How (not) to do effective leadership development

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson walks you through the pitfalls of leadership development programs for organizations that don’t work, and offers four intentional components to include in any leadership development program that will bring about lasting change, real learning, and a horde of newly trained managers and leaders for your organization.

Barbara tells stories from her life and what encouraged her to start a podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It doesn't work like that. Hello and welcome back to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. I'm your host, Barbara Iverson, and today I want to get in the weeds a little bit, so to speak, and talk about management and leadership training and the best way that I have found to go about that. There are tons of options out there for companies and organizations that are looking to develop their leaders and managers. I'm going to use both of those words, by the way, today because they're often used interchangeably. And I don't want to get too hung up on which word means what. So I'm just going to kind of use both. Managers, I tend to think of as people who have teams that report to them, whether it's multi-level teams, um, or if it's just one group that they're leading within an organization. And then you also have leaders who may or may not be leading teams. They may, though, be at a high level in the company uh because they are an expert or for whatever reason. So leaders, managers, whatever. But there's a lot of instances that companies have found themselves with a core group of people and then they hire very, very quickly, whether they're a scale-up or even still in the startup mode, but they can really start this quick hiring phase. And what will tend to happen is they will take the people who were with them at the beginning and promote them into manager positions where they've got a team of people who are now reporting to them. And these folks can have any level of experience. Maybe they've come from another company or organization where they have leading a team experience where they've they've already done this and so they're ready for it. You also have, it's very common to find you have people with absolutely no experience in leading teams. And they are suddenly managing groups of people. They may be an expert in the area. You might have someone who was in accounting and was doing a great job, and now they're leading the whole accounting team. And so their workday consists far less of actually doing the accounting work that they were originally hired to do, and now they're actually leading a group of people who were doing that work, and they have to have other things on their minds. And for a lot of people, this is really a struggle. The old-fashioned way to approach working in a big corporation was sort of getting into that ladder approach where you start off at one level and you might move up to another level within the department, let's say accounting that you were in. You are maybe you started as a junior accountant, and then you were an accountant, and then you were a senior accountant. And then for you to go any further in the eyes of the people at the company, you have to be promoted into a manager position. So now you aren't, as I said before, you're not doing that work as an accountant. You're doing the work of a manager of accountants. And then you can keep going beyond that. You'll probably stay in the area of finance within your company, but it just means your progression in the firm means more and more teams that report directly or indirectly to you. And that's how people for many years measured their growth within a company. This has changed tremendously. And I think a large part of that is women wanting to stay in companies and these ways of promoting where it was like become be someone who's new at the field, then becomes proficient in the field, then becomes an expert in the field, and now you manage, manage, manage, manage, manage, manage, direct, bop. Now you die. No. But you have these systems that were created by men for men. They would most likely not have gaps in their career. They wouldn't take time off, certainly not in the olden days. They wouldn't take time off if their wives got pregnant and had children. They would not take time off to care for those children or for their parents. You just simply wouldn't find gaps in men's careers unless they took a sabbatical, which was usually a learning opportunity. So they would have this continuous growth in these positions. Now, with having so many more women in the workplace, women take time off to have children. They may also take years off when they need to care for their parents. There's any number of reasons. It's not just sabbaticals anymore or these learning breaks. So then you have people whose careers don't have just this continuous growth. So you have gaps or anticipated gaps, which means you simply know that you're not going to have this seamless progression that might have been normal in a different day, but now having the gaps is far more normal. And you also have maybe because of the gaps, but also simply because of the self-awareness that many women have to say, I don't want to become a manager. I want to stay as an expert in this field. I have progressed. I was junior, then I was, you know, normal level, then I became senior. And I really enjoy being an expert in this field. I don't want to start spending my days doing only 20% of this work so that I can manage a bunch of people with 80% of my time. I really want to stay in the field. I might want to broaden my expertise so that I'm not just an expert in one small niche area, but I can have several areas. But I so I want to broaden to the side instead of moving up. So this ladder doesn't really work so much anymore because there's a number of people who don't want to do that. And it's not just women who want to not get on that ladder. But I think it's that's happened more with women in the workplace who have said, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be part of this kind of old-fashioned ladder mentality of this is what's this is what's necessary. I'm sure the gaps have something to do with it. I think ego has something to do with it. Not that women don't have egos, but it's a little bit different. And I think most people would agree that there's women and men approach the meaning of their work in quite different ways. Not all, please don't come for me for saying this, but there are differences. And I think it's been women who have pushed this need to have the option not to be on the manager track. I've seen this over and over. It's really necessary to give people the option. Why am I bringing this up in this context of like development of managers and leaders? Well, because if you don't really feel like you have an option in a company, that the only way that your career can move forward is to become a manager, a manager of a team of people, you're gonna say yes to that promotion, whether or not you have any of the skills or personality traits or desire to be in that kind of position. So you will say yes to it. Your bosses will be thrilled because they'll say, Oh, look, this person's been loyal to us. We've been working with them, we know them, we trust them. This is perfect. In many cases, it's great. The problem is you then need to make sure that you are training your people to be able to do that job of manager because it doesn't come naturally. It's not like an instinctual thing like motherhood, where you this is not true for everyone, but for many women, they hold the babies for the first time and all these instincts kick in. That doesn't happen with managers. You don't just go from being an expert in the field one day to like knowing how to lead a team of 10 people with a great variety of needs all in one afternoon. You don't, you don't. I have been thinking a lot about what does this look like? What is the best approach to building leadership skills, building manager skills in people so that you have managers who are able to either start leading their teams well over time, or you have managers say, This is not for me. Because when they don't know what the job entails and aren't learning it and aren't experimenting with it, they might just have something, some idea in their head about what managing a team looks like, and it's not even really accurate. But so the training works on a bunch of different levels. So, what does this training look like? Well, first I want to talk about what it doesn't look like. Because here's the thing: there's a lot of leadership experts out there who've discovered that companies don't want to hire an in-house person for this. They feel like that's pretty expensive and they don't want to do it. So instead, they go to leadership coaches or experts or trainers or what have you who promise results and who say, give us three days, maybe three days twice a year, but they promise that after three to five days of seminars, you will have a crowd of high-functioning, have it all together, fantastic managers. And I'm here to tell you, it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that. First of all, let's talk about the cost. I worked at a company who, before I was hired, had decided that they were going to do some leadership development because people were screaming from it. It was this scale-up situation where they the company had existed for years and they suddenly had this huge boom and were just hiring, hiring, hiring. So they were promoting all of these people. Many of them who had neither aptitude, maybe even not desire, but definitely not the skill to manage teams. So they were looking for the quickest possible fit to solve their problem. And they found a leadership expert who was happy to sell them a five-day leadership seminar to be held in Berlin where leaders from around the world, because this was a global company, leaders from around the world would come, they would meet there, and they would engage in seminars, workshops, different activities, and after five days, they would have all the skills that they needed. And then there would be like checkups, maybe six months later, there'd be like a one day, and they would sort of follow it up that way. First of all, let's talk about that because you can't just have a one-time, five-day leadership seminar and think that after that you can just do one day a year. What about all the people that have either been hired or promoted since then? Don't you need to do another five days with those people? Why wouldn't you? So let's talk about these five days. It was going to cost 55,000 euros just for the work of the leadership expert. That was going into their pocket. So it was gonna be, I think three people were gonna come to facilitate 55,000 just for them. But that was not taking into consideration all of the travel costs for the people who were coming from different places in the world. And by the way, at the level that those people were at, they would have been flying business class. You've got travel and you have the hotels that all of these people are gonna have to stay in. You have whatever conference room, that hotel or a different one, that you're gonna have to pay for. You also need to consider the lost work. When you take these managers out of their jobs for five days, that is lost work. I'm sure they're gonna be on their phones the whole time that they're sitting in these seminars. Don't get me wrong, it's not like they're gonna be focused, but you're not gonna get the same work out of them that you would have if they were in their offices doing what they normally do for those five days. So the costs for this were actually well over 100,000 euros. Well over. And now you have to stop and think. If these truly are all that's necessary, these five days, don't you have to do this five days every year to take into account your new managers, whether you've hired new ones or promoted new ones? So they have to do it. So don't you then have to pay between 60 and 100,000 every year for this for only five days? When you look at the math and the numbers that way, why wouldn't you hire someone in-house? Why wouldn't you say for this kind of money, we can actually hire somebody to be in-house and to do this not just five days a year, but 52 minus whatever days of vacation weeks of the year? Whole year round. It doesn't have to just be one week. So not just because of the money, but also because of the barrage of content that you then have to present. I saw the plans for this five-day seminar gig. Holy cow! It was topic after topic. It was coaching, developing, hiring, firing, setting budgets, lady leading meetings, managing stakeholders, and more. I mean, it was overwhelming. And I thought to myself, I wouldn't want to go to this. Because seriously, after five days, good luck remembering anything that you heard on day one, and good luck even knowing what to prioritize going forward. It could well be that at the end of those five days, they had a map for them, like do this first, do this, do this. Okay, but that's a lot of information in five days. It's more than most people can take in. And and what happens? They if they've if they're overwhelmed and they can't process or figure out what to do first, they are simply gonna leave it on the floor when they walk back into their office to do their jobs on Monday. It'll almost be like they never went because it was too much, they don't know what to do, they don't know where to start. You can't stick your mouth around a fire hydrant to get a drink of water. You will die. Or you won't really satisfy your thirst very easily. You won't even try it. So this these short bursts, these short-term three-day, five-day work, one workshop. Here you go. You're done. Way to go, you're leaders now. No, it doesn't work like that. Leadership is something, and even not even just leadership, meaning like knowing how to lead yourself. We've talked about this in a previous episode. Actually, doing the work of becoming a more mature, a kinder, gentler, whatever person. Managing a team takes time to learn how to do because every team is different. The people that you're working with are gonna be different. These four people are gonna be, it's gonna be a different situation if we add someone to the team, if we lose someone from the team. It is constantly changing. It's a constantly evolving animal, truly. It's not just one thing. And so management takes time to learn. It also takes making mistakes. You have to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. And hearing about someone else's mistakes is not gonna be enough for you to actually learn what to do and what not to do and why. It can't take place in a short amount of time, and these blitz where you're paying leadership experts tons of money to come in and put you in front of a fire hydrant of information is not gonna work. Okay, so what works? Well, let's think about how we learn to do almost anything. It takes time, it takes reflection, it takes practice, and it often takes being in a group of people who are learning the same things at the same time as you. This is not just me saying it. I've been reading articles about this. Leadership models from the past don't work. These short-term things don't work. What here's what works. And then they lay out exactly what I say this is the way to go about it. It doesn't have to look exactly like what I think, but it shouldn't look like this old-fashioned, let's just hire an expert to throw information at us for three to five days, and then we're done. No, it's ongoing. So, what do you need? You need training. You need training. It can be online. Online's a great resource now. There's tons of learning libraries out there where you can find all of the different videos and learning journeys that will help walk you through the process. Say delegation. Delegation is always a topic that comes up. Also, leading meetings, how to do that well, because most of us have an experience of doing it poorly. And so people want to know how do I lead meetings better? And how do I delegate? Those two topics, huge. There are so many learning libraries that have videos on those topics that maybe have a quiz or two, maybe there's a reading of an article, maybe there's, you know, not just an informational meeting, but also personal stories that people are telling. There's all kinds of learning materials out there. But you can have a training where you give people a common language, you give people concepts, and you give them action points. And then it's super important to create cohorts, cohorts of people with a similar amount of experience. So to me, that says like leaders who have been leading teams for fewer than two years, and then you've got like the two to five years, and then you've got five years and up. Because people who've been leading for those periods of time, like similar to each other, they're gonna have very similar questions, concerns, problems, issues, whatever. Because even though every team is different, teams tend to have a lot of the same problems. So if you can be with a group of people who've been leading for fewer than two years, you have a very good chance of even if you aren't going through that issue right now with your team, chances are within the next few years you will. So you can learn from somebody else as they're going through it. So you have these cohorts, you've got your trainings. So say you've been doing a training on delegation, you can come into your cohort that's ideally led by somebody with more experience. I was doing this in a former job, leading a cohort of people, and that was where you could bring, okay, I have this question. They talked about this in the video. Did anybody hear that? Did you agree? What's your experience been? And you can talk about it. It's a space where you can share your takeaways, what was new, what you've tried before, how you relate to the training that you just had. So you can do that in a cohort, and you can have as many cohorts as are necessary. You can have the by region, you can have them, you can need to make sure that you don't have bosses and employees together if there's multi level teams, but you can have lots of different cohorts and they don't need to. Be tiny, they don't need to be huge. The next step is reflection. So taking you've you've watched the videos about delegation, you have talked in the cohort about different experiences, things that people have done or tried. Now you're at the point where you need to think about it. You need to think and consider what feels comfortable for me. What does my team need? Do they need a lot of guidance or do they need to really be let go? Because you can have teams where everybody needs a ton of guidance. Good luck to you, those managers. But you often what you have on teams, if they're well put together, you have a variety of experience levels where some people need much more guidance and support. They need a lot more hands-on time with their managers than other people do. Other people may be senior experts in what they're doing, and you can just let them run and they just come to you when they've got an issue. You can help get unstuck. Otherwise, they go do their thing. That's fantastic. So, this reflection time, though, is figuring out what does my team need? Who are they? And how can I make sure that they have it? Do I need different levels of delegation within the team? Is it all the same? Where are we? And that takes reflection, that takes thought. You need time to think about that. Some people can catch on super fast. Other people really need to think about it. And you may need to talk with your team too to find out what's going on with them. And then the fourth step is putting it into practice. That's when you start saying, okay, we're gonna do this. You start delegating and you see how it goes. Maybe it was great, and that person on your team is so excited. They were given responsibility. You hung back, you said, I'm here to support, but they ran off and did something, and it was fantastic. Everybody wins. You can also have situations where you gave somebody the reins to something and said, All right, go with it, and they struggled. Maybe because they didn't have the skill set for it, maybe because there were way too many roadblocks that no one foresaw. But you can learn from that situation. This was the wrong moment, or they needed more support, or I, as the manager, needed to step in and clear some of those roadblocks beforehand or during the process, whatever it is. If you've got this four-step process of having the training, so you have a common language, you have ideas, you have action points, you have a cohort to discuss it in, you have time to reflect and decide what you are going to do, and then you can put it into practice. After the practice, you can then go back and just keep iterating and keep on practicing until you're at a point where you're like, this is going great. And then your team will change and you have to do it all over again. But that's what it's about, right? We're never completely finished. We're always learning, growing, developing, doing new things. Growth takes time and effort, and it takes thought. It takes planning. And once you've gone through these four stages, you can also add on to what you're learning. So you handled delegation. Now you can focus on leading meetings and you go through that same process again. And then the next topic is how to develop your team members. And you keep going like that so that you have this cycle where maybe it takes a month for you to go through that full cycle of one topic with the training, with the cohorts, with the reflection, with the practice. Maybe it takes a month, maybe it takes two, maybe it takes three. You should be able to get through it in a month as long as your learning journeys, the trainings themselves aren't endlessly long and people get used to preparing. But when I was doing cohorts for leadership, people were really happy to meet more often than less often. They really wanted it every month because it felt so valuable to them. It felt so worthwhile, a place where they could hear from other people, share what they were going through, share their issues, hear possible solutions. Like this was gold for them. So you should be able to do this on a monthly cycle. Now, that means that over the course of a year, you have done, give or take, 10 cycles, accounting for vacation and you know, busy times, whatever. You've got like eight to 10 topics that your people, your managers, have probably been able to master because you're still practicing the first one, even when you move on to the second one. You're not putting it down. It's part of being a manager that you start to really layer these skills on top of each other. Think about it. What a difference. You have maybe 25 topics that would be presented or more at a three to five day workshop, seminar, leadership development blitz done by a leadership expert who is external. Or you have a leadership expert within your company doing hands-on training and development that gives you at least eight topics in a year that they've actually mastered, that they've actually put into practice, iterated, and really feel confident and know what they're doing. To me, this is absolutely a no-brainer. And it's not a bigger investment, truly, when you look at it, because this is also ongoing, especially when you're doing the trainings online and you have the option to just send new leaders into those. Okay, these are the three topics that we have found are the most pressing, the most urgent for new managers to learn. Hey, you'll also learn that in this process. What are the big ones at this company? Because you'll have this contact with your managers through the cohorts, you'll have the feedback. You'll have them saying, Yeah, I'm glad we did delegation first because seriously, this is huge. Or you'll say, they'll say, you know what, leading meetings should have been the first one that we covered because I find that I've needed this much more urgently than delegation or whatever. And over time, you'll be able to create this new manager onboarding program that really takes them in their first six months through their most urgent topics, and they'll have people with them, and they will be learning with a group. And I can't even tell you, like to me, that gets me excited. You've probably heard it in my voice as I'm talking about this. This is what my heart beats for. This is what I think companies should be doing because it supports their employees, it puts tools in their hands, it gives them new skills, and it gives them the space to not only talk about it with people who are similar to them, but also put it into practice and iterate. This is how people learn, this is how people develop, this is how people grow, and this is how companies retain employees. This is why someone would want to stay at a company where they haven't been just thrown into the deep end to be leading a team, but they have the support structure where they have not only other managers that they can talk to, but they also have a leadership development expert that they can talk to. I found that people were coming to me all the time. Once they knew that that was part of my job, they were coming to me all the time with questions about leadership issues. And they wanted to know how they could best support their teams. People were starving for that information. And when they don't get it, they just ask themselves, why am I staying here? I don't feel like I'm able to do this job well, and I also don't have the support from this company to give me the tools that I need to make sure that I can do it well. That's a travesty. That's wasting great people. And it's just running them through this, I don't know, this circular hamster wheel of racing along and then like being thrown off of there with exhaustion because it didn't work out. Well, it could have worked out, it really could have. This is where we are. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Um, this is a topic, like I said, this is where my heart really beats. I get very excited about this. And if you were listening and you control the purse strings or not in your company, but you want something like this, contact me. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna send you to a leadership expert and I'm not gonna charge you 55,000 euros for three days. But if you'd like to talk about this, I'd be interested to talk with you. Thanks for joining me today. Your challenge. What is the challenge for today? I think to make this super relevant for everybody, I want you to think about your own learning process. First, an illustration for you about what this has looked like for me, and even to take it out of a leadership development context. When I learned how to do pottery on the wheel, it was with Pepe Arroyo, wonderful man, pottery master in Mesis in Valencia, Spain. I spent three days in his studio learning how to throw on the wheel. And the first like eight hours, I was really just centering the clay and learning to know what that felt like. Even though that was when I learned and I learned a lot, I wasn't really a potter then. I knew how to throw a few forms and of course how to center, but I didn't know much else. So when I was back in Berlin, I joined a studio and I had a private lesson so that I could fill in some of the gaps, but I still wasn't really a potter. I I knew what to do, but man, I was terrible at it. I have those first pieces. I will never sell or get rid of those because they are my memory of the first few pieces that I actually did on the wheel, but they are crap. Let me tell you, they are crap. In in most other situations, I saw a potter one time who was selling stuff, and instead of like saying seconds, she she called them embarrassments, and they were sold for a cheaper price. These would be if I if I ever did sell them, which I won't. They're in my kitchen. But those, that was even not me being a potter. I became a potter first at this studio. The conversations that I had, the friendships that I made, the the people that I learned from accidentally by just talking with them, observing them as they were throwing and watching how people did things, I learned by doing, but but in the studio situation, I was learning by watching and and talking with people. And then I had to actually do the work of learning. And when did I do that? It was when I rented a wheel and went through 150 kilos of clay during a very long lockdown. I've told people that's when I really became a potter. And I'm not even sure that's when I became good. But I think that's when I became a potter. It it's taken more time. Like I got lucky with a bunch of things that I did then, but I also really threw some duds because I was still learning and I was a little bit scared. I was a little tentative, I didn't trust the process. But that was when I really learned the skill. It took time, it took hours, it took a great deal of time. People say, I've heard that this is debunked, but anyway, it makes sense, if it's true, that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. Okay. Why would we think that you could go to 40 hours of seminars and become a good leader? No. It takes that, those small bites and then putting it into practice. That's when you really become skilled at something. And why don't we want our managers, our leaders to really become skilled at what they've been hired to do? Why wouldn't we do that? So your challenge for today is I've shared my experience on the wheel and how it really took time. I want you to think about a learning experience that you've had, and how did it fit in with those four steps or procedures that I talked about, where you have the training, where you get the information, a common language, all the things that you need to get started? You have a cohort, people that you can talk to that are either on the same level or an advanced level from you to learn from, to observe, to talk with, reflection so that you have time to think about what you're doing and how you want to do it, and then practice and iteration. What learning processes can you think about that included those four steps? Thank you for joining me today. I look forward to the next one. And as always, many, many thanks to Lilia Keys for our intro and outro music.