Episode 5 | Stick in the Mud Managers
In this podcast, stick in the mud leaders. I bet everybody listening to this podcast has experienced the following situation. You go through a process, you figure out a change, you implement the change. Things are going well. The process is improving and you go back a couple weeks later, a month later, and miraculously or mysteriously, the process is back to what it used to be and you are left scratching your head wondering what the heck happened. Why did they go back? Well, remember rule number one, never solve a process problem alone? Chances are you solved it alone. And the employees didn't understand it. Now here's the funny thing about employees. If an employee doesn't understand why they're being asked to make a change, they're probably going to listen to you. They're going to comply to your wishes. And then you go on your merry way and the employee's left to figure out what to do when the process doesn't go perfectly and as planned.
And the very first time that that process hits a speed bump and they don't know what to do in the new set of circumstances, because you didn't explain it to them. Guess what? they know what to do in that circumstance, in the old settings. So they go back to the old way and they run the process the way it was run. And I guarantee you, this is a simple thing to fix, but here's the deal. When I talk about stick in the mud leaders, what exactly am I talking about? Well, it's the same thing. That same mindset that the employee has. Guess what, where do you get your leads from or your frontline supervisors? The vast majority are getting promoted up out of the hourly ranks. And I have a very simple question for you. What do they understand about how to be an effective leader?
Yeah, not much. And I think you're going to recognize, as I explained this, that under stress and inevitably at a lead or a supervisor position, there's a lot of stress when they get under stress, people have a tendency to revert back to their comfort zone. They go back to what they know. So the lead or the supervisor who was really good technically, and you promoted them because they were good. Technically they're going to go back and they're going to push the employees out of the way and start doing the work themselves. And they literally compound the problem, see leads and supervisors very rarely have been trained and developed in how to be an effective leader. They know a little bit, but for the most part, they're the least developed leaders in your business, right? They have the most invested in the status quo and they have the they're least likely to know how to lead change. So what do I mean, the least developed?
Well, let me come back to my point. If you promote from within, where does that employee learn to be a leader? Where do they get their leadership training from? If, if you're not fortunate enough to meet an organization like mine, that trains people, frontline leaders in how to be effective leaders, where do they get it from? Because the leadership skills are completely different than what is necessary to be an employee. Yeah. There's interpersonal skills. Yeah. There's technical skill. But now we're asking them to be excellent at relationships and communication and guiding performance and correcting problems. There's so much more at the leadership level that, that employee's never been developed in. And you might say they could go to school for it really. Um, have you seen the average professor at a university? When was the last time they stepped foot in an operational shop? Um, that's not, you're not going to learn anything except some abstract ideas on how to do it.
And you might say, well, they have some adjunct faculty members that work in the real world. Yeah, they do. And then you got to ask yourself how many of your leads and supervisors are going to a university in the first place? I mean, going to school is not the place to, to learn leadership. They need to learn it from their P their supervisor, the leader above them. But here's the fundamental challenge. If you start do a thought experiment with me for a second, if I'm a lead, who's going to teach me how to be leader, because I'm going follow the example of my supervisor. And if I'm a supervisor, where am I learning leadership from, from my manager, if I'm a manager, where did I learn it from? Probably my general manager. And somewhere in that, in that middle range of leadership, maybe somebody went to school. Maybe somebody's got some advanced knowledge.
What they really have though is more years in the school of hard knocks of experience of getting it wrong. I want you to imagine this scenario with me for a second, just a simple little metaphor. Imagine you're walking through a mind field without a map because often when you're a frontline leader and you don't know what, how to be an effective leader, that's exactly what leadership looks like. You're walking around blindly hoping you don't step on negative feedback and get blown up. That's exactly the, the message that we give frontline leaders. Is this, this sense of we, we tell them when they're doing it wrong. I mean, it's one of my other favorite metaphors. It's Seagull management, isn't it? We fly around overhead. And eventually we see a problem we swoop in, we poop all over the lead and then we fly away.
That's not what we need to be doing. We need to be thinking about how do we develop this group? Because the reason there are sticks in the mud, if you will, is that they don't actually know how to lead change. They don't. They have the most invested in what little they do know a and they've at least developed the first thing we got to do, if we want an organization to move forward. If you want to implement change in a way that the organization's coming with you, you've got to get to a point where you're developing those frontline leaders so that the, the leadership competence and the change tolerance gets, I you're developing your frontline leaders so that they're, you're developing your frontline leaders, that they have more of a understanding of how to lead people through change. And they're building trust based relationships with their employees. And they're guiding the organization through these processes and building up resilience all the way deep within the organization.
If you're not doing this, you're going to have these sticks in the mud that are just resisting. The very changes that you need for your business to be successful. It's not that they're bad people. It's that, they don't know how to lead yet because no one's taught them. Negative feedback is not the right answer. And just watching the person ahead of them is not the right answer either because they have no access to what that person is thinking. All they're doing is seeing the behaviors. And if those behaviors are a little bit outside of the cultural standard, it's not going to take you anywhere.
We need to develop our frontline leaders. We need to give them the skills so that they can develop relationships. They can give employees feedback that doesn't come down the employee, but actually helps them perform better. We need to teach them how to communicate. So that, that the message of change goes through the organization. We need to help our frontline leaders get to a point where they don't have as much invested in the status quo because they're constantly learning how to improve their skills and their performance. And if you, you do that, what I think you're going to find is this idea that they don't know how to lead change is going to evaporate because they're going to figure it out with your guidance. I'll leave you this, this one little tip for our who does what by when I want you to start thinking about change in the way that I'm talking about and thinking about the element of your frontline leaders.
And the next time you're talking to one of your frontline leaders, ask them a simple question. I did this in a training class the other day, and I was floored by the answer. So imagine you're going to implement a small change in your work area. What's the thought process that you go through in advance of announcing that change. It's a simple little that will give you all the insight in the world into whether your frontline leaders have the capacity and the depth to implement change in a way that takes people with them or just forces them to comply. I think you're going to find if you're not developing your frontline leaders, they will not know how to answer that question. So just ask them that simple question and then start developing your leaders.
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 medium and large size 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 podcast, stick in the mud leaders. I bet everybody listening to this podcast has experienced the following situation. You go through a process, you figure out a change, you implement the change. Things are going well. The process is improving and you go back a couple weeks later, a month later, and miraculously or mysteriously, the process is back to what it used to be and you are left scratching your head wondering what the heck happened. Why did they go back? Well, remember rule number one, never solve a process problem alone? Chances are you solved it alone. And the employees didn't understand it. Now here's the funny thing about employees. If an employee doesn't understand why they're being asked to make a change, they're probably going to listen to you. They're going to comply to your wishes. And then you go on your merry way and the employee's left to figure out what to do when the process doesn't go perfectly and as planned.
And the very first time that that process hits a speed bump and they don't know what to do in the new set of circumstances, because you didn't explain it to them. Guess what? they know what to do in that circumstance, in the old settings. So they go back to the old way and they run the process the way it was run. And I guarantee you, this is a simple thing to fix, but here's the deal. When I talk about stick in the mud leaders, what exactly am I talking about? Well, it's the same thing. That same mindset that the employee has. Guess what, where do you get your leads from or your frontline supervisors? The vast majority are getting promoted up out of the hourly ranks. And I have a very simple question for you. What do they understand about how to be an effective leader?
Yeah, not much. And I think you're going to recognize, as I explained this, that under stress and inevitably at a lead or a supervisor position, there's a lot of stress when they get under stress, people have a tendency to revert back to their comfort zone. They go back to what they know. So the lead or the supervisor who was really good technically, and you promoted them because they were good. Technically they're going to go back and they're going to push the employees out of the way and start doing the work themselves. And they literally compound the problem, see leads and supervisors very rarely have been trained and developed in how to be an effective leader. They know a little bit, but for the most part, they're the least developed leaders in your business, right? They have the most invested in the status quo and they have the they're least likely to know how to lead change. So what do I mean, the least developed?
Well, let me come back to my point. If you promote from within, where does that employee learn to be a leader? Where do they get their leadership training from? If, if you're not fortunate enough to meet an organization like mine, that trains people, frontline leaders in how to be effective leaders, where do they get it from? Because the leadership skills are completely different than what is necessary to be an employee. Yeah. There's interpersonal skills. Yeah. There's technical skill. But now we're asking them to be excellent at relationships and communication and guiding performance and correcting problems. There's so much more at the leadership level that, that employee's never been developed in. And you might say they could go to school for it really. Um, have you seen the average professor at a university? When was the last time they stepped foot in an operational shop? Um, that's not, you're not going to learn anything except some abstract ideas on how to do it.
And you might say, well, they have some adjunct faculty members that work in the real world. Yeah, they do. And then you got to ask yourself how many of your leads and supervisors are going to a university in the first place? I mean, going to school is not the place to, to learn leadership. They need to learn it from their P their supervisor, the leader above them. But here's the fundamental challenge. If you start do a thought experiment with me for a second, if I'm a lead, who's going to teach me how to be leader, because I'm going follow the example of my supervisor. And if I'm a supervisor, where am I learning leadership from, from my manager, if I'm a manager, where did I learn it from? Probably my general manager. And somewhere in that, in that middle range of leadership, maybe somebody went to school. Maybe somebody's got some advanced knowledge.
What they really have though is more years in the school of hard knocks of experience of getting it wrong. I want you to imagine this scenario with me for a second, just a simple little metaphor. Imagine you're walking through a mind field without a map because often when you're a frontline leader and you don't know what, how to be an effective leader, that's exactly what leadership looks like. You're walking around blindly hoping you don't step on negative feedback and get blown up. That's exactly the, the message that we give frontline leaders. Is this, this sense of we, we tell them when they're doing it wrong. I mean, it's one of my other favorite metaphors. It's Seagull management, isn't it? We fly around overhead. And eventually we see a problem we swoop in, we poop all over the lead and then we fly away.
That's not what we need to be doing. We need to be thinking about how do we develop this group? Because the reason there are sticks in the mud, if you will, is that they don't actually know how to lead change. They don't. They have the most invested in what little they do know a and they've at least developed the first thing we got to do, if we want an organization to move forward. If you want to implement change in a way that the organization's coming with you, you've got to get to a point where you're developing those frontline leaders so that the, the leadership competence and the change tolerance gets, I you're developing your frontline leaders so that they're, you're developing your frontline leaders, that they have more of a understanding of how to lead people through change. And they're building trust based relationships with their employees. And they're guiding the organization through these processes and building up resilience all the way deep within the organization.
If you're not doing this, you're going to have these sticks in the mud that are just resisting. The very changes that you need for your business to be successful. It's not that they're bad people. It's that, they don't know how to lead yet because no one's taught them. Negative feedback is not the right answer. And just watching the person ahead of them is not the right answer either because they have no access to what that person is thinking. All they're doing is seeing the behaviors. And if those behaviors are a little bit outside of the cultural standard, it's not going to take you anywhere.
We need to develop our frontline leaders. We need to give them the skills so that they can develop relationships. They can give employees feedback that doesn't come down the employee, but actually helps them perform better. We need to teach them how to communicate. So that, that the message of change goes through the organization. We need to help our frontline leaders get to a point where they don't have as much invested in the status quo because they're constantly learning how to improve their skills and their performance. And if you, you do that, what I think you're going to find is this idea that they don't know how to lead change is going to evaporate because they're going to figure it out with your guidance. I'll leave you this, this one little tip for our who does what by when I want you to start thinking about change in the way that I'm talking about and thinking about the element of your frontline leaders.
And the next time you're talking to one of your frontline leaders, ask them a simple question. I did this in a training class the other day, and I was floored by the answer. So imagine you're going to implement a small change in your work area. What's the thought process that you go through in advance of announcing that change. It's a simple little that will give you all the insight in the world into whether your frontline leaders have the capacity and the depth to implement change in a way that takes people with them or just forces them to comply. I think you're going to find if you're not developing your frontline leaders, they will not know how to answer that question. So just ask them that simple question and then start developing your leaders.
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 medium and large size 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