Every senior leader I run into these days shares just how hard it is to do both the quality and the quantity of work that this crisis requires of us. We know that our pre-COVID strategy is no longer applicable (see article here), we know we need to be led by our product and R&D teams, and we know that we need to do all this while creating the highest levels of customer service.
It may seem counterintuitive, but this workload is precisely the kind of challenge in which your real leaders will step up and ask you to “put me in coach.” This is that once-in-a-career opportunity where those with real leadership skills will make themselves known.
Before we get into the “how-to,” let’s talk about the benefits of doing the work of building your team at this critical moment when for the rest of the world, it seems like the best thing to do is take your subject matter expertise and direct team members to specific tasks.
Leaders who make wise team investment decisions can expect to:
- Build organizations that can spot shifting trends faster. This means you can reduce the cycle time between one of front line team members and your product team producing a solution. As we spoke about last week, this is critical to recovery in a post-COVID world.
- Build firms that have fewer blind spots. Directive leadership has a place during times of uncertainty (see article here for more about the phases of recovery), but it quickly becomes a limiting factor if the only insight in play is coming top down. By properly developing your team, you can bring your firm’s whole brain to the solution of these massively complex problems – well ahead of other firms.
- Gain a reputation as a firm that builds talent, rather than consumes it. Recall that there is always a shortage of talented leaders and subject matter experts, and once the smoke clears, the best talent will vote with their feet. By having a firm that builds talent, you can avoid paying a surtax for “superstars” that others have developed and may not be a cultural fit for your firm.
To take advantage of this opportunity you need to:
#1: Invest time
Most of our calendar is tactically consumed. Constructing a firm to build leadership while serving its core clients is the foundation that lasting businesses are built on. There is a big difference between a “peacetime army” and when war breaks out – and right now, we are in a battle to put our global economy back on the tracks.
A first step: Take time Sunday evening to scan your upcoming week’s calendar for the purpose of putting one intentional talent development meeting in the mix for the week. Don’t underestimate what 12 hours per quarter can do.
#2: Get comfortable with fairly and accurately appraising people
Many of us are just too nice, and our people know it. They need us to speak candidly and constructively about their strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities. Setting up an atmosphere where this is practiced can be the refreshing summer breeze that leads to strong team performance.
A first step: Have a cup of coffee with a close peer in the firm that deals with your team frequently and compare notes on how your team shows up. Key in on surprises that may point to hidden talent.
#3: Provide opportunities for great feedback
Feedback needs to be an ongoing process to be effective, not just at review time. Feedback should be multidimensional and related precisely to what matters for success. The best learning comes with progressively more challenging tasks – and setting the foundation for rich dialogue with you, peers and subordinates will unlock significant insights that will benefit your team and the firm at large.
A first step: Commit to being one, fully authentic leader in all circumstances. Make use of unloaded language when giving feedback (privately), for instance, “I noticed during today’s planning session that you seemed to have more to say and pulled up short – can you help me understand why?
#4: Development planning
Be willing to take the risk and place people in challenging uncomfortable work situations. This is the tough truth of development: it needs to be something that is important, something that has a (hopefully low) probability of failure and where not doing it is not a viable option. When you take the time to talk with successful leaders with deep careers, they will all tell you about how they delivered when it was not a sure thing.
A first step: Have a key developing leader do a “phase one” plan on a tough task on your list that you’ve been unable to get to. Review their work, doing your best not to redirect on matters of style. If it looks good – discuss exactly what they need to move to the next phase.
#5: Customize the challenge, the support, and mentoring for the person’s real skills and abilities
All leaders have different skills abilities, leadership styles, and blind spots. Being a leader of leaders requires the ability to see precisely what and how you need to motivate and coach your key talent.
A first step: Invest in getting to know your staff (and yourself) better through a tool like Complete Growth Leader that will allow you to build on strengths and help the team to mitigate one another’s weaknesses (for more see articles here and here).
Putting Your Pipeline to Work on a Real Developmental Project
Getting a payback on this work pivots around helping your developing leaders engage in forming the Right Project, with the Right Team, and using the Right Plan. As we have discussed before (here and here) the key to doing fresh and valuable new work in an organization is to build a temporary organization to take the work on. This is commonly called a cross-functional team and is the best way to both diagnose and implement real, lasting performance improvement in a firm.
Combining challenging projects and development work can lead to three years of developmental work during normal business being completed in six months. I have had the privilege of working with dozens of these teams, and management is always surprised at how quickly these groups can find the heart of issues that have vexed the firm for years, and then untie the knot.
Key to this is having real tools and a strategy for finding and forming these teams and the precise scope of the areas they take on.
Let’s Talk
If you’d like to talk more about how this process works, it’s best if we have specific dialogue.
I take on a limited number of advisory and project clients, using facilitation tools, checklists, and processes honed through dozens of assignments. If you’d like to talk about how an advisory or consultative approach could help you through the muddled middle, please reach out to scott@scottpropp.com or put a 20-minute appointment on the books using this link.
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