Coaching Conversations in 2024

Turn Your Leadership Training Upside Down!

June 13, 2022 Tim Hagen
Coaching Conversations in 2024
Turn Your Leadership Training Upside Down!
Show Notes Transcript

What if we turned our leadership development program upside down? What if we looked at developing our organizational leadership skills and capacity from the bottom up, not from the top down? Let me explain. In the United States alone, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every single year on top line management, middle management, down to frontline leadership to become better leaders. There is nothing wrong with that. Here's the challenge. We have a major percentage of our people that are typically individual contributors or employees. Typically there's about a ratio of one to seven, maybe one to 10 leader to a number of employees that a leader would be managing. Now, with that being said, here is the funny thing, every organization we've gone through and worked with, and every leader that we've talked to bring up the same things that they go through when they're trying to lead their employees.

This does not mean they do a flawless job of leading their employees. What it means is there's an opportunity to look at this differently. Let me explain. Every company will say, well, have you ever worked in this industry? You know, our industry is really different. Every single industry, every single company from across industries bring up the same things: Feedback, attitude, motivation, teamwork, etc. Here's the funny thing. Think about high school. Think about college. You entered this thing called the workforce, the workplace after high school or college, maybe eight to 10 years later, or if you're right out of high school, four years, and you are thrust into this submissive position for lack of better description. You're now in front of someone called a boss as corny and as theatrical as this sounds. Think about that.

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Speaker 1:

What if we turned our leadership development program upside down? What if we looked at developing our organizational leadership skills and capacity from the bottom up, not from the top down? Let me explain. In the United States alone, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every single year on top line management, middle management, down to frontline leadership to become better leaders. There is nothing wrong with that. Here's the challenge that we have. A major percentage of our people are typically individual contributors or employees. So typically there's about a ratio of one to seven, maybe one to 10 leader to a number of employees that a leader would be managing. Now, with that being said, here is the funny thing. Every organization we've gone through and worked with, and every leader that we've talked to bring up the same things that they go through when they're trying to lead their employees. Now, that does not mean they do a flawless job of leading their employees. What it means is there's an opportunity to look at this differently. Let me explain. Every company will say, Well, if you ever worked in this industry, you know, our industry is really different. Every single industry, every single company from across industries bring up the same things. Feedback, attitude, motivation, teamwork. Here's the funny thing, Think about high school. Think about college. You entered this thing called the workforce, the workplace after high school and college, maybe eight to 10 years, or if you're right outta high school, four years, and you are thrust into this submissive position for lack of better description. You're now in front of someone called a boss as Corning, and as theatrical as this sounds, think about that. What classes did you specifically take that taught you how to seek and accept feedback? What classes did anyone take that taught people how to own their attitude in the workplace? How many classes had people taken in high school or college about how you need to find and cultivate your motivation? They don't exist. So what happens is we get these people, they go through onboarding, they're assigned a manager, they've got a job, and the boss, employee, the boss subordinate relationship starts, and then years go by and there's some attrition and people leave the organization, and then people move up and they've been there a while. And now tenure, so-called experience becomes the apparatus. It becomes the apparatus for promotions. One of the most fundamental examples is a really good salesperson. What they typically do is they promote that person, and all of a sudden they're managing sales people a tough demographic. So how do we turn leadership upside down? Number one, I think every single onboarding program at every company should have some tor type of value or principle. Now we have corporate values and principles. Yet I think we need to embed, employ values and principles, how to seek and accept feedback. Your role in feedback is to not agree or disagree with it. It's to embrace it, at least from a minimal perception standpoint to do something about it. So you can alter that perception attitude. It is incumbent to every employee walk into our organization physically or virtually with a positive mentality every single day. Sounds crazy, right? To be positive all the time, heaven forbid. Yet, if we don't lay it as an expectation, people will bestow upon themself permission to rewrite their job description and not notify their bosses of the change. They will literally cop an attitude. Well, you know, that manager has no idea what they're doing. You know the CEO here, I hear it all the time. So number one, onboarding. Teach people the value of feedback. Seeking and accepting why they need to own their attitude, why they need to come in with a positive mentality each and every day. Number three, how to find their motivation. And then number four, how to be a great teammate. So the onboarding commences. Now they go into this thing called the job, the second tier training after the onboarding must start, and that is how to be a great teammate, how to praise and acknowledge one another. You know, we get so cynical and so jaded. We have so many disagreements inside workplaces and outside. What if employees were trained, coached, mentored, nurtured to praise one another? The Gallup organization? I, I just, I love this statistic says, When we lead with strength based feedback, people engage more. Yet often what happens? You're doing a pretty good job, but, and we unload the negative stuff. Employees have to be taught how to recognize, how to observe and how to acknowledge through positivity. Through positivity. A second thing happens. People start to trust each other more. Where there's trust down the road, there's acceptance of potential future leadership. Plus,

Speaker 2:

By learning how to acknowledge and praise other people, you've learned the most valuable lesson. As a future leader, positivity will always outweigh negativity always. Then after teaching people how to recognize the good stuff is how to address the stuff that needs to improve. So when a teammate sees somebody with a negative attitude, not coming into the workplace with a positive mentality, how do they have that conversation? Safely and thoughtfully? Yes, it's possible. Now we've gone from onboarding to teaching people how to be a great teammate. Tier two. Now tier three becomes what are the core leadership skills you need to adopt as a leader today? And futuristically, what was, what would happen if everybody was taught? Everybody was taught how to be a great leader. Why? Leadership is tough. One, acceptance of leadership would go up, two, trust would go up. It puts people in a position to have an experience that they really typically complain about because they don't have a foundation for it. So number one, onboarding. Number two, how to be a great teammate. Number three, starting to learn some of the core leadership skills such as conversational skills, how to provide feedback, how to invest in others, how to praise even upper level management. How to help someone perform better when they're underperforming. So again, onboarding to being a great teammate, to now learning the value and the application of sound leadership practices. If an organization did that, what would the results be? Greater succession planning. The bench strength would improve. Engagement would go up. People would think there's opportunities inside the organization. Yes, will some people go to the forefront and some kinda leg behind? Absolutely will happen. Yet you're giving that choice early on before you need it. As an organization, we tend to promote when we need. We need to cultivate the skills and the know how of coaching leadership skills before they are needed. Let me know your thoughts.