We all know someone who looked like they had it all together. They took on all the developmental roles, then finally got the top job. Then just months later, they were sacked.
Or in the work I do with Growth Leaders, I have often seen this: a strong functional leader given the task to lead the firm to its next profitable product. If the work gets off track (the statistics report that 7 out of 10 do), then the leader finds himself having to re-establish his career after a setback.
How does this happen?
I had a chance to sit in on a great session on career development featuring guest speaker Kevin Wilde that was sponsored by the Prouty Group in Minneapolis. Kevin is a veteran in leadership development, having served with distinction during the peak of Crotonville and subsequently, as the Chief Learning Officer of General Mills.
According to Kevin, the answer to the above question can be distilled into a line of inquiry that I find fascinating: what is the key thing that derails the careers of elite mid-senior leaders as they step into their first high-level roles?
A Data-Driven Approach
Through his corporate work, and now as an Executive Leadership Fellow at the Carlson School, Kevin has maintained relationships that give him access to both databases and follow-up interviews with dozens of candidates who have become top operational leaders. His team went through the data carefully looking for key indicators of those that successfully made the transition – as well as those who had an adverse outcome.
The attribute that came out to be the most statistically significant was “coachability.” In other words, the question was this: is the leader open to receiving feedback and capable of building it into their operating model. In follow-up interviews with leaders of those who had adverse outcomes, he found that their immediate supervisors knew well in advance that there was an issue – often as much as 6-12 months earlier.
Why then did things progress to a separation? (It’s important to note that at this point, these separations are really costly in terms of the person’s career capital, the operating results in the business unit and the sunk cost of investment in development and training.) It’s safe to say that because these outcomes are hard on the firm, and hard on the people, every step was taken to help them succeed.
Mindset
This is a hard question to unpack, and Kevin gave us several thought frames:
The first one is that we tend to systematically train the coachability out of our leaders by emphasizing the need to not only always be right, but to always have the answer. He cited a study that shows that as we rise through the firm, the average coachability peaks as a middle manager and falls as we progress to senior leadership. This is also amplified by the fact that people are inclined to speak good news to people in power. We talked about the well-known issue of never being as smart, thin or funny as your people tell you after you’re promoted.
The second area pivoted around the idea of needing “finished products” to promote. In our organizations, we have become fixated on the mythical state of “ready” vs “ready enough.” By acknowledging that people are constantly growing, we can allow them to be less than perfect and still ready for more responsibility. This too is amplified when we label someone “high potential,” as it puts tremendous pressure on them to always have the “right” answer or an insightful new view as an individual. What we really need from them, however, is to bring out the best in the group.
So What Can We Do?
How then do we help leaders remain coachable? In what was perhaps my favorite section of the talk, Kevin offered us a three-part solution:
- The confidence to try it. All of us need to have a core foundation of confidence to be able to take feedback and try a new behavior or insight. By being sure of one area, and knowing we are a learner in another, it can help us move ahead. A nice example of this is reverse mentoring, where a senior leader has a younger mentor – typically in the area of technology or social media. This has a two-fold benefit: it models for the whole firm the value of being open and the value of lifelong learning. Ultimately, it provides a bankable insight that would not have been there without the support.
- The curiosity to open it. All learning begins with curiosity, and that curiosity requires the humility to admit there are areas we have a lot to learn about. I love the recent note from the CEO of Nokia where he spoke of his path to learning about AI, and modeled for others the need for learning regardless of your position in the firm.
- The motivation to spark it. Finally, there needs to be something that provides the sense of urgency and sustaining energy to keep us moving. Kevin cited a class he leads where he used to offer general “office hours” and almost no one took advantage of them. Instead, when he now offers a coaching opportunity for the first eight students who apply, he finds his inbox full before class is even over. We are inherently motivated to see that which is scarce, and by structuring coaching as a valuable and scarce resource, it draws competitive leaders to the opportunity.
What Does This Mean for Growth Leaders?
Those who aspire to growth leadership need to become flexible lifelong learners. Growth Leaders are constantly crossing organizational boundaries in their work and need to be students of technology, people and processes. This is key to the discovery that the Growth Leader needs to have almost continuously as they lead their firms towards new products and services.
By giving Growth Leaders a learning framework (background here, here and here) to be able to evaluate their skills and add critical new understanding and behavior, they’ll not only be confident of what they already know, but they’ll become students of those areas where they need to gain understanding to be effective.
This last piece of coachability is critical for the Growth Leader, as they need to gain experiences that simply cannot be learned by reading a book. It is somewhat like a pilot who needs to be able to read the manuals for a plane but also needs to have the practical training to be able to gain the muscle memory for each new situation will need to be addressed.
Next Steps
If you or a team member is about to take on a major cross-functional project, our Complete Growth Leader coaching course can get you off to a fast start. Participants report feeling much more confident, in addition to saving time, money and resources. For more information, give us a call at 847-651-1014, or set up a 20-minute call using this link.
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