XpertHR Podcast. Original XpertHR podcast: 25 January 2018

Transcription

1 XpertHR Podcast Original XpertHR podcast: 25 January 2018 Hello and welcome to this XpertHR podcast with me, Sheila Attwood. Today we ll be looking at leadership development what does it involve and how might it be delivered in your organisation? Joining me to take you through the key issues to consider when looking at leadership development is Nigel Paine, a learning and development specialist and consultant author to XpertHR. Nigel, let s kick off at the very beginning. What do we mean when we talk about leadership in an organisation? [0:00:37.4] Great question, Sheila, and a good place to begin, cause a lot of people still confuse the difference between leader development and leadership. And the difference is quite simply that leader development is a focus on usually a very small number of individuals who run organisations in a kind of command-and-control way and take most of the decisions, and the rest of us simply do. Leadership is basically a philosophy of engagement throughout the organisation, where responsibility is taken by lots of people at lots of different levels, the appropriate decisions at the appropriate level. And the aim is to build a fully engaged workforce. So to do that you require really good leadership and well as leaders who are highly competent. And putting that into context, could you just explain how a leader differs from a manager? [0:01:22.9] I can. Managers are very important, and I don t think there s any reason why a manager can t be a leader. And the difference is quite simple. A manager is someone who keeps the organisational processes flowing. So a manager makes the day-to-day practical stuff work. A leader inspires, develops and takes the organisation and the people who he or she leads forward. So you can do both. Being a poor manager and a great leader is not wonderful, but being a great manager and a very poor leader probably causes more damage because no one feels particularly motivated. But they fill in the right forms! That leads us nicely onto really what this podcast is about. If we talk about leadership development, what does that involve? How are we going to go about developing those people into leadership positions? [0:02:12.5] 1

2 Well the tragedy is that there are huge numbers of people who are in leadership positions who haven t received a day s support, or if they did it was a day a long time ago. I suppose my mission in life is to prove that leadership development is so important that every single organisation can do it, and also that leadership development needn t be incredibly expensive. There s a myth that leadership development, you either do leadership development and that sucks all your budget, or you do the rest of the organisation. And a lot of people in that context often agree, Alright, well we ll forget about leadership development and concentrate on the rest of the workforce. I think you can have both. So leadership development is giving leaders the skills, competency and behaviours to be able to run or help run the organisation in the way that the organisation requires. And it s also massively about consistency. So good leadership development means that every leader behaves in a very similar way, so you don t get, I like working for X but I hate working for Y. X does this, Y does the opposite. That is poor, poor leadership. So in terms of a business perspective, what outcomes are they going to hope to get from developing this leadership pool? [0:03:23.7] An engaged workforce. It s all about their whole organisation performing. So great leadership leads to an engaged workforce, leads to performance. I would argue that whatever you invest in leadership development usually pays for itself. You get your return quite quickly and quite obviously because the organisation knows where it s going, knows what it s supposed to do, and you don t get hoards of people leaving because they re fed up with inconsistent or appalling leadership. Or even appalling management. I guess that organisations could be at various different stages when they come into looking at leadership development. How are they going to work out what skills and what strategy it is that they need to deliver on those business aims? [0:04:03.3] Thank you, Sheila, cause I think that s a very important question. And one of the problems is that many organisations run too quickly to a solution, and if you run too quickly to a solution you miss the whole point. So let me give you three things that you should do first, before you go anywhere near a solution. The first is you work out what the truth of leadership is like in your organisation. You need to do some research and you need to be clear about what is it like to be led somewhere in the middle or maybe the lower part of your organisation? How do you experience leadership? What is it like for real people on a day-to-day basis as they come into work for you? And sometimes that reality is so awful and so striking that it kind of does the business immediately. Everyone says, We must do something about this. So you need to know the truth about leadership. The second thing is you ve got to work out what are the worst elements that need to be fixed most urgently. Everything may be 2

3 interesting, everything you may need to deal with, but there will be some areas, some groups, some way in which leadership is experienced that desperately needs to be fixed urgently, and you need to say, We re going to fix this, and you need to tell the rest of the organisation, This is what you ve told us and we are going to fix it. And that builds a bridge and gives you a bit of time. And the third point is once you know what leadership is really like, you know where the worst problems are, the things that you ve really got to fix, the third point is that you ve got to work out what resources you ve got and what approach you re going to take to be able to fix it. It s only at point three you actually begin the process of trying to build a development programme. And sometimes you need to invest money but quite often it s possible to put together some quite exciting and useful leadership development at zero or very low-cost budgets. So I always say, Start at zero and work upwards. Don t say, This is going to cost 100,000 oh, can we trim 10,000 off that? I think that if you start with a zero budget and work out what you can do by utilising the skills and intelligence and the insights of your staff, by drawing on resources that are freely available out there... There are lots and lots of TED talks, there are hundreds of thousands of hours of itunesu materials, there are YouTube videos you name it, there are resources out there that can be built into a very low-cost leadership programme. You talked there about the people who are going to be undertaking the development programme. How does an organisation go about identifying the right pool of people for that? [0:06:34.2] It depends, as always. I could say that as an answer for every single question. You ve done your research. You know where the worst issues are. Go for that group. So it may not be the top of the organisation. It may be the middle of the organisation, it may be further down. But you work out where your greatest needs are and you focus on dealing with those first, and then you can do stuff subsequently that reaches out across the whole organisation. But when you do your analysis there is clearly some group, cadre, some level that needs the closest attention first and foremost. And one of the other myths about leadership development is you always have to work with the very top people and that s it. Once you ve done them everything else falls into place. Not necessarily. Often it s not the top people, or they have relatively little impact on the organisation. It s the people lower down who are really doing the damage. So look for where things are toxic, look for where things are inconsistent and not working. Deal with that first. You talked a little bit before about the content of the leadership development programme, and I appreciate this is going to vary from organisation to organisation, but what sort of things might we expect to see in that programme? What should organisations look to include? [0:07:39.8] Good question again. I think there are a mixture of elements and the mixture depends on the people and the need. 3

4 The first thing is I think you ve got to and this is not traditional expose people to different kinds of experiences. You ve got to show them that the way they do things in this place where that person has worked for ten years may not be optimal and there may be much better ways of doing it. So expose them to things. That can be visiting other organisations. It can be even taking people to art galleries or taking them to a play or something that challenges the way they look at the world. So you need to, if you like, discomfort people, and you do that through experience. You also need some sort of intellectual underpinning. You need to explain why things have to move and what the basis of those decisions is. You ve got to share some research. And finally, you really have to get people to practise stuff. It s no good just having a theoretical grasp of how I m going to work with young Sheila. You ve got to actually have experienced it and to have practised it and to know viscerally, in yourself, what changes you have to make. And then you have to be held to the fire. You have to make those changes and be monitored and challenged and continue to make those changes til what was once a bad habit has been replaced by a much better habit. Basically we re talking about a sixmonth journey at the very least, not a three-day journey or a five-day journey. You touched on there what it is to be a leader and what it involves on a personal level. How are these individuals going to prepare themselves for taking on such a role? It seems to be there s quite a lot they need to be able to do. [0:09:16.7] Yes, it s true, they do. The first thing is to look at themselves and try to acknowledge openly where they have weaknesses. What are the things they feel they don t do very well? And it can be a very minor thing like, I don t really listen enough, to it may be, I am always losing my temper with staff and I know it s a bad thing, I just can t do it, that s the kind of person I am. And that s a real major issue that has to be tackled. But you ve got to have some agenda. So when you go into a development programme it s not a, Okay, teach me. It s, I ve got four things I want to address and these are the four, to be open about it, to have your manager (the manager of the person going through) working with that individual on working out what needs to be addressed, and then after the programme helping that individual make sure that they behave differently, that they ve addressed those issues and that there s noticeable change in the organisation. And the easiest way of defining whether a leadership programme has been a success is not to ask the participants they ll always say, Yeah, it was great, I really enjoyed it, I learnt a lot. You find out whether it was successful by asking the people they lead, What have you noticed? Have things changed around here? Does X do things differently now? And if the answer is, Yes, you re on the journey. You talked there about helping the individuals in achieving and making an impact after the programme. If I can just ask you about 4

5 support, what support is this person going to need? Where is it going to come from? In what format are we going to see that? [0:10:36.6] There are two key, key forms of support. The first one is peers. But the idea that leadership is a kind of lonely, individual journey of miserable failure is not a good idea. Leadership should be a collective commitment and the best leadership programmes build that strong cohort who support each other and help each other and don t put up with non-compliance. They go for each other and say, Hey, that wasn t the way you should behave. You know we re trying to do things differently. So your peer support. And then critically your manager. You manager has to keep you upto-speed, has to hold you to account, and partner you, mentor you, coach you, help you move forward on the journey. And if you re the CEO, that person will be the Chairman. There s always someone who can help you move down that path and who has, if you like, some kind of power over you so you kind of listen. You talked there again about how it s about what happens after the development. What sort of things are we going to expect an attendee at a development programme to do post that programme to provide an impact on the organisation? [0:11:36.5] If it s gone well, if the thing s been planned properly, the person has an agenda for action coming straight off the programme that was part of what was agreed before the programme began. That agenda for action will have a number of components and what is simply required is that that person works with their peers and with their manager, tackling each of those items. If it s managing behaviour, for example if we go back to the person who can t help shouting, one of the key components will be control mechanisms that are put in place so that whenever the person has an inclination to shout something kicks in and they don t do that. If someone is very poor at listening then techniques for active listening to their peers. If it s a case of better communication, better process of going to speak to people more regularly, organising different kinds of meetings and finding out what is necessary. If it s better communication and creating some sense of vision, then having had practice at that during the programme, then to practise it again and again post-programme. So post-programme is all about implementation. And doing that difficult thing, which is to change behaviour until it becomes a habit. And changing behaviour is not trivial. Now we all know if people smoke, everybody who smokes knows it s really bad for you. That doesn t stop them doing it. It s a habit and you ve got to undo one habit and replace it with another habit. And that s the essence of behaviour change. Who you are doesn t really matter; it s how you behave that matters. And you can behave different to who you are, but it takes practice and it takes habit. There s no excuse for angry people, there s no excuse for bullying, there s no excuse for inappropriate behaviour. All of those things can be dealt with and they should be dealt with in good leadership development. There are some really good points there about locally how this development is going to be applied. How is the organisation going to 5

6 look back on the investment it s made in the programme and see the benefits and measure whether it s had the impact that it was hoping for? [0:13:23.3] The way you measure the impact is by taking regular temperature checks throughout the organisation. It s almost pointless asking the participant whether it was good, because whether they thought it was good or not is kind of irrelevant. That sounds very unorthodox but it is kind of irrelevant. What is relevant is whether they do things differently that people notice, whether staff who would have left stay, whether staff who were completely disengaged feel more engaged, and whether those who were moderately engaged feel inspired and willing to go the extra mile. You should be able to clearly identify changes in the organisation. It may be it s all about the organisation being much more coherent, having a vision, having that registered throughout the organisation in terms of what is expected of individual members of staff that wasn t there before clarity, direction, all of those things emerge from good leadership development. Thank you, Nigel. There are some really good practical points there. Thank you, Sheila. Thank you very much. Now if our discussion has encouraged you to take a closer look at leadership development in your organisation and how it might be developed, there s plenty of information in our Good Practice Guide on leadership development on the site, for which Nigel is the consultant author. That brings us to the end of this XpertHR podcast. Thanks very much for listening and we look forward to you joining us next time. 6