Episode 133 - From Good to Better

[00:00:06] Welcome to the Leadership window podcast with Dr. Patrick Jenks. Each week through a social sector lens, Patrick interviews leaders and experts and puts us in touch with trends and tips for leading effectively. Patrick is a board certified executive coach, a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, a best selling author, award winning photographer, and a professional speaker. And now, here's Dr. Patrick Jinks. [00:00:30] Happy spring, boys and girls. Sorry for the delay. It's been a while since we had an episode. This is episode 133 of the Leadership Window. Glad you're along. Yeah. Excuse the delay, man. I've been busy and it's wonderful and I'm loving life and I'm loving the work and we're doing so many cool things with so many amazing organizations and leaders. [00:00:55] We've been to D.C. and Southwest Virginia and back to D.C. and New Orleans, Norfolk, Miami, all over South Carolina and it's been great. And fortunately, we have our first certified adjunct coach in place, Monroe Free. Some of our listeners know Monroe and it's amazing because he's able to help and we're able to serve more people because we've got an extra coach now that's certified. And just even before certification he was, he's so experienced and he's so, he's just wise and he's present with people and he's an amazing coach and I'm, we're so fortunate to have him and so we're glad about that. Real quickly, before we get into the content today, this is a solo episode. We do have some amazing guests that are going to be coming up here over the spring and summer. But today is that day when I just kind of pause and share with you some things that are coming up regularly in my coaching work, things that are on my mind, just sort of some frameworks that I thought I might be able to help you with as you think through how you're leading your teams and your organizations. But just a. I don't do this very often, but I want to pause and take the time to share with you a few of the things that the leader's perspective can help you and your organization with. [00:02:19] If you are a nonprofit organization, we can absolutely help you with strategic planning. And all I will say about that, other than we've done a ton of these and with a lot of success, is that we take a unique approach to strategic planning. We do everything through a coaching lens. [00:02:38] So if you're curious about what that means, how do we do strategic planning with a coaching approach? Give us a, give us a call, shoot us an email, go to our [email protected] and check us out. Reach out to us. If you are any organization, you're in any sector, you're leading a team or you're part of an executive team, there's a lot of things that we can do to support you in your work. We do executive coaching. I am a board certified executive coach and we have a certified adjunct coach as well. We do senior leadership coaching. So individual one on one coaching with members of leadership teams. We do systemic team coaching. I'm also a certified practitioner of systemic team coaching and that is really a different animal. That's where we're coaching your system through the team that is in the system. We coach the team through its leaders. We coach the leaders both one on one and in teams to help team with their purpose, their co creation, their synergy. How is the whole greater than the sum of the parts? How are they functioning on all cylinders and just helping the team be a team? We do culture mapping inside an organization, helping your organization's team determine the culture it wants and articulating that so that it can practice the culture that it wants. We do employee engagement metrics and manager coaching along how they drive employee engagement. And we now of course have the organizational leadership coaching training or O L C T and that is online on Demand. It's a 30 hour coaching training course that you can take to advance your coaching skills, gain a credential and gain 30 hours of required training toward board certifications. Program is approved or accredited by the center for Credentialing and Education to serve as required training hours toward board certification. So if you or a leader in your organization is interested in learning how to apply a coaching discipline, check us out the leaders perspective.com and onto today's content. The advertisement is over now but I just. We don't do that much on the show letting people know who even are we. We're a leadership coaching company so I just wanted to take an opportunity and remind folks of that. In my coaching practice I find several, what I call transitions to be of particular challenge for leaders. [00:05:33] And if you know me and have worked with me, you know I love frameworks and I think it helps people have reference toward what they're trying to achieve. And I'd like to share with you four particular areas that come up in my coaching might inspire you. You might be able to identify with some of these spaces. Plot yourself on the continuums. I'm going to share four continuums with you. This will make sense in a moment. [00:06:01] The first Continuum that I find leaders struggle with particularly early on in their leadership role is the continuum from performer to leader, or to be more specific, to move from being the high individual performer to being a high impact leader. [00:06:26] And it is a tough transition. Many of us came up into leadership roles because we performed well in our functional areas. [00:06:37] We coach obviously a lot of nonprofit leaders. We have nonprofit leaders who were great fundraisers. And so we said, let's, let's make them the resource development director or maybe a CEO. People who are great in finance, people who ran programs very effectively, they were super in the marketing field, whatever, whatever that was, they performed at a high level and now they're in a role of leadership. [00:07:03] And it's one thing to have the functional expertise and talent. If, if you're a great fundraiser and now you're leading a fundraising team, that, that seems to make plenty of sense. It's great, it's a great asset to have. [00:07:17] But when you are a leader, you're being paid to lead, not just raise money. So where's the leadership part of it? How are we developing the people that we lead? How are we exerting influence on the system, the function, the organization, the individuals on the team? Those are leadership tenets. [00:07:46] And I don't need to spend a lot of time on this one, but it is again, particularly for people who are in new leadership roles. They find themselves still performing in the work and it causes a lot of challenges. One, one example, when I'm still in high performer mode, I'm probably not going to be as effective a delegator to my team, but in a leadership role. Now my job's not to do it all. My job is to lead people towards success. [00:08:19] How am I helping to develop them? With new skills, new opportunities, increased competence, greater autonomy, more connection to the work. I can never develop a team of leaders if I'm still in performance mode only and I'm just another member of the team performing some of the work, or worse, all of the work. And the team then doesn't really have a lot of relevance because I'm doing everything. [00:08:49] So one of the things that we say is it's easy to delegate things you don't want to do or that you're not good at, or that you, that shouldn't be on your plate. [00:09:00] What's more difficult to delegate are things we do like doing things we are good at, things we like on our plate, and we think might be appropriate on our plate. Because then the question is, well, who gave me the opportunity to develop those skills? And how will my team members ever learn and grow into these roles if I just continue to do everything and not delegate to them the opportunity? In fact, one of the things we say about delegation is delegate opportunity, not task. [00:09:37] If it feels like a work dump on somebody, hey, I need you to do this because I need it off my plate. So I need you to handle this. That's a work dump. That's delegating a task. But if I'm inviting my team members and team leaders to take initiative, to grow their responsibility, to take leadership of something, that's a different ask. I'm almost delegating significance to them. [00:10:05] So that's just one of those transitions is moving from performer to leader. You say, well, how do I make the transition? You start by having a leadership plan. [00:10:15] Think about this. As a performer, you have a to do list. I need to submit the budget by Thursday. I've got a meeting on Friday with so and so. I've got a prospect call on Monday. I've got to work on this. I've got to do that. We keep our to do list either in outlook or on a piece of paper or a whiteboard, something. But where's the leadership to do list? Where are we planning activity around leadership delegation, around vision casting, around shared leadership, around holistic communication, around assertiveness. [00:10:54] What's our to do list around those things we hear leaders say all the time? I need to be a better communicator as a leader. Well, great. Where are you going to start? What's the to do list around that? [00:11:06] So it's a different thing. It's a different job to be from performer to leader. Now, in a small organization and even in some large ones, you might not have the luxury of just moving from performer to leader, where you get to ditch the performance. You may still have to carry a portfolio of work on your own in addition to leading other team members. But there still has to be some kind of shift. [00:11:33] Otherwise we've changed your title, given your promotion, maybe even a raise. But we might have set you up for a position that you weren't fully prepared for and that you're not growing in. So for leaders of leaders, your question is, how do you help your leaders move from high performance to high impact leadership? So that's, that's transition number one from performer to leader. And it doesn't all happen. You don't flip a switch on Friday night, and then Monday morning you walk in, you turn the switch back on, and suddenly we're leaders. It's a slow burn. It Takes time, but it's critical if you want a culture of leadership inside your organization. And if you are that performer who, for whom this is resonating, ask yourself the question, yeah, how do I add the leadership competencies to, to this? How do I grow as a leader? How do I practice as a leader? What are my drills? What are my. What are my practice modes? When are my next opportunities to apply what I'm learning and what I'm trying to learn as a leader? So, things to keep in mind, here's the second of the four transitions or continuums I'd like to share with you. And it's related, and it's the continuum from invitation to expectation. This is closely related, but it's a little bit different. And in this one, I like to talk about this on three levels, three steps in the continuum from invitation to expectation. And here's what we're referring to. We're talking about leadership initiative. [00:13:14] So I coach a lot of CEOs who have vice presidents or directors that they want to see. Those directors take more leadership initiative, to step up and lead, to step out, to be courageous, even to make mistakes, or just step out there and lead. I'm still feeling like I'm having to push my leaders and I'm having to do for them, and I'm having to this and that. [00:13:38] So there's three levels on which leaders can develop other leaders. The first level is the competence level. [00:13:45] And you have to clear this level. And it simply says, are the people that I'm expecting to take more initiative and lead, are they capable of it? Do they have the core competence, the raw talent? Even if it's. It's not. It's not showing up, it's not online yet, but it can be developed. You have to ask the question, is this person, do they really have the capability to lead, to take initiative, to think strategically, to think critically, to be bold, to cast vision, to give direction to, you know, set the example, all those things, because we all. We will often put people in leadership positions that they're, again, they're great performers, but it does. That alone doesn't make them a great leader. And so oftentimes, we'll put them in a leadership role and give them no leadership training, no leadership development of any kind. We just expect them to be able to lead because they were good at the function. [00:14:55] So we have to clear the competence question. If you've got people on your team that are not stepping up into real leadership initiative and being assertive and stepping into that role, pause and Ask, are they capable of it? Can they do it? Because if they can't, and you don't believe that, they're just not cut out for it. They just don't have the innate qualities they don't have, whether it's the motivation or the ability, then they might be in the wrong position. You might be in a place where you've promoted someone into leadership that isn't prepared to lead. So you gotta pass the competence level. Once you've passed the competence level and you say yes, the people I'm talking about are capable of doing it. They're just not doing it. Now you got to hit the second level, and that is invitation or opportunity. Am I giving my leaders an opportunity to lead something? If I've just elevated them in title, but I'm still doing for them, I'm not really stretching them. They're not really growing as a leader, or worse yet, they're failing as a leader. Their people don't like them or people can't relate to them. Their people are being mismanaged or micromanaged or not managed and. And they just aren't doing it well. The question is, have you given them the opportunity? Again, we're back to delegating opportunity, delegating leadership, delegating significance. [00:16:24] Are you inviting them to lead? [00:16:28] The third level that you really want to get on is the expectation level. And that's the level where people realize. When you work here, when you're in a leadership role here, you're expected to lead. You're not just invited to lead. It's an expectation. [00:16:49] It's. It's the job. And if you're not doing it well, we need to have an accountability conversation. [00:16:56] So you start with opportunity and invitation to give them the opportunity to learn how to lead, how to take initiative, how to fail. Forward to the point where ultimately you create a culture inside your organization where it is expected that our leaders lead. [00:17:15] And when you reach that place of culture, you don't even have to tell your leaders, hey, it's expected of you to lead. They'll feel it, they'll see it in the culture that that's just the expectation. So that's the second continuum from invitation to expectation. That continuum assumes that level one has been cleared, the competence level. But if you want to really create the continuum on a framework, competence is invitation, expectation. Those would be the three pieces of that framework. How are you as a leader developing other leaders on that continuum? It could be that you're the one falling short, that you've not hired the Right, people. [00:18:01] So you can't pass the competence level or that you have good people, but you're not explicitly giving them opportunity or invitation or that you do that, but sporadically and not as a matter of expectation or culture. So your leaders not taking initiative could be on you. [00:18:23] Food for thought continuum number three. [00:18:27] From agreement to commitment. [00:18:31] From agreement to commitment. This is somewhat semantics, but it is more than semantics. [00:18:41] When you agree to do something and when you commit to do something, are those the same thing? They're close, aren't they? They kind of sound the same, but it's different. And the way that it happens most often where it doesn't go beyond agreement is in a team meeting where you're talking about something and you say, you know, we need to do such and such, and everybody nods their head and agrees. I agree, that's a good idea, let's do that. [00:19:10] But you walk out of the meeting having never assigned commitment to it. [00:19:17] There's no specific assigned. Okay, we are going to do it. And here's the first step we are going to take. [00:19:26] And let's check back in on that next week and see where we are. Right. We go from agreement to commitment. I hear it one on one, too. I'll hear coaches. I actually learned this from my coach, Dr. Jim Smith. Well, he was so, so good at this. I think I may have shared this before, but I'll share it because it's just so inspiring. He will listen to a coachee on a call say things like, yeah, I think I probably need to start, you know, thinking about, give getting some more training for my team. [00:20:02] And he will say, oh, that sounds really good. Can I reflect back the words I just heard? Oh, sure, sure. Well, I just heard. I think I probably need to start thinking about maybe getting some training. Are you hearing these words that we're talking about? Lots of agreement. Yeah, I think I probably need to. Okay, I think not. I know probably not. Certainly need. Not going to think about. Not do. Those are the words that we use often because we want. We think that agreement is going to give us that. That rush, that feeling. Yeah, I think I probably need to start thinking about getting more training for my team. [00:20:48] And so he'll reflect those words back and they'll say, oh, yeah, no, yeah, I hear you. No, I definitely need to start. I definitely. I definitely need to start getting more training for my team. And he'll say, well, that's closer. That sounds good. You definitely need to. [00:21:04] Yes, I definitely need to. [00:21:07] So what's the action on that? What's the commitment? Just saying I need to is acknowledgement of the need. But where's the commitment? [00:21:16] You see where this goes? There's agreement. The coach and the coachee both agreed that a need exists, that it would be a good thing, that they should probably start thinking about it, but where's the commitment? And so he'll push it until it gets to the point of, now I'm going to up, up, up, up, up, Right? And he'll say, yeah, when are you going to start on that? What's that look like? What's the first step? When is that going to happen? How do we follow up on our next coaching goal? How do we know we're getting there? And so it's really the push toward that commitment. And it happens in teams, too. You'll hear things like, hey, you know, it'd be a good idea to do this, or we should. We. We got to start doing this better team. Everybody agrees, everybody nods. Yeah, all right, we'll start doing it better. But nobody walks out with any new behavior or action. Commitment. And then comes the phrase that you've heard a million times, guarantee it. Probably guilty of being the one who even says it. I know I have. And that's this phrase. Well, we talked about it. [00:22:20] Yeah, we did. Where is it? Well, I mean, I don't have it. We talked about it, and that's it. And the reason it's not done is because we talked about it, we agreed on it, but we didn't articulate commitment. You know, I've shared about the word accountability many times on this show. It's two words, account and ability. It's the ability to account. [00:22:45] Well, commitment increases the ability to. To account. [00:22:51] Let me say that again. Agreement doesn't help the ability to account. It's just agreement. It's just a cognitive affirmation of something, an acknowledgment of something, a nodding of agreement. But a commitment creates an expectation, and that increases the ability to account. And if you want to frame it in a way that maybe you're more familiar with with regard to accountability, it helps hold people right. I've had people tell me, hey, give me a deadline, please. I need that accountability. If you just give me something and let me just work on it, I don't have the discipline. I'll procrastinate, I'll put it off. But if you give me a deadline, I get a target to shoot for, I'll get it done. That's why deadlines are accountability boosters. They boost the ability to account. So I think enough said on that. Move from agreement to commitment. Think about your next team meeting and watch real closely to the language and ask yourself of all the things you talk about in your next team meeting, at the end of it, ask what action did we just commit to and is it really framed in the form of a commitment? [00:24:09] So there's continuum number three. Continuum number four is kind of a new one for me that I'm working on refining. And what I've done is I've taken Dr. Pierre Peter Hawkins continuum on this and I've expanded it just a little bit based on my own experience. So Dr. Peter Hawkins is a world renowned guru in systemic team coaching and I've done a lot of learning from him. I've gone through one of his programs, I'm in another one right now. It's a global practicum on this stuff. And one of the things I really picked up from him was we talk about we want a high performing team. [00:24:50] But he said, is that really what you want or is it a value creating team that we want? [00:24:57] So I'll say more by adding two more dimensions of that continuum. So his continuum is move from high performing team to high value creating team. I want to put two steps below that to help you think about this not only from a team standpoint, but from an individual standpoint. For me, the continuum starts at busyness. [00:25:20] I'm busy. I'm doing a lot of things. I get to work and from 8:00 to 5:00, there's no idle time. I am busy. I am doing reports and I'm sending out emails and I'm just working, working, working. I'm printing this and I'm having this meeting and that meeting and I'm doing things. I'm busy, okay? And that's a good thing. You want your people busy. You don't want them sitting around twiddling their thumbs. But busyness is just the very beginning of the continuum we're talking about. Because the next level is, okay, I'm busy, but am I productive? [00:25:55] Is my busyness producing something? Something tangible, something I can see or define? Am I producing a document? Am I producing a framework? Am I producing a curriculum? Am I producing a product? Am I producing a, a new strategy? Am I productive? [00:26:16] Does my busyness produce? [00:26:20] And if you think about just those two steps, you can see the difference. You've seen people who were busy. I've had people in leadership roles going back to my organizational leadership days. Busy, busy, but not productive. It's like I see the Busyness. I'm working on this, I'm working on that. But you never see any product, so you got to make that step. The next step is high performance, high performing. So I'm, I'm busy. That busyness is producing. And I'm producing at high levels. [00:26:56] I'm either producing at speed or at scale and maybe even on budget. [00:27:07] So I am not just a producer. I'm a high performing producer. There are salespeople and then there are high producing, high performing salespeople. And that's great. It's a third level. Sounds better than the first two, doesn't it? But then there's that final one that Dr. Hawkins introduced to me, and that is, okay, you're busy, you're producing, you're performing at a high level. Is it creating value? [00:27:37] And for whom? What is the value that high performing productivity is creating for your key stakeholders? What value do your various stakeholders need from you? You might be highly performing and productive, but in just something that you want to do, something your organization has just always done. Maybe there was value in it 10 years ago, but if you paused to think, is that really where our primary energy and bandwidth should be? Is it still producing the kind of value that our stakeholders rely on and expect most from us? [00:28:23] Is it a trade off? [00:28:26] Are we high performing and productive on something that might have some value? But if we spent that same bandwidth on something else, we could produce more value. [00:28:39] They do that in a manufacturing environment. If they produce widgets and gadgets, they have to figure out which one's more profitable. Should we produce this many widgets and this many gadgets? Should we get out of the gadget business altogether? Is there more value and more profit in selling gadgets over widgets? The same applies to the bandwidth we put in our work. Even when it's not that tangible, is what we're doing even if it's high performance and high talent showing? Is it high value creating? [00:29:12] Go to your strategic plan, your departmental plans, your individual work plans, your own portfolio of work and where you spend your energy and your bandwidth, and ask that question. [00:29:24] Is what I'm doing right now creating the most value I can create, or could I create more value by shifting what it is we're working on? And you can't just ask that question every five years when it's time to update the strategic plan. You have to constantly be asking that and asking that of your team. And it goes back to delegations. Go back to the first performer to leader. How is your delegation creating value for you? For the person being delegated to and for the organization. [00:30:02] Is it creating value? [00:30:05] So I'm going to close with a question, and that is, what transition are you working on? I like to call this from good to better. [00:30:16] All of these are good. Being a performer is good. [00:30:19] But if I'm a leadership role, being a leader is better. Agreement is good, but commitment is better. [00:30:27] Invitation to lead is good. Expectation is better. Busyness and productivity are good. Performance and value creation are better. [00:30:38] What transition are you working on? [00:30:42] Fill in the blanks. Here's here's the coaching question I'll leave you with. [00:30:47] We are moving our team from blank to blank. [00:30:53] What's the continuum that you're on and how are you leading yourself, your team or your organization through that continuum? [00:31:07] How are you leading yourself, your team, or your organization to an articulated Next? [00:31:14] That's the leader's perspective for this time around, at least this leader's perspective. I hope it's helpful to you. Hope you have some context around it. You can relate in some way. Listen, if I can ever be of support to any of you, shoot me an email [email protected] or reach out to us through our website. [00:31:36] That's it for now. Lead on.