Recently, in Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute‘s People and Performance Playbook LinkedIn Newsletter, there was an article by Jami Dix and Morgan Miller titled: The Five-Step System for Building Leadership Capability.
Here's a section:
Most organizations treat leadership development as a series of programs to deliver. They ask: What workshop should we run next? Which coaches should we hire? What curriculum should we launch?
Organizations with true leadership systems ask different questions: What does our strategy demand of leaders right now? How do we assess reality against expectations? What experiences will actually build capability? And how do we reinforce it so it sticks?
This isn't just better planning. It's a fundamentally different approach to how leaders develop.
The shift from fragmented training to an intentional system changes everything.
This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. This episode features Jami Dix and Praisy Issac expanding on the article referenced above. Listen through the link above or through your favorite podcast provider. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co on Linkedin.
Transcript
Jami Dix: Welcome. We are glad to be here again today. My name is Jami Dix. I am a senior consultant for Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute, and I am joined here by my colleague.
Praisy Isaac: It's Praisy Isaac. I'm a consultant here as well.
Jami: Let's kick off today. We've been having a lot of conversations around training and development and assessments, and those are all, in my head, parts of a larger system, part of every organization. I think it's interesting to consider how they all fit together. But today, specifically, I was leading a training on our Truly Human Leader program, and our content was on empathetic listening, which is something we talk a lot about.
To me, it still continues to be one of those skills that people continue to talk about. We were wrapping up at the end, and a participant came off mute, and he said, Jami, what do I do when my leader only faux listens?
We define faux listening as not actually listening. You might be making eye contact with the person. You might be nodding your head, but your brain is completely somewhere else. For his example, he said, I walk into the office, and I have something that I need to communicate with him about a shared project.
He's nodding his head, but he's not even making eye contact with me. He's also on his phone. Then he says, I'll take it. But in two weeks, nothing has happened. He said, what do I do?
That's not the first time I've heard a participant in a class offer something like that, where they come up to you at the end. It is somewhat heartbreaking because we just spent two days together as an example and they'll say, did my leader go through this? It's really hard when you have to tell them yes. Your leader did go through this, but they're not seeing any of the things that we talked about in the training class. I think that's why it is really important to know training alone is not going to solve for some of the issues that you're seeing within your organization. That's why we wanted to come together today to really talk about what's important about having an aligned system in your organization.
Praisy: Amazing. I think that'll be really helpful. For the listeners who are wondering about the difference between what you just described as a training program and what we're talking about as a system, how should we be thinking about that?
Jami: I have to say I'm a senior consultant because that is my title, but I do not like the word consultant. I think sometimes we use words that just don't make sense. Think of them as all the different things that would help an individual leader grow in your organization.
Maybe that is an assessment. Maybe that is training. Maybe that is coaching. As a leadership team, maybe you're not just doing strategic planning, but the nine-box succession planning. There are all of these different pieces that are within this larger system. Think about all those different pieces as part of the system. We just use the word system to describe them all.
Praisy: Yep. When we think about traditional training, it's so hyper-focused on a very small skill set or a very small situation or scenario that when leaders or participants leave that training and go back to their environment, they're kind of swimming upstream when they think about implementing some of the things that they've learned in the session.
That also leads to the question of, has my leader been through this? I went through this training, and my leader supposedly went through this training, but there is no observable change in how we lead back in our organization.
As we think about leadership systems or having a system that enables leadership development, what is the first thing that you think organizations should start with?
Jami: For me, I think it is being really explicit about what we mean by good leadership. I think that definition can be so different. It makes sense because people are coming with wildly different backgrounds and different experiences with different leaders. We all could probably name the best leader we've ever had and the worst leader we've ever had.
I think most people aspire not to be the worst leader. Unless we make some of those things really explicit, sometimes we only do what we know, and it's not always the greatest behavior. If we say to our leaders, it's important that you care about your team members. It's important that you listen to them. It's important that you provide feedback when necessary: good and developmental. I won’t say bad: it's just feedback. Recognition and celebration is really important to us. Being open and honest with your team is really important to us. We have to name some of those things. Otherwise, I really don't think people know. I really don't believe leaders show up wanting to do a really bad job in their organization, so we need to make some of those implicit things much more explicit.
Praisy: That makes a ton of sense. I think, too, oftentimes we measure people against these expectations that we haven't told them, which is super unfair. I think people, to your point, do want to do a good job and they want to rise to the occasion, but we haven't told them what the measuring stick is. How should organizations think about defining what good looks like? What does that actually look like in practice?
Jami: I think in a perfect world, I just want to start with a conversation. As a leadership team, let's grab a cup of coffee and talk about the things that we see in our organization that we're really proud of. Who are the leaders that we know continue to get really great feedback from their team?
What are they doing? Behaviors, not just that they just care. That's great. But I think we need to be much more definitive in what we mean by that. Really describing what are the things that we're super proud of, and where are the places we know are struggling? That does not mean you immediately go to those leaders, and we get rid of those leaders.
It's actually asking them, what do you need? Here's what we know makes a good leader in this organization. This is where we see you struggle. How can we help you? Sit around with your cup of coffee or whatever it is and talk to each other. How does each leader on that leadership team define good leadership?
Do we have some level of agreement? Once you have wrestled with that, how are you communicating that out to the rest of the team? Have really honest conversations, not in a corporate-wide email that consistently gets spit out, but truly having one-on-one conversations with peers, with people in your span of care, to acknowledge these are the four to five things that are really important for us in this organization.
Praisy: Organizations that I see doing this really well tend to align on, again, that shared definition. The way that they do it is through a competency model. We have a few clients that have created this, and they've got competencies or definitions for what good looks like at the individual contributor level, the people leader level and the senior leader level.
It is very explicit about the behaviors that are expected at each level. It isn't necessarily a rubric of how you're not measuring up. It ends up being this development path or checklist of the things I need to be working through in order to be really great at being a leader here at this organization.
Jami: Praisy, do you know a client that we have that is new into outlining some of those competencies for their leaders? How did we get there? Do you mind sharing a little bit about the struggles and maybe the grind that you saw existing there that we're trying to help them out of now?
Praisy: I think it's a good story because I think we're in a good place. We were partnering with this organization. They were high growth, very gritty, very entrepreneurial people who just cared about getting shit done. Over time, they had moved from a more flat organization to more hierarchical. They needed to get people upskilled really quickly in the fundamentals of leadership development.
They were sending people over the years through a training program with us or coaching or lots of different, very disparate programs. Last year, we had a conversation with the senior leaders around how that’s going. We were looking at their talent and looking at their strengths and their development opportunities. One of the senior leaders asked the question of what are we developing these leaders toward? What does good look like? What is the actual end goal? I think it forced them to have a conversation around setting some rules for what good looks like there. That is what spurred the conversation around creating a competency model for them.
I think the great thing about having something like that doesn't just support them from a development perspective, but it also lays out the expectations for promotions, for how to select the right talent. Again, on the flip side, for performance, how are we measuring your progress and like the things that you're supposed to be working on in the upcoming years? It serves as a big foundation for all of their talent and leadership initiatives.
Jami: Could you describe an absence of that? Prior to this moment of us doing this work with them and that happening, How would you describe the environment?
Praisy: This is also information that we have heard from leaders as they come into coaching sessions, in sessions with us, workshops with us, the environment there was, again, fast-paced. There's a lot of change, a lot of ambiguity. Leaders were just expected to rise to the occasion, and they were often crafting their job description.
There was no playbook, no vision, no path forward. It just left people disadvantaged at so many levels, not including the jobs that they were hired to do. This was one way to help people have a clear sense of vision of exactly what they're supposed to be doing in order to be better leaders at the organization. I don't want to say that it completely flipped the culture. The culture is still evolving, but it's definitely one way that leaders have greater clarity over their roles.
Jami: I know I feel like this quote gets thrown around so much, but I think Brené Brown has famously said, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” That's what the work that we've done with this organization up until to this point is driving toward. I really don't think leaders show up wanting to be bad people or do bad work. But in absence of a clear vision and strategy and expectations and competencies that we all agree are super important, I'm kind of just going to do my thing over here and hope that something sticks After a certain period of time, I think that just gets really exhausting because there's not a lot because I'm over here doing my thing, and you're over there doing your thing, and they're kind of aligned. But we go about them in different ways. I just think, again, it's exhausting. I just think about how much stronger leadership teams can be if we can all agree these are the things in this organization. Each organization is different, so I'm not going to rattle off the values for you.
You should have that conversation with your leadership team. What does that mean here? How are we holding people accountable? How are we communicating why this is important to us? How do we think it will impact the business? What does it do for people outside of work? I think being able to articulate and talk about and agree upon that is so important.
Praisy: The other thing that this organization has done, and they're kind of doing things sort of concurrently, is assessing their talent. It isn't just defining what good looks like, but it's also looking at their current bench of senior leaders, people leaders and other rising high-potential leaders and looking at their assessment data.
There's a few reasons that they're doing this. But one of the main reasons is to be really objective about assessing their talent and understanding their strengths but also understanding their development opportunities. That data directly feeds their leadership and culture leader work. This is a roadmap for how we're developing people and what we're developing people in.
Jami: I love a good 360, but a 360 not done well is not good. I think where I see it somewhat go off the rails is that we don't prepare people who are being asked to fill out a 360 what good feedback looks like. How often we see, using Praisy… Praisy should be more strategic. Praisy needs to have a bigger vision and there's nothing in that that Praisy can actually specifically do with. Your ability to step aside whatever story you have about this person that's asking you to fill out their 360 and get very factual about the behavior so they can do something with it. The goal is not to call people out and make people feel less than because they do.
Everyone has a development opportunity. There is no person on this planet that has mastered 82 competencies. There's just not. I think if we agree that we all have places we can work on, give somebody feedback that they can do something with and let go of the story you have about this person. Rid any feedback that includes judgment.
That's why we spend so much time focusing on behaviors when we're talking about feedback because I can actually see myself doing that behavior, and I know what that behavior has done to you. I can actually change that. When they're riddled with judgment, we get into an agree-disagree. Then you might as well have the 360 at the window, in my opinion.
Praisy: Absolutely. One thing that you said made me think about this other really important piece of leadership development. You talked a little bit about connecting it to strategy or business objectives. It is really important to understand, even when we're developing or creating a competency model about a person and their abilities to think about that person and their abilities for a specific role, for a specific place in the organization.
It's really important to connect all of this leadership development to start with the business strategy and understand what the business is looking for. What are we wanting to do? Are we wanting to be more agile? Are we wanting to grow in scale? Are we wanting to acquire another company? It's going to require a different set of skills than if we were moving in a different direction. I think, again, to your point, if people are well-intended and want to do a really great job, and we are sometimes predisposed to do the thing that we've always done, and so we don't entirely question like, hey, why are we running this program?
What was the original intention of this? And does that still serve us with the vision that we have cast? A practical example is a 40-person organization that is looking to move to 200, for example. That requires a very different set of skills from leaders. A very practical one is decision-making; probably very used to making decisions in the 40-person organization with getting everyone's perspective and by and making sure everyone feels really good about it.
It's kind of unfeasible to do that in a 200-person organization, let alone a thousand-person organization. Even the skill of decision making needs to look very different in both contexts, in both scenarios. We have to be really mindful of connecting all of the development toward this business goal. It's not just supposed to happen in a vacuum.
Jami: The other example that came to my mind was an organization that needs to turn around. If they've been a struggling business and they have a new leader, that's going to look really different than somebody who's trying to scale their business. It just is. It's not to say if we had these expectations of our leaders five years ago, and now we're in a turnaround phase or even scaling phase, and now we need these five, it doesn't mean that those five aren't important. It just means we need to really shift how leaders are showing up. And then ensure. I think this is why the assessments matter. Because you can tell by all these competencies how your leadership team is. It gives you information on where there are gaps on your leadership team.
If there are gaps, then either we need to scale our people up, or we need to bring in some folks to help us fill that gap.
Praisy: Absolutely. We started off the conversation talking about programs versus systems. I think this next step is really important. Oftentimes when clients talk about leadership development, they anchor around leadership training. It's like a classroom. There's a PowerPoint. You'll be lucky if the PowerPoint has not been changed from the standard office theme. It's so hyper-focused on getting people together in the room and giving them something.
Jami: I think about how often in training classes, I’m like, hey guys, I gave you the feedback model. I showed you how to do recognition celebration. You know how to frame a difficult conversation. You know how to empathetically listen. Hey, we did coaching, too, one time.
Praisy: Yeah.
Jami: It's no wonder that people come up to me and say, did my teacher go through this? The classroom learning is important. The training is important. I will never not advocate for training, but training alone is not going to get to the behavior change you want. It's just not. You have to think about, as you turn back inward to the organization, what am I being recognized for? As a leader, do I get recognized for providing recognition and celebration? Do I get recognized or do people notice when I'm providing feedback? Or am I still only recognized because I can sell the most in our organization?
Because if that's what our reward system are geared toward, I don't really care about your coaching thing. That's not where I'm going to spend my time. I'm going to spend my time finding new business and closing deals, regardless of who I need to step on.
My point is it can't just be one time. What is the work after? You can have a training class, and then if you know that we have a project in our organization and you have to practice coaching or you have to practice what you learned, that's tying it right back into the organization and not just living alone in this one classroom one time.
Praisy: It also reminds me of our last conversation around heart set, mindset, skill set of why is coaching hard for me when I go back to my job? Maybe I learned it in class and I have to really experience it for it to be natural to me. Perhaps there's some beliefs I have around my identity as someone that has to produce work versus enable others to do work.
Maybe there's some beliefs, something deeper than that that is driving that. It’s really important, even in training, even if you're in that training course to be able to not just focus on the skill set but also the beliefs and some deeper drivers to make sure that behavior really starts to stick.
Jami: The coaching is a perfect example for heart set, mindset, skill set. I can teach you the skill of coaching, but if your mindset is I'm going to fix everything anyway because I was hired to do this, this is what people pay me to do, you're never going to do the skill set. You have to shift your mind to believing that your job as a leader now is actually to grow your team. That does not mean I'm solving and fixing all your problems. It is I'm asking you some really open-ended questions, and I'm pushing you to think really hard for yourself.
Praisy: I also think that is a really good reason for why we want to engage other types of experiences in leadership development. Not just the training, but also, how do we learn from others? How are we paired up with a mentor? How are we getting coached? Then it’s so important to be able to actually practice the behavior in our actual jobs. I think adult learning theory would support that if people learn best or most when you're actually doing the work. Then, the smaller percentage of how we learn is through coursework or through relationships.
Jami, obviously you and I think this is important and this is our bias for how people grow and develop and what organizations should do. Again, as we talked about in our last episode, people spend $60 billion. I think it's actually more than that annually on leadership development, and they're not seeing the outcomes. People are interested in this, but we're not necessarily moving the needle in the way that we need to. We have a different perspective on perhaps we're not approaching leadership development holistically, and maybe we are looking at it in a fragmented way.
Yet, our clients often continue to do the fragmented approach. Why do you think leaders or organizations should even consider this approach? Why should they adjust their leadership development approach?
Jami: I think my answer would be, what do you really want? What are you finally tired of? Because if you're really tired of some of the behaviors that you're seeing in your organization, I would encourage you actually not to start with training. I think sometimes people are afraid to sit down around a table with their co-leaders and that leadership team and name some of the things that aren't working and not be defensive and not get angry or upset. And look, I am a high-emotion person. That's really hard to turn off. But if you can say to your team, hey, this is not working for me, and I'm curious how you all are doing.
Praisy: Well, you can't solve something you won't name.
Jami: Yeah. Just even being able to name it. I would encourage leaders as best they can to set aside whatever judgment they have in their brain about what that other person's going to say. It's so hard to get specific answers here when they're you don't know the players and the dynamics. Every leadership team is different, but I see leaders being afraid to have an honest conversation about what's real in their organization.
Praisy: I also think some of this is our work at BW and at Chapman & Co. of really believing that business can be a force for good. That's externally within the world, but also internally within the organization. We want to be really good at what we do, and we want to be good for our customers.
In order to drive that high performance, we have to bring our people along. We can't treat leadership development as a checklist item. It has to be imperative to our business success. In order for us to do that, we have to have a more holistic, connected, aligned approach. It does start, to your point, with leadership at the top.
Jami: I think it starts with leadership at the top and having that honest conversation. I think organization sizes vary. In a group of 40 people, perhaps you could do a one-on-one conversation with every team member. If you're at BW and have 13,000 people, you might want to consider running some sort of engagement or culture survey to get an understanding of what's really going on within your teams, to have some actual data.
It's hard. I have lots of gut feelings about things, and what I'm learning is that could be true, but is there data that actually supports it? I think rather than taking somebody for face value and truth, there are ways that we can help you understand what is going on in any organization, in any department under a leader.
I think that has to start with that. Somebody might be out there like, well, that's dumb. You want me to talk to my leadership team? Yeah. Because I actually think people struggle doing that. Having real conversations, not getting up on a soapbox, this is what I see, just really trying to use as much I language in that as you can and not speaking on behalf of the entire company. How are you feeling about this leadership team? How do you think it's going? What do you need?
Praisy: What can people do? If they're listening to this, and maybe we've spurred some interesting thinking, some challenging thinking, what would you recommend people start with?
Jami: I think you have to name what good leadership is for your organization. Truly, as a leader, can we name some of those things, and do we agree on them? I would encourage you not to think 20 things need to be the most important thing. I would probably guess some of our psychologists would say five to eight competencies to start with.
Can we align on that as a leadership team? It would just be an easy — I won’t say easy. It would be a step one to start there as a leader. Then, if you lead a team and you don't see this kind of conversation happening at a high leader level, that doesn't mean you can't have the conversation with your team.
If you're a team leader and you have a span of care, have that conversation with them. What do they need in a leader? Ask for feedback. How are you doing?
Praisy: If you are an organization, maybe I would think about mapping out all of the initiatives that you've got going on. It even would be understanding like what is our business vision, what is our strategy, and is our connecting directly to our people initiatives? I think that will be a very good, gut check to ensure that the money that you're spending in the talent space is enabling your business success.