5

Lies About Learning to Lead

Terry Traut

There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This quote by Mark Twain, who attributed it to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, forms the basis of this chapter on lies about learning to lead:

   Learning to lead people is easy—that’s the lie.

   I don’t need leadership development because I’m already a good leader—that’s the damned lie.

   I subscribe to the [pick a leadership guru or program] approach of leadership—that’s the statistically short-lived delusion.

This chapter is about learning to lead. I’ll discuss the lies some leaders use to avoid leadership development and what we, as proponents of effective leadership and as training practitioners, can do to help leaders learn to lead and manage people effectively.

Lie #1: Lie—Learning to Lead Is Easy

Let’s face it—leading is not easy. For many of us it’s not natural. In fact, for many of us in leadership positions, leadership wasn’t a career choice or something we considered majoring in at college. Most of us who have assumed—or been bestowed—a leadership position probably stood out for being great autonomous, independent contributors or for being more technically capable and harder working than our peers. One day we got promoted, and we suddenly found ourselves with the title of team leader or supervisor and thought in our naïve, unknowing way: “How hard can this leadership stuff be? It must be easy! If those people [pointing upward in hierarchy] can do it, surely I can do it as well.”

Well, leading may be simple, but it’s certainly not easy. Why? Because the characteristics that made us successful and helped us earn that promotion are not necessarily what’s needed to be a good leader, according to Marshall Goldsmith, co-author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007). In fact, they are likely to make the transition to leadership more difficult.

Leaders have to get things done through others, so their individual technical prowess, attitude, and drive doesn’t matter nearly as much as that of the team. In truth, it’s likely that few employees can match the new leader’s capabilities or passion for the work. That’s probably why the leader was promoted in the first place and his peers weren’t. But many new leaders end up alienating their teams out of frustration over what is perceived as a lack of skill or initiative. Or they may simply end up doing the work themselves, since no one can do it as well or as fast as they can. More often than not, this leads to failure as a leader.

Helping teams develop, engage, and perform is what new leaders are all about now. But no one ever (or rarely) takes first-time leaders aside and shows them how to lead. No one ever tells them that their individual skills, which made them what they are today, are no longer as important—that getting others to excel is now what matters.

The shift in what skills are important is often the greatest hurdle leaders face—and what we in leadership development must first, and continuously, address. Making this shift is akin to looking at one of those 3-D pictures. With concentrated effort—and a bit of squinting—you might be able to tease the 3-D picture of dolphins or a cityscape from the abstract. Then poof, the 3-D image is gone. Shifting a new leader’s perspective about what is now important is equally challenging, but it is the necessary first step in development.

The shift occurs at each transition in a leader’s journey up the organizational ladder, as Ram Charan and his co-authors point out in The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (2007). From supervisor of individual contributors to manager of managers to business unit leader to C-level leader, each transition first requires a shift in values and in what is important for success in each role.

There are two main reasons why learning to lead is not easy: First, learning to lead initially requires unlearning. And second, leading is a messy business.

“But how hard can it be?” you ask. “I’ve seen people lead; I’ve been led.” That’s the equivalent of saying: “I can be an effective parent because I was a kid once.” Not true.

Learning to lead requires rewiring the brain. It requires that leaders unlearn many of the behaviors that have become engrained in who they are. Leaders can’t rely on technical ability; they must ensure that their teams have the technical capabilities they need to succeed. Leaders can no longer rely on their own initiative to carry the day; they need to inspire and motivate others to demonstrate the initiative and drive their teams’ need to achieve their collective goals. Leaders no longer have the luxury of managing just themselves and their own little quirks; they are now responsible for dealing with the quirks and idiosyncrasies of their direct reports. That’s a messy, complicated thing.

And guess what. Most new leaders inherit teams hired by someone else. Messy. And many leaders were part of the team they now manage. Doubly so.

Leading would be easier if it weren’t for the people. And learning to lead, by extension, would also be a piece of cake. Unfortunately, it’s filled with all the messiness and unpredictability that comes from working with people. And that’s also what makes leading, which is arguably the most fulfilling job in the world, so difficult—if it were easy, anyone could do it.

And so that is why leadership development is so important. We all have thoughts about what it takes to lead—“I need to be strong,” “I need to be charismatic,” “I need to have the answers”—and many of them are simply wrong.

In the end, effective leaders must:

   Link organizational goals to individual contributions. Effective leaders need to ensure that their employees know that what they do is meaningful and how it contributes to the greater good.

   Support people as they contribute to organizational goals. Sometimes this support can be a pat on the back or a kick in the pants. Sometimes it’s recognizing when to train employees and when to offer feedback, coaching, or stretch assignments. There are thousands of ways to provide support, and effective leaders need to know them all. This is what makes leading challenging—and rewarding.

   Connect with people. Effective leaders must be seen as authentic and trustworthy—and secure in their roles. Connecting with people not only builds human capital and trust, but it also enables work to get done.

   Delegate effectively. Effective leaders need to delegate—not only to get work done, but also to develop the skills and confidence of team members. New leaders often struggle with delegating, thinking that it is easier and faster to do the work themselves. Not true. Leaders need to delegate the appropriate responsibility—ensuring that the person has a good chance of succeeding, while not putting the team at risk.

   Have the tough conversations when needed. And by extension, do so in a way that improves performance and increases loyalty and commitment. When team members know that their leader cares about them and their performance, team effectiveness skyrockets. Strong leaders emerge when confronted with challenges.

For the most part, everything leaders do is in support of these five competencies. So leaders learning to lead should focus on these critical leadership activities first and foremost.

As a leader learning to lead, here is a proven path to success:

   Learn how to analyze employee performance and then provide what employees need to succeed. Team members need clear expectations and ongoing feedback. They need resources and tools. They need skills and knowledge (training). They need meaningful consequences (positive and negative). They need help in setting and resetting priorities.

   Learn how to communicate and connect with employees. Everything is easier—more efficient and more effective—when employees trust their leaders and feel connected with them and the organization. Without this connection, some important things like coaching and engagement often just aren’t possible.

   Learn how to provide positive and constructive feedback. Then do it—a lot. Feedback is to improving employee performance as a GPS is to reaching a desired location, continually reassuring when the employee is on the right path, while immediately but gently “recalculating” when the employee has veered off course.

   Learn when to coach to take good performance to great (and build employee engagement) and when to have those difficult conversations to take unacceptable performance to acceptable. They are very different conversations. Leaders need to learn the difference.

   Learn how to coach effectively. In a business environment, telling isn’t coaching. Leaders need to use questions to encourage employee self-assessment; this builds a critical skill in the employee, but also helps develop a culture of continuous improvement.

Those responsible for developing leaders have an additional challenge: not only must your leadership development program include these skills (and others as necessary for your organization), but it must also present these skills in a way that is relevant, simple, easy to adopt, and immediately applicable to the job. Moreover, because leadership development doesn’t only happen in a classroom, opportunities for practice and feedback on the job must be built in.

Learning and developing these competencies will put new leaders squarely on the road to effective leadership. But new leaders still must apply them—and reflect on them—day in and day out to shift their perspective of what’s now important and to hone their craft. Which brings us to our next lie.

Lie #2: Damned Lie—I Don’t Need Leadership Development

“I already know how to lead.” “I went through leadership training X years ago (or at my previous job); why do I need to go again?” “I must be doing a good job because no one’s told me otherwise.” All are variations of the same concept—or lie—that leaders don’t need leadership development.

One irony of leadership is that when workers are thrust into a leadership position, their ability to assess their own effectiveness declines dramatically. While they may be able to measure their team’s sales or evaluate projects completed on time and under budget, their ongoing success is based largely on how they got those results. They may have made their numbers, but did they burn up their team? Is the team demoralized or disengaged? Often we really don’t know as leaders. Employees often don’t want to jeopardize their jobs by pointing out their leader’s shortcomings; the leader’s leader sees the numbers and, as long as there is no smoke, assumes everything is fine. And often leaders don’t want to know what complaints their people may have because they wouldn’t know how to fix them.

Studies suggest that managers may have an overinflated perception of how they are performing. A recent article, “Leaders Behaving Badly,” suggests that leaders aren’t leading (Frasch 2013). Specifically, of the 1,279 employees surveyed:

   49 percent say their leaders never or only sometimes ask for their ideas to help solve problems.

   47 percent say their leaders never or only sometimes help them solve problems without simply doing it for them.

   45 percent say their managers never or only sometimes give sufficient feedback on their performance.

Less than half of the surveyed employees feel as though they’re being led. And my experience at Entelechy in conducting 360-degree leadership surveys as part of our leadership development programs backs up those statistics. Often, leaders are surprised by the disconnection between how they thought they were doing and how their employees thought they were doing. In many cases, the disconnection unnerves the leader, because the feedback may be scathing. But in other cases, the disconnection is pleasantly surprising—the leader is doing better than expected, based on employee responses. Unnerving or surprising, the fact that a disconnection exists at all is telling: Leaders simply don’t know how they are doing.

Leigh Branham, in “The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave,” wrote: “The keys to keeping and engaging employees are no big mystery, yet so many managers just don’t see it” (Branham 2005). He draws from extensive research of exit interviews to highlight seven hidden reasons that employees leave a company. One reason most employees (60 percent of those interviewed) leave is because they believe they did not receive enough coaching and feedback. In contrast, I’d guess that most of the managers of those employees would say that they coached and provided enough regular feedback.

Marshall Goldsmith often claims that there is one thing that effective leaders do that other leaders don’t: They build mechanisms to assess how they are performing, whether it’s 360-degree surveys or one-on-one discussions with employees to ask what they can do to help the employees be more effective in their role. And Goldsmith suggests that the truly brave—and most effective—leaders invite employees to help them improve what they are working on. Companies could save billions of dollars on leadership development, Goldsmith believes, if their leaders simply asked for input (he calls it “feedforward”) on their performance.

So when leaders claim that “I must be leading well because nobody’s said anything to the contrary,” it’s a damned lie. When developing your leadership development plan, be sure to build in opportunities for leaders to receive input and feedback on their performance. And then teach your leaders how to overcome those built-in blind spots using feedforward or a similar technique.

Leaders often also claim that “I just went to leadership training a couple years ago; why do I need to go again?” That’s akin to “I went to the gym last month, so I’m good.” Effective leadership is a process of continuous development that requires ongoing attention. One Entelechy client, a CFO, explained it this way: “I have to get recertified in accountancy every year and attend training as part of that recertification. Leading people is at least as important—and 2.4 times more difficult—as determining EBITDA.” Something is wrong with this picture.

Even if you did take a leadership course years ago, we fall out of good habits. Think about your last diet. It probably started well. You may have even lost some weight. But like most dieters, you eventually started to slip. And then one day you’re out of the routine entirely.

Leadership development is a lot like that. You go to training and learn some nifty techniques to diligently apply back on the job. You see some positive results, and all is good. Then projects start to back up, quarterly reports are due, and the stress mounts. You resort to old habits, doing what you’ve always done—and getting what you’ve always gotten. To turn leadership skills into leadership habits, you need support, and ongoing leadership development is your support.

For those in charge of leadership development, consider these suggestions to address the lie leaders tell when they say they don’t need leadership development:

   Complete an annual 360-degree survey as a tool to refocus attention on critical leadership skills. Marshall Goldsmith claims that what separates great leaders from good leaders is that great leaders understand the effect their behaviors have on others and also know how to change those behaviors. A 360-degree survey is a great tool for identifying behaviors that may be weighing others down and hurting performance.

   Ensure that leadership training is current. Those in leadership development shouldn’t rehash the same old stuff. They should make the training worthwhile and focus on today’s leadership challenges in the organization. What is your organization’s current business challenge? Is it working more efficiently? Is it engaging and retaining high-potential employees? Is it reducing waste and improving quality? Just as leaders need a refresher from time to time, so too do your leadership development programs and strategies.

   Look beyond traditional event-based leadership development and make leadership development a process. Launching a new product? Build in a leadership component on evaluating the sales strategy and high-value customer needs. Reorganizing departments? Build in a leadership component on facilitating change. Reporting quarterly earnings? Build in a leadership component on communicating the company’s vision. Having a company picnic? Build in a leadership component on relaying employee recognition. Capitalize on any opportunity to engage leaders in learning. Any time is a good time to develop leaders.

Lie #3: Statistical Lie—I Subscribe to the [Pick a Leadership Guru or Commercial Product] Approach to Leadership

Don’t you love it when leaders come back from the latest leadership seminar featuring the current leadership guru? Then for the next couple months, you have to suffer through the oddball terms and obscure techniques that your boss learned at leadership camp until things settle back to normal (not better, just normal).

The most alluring lie about learning to lead is that we’re doing the right things to create better leaders. According to industry-watchers Bersin & Associates, U.S. businesses spent $13.6 billion on leadership development in 2012, a 14 percent increase from the previous year (O’Leonard and Loew 2012). That’s a lot of money. So shouldn’t it have a measurable, meaningful impact on employee retention, engagement, and performance and company achievement of goals? You would think. But employee polls continue to conflict with what you would expect from such an investment. And I think those of us who work in leadership development are partly to blame.

We often sabotage leadership development by overlooking context. Instead of determining what our leaders need, we identify the latest leadership book and invite the guru to talk to our leaders. In a McKinsey Quarterly article “Why Leadership Development Programs Fail,” the authors explain, “Too many training initiatives we come across rest on the assumption that one size fits all and that the same group of skills or style of leadership is appropriate regardless of strategy, organizational culture, or CEO mandate” (Gurdjian, Halbeisen, and Lane 2014).

Successful leadership development programs use consistent language throughout and have simple, yet effective, models. This is to avoid creating “Frankenleaders,” a term coined by writer (and leadership guru himself) Marcus Buckingham. His article, “The Frankenleader Fad,” describes the Frankenleader as the monster that’s created when disjointed—and often conflicting—approaches, techniques, and theories are used during leadership development (Buckingham 2005).

To be clear, I am not criticizing gurus and their books—many are amazing (and my company has created training for 60 of them, including Warren Bennis, Jack Welch, Marshall Goldsmith, and Mike Abrashoff). Each guru carves out a unique and compelling facet of leadership, and each has his place, given the right organization facing the right challenges at the right time. But none alone provides the broad-based foundation of critical leadership skills required in a successful leadership development program.

We also overlook context by relying too heavily on commercial leadership development products. Jay Conger and Douglas Ready, in their paper Why Leadership Development Efforts Fail, cite what they call the “productization of leadership development” as a leading cause of leadership development failure (Conger and Ready 2003). Searching for quick fixes, we often rely on commercial leadership development products with limited relevance to our needs. We focus more on just using the products than on solving our problems. For a leadership development program to have a lasting, meaningful impact, the program needs relevance, simplicity, and—most of all—organizational alignment.

The whitepaper Leadership Training That Sticks offers 22 lessons from the past 21 years that can help organizations create lasting leadership change and sustained business impact (Traut 2014). While simple, the suggestions for successful leadership development require a concerted, orchestrated effort within the organization. Successful leadership development programs start at the top, with executive support and organizational alignment. Such programs must have buy-in and support at all levels of the organization; the message up and down the organization must be: “This is the way we lead.” While an organization’s products are known by their brand, the organization itself is known by its leadership and culture: People are attracted to organizations with strong leadership, and it’s why they stay and engage.

Successful leadership development programs focus on challenges the organization faces and the explicit goals it wants to reach. Leadership development is about helping the organization grow through its people.

The lie that those in charge of leadership development are doing it right by consulting only leadership experts and commercial products is convincing because a lot of time and money is being invested in them. These experts and programs deliver training—sometimes really slick training—and their mantras are fairly easy to implement and even easier to sell. After all, what leader doesn’t want to sit at the feet of a guru? Or participate in a multimodal, technology-infused whiz-bang leadership flight simulator? But it’s important to remember that these gurus and products are not always the right thing for leaders in all organizations.

Conclusion

I haven’t addressed all the fibs, white lies, half-truths, and errors of omission about learning to lead here, but I have discussed the three big ones and provided suggestions for dealing with them.

Learning to lead is easy. While leading at its core is fairly simple, changing our engrained (and often misguided) behaviors and beliefs—ones that have undeniably worked to our advantage for years—is not easy. To address this lie—that learning to lead is in fact easy—those responsible for developing leaders should outline the expected behavior at each leadership level; expectations of frontline leaders differ from those of midlevel leaders. They should train leaders on how to shift their perspectives on what’s important in their new roles. They should link training directly to expectations by using scenarios that leaders face regularly at their companies. They should use simple, adaptable, and practical models in the training because leaders don’t have enough time to break down more complex, theoretical models. And they should provide structured on-the-job support to ensure that models and techniques are, in fact, used—and continue to be used—on the job.

I don’t need leadership development. Leadership positions often come with blindness. Fewer people want to, or are able to, provide meaningful feedback on how leaders are performing as they climb the leadership ladder. To address this lie—that leaders don’t need additional leadership development—those responsible for developing leaders should implement some feedback processes, such as 360-degree (or 180-degree) assessments, to provide leaders with the input they need to succeed. Or if leaders aren’t ready for such a direct form of input, those responsible for developing them should consider an organization-wide survey that provides more general input on leadership effectiveness. They should use the feedback to focus training on current challenges as part of the core leadership development program. And they should teach leaders how to ask for input in a way that demonstrates openness to continuous improvement.

I subscribe to the [pick a leadership guru or commercial product] approach to leadership. Basing a leadership development strategy on a leadership guru or a commercial product can create Frankenleaders out of disjointed and competing approaches, techniques, and theories. To address this lie—that the teachings of leadership gurus and their products should be implemented blindly—those responsible for developing leaders should seek out (if internal development is not an option) a tried and tested leadership development program that can be modified to fit the organization’s culture and focus on organizational challenges. If purchasing a commercial product is the only option, they should make sure that it can grow and evolve as the organization changes and as the leadership focus evolves. And they should be judicious and deliberate in augmenting leadership development with books and presentations by leadership gurus. Instead of simply subscribing to the leadership guru of the day, they should make sure that the guru’s theories don’t conflict with the leadership development foundation already in place.

Training is one of the most rewarding industries. And training leaders is especially rewarding, because it cascades down the organizational chain: Well-developed, effective leaders have more confidence and success and thus their employees have more self-confidence, are more engaged with their work, and contribute more to their companies. Great employees join great companies led by great leaders. Their careers are more fulfilling when the organization abounds with great leaders—leaders who have learned to lead through great leadership development programs.

Having trained leaders at all levels since 1992, I understand the challenges of this important work. But take heart, organizational success—through leadership development—is truly in our hands.

References

Branham, L. 2005. “The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave.” Executive Update. The Center for Association Leadership, February. www.asaecenter.org/Resources/EUArticle.cfm?ItemNumber=11514.

Buckingham, M. 2005. “The Frankenleader Fad.” Fast Company, September 1. www.fastcompany.com/54132/frankenleader-fad.

Charan, R., S. Drotter, and J. Noel. 2007. The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Conger, J.A., and D.A. Ready. 2003. Why Leadership Development Efforts Fail. CEO Publication, May. Los Angeles: University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business, Center for Effective Organizations.

Frasch, K.B. 2013. “Leaders Behaving Badly.” Human Resource Executive Online, October 31. www.hreonline.com/HRE/view/story.jhtml?id=534356316&.

Goldsmith, M., and M. Reitner. 2007. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. New York: Hyperion.

Gurdjian, P., T. Halbeisen, and K. Lane. 2014. “Why Leadership Development Programs Fail.” McKinsey Quarterly, January. www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/why_leadership-development_programs_fail.

O’Leonard, K., and L. Loew. 2012. Bersin & Associates Leadership Development Factbook. Oakland, CA: Bersin & Associates.

Traut, T. 2014. Leadership Training That Stinks. Merrimack, NH: Entelechy.