Episode 146 - Leadership Development with Dr. Patrick Jinks

[00:00:06] Speaker A: 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 Jenks. [00:00:31] Speaker B: Happy New Year. Year 2026. Can't believe it. Comes around fast every time, doesn't it? I'm happy to be here, I can tell you that. It's been an exciting 2025 for me. One of the, one of these days I might talk about my year. I've got some learnings that I've been trying to process. Had a motorcycle accident back in May of last year and totaled the bike and, and tore a rotator cuff in my shoulder and fun stuff. And then in October, through a series of just physical signs and my body telling me things, I had double bypass, open heart surgery. And so we've done one episode since then. I would encourage you to go back and listen to episode 145 because I talk a little bit more about it and particularly, excuse me, particularly my voice, which as you can hear is not, it's not 100%, but it is better than it was the last time I did a podcast and it's definitely better than it was than probably the first month following the surgery. I couldn't really, I really couldn't talk at all. I couldn't hold a conversation today. It's better. I just can't. My voice will wear out after a while, so you'll probably hear it in this episode. I'm going to keep it as brief as possible. You can hear that. People tell me now, hey, you sound like you have a cold. And I don't. But anyway, I, I won't go too much into depth on it. Listen to episode 145 to find out what happened to my voice and what's going on with it. And I'm again, I'm hoping for full recovery, but we'll see. I can't sing. That's the one thing I cannot, I still can't do. I don't have my singing voice. I can't, I can hardly hit a note without just completely cracking. And I'm a singer songwriter. I love to sing and play. I play guitar and keyboards and most, you know, just at home. But that's been a thing that I'm still struggling with. I'm not patient and that's one of the things I've had to deal with. All my life is working on my patients. I am glad that I'm making progress and it's easier for me to talk and have conversations and coaching sessions and facilitate meetings and those kinds of things. So again, go back and listen to the last episode for a little more reflection on that. Today I am. I'm wanting to talk, I'm wanting to present a challenge to you, to our listeners for the New Year. And I'm not talking New Year's resolutions with you today. I'm not even talking about business vision for 2026. I thought about those things. Those are, you know, easy enough to do. And you can probably find inspirational podcasts on that all over the place. I do have a challenge for you to think about for the coming year. I love New Year's Day. The New Year is my favorite time of year. I love beginnings. It's why I love Monday mornings, because the beginning of a week is beginning of a day. I like the beginning of a year. Kind of gives me some fresh perspective. So I want to talk with you, take a few minutes and talk about a challenge I have for you to invest more, whatever you're investing, to consider investing more in the development of you, yourself and your team to lead. We're talking about leadership development. You can read a lot about leadership development today, and some of the research behind it says it doesn't work. Leadership development doesn't work. And the research that points to that is actually accurate because organizations who go about leadership development without a lot of intention and any KPIs or anything like that around it, well, what they end up doing is they they do seminars and workshops and they attend conferences and they classify that as leadership development. Some organizations go further than that. The organizations that we've worked with that have invested in leadership development more intentionally are absolutely seeing results. But the traditional leadership development leadership training, that often doesn't work. My theory is because it doesn't come with a lot of intention. So I want to talk about the intention around leadership development for just a few minutes here. I don't think this is going to be a long episode at all. Leadership happens with intention. Intention is one of the words we've used the most, I think, in our business. It's so critical. You have to be intentional about things. If you've been through any of our coaching, you will know, for example, that we take our leaders that we coach through leadership planning. Well, what's my what does a leadership plan look like? I have a strategic plan for the business. I have a marketing plan. I have A finance plan, we call it a budget. I have work plans, our departments have work plans. I have a plan for the week. I have a to do list that's connected to my calendar. But those are all about the work. What is the intention around leadership? What's my plan for being a more effective leader? And that's what we do when we're coaching. We ask that question, we identify those things and then we work on them intentionally. And the leader plan becomes what we often call the leadership to do list. We wouldn't dream of going through the week without some kind of to do list of knowing what we have to accomplish that week. But we don't do that with our leadership. We think leadership just happens. It's a concept, it's a, it's, it's a gift some people have. Well, that's true. Leadership is a gift that some people have. Some people have more innate capabilities around leadership than others. But leadership doesn't just happen because you want it to happen. It happens with intention. And part of being an intentional leader means getting better as a leader, working on it. And that's what we call development of leadership or leadership development. And that happens with intention. Some of it happens organically. Experience is a great teacher. But developing our leadership skills, following it, identifying our blind spots, identifying our potential for growth, all of that has to be intentional. And I'll tell you something, I see so many organizations who are willing to spend six and seven figures. They won't bat an eye to spend big money on HR firms and consultants, many of whom are contracted to solve problems after they've occurred. But yet those same companies are often reticent to hire or invest significant resources in proactive leadership development, particularly coaching. I think that's because a lot of organizations still don't really understand, maybe even trust coaching because they don't fully understand it. And many coaching engagements are initiated too late. I get a lot of calls from companies. Hey, I've got a, I've got an employee or a manager or whatever who's, yeah, they're on the ropes. Last ditch effort. We're going to hire a coach for them, see if you can fix them. It's too late at that point. Something's gone wrong in the leadership process. So again, I see companies who are willing to spend, even non profit organizations, I've seen the budgets, I've watched them do it. They spend six and seven figures on maybe marketing firms, HR sometimes, you know, other, other sort of consulting efforts, but they don't make the investment in leadership development of their teams. So I probably don't need to tell you, you probably know this intuitively. But it's important to note that there's a growing body of research around the impacts of leadership coaching, particularly coaching in organizations. There are strong there's enough longitudinal research out there now that shows strong correlations between leadership coaching and employee engagement metrics measured strong correlations between leadership coaching and retention. Boy, I'd love to ask each of you individually, how much money are you spending on churn and employee turnover? There's a body of research that shows strong correlations between coaching and performance, team performance, creative performance, productivity, and yes, even organizational impact. By the way, these are things that show up in every day in my coaching work challenges for leaders who have a workforce that's not engaged, they have retention problems, they have performance issues, have difficulty measuring their organizational impact. When you look at what they're investing in, the development of their abilities, their talents to lead, they're not doing it. And there's a strong correlation there as well. So here are some simple but important questions I have for you. Again, I told you this episode's not going to be long at all. I'm going to ask these questions, explain them a little bit, and then move on and get on about our year. These questions are for you. For your organization, your team, your board, you name it. Here's the first question. What leadership skills are lacking in your organization? Look across your teams, look at yourself, look at your C suite if you have one, your senior managers, even your board, and ask yourself what leadership skills are lacking in your organization? I don't know. Take an inventory. Some people say define a leadership skill well. What do leaders do? Where are you? How would you measure your people's ability to create, craft and cast, vision and meaning for your organization? What about influencing others to want to follow along and do better and give their most? What about the ability to think critically and strategically? What about the ability to challenge your people to do more, to stretch them, to grow them, to develop other leaders? What skills, what leadership skills are lacking in your organization? And a follow up question that is, how can you develop those skills as an organization? Some of it you can do on your own, some of it we would highly recommend from a acknowledged biased perspective that some external help can really be of great benefit. Here's the next question for you. How much of your talent development investments are applied toward the more technical job skills versus leadership competencies? And how do you rationalize that weighting? What's the strategy of that ratio? The amount of investment you make in your people toward the technical skills that they need to learn how to do their specific job as a clinician, as a fundraiser, as a program manager, as a grant writer, et cetera, versus the investment you're making in helping them become better leaders, not just managers. Although that lacks too. That training lacks as well. But where is the investment in leadership competencies for your people? What's that ratio? What's that balance for our nonprofit friends? Here's a question for you. How much is the notion of being a nonprofit affecting your appetite for investment in leadership development? In other words, how much are you allowing the fact that you are a nonprofit organization excuse you from investing in leadership development of your people? I don't mean to be disrespectful. It's a sounds a little bit irreverent, but it is real. It is 100% real. To say, well, we don't have the money to invest in leadership. Well, I've heard that all of my career. I've spent 20 years in the sector in executive leadership. We don't have the money for marketing. We don't have the money for technology. We don't have the money for leadership development. We don't have the money for talent development. We just don't have it. We just gotta go. Just got to do the best we can. We have to rely on the fact that we care. We care about our people. Our mission is not one of profit, and it's not one that has a lot of money. And if you've known me for long, you've known that I have for many years probably always pushed against that mindset because there are nonprofit organizations who have learned how to flourish because they do invest in those things. And it's not spending money. It's in. It truly is investing. There's not. There's none among us who could be an entrepreneur and go start a successful business without investing in the business. I have to have the tools, I have to have the visibility, I have to have the capability, the competencies. Now all of that. I have to invest in the business, even if it means I go into debt for a little bit, or I have to go find investors and create a return on that investment over time. And that puts pressure on the business. Yeah, that's how businesses grow. Nonprofits get off the hook because, well, we just don't have the money to spend on that. And so how are we measuring our performance against our state admissions? Are we even measuring? And if we are, are we really making a dent? And how much of that, do you think is a factor of how talented we are, how competent we are in leadership, leading our people, leading the community toward an inspiring vision, leading our donors to want to invest more in us, leading our board to engage, effect? All, all these things require leadership. They don't just happen because you have a 501C3 status. So how much are you allowing the fact that you're in the nonprofit sector to affect your appetite for or your willingness to invest in leadership development? Leadership development is not fluff. It's not a luxury. It's not a luxury spending items that only some organizations have enough money to invest in. It is mission advancement. You don't, you do not, cannot, will not advance your mission without leadership. Well, I think we would all agree with that. So it should stand to reason then that the more competent our leadership, the more widespread our leadership capabilities are throughout the organization, the more we can advance our missions. So is there a short to intermediate investment to make in the organization that advances the mission over the long term, way further down the road? And that's really it. Those are just some questions I want to challenge you this year to think about how much of your bandwidth, your financial bandwidth, your time commitments, all of those, are you truly thinking about an investing strategically in the leadership competency of your organization? And I will close this podcast. I told you it was going to be short. I will close it. At the risk of being a little bit salesy, obviously I mentioned, yeah, we're biased toward this. I run a leadership coaching company and so I make this case all the time. But the challenge question for any of you who are utilizing a leadership coach is there or not utilizing. I should say the challenge question for any of you who are not utilizing leadership coaching in particular. I'll get specific. There is this. Why do you think the greatest team and individual athletes in the world. Employment, sports skill coaches and physical trainers. Why do you think that the greatest, most famous, legendary singers employ vocal coaches? Why do you think the greatest actors employ acting coaches? What about the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies? Why do they invest and employ executive coach? They've already arrived. They're running a Fortune 100 company. Why do you think they do this? I'll give you a hint. It's not because they're broken. It's because they're already great and they want to be greater. It's because they know that what got them here won't get them there. They want to be the best at what they do. They want to deliver on their missions to the Best of their ability. So they invest in the help and the development, and they push themselves and urge themselves to grow and stretch and go further, higher, deeper, farther. That's what they do, and they utilize coaches to do it. Now, some of you may not trust coaching. Coaching is for a good bit of time, and I think there's even a pretty large degree of it today. It can be a fluffy space because coaching is a little like photography. When digital photography first came out, everybody became a photographer. You buy a digital camera that you can upload pictures and edit them in Photoshop. And if you can develop a watermark that says, joe Blow Photography, boom, you can hang a shingle and you're a professional photographer. And there's a lot of industries like this, low barrier to entry into these industries. And coaching has been that way. Low barrier to entry. You can just call yourself a coach, create a business name, get a website and call yourself a coach, and you can be a coach. But the coaching industry now is becoming. It's not regulated like the counseling industry is, but it is becoming more and more professionalized. There are legitimate credentialing entities like the International Coach Federation or the center for Credentialing and Education and many others who now are sending coaches through the rigor, similar rigor that counselors, for example, might go through. In order to get my board certification, there were, you know, scores of hours of training that I had to have as an educational level that I had to have. There is a proctored exam you have to pass. You have to have a set number of coaching hours verified and endorsed. You have to have a certified coach endorse you as a. There's a. There's a whole process for becoming certified. There's a. There's a code of ethics. There are data policies. There are all these things that if you find a coach who is in the professional sector, growing and learning and operating as a professional coaching business is well worth the investment. To help you think through things out loud in a safe environment so you don't have to use the leader's perspective, I would urge you to consider the investment in somebody in some help. It is not a luxury. It is an imperative. I'm going to probably be really preaching that more loudly than ever this year. This is not a luxury. This is. This is imperative. We're really going to advance community impact and outcomes toward our mission. We're going to have to. We're going to have to level up. We have to raise our game as leaders, internal and external in our organization. So in the event that you do want to discover more about the leader's perspective and how we might be able to play that partnership role with you, Just Visit the leaders perspective.com and set up a call with us. That's all. I'll say we're easy to find, we're easy to set up a call with and just talk it through how we might be able to help you. And that's really it. That's my challenge for you. I hope you'll take it on. I hope you'll pause and think about it and get with your team and say, hey, how do we level up as leaders? Not just the functional areas of our work, but as leaders, how do we level up? And that's really it. I just want to encourage you. Often people will say, have a wonderful year. Like, I hope you have the best year ever. I like saying, I hope you will make the best year ever. You have a lot of control and influence over how successful a year you will have. So yes, have a wonderful 2026. More importantly, make a wonderful 2026. As we gear up for our year in podcasting, we got some amazing guests whose scheduling is in the works. So stay tuned. We will see you next time. Lead on.