Those of you who follow me know that for some time I’ve been speaking about a fundamental belief we’ve got a gap in leadership in the country and in the world. The things we can do to become better leaders can make the world a better place for everybody, whether it’s at work or in your community.
In a recent episode of my Podcast “Leadership Powered by Common Sense” I interviewed an organizational psychologist, Tania Luna. She’s done some phenomenal work in studying attributes of leadership that can really help crystallize the fundamentals.
Doug: Welcome to the show.
Tania: Thank you and for those of you listening, you can’t hear the sound of me nodding emphatically, I’m very much ready to get up on that soapbox with you. It’s very much my belief as well that we need more great leaders more than ever and we really have to treat it as a craft and a skill set rather than cross our fingers and hope for the best.
Doug: I was actually on an interview yesterday and I was asked the question you know number one: why do I believe there’s been a decline in leadership effectiveness and when did it start happening?
I think the decline actually started in the 80s. I’m sad to say I think, on the very public stage we saw a fundamental shift in our socio-political leaders, those that get elected to public office, especially here in the United States.
The shift seemed to move away from the core belief in doing what’s right and there was a lot more focus on doing what was politically correct or politically necessary, and I think that shifted the whole impact of leadership and the business world.
I think what happened was this incredible acceleration of the speed of business and the complexity of business.
There is a difference between being in a position of authority and being a leader. Radical difference. People in positions of authority got so consumed by the velocity and complexity of their work, that they abandoned the learning of leadership and the exercise of leadership.
Tania: That’s interesting. Can I share kind of potentially counter perspective? And I don’t know if I disagree, because it might be that leadership has been declining in quality throughout my career, I haven’t quite seen leaders get worse.
What I have seen is leaders become more overwhelmed. To your point about increasing velocity and complexity, which also goes hand in hand with the fact that there is more distribution of the requirement to lead across more people.
So some of our first clients at LifeLabs Learning in my leadership development company, were, for example, one company, when they were only 100 people, and we got really lucky because we got to be in the front row seat so to speak, as they grew very.
Very quickly double tripled, quite tripled in size, and what we saw happening in organizations like that is, you know not with them specifically, but in general, when companies grow fast, people are just kind of chucked into a leadership role.
So much so that you know Life Labs. Learning we teach leadership skills, but I can’t tell you how many times we get into a workshop and the conversation that ends up happening is well. What is a leader? What is a manager? What’S my job description? No one ever gave me a job description, so I think it’s that there are more leaders, both formal and informal than ever before, they’re being placed into those roles faster than ever and their amount of sort of complexity and Challenge and even responsibility.
You know leaders these days, they’re expected to be responsible for people’s emotions, not just their outcomes um. So maybe I’m talking myself into agreeing with you actually, but I guess I can’t speak to whether leaders are getting worse.
I just think that there are way more people in those seats with a lot more pressure on them. I I I agree with you what you said and I I don’t take that as a counter position at all. I think it’s very consistent with the with the details of of what I’m speaking to the the conclusion I’ve drawn and let me let me share two thoughts on that.
One is and again people that are regular. Followers of the show have heard this heard me say this before when I first decided to turn my professional attention to coaching and leadership development. I met with a friend of mine, who is a very accomplished – CEO, he’s now retired, but he was heavily involved most of his career in the private Equity inventure Capital realm and was the guy that always got hired to go in and become the new CEO of An acquisition and do a turnaround and do a maximize so they could sell it for a profit.
You know that’s a professor BC game right, no pressure, but this guy was really good at it and he was an incredible. He happened to be Dutch by Heritage and he was an incredible learner and he made it part of his game to study leadership and and if you wanted to have a discussion about leadership, principles and theory and all that phenomenal guy to know so anyway, I was Presenting to him my idea, what I wanted to do with leadership coaching, he shook his head and he said you can’t sell leadership.
I said what – and he said my humble advice to you is he said, number one. I believe in what you say you want to do. He said, don’t give me wrong, it’s it’s huge and it’s very necessary, but right now in our business world and by the way this was about eight years ago.
He said right now in our business world, you’re not going to be able to sell leadership. If you go knocking on doors, saying I’m a leadership coach they’re going to glaze over and shut the door in your face, yeah, I said really.
So how do you recommend? I get in and he said, you’re going to have to talk about something else, you’re going to have to help them with other business related conundrum. I said you’re telling me. I need to still act as a consultant.
Well, yes, and no uh. He said all I’m telling you is you just you’re not going to be able to sell leadership? Well, the good news is in in just that short eight year period. I think the pendulum has swung on that there’s.
Definitely a market-wide and worldwide appetite for leadership development resources. Companies are turning their attention to saying oh crap, we don’t have enough leaders in our shop, and that brings me to my second point – and I agree with what you said.
The the tradition we have in modern business is as we grow as a company. We feel the need to hire or identify a new Frontline supervisor. So what do we? Do? We go look at the team. We pick the best producer, the best performer and we go poof you’re a manager right ouch.
It’S like I, I think about it as like. It’S trying to pick the best surgeon and using that as a prediction of whether they’ll be the best basketball player, it’s like there’s almost no overlap whatsoever, exactly yeah exactly and then what happens is that person who gets into that role? They they may in fact survive and do well because they on their own volition, they figure some things out.
Um or sadly, they don’t and and what the company ends up doing is ruining a good producer right. But if they survive, what happens they get promoted and they get promoted again and again and now all of a sudden they’re at a so-called director or even VP level and they’ve still yet not had leadership.
Training right well – and I think it’s it’s part of the problem – is the lack of training. The other problem you’re pointing out, is the lack of sort of assessing whether someone has the necessary skill set and aptitude, and then the third is just not even the even the organization itself, not knowing what expectations they have for someone in that role right, which is Why you have this sort of kind of messy soup of disappointment and frustration, because the leaders underperforming, but there’s no one within the organization? That can say, hey look actually what success looks like is this, and here is where you are and there’s the Gap, and here are the skills you need to be able to close that right.
They’re, just like I don’t know it’s not working. People are quitting we’re losing money and there’s this this notion within leadership. You know to to your friend’s point about leadership being hard to sell.
Although greed it is, it is absolutely getting easier, but there’s this sense that we’re just you’re gonna figure it out on the job, if you’re a smart person, if you’re a competent person you’re going to get in there and you’re going to figure it out again, You know if we use the surgeon metaphor, would we do that with a surgeon? You know what you’re a smart person you get in there into the operating room.
You’ll eventually figure it out, so we somehow think of this kind of this belief system. We hold this belief system that leadership is something so intuitive that you can just get in there and you can learn from experience and they’re one of two things that happen either.
You don’t learn from experience at all and you make you know kind of horrible mistakes along the way and you can’t quite learn from it because something I did today results in someone quitting six months from now.
So I can’t even have the feedback loop of telling me. Oh don’t say it that way say it this way or you know, create Clarity in this way. So either you struggle struggle struggle and you have these these horrible things happening or you’re.
You are getting better, but again you don’t really understand why and you can’t really put specific words to it so that you can systematize it and turn it into into kind of like a design. So the the learn from experience path is uh.
I think a very risky one, a slow one and a dangerous one for everyone involved and it’s usually the rare situation where there is someone up the chain who is willing to be a leadership, mentor and and shape and guide the up and coming.
And I know companies have created these and and I’m speaking of larger companies now they’ve created these high potential programs where they do look at those yeah first time. Second time, managers and say: okay, you seem to be getting this well we’re going to declare you a high potential leadership, uh Prospect and um.
You know that’s where um maybe they’ll get more support. Yeah they’re going to get more support, there’s maybe formalized mentoring, there’s workshops! There’S coaching there’s things: I tell a Story Once Upon a Time um, one of the large Global construction companies asked me to come in and do a workshop for first-time managers.
So this was a predominantly engineering based company, so people that were being elevated into first-time managers were all Engineers, civil, chemical Mechanicals, a lot of our clients, yeah and um. So I’m in this conference center – and I got about 60 people in the audience and we got through.
We had a big big old three-inch binder that we were going to do in two days and introduce them to the notion of what does it mean to be a manager we got through about the first two hours took a break and there’s this line at the Podium and this first person comes up and very very first person in line, says if what you said in the first two hours is what we’re going to do the rest of the two days.
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be a first-time manager, yeah and I’m ready to go talk to HR, and I said okay well you’re, going to step over here. Uh you stay in this part of the line. Let me answer these other questions and I’ll get back to you and the very next person said well as a matter of fact, I’m what he said you know, and everybody in line was doing that and there’s this kind of bait and switch that happens so often Within organizations of you know not actually knowing what you’re signing up for until you get there or feeling like you, have to go down that path.
Otherwise, you’re, not learning and you’re, not growing and you’re. Either your ego is tied up in it or it’s the only way that you can increase your salary within an organization which I think is a whole other problem.
Ideally within organizations There’s an opportunity to increase the complexity and and pay of your role without having to be in a people. Leadership option. Well enough of my stories. I want to get into your work, because that’s what really attracted me to doing this show so give us kind of the well first give us a little bit of the background story of your journey and how you got into what you’re doing oh gosh as a Winding crooked path, but the the bit that looks most linear is, I studied psychology, and actually I wasn’t looking at organizational psychology.
I was looking at what’s called positive psychology, so I looked at group, creativity and cohesion. I was looking at uh emotion, regulation like how do we have kind of more um, better relationships with our own emotions, things like that and uh kind of really tumbled into studying leaders, because it was something that there was a lot of this kind of like mystique And mystery and confusion around and the scientist part of my brain was like we got to be able to simplify this.
It can’t be that it’s Charisma and inspiration, and these kind of big um hard to touch Concepts. It needs to be something specific and behavioral enough. That you could study it, you know and then, if you can study it, then you can pass it on and uh started, collaborating with co-founder at Life, Labs learning, Leanne, reninger.
Her background is in experimental psychology, so both of us really kind of fell into organizational psychology with a lot of naivete, and I think that was kind of a good thing, because we didn’t come in with preconceived notions.
We just went in going. We don’t know what a great leader looks like we don’t know what a great manager looks like, so let’s actually observe and look at what are the behaviors that are distinctive between managers who receive the best ratings from their team and have a track record of accomplishing Results versus looking at average and what we found again and again through those behavioral observations is there were a few specific things that stood out.
What’S interesting is that we started out by just interviewing people and that did not work. It turns out that most people have no idea what makes them effective. For example, one of the things that we saw across the board is everyone said that listening skills is core to what makes them effective, but there was no correlation between how good someone thought they were at listening and how good other people thought they were at listening.
So everyone rated themselves, as you know, within the the top percentile of effective listeners, and then their team did not agree. So we we realized. We can’t just ask people. What is that you’re doing we started observing? How are they having one-on-one meetings? How are they having difficult conversations? How are they leading team meetings? Things like that, and I can speak to some of the things that we found but I’ll pause there, because it looks like you have a thought.
No, I I think, that’s fascinating and my only comment on the the listening thing. I it is interesting. You say that that though the leader thought they were good with listening skills, that there wasn’t a correlation with what the team thought.
So that’s um. I I in a word, I’m going to say that’s insightful and and probably not different from what I’ve I’ve heard in my own coaching opportunity. It kind of connects to what you were talking about with the difficulty of selling leadership.
We had no difficulty selling manager training. I think that’s because yeah well, it’s hard to say why, but my hypothesis is one of the reasons is that the people who are paying for the manager training are not the managers themselves.
It’S really easy to be in a leadership role and go. You know in a senior leadership role and say our managers aren’t good enough. It’S much harder to be in that executive leadership, role yourself and say: I’m not good enough, and so I think that’s one of the reasons.
There are many others, but, but I think that that’s an important driving one um, and so one of the things that is, you know, kind of related to the listening um. Finding that we had is that we also had to be really thoughtful about.
What are the topics that we offer on our course menu in our in the programs that we teach, because people have to look at it and go yeah? I have that problem. For example, we offer feedback skills, training and people go yes.
I need that and I want that and I’m not good at it when we offer listening skills, almost no one booked it because they were like no I’m already good at that uh. So yeah. It is this interesting. You know kind of distance between reality and perception and in similar fashion, to how you had to find that kind of way to sneak into leadership development.
Sometimes we have to sneak in the skills that we know have the biggest impact in the shortest time. Even if we kind of tuck them into uh something else I used to volunteer through this organization called citizen schools there’s this after school program and they said their their metaphor was hide.
The spinach in the brownie so give someone this delicious brownie that they want and all the actual nutrients is hidden inside. So every once in a while. We have to do that because, of course, there’s an ego component involved here right, it’s scary and unpleasant and uncomfortable to think of yourself as lacking in leadership, because it’s imbued with this kind of moral um element to it like.
If I’m not a good leader. Am I not a good person, I’m not. Am I not a powerful person so anyway, I digress uh, but yeah that a lot of it. A lot of our findings had to do with what can we see with our own eyes and using integrated reliability? Not just what do I think, but what do what is a group of us notice when they’re, when we’re observing these behaviors to try to extract out the distinctive actions? I think that’s powerful and I’m sitting here I’m I look distracted, I’m making a note.
I love that phrase hide the spinach in the brownie um. That is such a great metaphor for, for this thing, and – and I do think uh your point is very valid. People don’t have trouble thinking about Management, training and and bringing that in and and helping the leaders um the the same engineering company I referred to earlier in my story.
Uh, a friend of mine uh, was one of their senior HR people and that’s how I got the gig actually and uh one of his things was. He actually went on an internal campaign to convince the company that they needed to redefine the purpose of HR, and his Mantra was: if we fix our managers, we won’t have people problems um.
That was his Mantra in a nutshell. Well, oh sorry, well and um. He he made a little bit of inroad, they, they won a giant contract and he was named the number two HR person on that contract and there was a population of 50 000 employees that were going to be subject to this contract and the company told him They said all right, we’re game, we’re going to let you test this over there and do that and see how it works.
Well, it actually worked very well, and this was a large multinational platform, and so it had all the complexities of of what you might expect in something like that, but they spent a lot of time on the management, slash leader development.
It’S a great strategy. We what we when we first started Life Labs learning. We assumed, like many others, do, that comes sort of top down and that we had to start with Executives, uh and then that didn’t really work because they they were too busy and they perhaps weren’t self-aware enough to recognize the need to you know, develop the skill Set so then we were like okay.
Maybe we should go for the largest segment of the population. Let’S go for individual contributors, a lot of excitement there, a lot of interest, but again not the biggest impact, turns out managers that are sort of that middle layer.
Of most organizations biggest change in the shortest period of time, and what we found is that they actually exerted that sort of positive pressure across the organization if they were skilled in, for example, asking high quality questions or giving really clear feedback or setting expectations with.
You know alignment across individuals, then we notice that the executives started doing more of that and then individual contributors and cross-function. Even we have the best impact when all managers across the company are trained.
But even if you have a subset of managers trained, especially if you sprinkle them across the organization, you see that spillover effect of those things yeah yeah exactly. This is all about solving complex problems as fast as you can create them, become the best Problem Solver by Leading others to Greatness too, and the first step is going to dougthorpe.
com. Doug Thorp is known globally for coaching entrepreneurs and Business Leaders, improving their performance and the work output of everyone surrounding them. You can find health wealth and happiness by learning to lead others to help wealth and happiness, go to dougthorpe.
com now and Order Doug’s books or hire him to coach. Your managers – that’s Doug, t-h-o-r-p-e.com and and to the point that you made earlier about. You know your pursuit of leadership and accessibility of leadership around the world.
We also saw in our in our research – and we regularly see at this point – we’ve trained over 400 000 people across two thousand companies. We regularly see that tip over effect into personal life and not just the workplace.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had individuals after workshops, you know when we see that line after the workshop, whether it’s a live or virtual one people will say things like hey. I use this model that you gave me for.
You know addressing conflict. I use this with my roommate and finally we’re able to coexist for the first time or we had this one guy. We had this Workshop called effective one-on-ones and it’s essentially how to transform your conversations that are one-on-one with your direct reports into uh.
These kind of like engagement, amplifiers, so we’re not just doing status reports, I’m helping you walk away, feeling more clarity, more autonomy, more motivation, things like that. It’S very focused on the workplace.
There’S this one guy. After the workshop he said I printed out this template and I use it every month with my wife and we have a one-on-one for us as a couple when we talk about how are we doing what feedback do we have for each other? You know, and and usually it’s not quite so tool based – usually you just see it in the form of less toxic stress, more curiosity, more ease of collaboration and communication, but sometimes people literally will print out their worksheet put it on their refrigerator and they apply it To you know how they interact with the people in their personal lives, which I find incredibly important, we think of the workplace as this like microcosm, if you’re, if you’re miserable at work, you come home and everything’s, fine, no you’re, still the same person and that that Stress that you know that sense of Injustice, all of the things that can happen when leaders aren’t effective at their jobs.
It spills over. It’S like this toxic waste that spills into the water that we’re all drinking and then the flipping is true, of course, as well. You know you have people who are leading through Clarity and compassion and amplifying your Effectiveness, and then we become the kinds of people that bring that into our communities.
Oh, I agree with you totally and I’m grinning. I I’ve had a number of instances, and I count these as one of my own personal victories for my coaching work is is when I have a client come into a session, and I can always tell when this is getting ready to happen.
They come because they have this really sheepish, look and and they’ll say you know what we talked about last time. I think you probably picked up on the fact. I didn’t necessarily agree with you and but I went home and I talked to my spouse about it during dinner, and I was told absolutely your coach is right.
Listen to what he’s saying. Yes, it’s so true, I mean yeah and it goes it. It’S not like you know, you go into the workplace and I just started watching that show Severance. You know when you, when they slice essentially themselves into and there’s your work self and there’s your your personal life self.
It doesn’t even spoiler alert, it doesn’t even work in the show in this fictional reality. Of course, it’s not going to work in our reality. No, it really doesn’t yeah, and you know to that point. Uh I’ve actually changed my own vocabulary.
People for many years talked about the the search for work-life balance and I’ve abolished that phrase from my vocabulary now, or at least try to I I I suggest people consider something more in terms of a blend or a Harmony, so much more efficient yeah.
Exactly yes, can you I mean I I think I know exactly you know where you’re coming from, but can you speak more to that because I think it’s a little taboo to not believe in the kinds of the ultimate conundrum, with the whole world clock balance and Even when I became an advocate of it to help leaders account for that in the in their frame of reference, there was always the sense.
Well, balance means give and take you know you you raise something up, you got to take something down and – and you literal you know, balance on a fulcrum is, is that give and take? And that’s not reality from a personal standpoint us as individual human beings? We are one person um, even seeing your visual, it’s like treating work in life as other independent versus interdependent, exactly and and the fact that we show up either at home or at work.
It’S it’s a question of focus, not uh adjustment and and um. You know, arguably, when you show up at work, you need to have a level of focus on what the work’s about when you’re at home. Hopefully, you’re focused on matters of the home and you’re, not distracted by thinking about work, and that’s where that conundrum comes in the interesting thing and and the whole covid pandemic.
Lockdown really accelerated the emphasis on this right. People were forced with establishing that Harmony, and yet they were cohabiting, the same space right, husbands and wives and kids and everything was going on at the same time.
So there was no give and take per se um. You had to figure out a Harmony and a balance there and I think it’s it’s constant in the sense that balance implies. If I put a little bit on the side of the scale and a little bit on that side of the scale – and I can get it just right and the reality is in one of the reasons I also lean on you know, the concept of Harmony is That it is a process, a continuous process where you have to keep um intending to it.
Almost like a practice. There’S a a business scholar who wrote in the 1920s named Mary Parker Follett, who I we can have a conversation just about the things she had already figured out in the 1920s that were just starting to catch up on today, and one of the things that she Talked about is this idea of integration or unifying being a continuous process? There’S no such there’s.
No such thing as I’ve got the balance right. I’Ve figured it out or we work together. Well, as a team. Now we’re done, or my leadership is already effective, and I’m done as all of the things around us change and these days they’re changing so fast that you know how do you even prepare for the next day? It’S the verb of constantly getting to a place of Harmony versus the noun of I’ve, got balance done, and I think that’s something that’s so important to keep in mind, because otherwise we feel like we’re failing constantly at balance, because it seems like it’s a thing that You finish and walk away from yeah.
Well I’ll, tell you what Tanya you know I I could do this all day long and thoroughly enjoy it, but uh for the for the sake of what we’re trying to do in this show. Here I would like to get to those core elements that your work has identified and hopefully that’ll be some solid takeaways people can get from our discussion here so run us through those key elements that you uncovered in your research sounds good, so the one of the Things we were most excited about is the recognition of eight.
We call them core skills that came up again and again when we study what great managers were doing differently, and this is across multiple countries across multiple company sizes, so I’ll quickly go through those eight and then what I’ll show you is, how we then take them And break them down into what we call behavioral units, because it’s one thing to try to tackle a skill, but a skill is like driving a car.
You can’t just put someone in a car and go drive. You really have to go. Okay, here’s the first step! You look in the rear view, mirror I don’t know I actually. I think I might have confessed this to you before.
I do not drive so I should have used a different analogy, but you, my understanding, is, I grew up in in Brooklyn um. My understanding is that you break it down into small steps and that’s what we’ve done with the leadership skills, so the the eight core skills we’ll give you that go ahead, go ahead.
So number one is uh coaching skills and this honestly, if nothing else, this is the number one Tipping Point skill. So coaching skills is essentially helping someone clarify their own thinking and come to their own conclusions versus telling them what to do so at the heart of it is asking the kinds of questions that will allow someone to take the kind of mess of knowledge that they Already have in their mind and be able to extract Insight from it.
So coaching skills number one number: two we found was feedback skills so being able to learn quickly to calibrate to reset expectations through both giving and receiving feedback. Number three was productivity and prioritization, but truly out of those prioritization increasingly we’re seeing come to the surface.
So that’s when time is scarce when resources are limited. What is truly the most important thing for you to do? Do you know that as a manager, and can you help your team both know what it is and stick to what it is, so coaching feedback prioritization, the fourth one is leading effective one-on-ones.
We were surprised by that one. But again and again what our research found is that managers who were highly effective had this practice of consistently meeting um, sometimes weekly, sometimes every other week, there’s some research that shows that if you meet once a month consistently, it actually has less benefit than not than Just meeting spontaneously, because then people sort of save up their conversations too much, but those consistent one-on-ones are touch points to say how are things going, not just what’s the status of your work, but how are you feeling? What do you need? Are you learning? Are you growing? Do you feel engaged, so those are the first kind of four core.
If you’re going to do nothing else, those four are essential as the complexity of a manager’s role or scope of responsibility grows. The next four that we see are strategic thinking. So not just knowing, what’s most important but being able to anticipate risk being able to diagnose a complex situation essentially being able to anticipate and plan for the future.
Even in the midst of constitution. Thinking meeting facilitation is an interesting one, increasingly we’re seeing the need to both um lead meetings within your team and cross-functionally, and we thought it was like this kind of tactical thing, but actually at the heart of it is, can you gather and integrate diverse perspectives? Can you make sure that everyone is heard and feels heard? Can you drive action through collaboration, and so much of that comes out of meeting skills, leading change that kind of speaks for itself, but when there’s change all around, how do you both get people comfortable with that, but also, how do you mobilize a group to be Able to shift how they’re doing things in a really you know consistent and effective way, and then the last one is systematically developing people.
So, of course, coaching conversations feedback conversations they do sort of um consistent lightweight development, but what we’ve noticed is that really effective managers are also thinking ahead and going what skills are missing on my team? What’S my succession plan, how do I make sure that people are both learning in ways that are engaging to them and filling the skill gaps that we have today and that I anticipate having in the future? So those are the eight uh and there’s so many other skills out there, of course, but truly when resources are limited, when time is limited, what we’ve seen is that people get good at these Tipping Point skills and it’s like it.
It tips over into so many other challenges and situations. If I’m really good at feedback skills, I don’t need to take a conflict resolution or a negotiation Workshop. I mean I can it’s great to keep learning, but my feedback skills are solid.
It’S going to tip over into handling conflict, difficult conversations, negotiation. Even things like delegation stems from being able to uh, develop and hone those feedback skills. I love it. I love it.
So do me a favor and repeat those first four that you counted as a primary core yeah. First for private yeah, primary colors, coaching feedback, prioritization and leading effective one-on-ones. You know, as you were saying, those one of the things that I thought about, especially on the prioritization one, and – and this is one that I see – small business owners suffer quite a bit – is the ability to prioritize, because everything feels urgent Everything feels important.
They have their hands in everything and they’re. Trying to one of their biggest struggles is elevating above the The Fray and, as the popular phrase goes learn how to work on the business not in the business.
Yeah yeah, and I think that art of prioritization is a big one. But from a from an execution standpoint to know and understand, the concept of prioritization is one thing, but to do it is something totally different.
Absolutely and I’ve actually got some folks. I’Ve been working with that. I’Ve encouraged them to try and exercise, and that is to the extent they’ve already identified their five or six biggest priorities for the near term.
I think I posed the question to him. How are you going to work on it? What are you going to do about it and, okay, you did great work identifying them. I agree with you, you know they all fit, they make sense.
But how are you going to do it and it came down to their ability to get the junk out of their head and the noise out of their head and find time in every day to chip away at the big things the big rocks and the the Bigger it feels the more overwhelming it is the more.
This is where the psychology is really useful. So often we end up not doing the big important things, because it ends up getting our cortisol levels. Our stress levels up when our stress levels go up.
We have a negative association with that big thing and then intentionally or usually unintentionally, we procrastinate and procrastination is often a sign that you haven’t broken it down into small enough components to not have that overwhelm.
So you can really kind of befriend that procrastination, because it could be this wonderful alert for your brain, telling you. Ah okay, it means I’m looking at it as too large a chunk. What is a small tiny chunk that I could break it into so that I can actually make progress because there’s an emotional psychological component to it? It’S like.
We know we should be doing it, but we don’t yeah. I agree with you, I think prioritization. You know it used to be, I would say if we were talking even two years ago, I would say coaching and feedback most most most important and still I I do believe that, but in terms of where there is most pain and struggle right now, I think It’S within the realm of prioritization things are just moving so fast, there’s so much fear, there’s so much urgency.
Even if you look at what happens in our brains when stress levels go up, our peripheral vision Narrows physically Narrows, and so we just just do the thing. That’S right in front of us, or we do the thing that is, you know my quick win or I do the thing that some I’m so tired that I’m just going to do the thing that someone just asked me for, and that is really quite dangerous, because Then you are just wasting the resources that you have um, so I think that’s such an important one for readers today.
Well, it is compounded by again what we started with talking about the complexity and velocity of work, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve I’ve gone into a middle manager’s office and he’s here she is shaking their head going.
I just got out of another meeting with my boss, and I said: okay, what happened and they’ll say well, the things I thought were my last 10 priorities now have all been jumbled again and I’ve been given three more and now they’ve been all bumped up and The whole – and it’s just this ongoing sense of frustration that I can’t make progress toward accomplishing something because the goal posts keep moving.
I share a few quick tools, yeah this behavioral units. So absolutely I think that what you’re bringing up a spot on as as the challenges um. So if you just really simple, quick tools that we’ve seen kind of have small change, big impact, one is this model called mit’s.
Most important thing sounds silly simple, but what we find is that if you just get in the habit of saying hold on, let me pause what are my most important things? What are my most mits for whatever it is this week for this month, for this quarter? Just even having that vocabulary, like with my own team, we’ll often start our meetings with.
Are we still aligned on mits or what’s your mits this week or if someone says hey you’re, working on these three things? I have this Force thing. You can pause and go of these four. What is the actual MIT um one of the things that is incredibly useful when it comes to stack ranking? Oh sorry, when it comes to prioritization is stack ranking, so most people go.
How important is this you know. Is this, how urgent is this and then it’s all urgent and it’s all important, the real art of prioritization? Is you put those three or four things on a list and then you rate rank them, not rate them, but rank them in order of priority, and that is also really important discipline.
If someone comes to you and says, hey do this thing you can go absolutely. I want to, you know, make sure that we’re doing the most important things, here’s my list of three: where would you put this list? Would you put this on top of the others? Would you put it on the bottom of the others, and it’s just it’s a it’s a way to really co-create a reality around the fact that we can’t do all the things and then create this sort of forced alignment around which of these things are we actually Treating as most important so just that, like stack, ranking and mits, I like that, and you know that sounds very similar to a methodology that I coach and a colleague of mine actually introduced me to this many years ago.
He actually worked for me in my banking days and then we’ve stayed friends and colleagues ever since um. It’S something called the big five and – and it ties into your for your notion of feedback for your employees and what what the big five methodology says is a manager does it for himself, but he also in asks his team that at the first of the month, The first five days of the month give me a list of your perception of your five priorities for the new month, but I also want you to identify in the second list what you believe your five accomplishments were last month: um, oh that’s great, and then you Have that feedback meeting and – and you look at this list and that’s a chance for the manager to look at the priority list and say love it love it.
No number three here tell you what let’s table that I want you to bump that down in the ranking, and I want you to do this other thing. Instead, yes and employee can go okay, do I have questions or not giving Clarity and you have that discussion and then they can go off and they have their agenda for the month.
That’S great. I love that and having it written down, sounds so simple, but it makes huge difference because then you can keep coming back to it and you go. Is this still? It has anything, changed it’s okay, if it’s changed, but but let’s talk about it, I even have seen people have a not priority list, which I think is incredibly useful.
So you actually have a list that says I will not do these things unless the you know the other five are done. These are we’re deliberately agreeing not a priority, and the side comes from the word for to cut off right, the Latin for cut off, and it’s so much of being able to handle the pace of today is to be really good at cutting and to be able To say, yes, I’m doing this, no I’m not doing this, and – and you know the what the research shows is – that organizations that have a smaller number of priorities consistently outperform in terms of Revenue, growth companies that have a larger number of priorities, so both on a Macro level and on a micro level, you know micro level, it’s so sad to be incredibly productive, incredibly busy and feel like a failure every day, because you still feel like you have just as much work to do today, as you did yesterday on a macro level.
Companies really suffer when you know you’re you’re. I learned the expression recently and digging for well in 100 digging for water in a hundred places versus digging one one. You know deep well where you can actually hit the water yeah.
I like that, and that may be a good one to put a bow on this show I um I do know our time’s up, but this has been uh phenomenal, set of content and Tanya, and I really appreciate you sitting in tell everybody how they can get A hold of you if they’re looking for more information, sure thanks so a training.
Our website is called life. Labslearning.Com lifebobslearning.com. We have a book out that breaks down our research. It’S called The Leader Lab Core skills to become a great manager faster and if you are interested in any of the other work that I’m doing my website is tanyaluna.
com t-a-n-i-a. Just to confuse you luna.com tanya.com great well again, thank you so much for sharing this uh. You and I do think we – we share a lot of common threads here and I look forward to maybe figuring out how we can do some work together in the future.
I think this is good stuff. That’S great! Our soapboxes will stay together, yeah yeah. Definitely thank you, but folks with that we’re going to wrap it up here and let you have your day back and uh. I do always like to remind you at this point in the show that, if you’re listening on your favorite streaming service, we do have a video version of this over on YouTube channel by the same name.
Leadership, powered by Common Sense, hop over there subscribe, give us a thumbs up thumbs down whatever. I always tell people, I’m a big boy. I can take it if you need to correct something. I said: let’s open the discussion, love to hear it, but the bottom line is.
I hope this has been helpful for you, if you’re in a position of authority and you’re struggling with what it means to be a good leader, take a listen again and maybe play this back another time and and reach out to Tanya or me and either one.
If, if we can give you any help in your own leadership, development Journey, so for now we’re going to sign off, say goodbye and have a great day hope to see you again real soon take care foreign you’ve been listening to leadership, powered by Common Sense, hosted By Doug Thorpe, if you would like to know more about the coaching and advisory Services, he provides visit, dougthorpe.
com
