Category Being A Leader

We are experiencing the most significant shift in leadership training and professional development in decades.

If not, ever.

And it is disrupting our entire approach to new manager training and leadership development. 

The Association for Talent Development calls this shift ‘Revolution 4.0.’

In reality, we are experiencing generational change and technology breakthroughs.  

The Age of Millennial Management

We all know that millennials are upon us. As baby boomers retire rapidly and millennials (age 25 to 35) come rushing in, they’ll form 50% of the workforce in just two years and 75% by 2025.

So stop asking, “How do we manage those millennials,” because millennials are now becoming managers themselves. 

What Millennial Managers Think Of Current Training?

Soon, we will have more younger managers with fewer mentors above them.

A recent survey of over 200 first-time managers–ranging in age from 27 to 32 and working in either mid-size or large enterprise companies asked for open-ended comments, which included:

• • • “My generation really doesn’t want to learn from PowerPoints.”
    • “We took some online training about harassment, diversity and what kind of questions to ask if we’re interviewing someone. But nothing about motivating people or how to be a strong team.”
    • “It’s crazy. I can watch any episode of Friends in three clicks on my phone. But it’s like dozens of clicks, logins and popup windows to start an e-learning course.”
    • “We have tuition reimbursement, a corporate university and supposedly over a thousand courses on the network. But there just isn’t any time. Zero time.”
    • “I like learning about stuff, but the work training isn’t very good. I just listen to podcasts, watch TED talks and sometimes read.” 

 What New Managers Want From Their Training?

So, if our new generation of managers isn’t in love with our current solutions, from classroom training to online learning catalogues, what do they want?

1. 1. 1. Self-awareness is the foundation of great leadership, and you are likely already investing a lot in this area. From personality assessments, communication styles, and strength profiles, we spend a lot to discover what makes each manager tick. But are you using that data to personalize your training programs? When training on delegation do you explain to highly conscientious managers that they need to be careful not to micromanage? Does your training explain to managers low in conscientiousness that they need to delegate, not just dump? 
      2. Coaching. One of the big ironies in our industry is that the people who get executive coaches are the ones who already have the most experience. Who (or what) coaches your front-line managers? Do they have a new developmental goal every quarter? Do they have someone to motivate them, and to hold them accountable?
      3. On Demand. Nobody wants to travel to a remote seminar. Nobody has the time to be away from their desk for several days. Modern learners have been informally trained to look things up on Google or YouTube. How much of your leadership development curriculum is available at any time? How many minutes does it take to go from the desire to learn something, and the learning intervention itself?
      4. Ongoing (long-term).Too often training is delivered as a “one and done” event. Numerous studies have shown that we quickly forget much of what we learn in our day(s) long training programs, and very little ever gets applied. Rather than viewing management training as a “boot camp” style event, how can training become continuous?
      5. Mobile. The call it the consumerization of enterprise software. Our modern workers expect digital solutions at work to be as easy to use (and perhaps as engaging) as the apps on their phone. Most of us now have access to 12,000 movies and TV shows (Netflix), 20 million songs (Spotify) and 4 million ebooks (Kindle)–all in the palms of our hands. How many leadership development programs are on your new managers’ smartphones? How many clicks does it take to access them?

There Will Be Winners And Losers

We know from Gallup research that 70% of the variance in employee engagement is tied to the manager. Who your boss is counts greatly: Discretionary effort, performance, service, safety, employee grievances, and more. And when it comes to talent retention, that old saying, “You join a company but leave a boss,” is largely accurate. 

Those who fail to take action now—who fail to move quickly to adopt new training strategies—will be overtaken by those who recognize that these mega-shifts are both a threat and an opportunity. 

Innovative leadership development professionals who adapt quickly will turn their organizations into millennial talent magnets. Front-line leaders will unleash the discretionary effort of their teams, and retention will be high.

While the impact of these shifts may be arguable, nobody can risk sitting on the sidelines. At the very least, ask yourself, “How can I deliver a better learning experience to our managers?”

Much of success in business relies on getting everyone on the same page.

And inevitably someone has to choose to lead the charge in getting clarity. 

In the Army, we reviewed ‘comms’ (communications) procedures during pre-mission briefings to ensure that everyone would be on the “same frequency.”

In this case, gaining clarity could mean the difference between life and death.

In team sports like football and baseball, we see players and coaches using all sorts of signals and methods to achieve communications clarity to have precise execution of the play.

Without clarity things fall apart as the play unfolds; the feedback loop is immediate and obvious—from both the players and the fans.

The Challenge

At work, it is not as obvious as the fans booing you when there is a loss of alignment and focus.

I see it every day, and I understand why it’s so easy to fall into this trap.

We’re all uniquely designed and are naturally inclined to communicate in unique ways.

The goal is to understand your natural behaviour and make positive adjustments so that everyone clearly understands your message.

Clarifying Clarity Clues

Here are also two important clues to clear up the murky fog of communication and gain greater clarity –

Don’t assume that everyone hears (and visualizes) your message.

We have a natural tendency to assume that something is clear to us; we assume that it would be clear to everyone else. 

Using the sports analogy, teams usually have set plays, and they rehearse them in practice for weeks before they execute them in the game.

Work situations may not have a playbook, so when the leader calls the play, team members create their individual mental diagrams/pictures of what it’s supposed to look like.

Read about different images of the future

And,

Some are distracted and never even hear the message. 

As a leader, we must regularly and publicly clarify our expectations.  

At the top of the organization, most of these expectations are at the 37,000-foot level. 

As we move down the organization, the clarity needs to get more granular as standards more specifically to the tasks.

This is hard work because it takes mental discipline, time, and energy to clarify what is expected of our employees and to supervise the level of detail is required.

Read about expectations

Clarify Where You Are

How are you doing on clarifying standards and expectations?

Reflect on it yourself and look for times when people were not on the same frequency with you.

What happened?

Whose responsibility was it?

Get feedback from a couple of your stronger players on how well you are doing on clarity.

​ The coronavirus pandemic has generated tremendous uncertainty for businesses. But while the scale of the crisis is new, uncertainty itself is not—it’s a natural condition of doing business, and numerous tools exist to quantify and mitigate it.

 Most strategies rely on accumulated knowledge from the past—there’s a precedent on which to make sense of unknowns. COVID-19 breaks all that.

There is no precedent for how to respond to this moment, much less steer ahead.

 The biggest challenge to businesses right now isn’t uncertainty, but ambiguity—a condition in which the future is unclear, the past is no help, and we don’t even know what we don’t know. There’s no predicting when the pandemic will end, nor what “business as usual” will look like when it does.

Understanding that organizations are facing a broad range of challenges and have varying capacities, the question becomes, how might businesses create new ways to push ahead intelligently?

Being exceedingly human can offer leaders an alternate set of mindsets and methods for navigating ambiguity.

Here are four ways forward, along with inspiring examples and questions to drive action.

Read about the crisis no one saw coming.

Lead with people, and the business will follow.

Perhaps the most well-known design thinking model suggests that innovation occurs at the intersection of what the consumer wants, business viability, and technical feasibility. Many leaders are mired in thinking about what’s possible in this new world (technical feasibility) and what the economic impact of COVID-19 might be (business viability). While a pivot of your business model may be critical to staying afloat, it’s essential not to forget to lead with people.

Focusing on customers’ needs is a way to rally a company and employees around a purposeful cause.

It also offers focus and clarity operationally and strategically and points to a clear path forward that can deliver value. 

Questions to inspire action: 

• How are our core customers’ needs changing right now? How can we deliver on those needs during the pandemic?
• Who can we learn from in our organization that is closest to the needs of our people, partners, and consumers? Better yet, how might we engage with our people, partners, and consumers directly to learn from them?

Forge unexpected partnerships

Read  more about partnering up with your boss

Part of what makes the current changes, so complex is their scale.

It’s inspiring to see examples of companies redirecting their capabilities toward urgent needs—distilleries using their alcohol to produce hand sanitizer, automakers shifting to produce ventilators and respirators. But this kind of quick adaptation isn’t simple, and the opportunity isn’t always clear. Stepping outside of our domains and even our companies to connect can help. 

Pivoting calls for processing viewpoints from different departments and types of thinkers. Some companies are relying on open innovation, which can be used internally to break down silos, or externally to find new partners to bring ideas to life.

Leaders need to challenge their humility and courage and open up to anyone involved in business to work together to find partners, develop new offerings, and secure funding. 

Questions to inspire action: 

• What points of view are we missing on our team, and how might they help us uncover opportunities and identify blind spots? 
• Who can we partner with right now to deliver something unique or previously impossible to our teams, business, or society?

Experiment today to strengthen the business for tomorrow 

The time has never been better to experiment. This means considering fundamental changes in business and operating models out of necessity, while also prototyping new channels, offerings, pricing structures, and value propositions. 

Experimenting doesn’t have to result in a full-scale business model transformation or a polished new offering. This is a moment of extreme leniency: Customers will forgive scrappiness and even mistakes, and they’ll appreciate effort and vulnerability from organizations that try. Moreover, experimenting in low-fidelity ways allows teams to iterate, minimize costs, and preserve optionality quickly. In other words, there’s little investment required for a potentially high return.

Read about driving innovation through curiosity.

Questions to inspire action: 

• If we’re in an all-hands-on-deck moment, is there a group of employees that can start to think about how we might operate differently during COVID-19?
• What are simple experiments we could run in the next few days?
• If we’re able to dedicate time and resources, how might we use this moment to challenge the fundamental assumptions of our business and industry?
• What are the simple experiments we could run in the next few weeks?

Leverage scarcity 

It’s understandable to feel an overall sense of scarcity right now.

Organizations are inundated with legal, health, social, and operating constraints. It may seem counterintuitive, but limitations often create generative circumstances for growth and innovation. A recent study on innovation in crisis found that during the Great Depression. At the same time, the total number of patents decreased, but the average level of quality increased, which increased the overall impact of the innovation.

Questions to inspire action: 

• How might we turn these new constraints into the cornerstones of our business?
• What is the core promise or value we provide to customers?
• How might we repurpose the assets that we still have to keep delivering on this promise or value?

 Please read about my biggest business mistake

Final Thoughts

We are in challenging times.

Leaders are called to make difficult decisions about strategy, operations, and people.

As we continue to navigate these uncharted waters, we can find ways for ambiguity to be an aid rather than an impediment to progress.

Human led mindsets like empathy, collaboration, experimentation, and even scarcity can be guiding lights along the way.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is easy to look good and behave well when everything around you is going well. If you want to see what a person is made of, put the pressure on them.

When a routine is thrown into the air, when people are stressed out, when employees are under unimaginable pressures, it is precisely the time when you want to test people for leadership potential.

Dozens of times in my life I have seen the sharpest, best & fittest soldier in the barracks or on the parade square fall to pieces under the leadership pressures, of lack of sleep, bad weather and the intensity of combat.

But the quiet person, the calm and steady one, the least suspecting man or woman rise to the moment and steps up into leadership like a well-fitted suit when given the opportunity.

In a recent post, I explored the difference between those high-performance employees and those who have high potential.

Read that post here

When looking for your next generation of leaders, it makes sense to cultivate the most extensive pool you can manage and explore who is stepping up during the current pandemic.

Start asking yourself:

Who is quietly leading their teams and their coworkers?

Who is the person other employees look to for help and guidance instead of existing managers?

Who is bringing the ideas forward?

When thinking about the future executives should stop old-school thinking by stopping these common errors:

1. Overvaluing job performance and undervalue character traits.
2. Promoting people who look, talk, act, and manage as they do.
3. Undervaluing opinions of your employees.

Performance Matters. But Potential Matters More.

Then, when looking for leaders, you can focus less on performance and more on actual leadership skills, like

• Curiosity;
• Emotional intelligence; or the
• Ability to communicate.

Read more about Emotional Intelligence.

When trying to identify future leaders, merely skimming from the top layer of job performers is seldom the best strategy.

Look for People Willing to Try Different Solutions — and Accept the Consequences

Pointing out problems is easy.

What is harder is to come up with solutions.

Even harder? Have the wisdom to change things when the first solution doesn’t work.

Great leaders aren’t only those with the best ideas. They’re also willing to accept responsibility for the decisions they’ve made: especially their failures. That’s what inspires other people.

So when looking for leaders, it’s not only essential to search for creative thinkers. You also want to find people with the courage to fail, publicly, and to re-evaluate their strategies accordingly.

The Best Leaders Are Not Always Those Who Talk the Most

Studies show that people who talk the most in meetings tend to get their performance rated as more intelligent, and they overwhelmingly tend to be male.

Put differently, those people who seem to be leading in group settings may, in fact, not be leading at all – they’re just talking a lot. 

Consider that maybe the best leader is the person best able to build consensus or is the quiet person who waits to speak but always comes up with the most forward-thinking solution.

Some leaders may be quite successful with personal projects.

Point being, many successful people keep their wins to their selves.

Read about boastful leadership

Trust Your Employees’ Opinions

Too many executives tend to imagine that they can easily pick out leadership potential, but relying only on your own opinions can limit the range of people you notice.

Here’s a different idea: ask your employees what they think.

Every once in a while, ask all employees who, other than themselves, they think possesses the most leadership potential.

Whom would they follow into uncharted territory?

To whom would they most trust their jobs or the future of the company?

This bottom-up approach to identifying leaders can pay huge dividends: you’re not only telling your employees that you value their opinions but also locating people whom employees already look for guidance.

I’ve long used curiosity as a tool to help me understand what is happening around me.

Now and for the record, a Harvard Business Review and a Price Waterhouse Cooper study confirms that I wasn’t just nosy. Research shows that I was attuned to better leadership.

During the 2011 Slave Lake wildfires, I led the disaster response. There is a normal ebb and flow to disasters, but at a certain point, the data showed that the need for disaster assistance was falling off.

I could have assumed we solved the problem, but something didn’t feel right.

Curiosity forced me to explore the data, and I found that we were missing a new demographic of a client. This resulted in a rejigging of our disaster assistance program to suit the needs of the community.

Click to watch the video of me telling the story.

Why Curiosity Is An Important Leadership Mindset

Consider the following:

• If you think you know, then you won’t ask.
• If you think things are a certain way, then you won’t notice changing conditions.
• When you think you have all the relevant information, then you won’t look for other information.
• If you feel you have the solution, then you won’t explore different answers.
• If you think you’re right, then you won’t listen to other people.
• When you think you know, you won’t ask, see, or hear.

“I think” is a very dangerous leadership stance in a rapidly changing world. Instead, I encourage you to be curious about what you might not know. The worst-case scenario is that you’ll learn something new!

There’s a certain kind of curiosity that’s particularly useful for leaders. Keep reading for five ways to develop this skill.

How To Be ‘Leader’ Curious

Five practices to help you become more curious:

1. Listen to learn, rather than respond. Most of us listen so we can confirm our opinions, or we only listen so we can respond to objections. Try listening to learn something instead. Silence can be a handy conversational tool. Here are three tips to help you use silence to improve your conversation skills.
2. Pretend you don’t know the answer. Once you believe that you know, you will stop looking, listening, or testing. But this is precisely what you need to do to spot trends and problems before they arrive.
3. Hold the tension. When challenged with something that seems impossible, don’t be quick to dismiss the idea. Hold the tension. Get curious. Explore. Everything new was once impossible until someone figured out it wasn’t.
4. Don’t be the smartest person in the room. The more experience and higher position you have, the more you think you’re the brightest in the room, and you stop learning. However, if you decide that others may have something to offer something you can learn from, then you will. Want to learn how to have better conversations? Here are six essential questions you can ask children and employees.
5. Think: “I wonder what else?” At best, we only see part of the picture, but not all of it. By asking, “I wonder what else?” you will keep looking, listening, and exploring.

Sure, there is some wasted effort and discussions in the process of being curious.

But at the risk of sacrificing a little efficiency for the sake of exploring, know that innovation and breakthrough rarely arrive in a straight line.

Curiosity will not only save from disaster but will allow you to notice and take advantage of opportunities.

Yes, curiosity is vital. But what is the essential leadership skill? Moral courage. Click here to find out why.

If you’re interested in going even deeper or moving your career to the next level, you’ll also want to have a look at my 1-on-1 coaching services.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check these out, too:

A Curated List of Crisis Leadership Articles
9 Stupid Management Practices (and what to do instead)
The 6T’s To Know What To Delegate

This article was originally published on January 18, 2019, and has been updated.

You would have thought I would have been smarter!

I was hired as the Chief Administrative Offer for a small town in Canada’s arctic.

During the hiring process, I specifically asked about labour relations and organizational health & culture. “Don’t worry,” I was assured, “we have a great team.”

Read about a new boss as an organizational change

I should have recognized the lie and I later found out I was hired to solve problems.

The organization was top-heavy with 7 Directors for a team of 25, and the residents had unmet needs. Stories about missed opportunities and hints of a toxic culture had drifted upward to the Mayor and Town Council.

All those factors had prompted the decision to replace the out-going CAO with someone from the outside, and I seemed to fit the bill. I had a record of accomplishments in leadership, turning around broken teams and implementing wholesale changes in business models.

But in taking on this new role, I faced a common challenge: I didn’t get to handpick the people who would be working with me.

Rather, I inherited the team that had created the situation I was hired to fix.

It was like fixing a plane in midflight.

You can’t just shut down the plane’s engines while you rebuild them—at least not without causing a crash. You need to maintain stability while moving ahead.

I needed a framework for taking over this team to:

• Assess the human capital and group dynamics they have inherited;
• To reshape the team according to the organization’s goals; and
• Accelerate performance.

Read about surviving the first 90-days as a new boss

What Qualities Are You Looking For?

Like most leaders, you may have a “gut” sense of what you look for in people.

But different situations and challenges call for different strengths.

This exercise will help you better understand and articulate your priorities when you take on a new team.

Assign percentages to the qualities below, according to how much emphasis you think each should receive, given your current circumstances and goals. Make sure the numbers in the right column add up to 100.

Those numbers will be rough, of course. For some team members (say, your head of finance), competence may be the top priority; for others (say, your head of marketing), energy or people skills may be equally or more critical. The importance of the role and the state of the business may also affect your estimates.

Your requirements will depend partly on the state of the business. In a turnaround, you will seek people who are already up to speed—you won’t have time to focus on skill-building until things are more stable.

If you are trying to sustain a team’s success, however, it probably makes sense to develop high potentials, and you will have more time to do so.

To conduct this assessment, hold a mix of one-on-one and team meetings, supplemented with input from key stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and colleagues outside the team.

Also, look at team members’ individual track records and performance evaluations.

Depending on your style, these meetings might be informal discussions, formal reviews, or a combination, regardless you should approach them in a standard way.

Then What?

Prepare.

Review available personnel history, performance data, and appraisals. Familiarize yourself with each person’s skills. Observe how team members interact. Do relations appear cordial and productive? Tense and competitive?

Create an interview template.

Ask people the same questions and see how their insights vary. For example, What are the strengths and weaknesses of our existing strategy? What are our biggest challenges and opportunities in the short term? In the medium term? What resources could we leverage more effectively? How could we improve the way the team works together?

And my favourite question … If you were in my position, what would you do to make things better?

Read about using silence to talk

Look for verbal and nonverbal clues.

Notice what people say and don’t say. Do they volunteer information, or do you have to work for it? Do they take responsibility for problems, make excuses, or point fingers at others? Look for inconsistencies between people’s words and body language, this can signal dishonesty or distrust of management.

Pay attention to topics that elicit strong emotions, this provides clues to what motivates people and what kinds of changes would energize them.

Summarize and share what you learn.

After you’ve interviewed everyone, discuss your findings with the team. This will demonstrate that you are coming up to speed quickly. If your feedback highlights differences of opinion or raises uncomfortable issues, you’ll also have a chance to observe the team under a modest amount of stress. Watching how people respond may lead to valuable insight into team culture and power dynamics.

Reshaping the Team

The next task is to reshape the team within the constraints of the organization’s culture, the leader’s mandate, and the available talent.

You want people to be able to share information freely, identify and deal with conflict swiftly, solve problems creatively, support one another, and present a unified face once decisions are made.

Composition.

The most obvious way to reshape a team is to replace underperformers and anyone whose capabilities are not a good match for the situation.

But this can be difficult culturally and politically, and in many cases, it’s simply not possible.

Spend the first few months observing employees in critical roles who clearly cannot do the work, or for truly toxic personalities that are undermining the enterprise.

Alignment.

Ensure everyone has a clear sense of purpose and direction.

To get everyone aligned, the team must agree on answers to four basic questions:

1. What will we accomplish? You spell this out in your mission, goals, and key metrics.
2. Why should we do it? Here is where your vision statement and incentives come into play.
3. How will we do it? This includes defining the team’s strategy in relation to the organization’s, as well as sorting out the plans and activities needed for execution.
4. Who will do what? People’s roles and responsibilities must support all of the above.

Get your team discussion guide here

Accelerate Development

Energize team members with some early wins.

Start by setting challenging goals for the next three months. Specify the work involved and who was accountable for it, and develop messages to share your team’s successes.

Once the team had those successes in place, it kept building on them.

The result is a cycle of achievement and confidence.