Our Smartest People Are Not Leading Well AND We Are Not Prepared to Develop Them
Point #1
Businesses will be significantly reducing or eliminating employee training for the rest of 2020 and perhaps beyond. In industries most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, training and development functions will be wiped out.
All nonessential expenses must be reduced by June 1 due to the dept of cash flow crisis that most companies will face. One ‘easy’ expense to get rid of is training because businesses don’t do a good job determining the return on their investment.
That may be depressing news to those who were looking forward to participating in the company’s leadership development program this fall. Or for those employees who might have been sent to leadership external training.
For many employees, this means they will have to fend for themselves. However, most younger and emerging leaders, haven’t had any resources before, so they aren’t going to miss something they never had. So, they have always been on their own when it comes to developing the so-called soft skills of leadership.
Point #2
In many businesses, the people who rise to the top positions with the most leadership responsibilities are the ones who seemingly are the smartest. But as one rises in responsibility the technical responsibilities decline as the leadership responsibilities increase. Most smart people find themselves ill-equipped to lead their teams and the organization because they have technically focused most of their time and energy.
In 2018, according to Brandon Hall Group’s 2018 HCM Outlook, Leadership Development research showed that “no more than 41% of organizations believe LD programs at any leader level – from emerging and frontline all the way to the executive level – are effective. The outlook is clear: leadership development is poised for disruption – partially through reinvention, and partially by democratization.”
What’s a CEO to do? Stops/Starts/Continues
- Stop comparing the way you developed yourself to others. You spent a long time connecting the dots with your back against the wall before you discovered your leadership groove. Your organic process may have turned out well but it’s not something that is duplicatable in today’s hyper-fast, ever-changing environment.
- Start recognizing that your best leaders may not be your smartest lieutenants, that learned to manage up better than lead their teams. You need a dose of reality. Unless you have done a 360-degree assessment of your people, you don’t know if they are perceived as leading effectively.
- Start developing more of your potential leaders. Not just the smartest ones, but those that seem to do a great job asking and listening to others. Those that have humility and put their team ahead of themselves. Look for those that have trust and respect. Notice the people that have an incredible personal resolve to drive results and balance that by demonstrating a concern for others.
- If you have been doing some form of leadership development in the past, now is the time to question how it could be redeveloped and redesigned in a more efficient and effective manner. Leadership development should be done as a process and should reward people for changing behavior. Therefore, there must be a measurement in the process. Your process probably doesn’t have any significant ways to help people create new habits and the metrics to measure habits and results.
- If you’ve never done any form of leadership development, find the best leader in your organization and make it their responsibility to work with you as the sponsor to develop a coaching and development process. Let people know that you will ‘invest’ your personal energy into helping people become outstanding leaders. I guarantee this will be noticed and be a big positive to the business.
Ensure those you nominate to be a part of the process. That they agree to be accountable to a process establishing frequent observations of their progress and effort, and key learnings.
If you need some help in designing what this could look like, refer to my book: “Best Boss Ever: The 5 steps to rapidly develop yourself into the leader everyone wants to follow”.
- Lastly, stop thinking about eliminating all expenses and time commitments towards developing leaders. It may sound paradoxical to you as you read these words. But if you choose to not develop your best people into becoming your best leaders, you’re disregarding the culture and people who’ll lead and maintain the changes necessary for your organization to win in the post-pandemic period. Now more than ever. You need extraordinary leaders who can create a vision and engage their teams to do the heavy lifting. This will make your organization the kind of company that everyone wants to do business with.
Twenty years ago, we put the people with the most ‘potential’ into roles that would stretch them. They would organically learn from good as well as bad leaders, what works and what doesn’t. This model still works today but the challenge with it is that it takes too long.
People flounder longer due to the complexities and lack of coaching and development in our organization from busy senior executives. Every mistake or failure lessens the person’s confidence and other’s perception that they can deliver results. We no longer give people permission to fail greatly without them being judged as not being good enough.
Our businesses need the greatest business leaders of all time to respond to economic challenges. We must meet the challenge of rapidly developing profound leadership skills in all aspects of our businesses. Productivity, retention, engagement; are all critical to our businesses and they are all primarily impacted by good or bad leadership. More importantly, outstanding leadership has a much greater impact on business results than even good leadership does. One way to make a tremendous investment into your business is to develop your leaders.