Dear Friend, Subscriber and Circular Leader,
We all know good leadership when we experience it, don’t we? We feel heard and supported, trusted and inspired. Our team comes together and works better than it ever has. We remember these leaders for a long time.
One researcher found that only 13% of managers fit this category. These are the people who simultaneously build a results-driven team that’s also engaged and fun to work in.
But why are they so rare? Are they simply one end of the normal bell curve? Is it just too difficult for managers to support people and get them to perform well?
Or is there another answer?
You, Circular Leader, already know there’s another reason. Like you, The Circular CEO thinks good leaders are made, not born. And I think we agree that we need to make a whole lot more!
Dr. Philippa Hardman is a leading expert on how to build effective training courses. We were recently discussing leadership courses and why so many organizations, who spend billions of dollars a year on them, are so dissatisfied. This is what we came up with:
There’s too much content and complexity.
They’re too theoretical and they often don’t apply to the specific challenges at hand.
They’re not interactive enough.
They don’t reconcile the tension between people and performance.
These issues arise when courses are designed to teach stuff rather than to help people learn. That’s a very important difference. Leadership courses magnify the effect of poor design because they profoundly impact both team productivity and the quality of people’s work experience.
Poorly designed leadership courses don’t just waste money
Too much content makes it seem like managing people is far more difficult than it really is. It seems daunting when there’s so much to remember.
It’s almost impossible to master skills from theory alone. Managers need a chance to try out new things in a safe place otherwise they’re left experimenting—and making mistakes—with their staff.
Leadership means working with people. Good courses are interactive and dynamic. They encourage a collaborative experience.
Human relationships at work are always a balance between performance and people. Too often, though, the balance is implicitly—sometimes explicitly—framed as an either/or choice rather than a both/and approach.
A poorly designed leadership course is an opportunity lost. It wastes the organisation’s money. It wastes the participants’ time. Worst of all, the full potential of the leader’s team remains undiscovered and undeveloped.
What would a well-designed leadership course look like…
…and why would it be better? Dr. Hardman and I determined that a great leadership course would be more practical and more collaborative, and it would integrate a team’s performance goals with its member’s human dynamics.
Before we get into our redesigned course, let’s start with an overview of what a leader does. The following points have grown out of the most recent research which helps to make things simpler.
A leader needs to know how their people are feeling.
A leader needs to know how this relates to productivity.
A leader needs to know how to support their people in a way that unlocks their productivity potential.
With these things in mind, let’s re-think our leadership course framework:
Make it about their team and their concerns.
Let’s figure out a way to identify each leader’s key objectives and challenges. How do they affect the team? What do they prevent the team from doing? What would the team achieve if the objectives and challenges could be solved?Use less content. W-a-y less content.
Our job as course designer is to select just the content we need to make our point and no more. All that other content? Add it to a section called, “Further reading for those who are interested.”Facilitate discussions that solve problems.
Use as much classroom time as possible to get small groups of participants discussing their challenges using the content you’ve just shared. You’ve now made the course practical, collaborative and fun.Encourage solutions that are both/and rather than either/or.
The latest workplace research and the finest workforce analytics clearly show that challenges are best solved by taking a people-first approach. Teams that out-perform in the medium- and long-term have leaders who support them. Their productivity, innovation, retention and capacity for change are all higher. This is what leadership in the workplace is all about.
Good leadership significantly improves every team metric from performance to retention. Let’s rethink our leadership training programs in 2023.
BTW, you can see what Dr. Hardman and I came up with for a radically improved leadership course here.