And by that, I mean, they were in the right at the right time, performing at the right level to get the next opportunity. I really wonder how many talented performing people there are, where those opportunities never came up that are languishing at lower levels in an organization, waiting for someone to develop their capacity, to transform an organization and perform at a higher level. I think there are more than you can imagine, but our reliance on this idea that the person already has to have the right skills coming in, actually sets us up to be mediocre. We really got to wrap our head around this. Now let's, let's change gears a little bit. I'm going to make this a little bit more, uh, personal, if you will.
Senior leaders live in an echo chamber and I'm not talking the political echo chamber that we see now. And that's not what I'm go talking about. I'm talking about a different one. How many of your direct reports are willing to share bad news with you? One of the things that every direct report is thinking is how do I put a spin on this? How do I present this, this bag of crap in a positive way? How can I put it such that I'm not the bearer of bad news, that you might not be the kind of manager that, that punishes the person that brings bad news, or you may be regardless. The point is that all of your direct reports are trying to find ways to tweak their message, to get through to you in a positive way and position themselves for the next opportunity.
You may agree with me or not, but I, I see all the time, we do not get objective feedback. We get subjective feedback by direct reports. And for that reason, it's actually why organizations stay mediocre because there isn't the sense of open communication of, of honest trust based to way communication, where you get to see exactly what's going on in your organization. And your direct reports are able to learn from your experience on how to get better. Without that open real communication, you are stuck in mediocre land. So how do we do that? How do we create this? Because for me, you want to talk about developing your direct reports, start with where you're at. You've got to direct, you've got to develop your existing team. And you want to be thinking about how do I bring more talented people into the organization and future, but start with where you're at.
Start with your direct reports. There's really two core pieces of advice that I have for you. First of all, recognize, you need to have honest input. You can't deal with this subjective tweaked or spin reality. You need real data. You need trust based professional relationships with your direct reports, such that you can help them grow. And if you're, if you're growing them, you will continue to grow the performance of your organization. How do we do this? First thing I want you to think about is group versus individual to get honesty and openness in a group is an incredibly difficult challenge. Think about this, think about the manager who maybe they're, maybe they don't have a degree, or maybe their degree comes from a school that isn't respected within your organization. And they are standing in front of all of their peers and you, how vulnerable do you think they're going to be?
Chances are they're going to be closed off and self-protected in order to not lose face with you because they know it's going to impact their next performance review. So you've got to be really conscious of the fact that this is what happens in real organizations. I had the opportunity to work with a senior leadership team at a California based manufacturing company. And what struck me was how closed off they all were. They couldn't be honest, even in simple things, because the culture was one of the scarcity based cutthroat, that they knew that if they shared who they actually were, that it was going to get used against them in the future and their budget would get cut, or they they'd be marginalized in some important project. Recognize you've got to create a culture where trust is flourishing. And you got to also realize that we live in a scarcity based reality that we have a fixed budget and the, and the pie can only be split in so many different ways.
And until you can get your managers to operate in an abundance mentality, where you can find a way to increase the size of the pie, this what I'm talking about, isn't going to change. So how do we move? How do we get them to, to start? So, first of all, group is harder than individual. I would recommend starting with the individual and have a process where you're developing trust based professional relationships with all of your direct reports. I love the concept of a one on one frequency is up to you and based on, on your organizational priorities, but don't underestimate the power of just a half an hour every other week with each one of your direct reports, you will know intimately what's going on in their area. They will have the opportunity to be developed by you to get feedback by you. So many powerful things.
So we want to do one on one conversations, and we need to foster a sense that you can be trusted. So we need to recognize move away from the blame game toward the learning game and when in their one on one, encourage them to be honest, do not react negatively. If they get critical, be objective about it. It's the only way you're going to break through. Here's the beautiful thing. And we're going to talk more about this in a future cast. If you ask them to share feedback on a particular situation, then ask them for their assessment of at feedback, how did they arrive at that conclusion, what they think they would do in that situation? You can begin to understand how sophisticated their thinking process is and whether they're actually capable of the conceptual skills of, of understanding the complexity of the organization, the culture of the organization, the processes that you have in place, and they're giving you everything.
You need to learn how to teach them to get better at it. So one-on-one is definitely the right way to go. I'm going to give you a simple tip on the group technique, start small, start small. I also highly recommend that with your senior, a leadership team, that you build a behavioral agreement of how we're going to work together, simple things like we're going to be respectful. We're going to listen to one of those point of view. We're going to disagree with a question. In other words, seek first to understand, not to interrupt and make your point more boldly, get it right, build a behavioral agreement, and then hold the team accountable to the agreement. If they build it with you, then all you got to do is point to it and go, are you following this next? When you share a message with your team, I want you to think about speaking last, not first, if you share your opinion, all of those, yes men and yes women are going to agree with you. They're not going to, to offer a contrasting view, speak late in the org in the conversation, not early.
The other thing is this. When you share a bit of information about a situation or a decision that needs to be made, instead of saying, are there any comments, ask them, what comments do you have about this? What's your perspective? Ask an open-ended question with an assumption embedded that you know, that there are comments and questions and you want to hear them. And here's the key. Ask it that way. What comments do you have? What questions do you have? And then hold silence. Five seconds, 10 seconds of silence by doing that, what you'll actually do is you'll give the introverted managers in your team time to think it through, to come up with something. And it's just awkward enough that someone's going to get the ball rolling. The challenge that I see with many senior leaders are so impatient that they can't wait even one second, because they don't think that anyone's going to share anything. Wait, 10 seconds. You'll be shocked at how much value you get. Okay. So that's it for this cast. We're going to come back and we're going to dig into more on how to develop your team, how to hire really well, but that's it for now lead Well, everyone.
My company Developing Leaders Inc. provides a number of performance improvement related services to companies such as yours. We work with the Fortune 500 and local so Cal Businesses. If your company needs support in developing their process performance or in enhancing leadership effectiveness, reserve your no obligation strategy session with us today.
Reserve Your Strategy Session
In this cast Why you must be a developer of leaders. Several years ago, I was having coffee with the CEO of a major brand. We were talking about leadership development and I asked him, so what is it that you do in your organization to develop the leadership capacity of your direct reports, you, the vice presidents in your company? His answer was astounding. He said to me, well, I expect them to have that already. We do training of our frontline employees and the technical aspects of how to do their job, but that's pretty much it. I didn't progress the conversation any further with him, because it was really clear that we have a different view on the need to develop talent. And I want you to think about this with me for a second. What if there isn't enough talent out there in the first place?
Where does it get develop? iIf you're not honing the talent of the people that you're bringing into your organization, where are you going to get them from? It's such an important question. There's, there's a concept that gets a lot of cynical play called the Peter principle. And the idea is that in many organizations, you get promoted to level of incompetence. So you keep getting promoted out of one position. You perform well, get promoted, perform well, get promoted. The challenge with the Peter principle is this, that the skills that were necessary that made you successful at one level are not the same skills that are needed at the next level. In fact, what happens is if you look at the skills model of leadership, we've got technical skills, we've got interpersonal skills and we've got conceptual skills. And as you move up within an organization, the dependence that we have on the technical skills decreases the amount of, of need for us to focus in on our interpersonal skills, never changes, but this other piece, these conceptual skills become critically important.
And in case you're wondering what I'm thinking about when I say conceptual, think vision of the organization, think systems thinking and how processes work and how you integrate new people and culture and all of those aspects that are more intangible. All of that is conceptual in nature. And by the way, I'll give you a foreshadow of some future casts. Problem solving is highly conceptual. And if you don't get the conceptual side of problem solving, chances are your leaders are not solving problems. They're putting band aids on problems. So the Peter principles just really, really important idea that we need to wrap our heads around because if we promote people for the wrong reasons, we're going to create mediocrity. In fact, we're not just going to create mediocrity, we're going to embed mediocrity in our organizations. I also want you to think about this other idea, luck cynically, I've thought a lot about luck.
And it seems to me that in many organizations or many individuals who get promoted into leadership positions, they were just lucky. And by that, I mean, they were in the right at the right time, performing at the right level to get the next opportunity. I really wonder how many talented performing people there are, where those opportunities never came up that are languishing at lower levels in an organization, waiting for someone to develop their capacity, to transform an organization and perform at a higher level. I think there are more than you can imagine, but our reliance on this idea that the person already has to have the right skills coming in, actually sets us up to be mediocre. We really got to wrap our head around this. Now let's, let's change gears a little bit. I'm going to make this a little bit more, uh, personal, if you will.
Senior leaders live in an echo chamber and I'm not talking the political echo chamber that we see now. And that's not what I'm go talking about. I'm talking about a different one. How many of your direct reports are willing to share bad news with you? One of the things that every direct report is thinking is how do I put a spin on this? How do I present this, this bag of crap in a positive way? How can I put it such that I'm not the bearer of bad news, that you might not be the kind of manager that, that punishes the person that brings bad news, or you may be regardless. The point is that all of your direct reports are trying to find ways to tweak their message, to get through to you in a positive way and position themselves for the next opportunity.
You may agree with me or not, but I, I see all the time, we do not get objective feedback. We get subjective feedback by direct reports. And for that reason, it's actually why organizations stay mediocre because there isn't the sense of open communication of, of honest trust based to way communication, where you get to see exactly what's going on in your organization. And your direct reports are able to learn from your experience on how to get better. Without that open real communication, you are stuck in mediocre land. So how do we do that? How do we create this? Because for me, you want to talk about developing your direct reports, start with where you're at. You've got to direct, you've got to develop your existing team. And you want to be thinking about how do I bring more talented people into the organization and future, but start with where you're at.
Start with your direct reports. There's really two core pieces of advice that I have for you. First of all, recognize, you need to have honest input. You can't deal with this subjective tweaked or spin reality. You need real data. You need trust based professional relationships with your direct reports, such that you can help them grow. And if you're, if you're growing them, you will continue to grow the performance of your organization. How do we do this? First thing I want you to think about is group versus individual to get honesty and openness in a group is an incredibly difficult challenge. Think about this, think about the manager who maybe they're, maybe they don't have a degree, or maybe their degree comes from a school that isn't respected within your organization. And they are standing in front of all of their peers and you, how vulnerable do you think they're going to be?
Chances are they're going to be closed off and self-protected in order to not lose face with you because they know it's going to impact their next performance review. So you've got to be really conscious of the fact that this is what happens in real organizations. I had the opportunity to work with a senior leadership team at a California based manufacturing company. And what struck me was how closed off they all were. They couldn't be honest, even in simple things, because the culture was one of the scarcity based cutthroat, that they knew that if they shared who they actually were, that it was going to get used against them in the future and their budget would get cut, or they they'd be marginalized in some important project. Recognize you've got to create a culture where trust is flourishing. And you got to also realize that we live in a scarcity based reality that we have a fixed budget and the, and the pie can only be split in so many different ways.
And until you can get your managers to operate in an abundance mentality, where you can find a way to increase the size of the pie, this what I'm talking about, isn't going to change. So how do we move? How do we get them to, to start? So, first of all, group is harder than individual. I would recommend starting with the individual and have a process where you're developing trust based professional relationships with all of your direct reports. I love the concept of a one on one frequency is up to you and based on, on your organizational priorities, but don't underestimate the power of just a half an hour every other week with each one of your direct reports, you will know intimately what's going on in their area. They will have the opportunity to be developed by you to get feedback by you. So many powerful things.
So we want to do one on one conversations, and we need to foster a sense that you can be trusted. So we need to recognize move away from the blame game toward the learning game and when in their one on one, encourage them to be honest, do not react negatively. If they get critical, be objective about it. It's the only way you're going to break through. Here's the beautiful thing. And we're going to talk more about this in a future cast. If you ask them to share feedback on a particular situation, then ask them for their assessment of at feedback, how did they arrive at that conclusion, what they think they would do in that situation? You can begin to understand how sophisticated their thinking process is and whether they're actually capable of the conceptual skills of, of understanding the complexity of the organization, the culture of the organization, the processes that you have in place, and they're giving you everything.
You need to learn how to teach them to get better at it. So one-on-one is definitely the right way to go. I'm going to give you a simple tip on the group technique, start small, start small. I also highly recommend that with your senior, a leadership team, that you build a behavioral agreement of how we're going to work together, simple things like we're going to be respectful. We're going to listen to one of those point of view. We're going to disagree with a question. In other words, seek first to understand, not to interrupt and make your point more boldly, get it right, build a behavioral agreement, and then hold the team accountable to the agreement. If they build it with you, then all you got to do is point to it and go, are you following this next? When you share a message with your team, I want you to think about speaking last, not first, if you share your opinion, all of those, yes men and yes women are going to agree with you. They're not going to, to offer a contrasting view, speak late in the org in the conversation, not early.
The other thing is this. When you share a bit of information about a situation or a decision that needs to be made, instead of saying, are there any comments, ask them, what comments do you have about this? What's your perspective? Ask an open-ended question with an assumption embedded that you know, that there are comments and questions and you want to hear them. And here's the key. Ask it that way. What comments do you have? What questions do you have? And then hold silence. Five seconds, 10 seconds of silence by doing that, what you'll actually do is you'll give the introverted managers in your team time to think it through, to come up with something. And it's just awkward enough that someone's going to get the ball rolling. The challenge that I see with many senior leaders are so impatient that they can't wait even one second, because they don't think that anyone's going to share anything. Wait, 10 seconds. You'll be shocked at how much value you get. Okay. So that's it for this cast. We're going to come back and we're going to dig into more on how to develop your team, how to hire really well, but that's it for now lead Well, everyone.
My company Developing Leaders Inc. provides a number of performance improvement related services to companies such as yours. We work with the Fortune 500 and local so Cal Businesses. If your company needs support in developing their process performance or in enhancing leadership effectiveness, reserve your no obligation strategy session with us today.
Reserve Your Strategy Session