Providing the Context to Leadership Development We Need w/ Dr. Rob Lion
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In this week’s episodes of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with professor and performance management consultant Dr. Rob Lion on the context we need for better leadership development.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is a Professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University, Principle at Black River Performance Management, specializing in leadership and organizational development, he’s a volunteer at the Academy of Human Resource Development and contributing editor for Performance Improvement Quarterly (an academic research publication).
Connect with Rob and learn more about his work…
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“Mainstream books… present ‘just do this, and that will work.’ And the reality is no, it’s not. It’s super nuanced, it’s context specific, it shifts by the day. And that’s one of the things that a leader has to fundamentally appreciate—how this one-size-fits-all approach is not gonna serve anyone well.”
Dr. Rob Lion
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Dr. Rob Lion, and here is why he is. Awesome. He’s a Professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University. He’s a principal at Black River Performance Management, which specializes in leadership and organizational development.
He’s a volunteer at the Academy of Human Resource Development and contributing editor at Performance Improvement Quarterly, an academic Research Publication. Busy boy. And he is also here to talk to us about professional development. Hello, Rob.
Rob Lion: Hello, how are you this morning?
Russel Lolacher: I’m delightful. I’m not caffeinated enough, but I am excited enough about the topic. So that sort of fuels.
Rob Lion: Awesome. Let’s do it.
Russel Lolacher: So today we’re getting into leadership development, the context of it, digging into what it really means. But first I have to ask you the question I ask all of my guests, Rob, which is, sir, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Rob Lion: So my best and worst are the same actually.
Russel Lolacher: Oh, perfect. Okay.
Rob Lion: And so, and it was at the expense of someone else. So unfortunately it was the, at the expense of someone else. I was raised in a family that didn’t do confrontation and didn’t have difficult conversations, and I brought that to college. I brought that into my marriage.
I brought that all over my life, as you can imagine. As a young manager, as a first time leader, this is the best and worst experience. It’s the best in the sense of, it’s been the most influential experience probably of my career to change the trajectory of my behavior. It’s the worst because I did something very.
It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great for the other person. So let me set it up.
I was managing a team of 10. We were approaching end of the year evaluations. Actually end of the business cycle evaluation. So we were actually doing evaluations in May and and so. You just think about it how a person enters an evaluation.
Maybe they got their evaluation in advance so they could look at it and prepare some responses. Or maybe you’re handing them the evaluation. So first off, new leader, no framework, no help, no structure in terms of how do I do the successfully, right? So there’s a learning lesson right there. So this woman comes in and this is May.
Let’s keep this in mind. She comes in and she’s expecting a satisfactory, if not outstanding evaluation. I slide it over to her and it was like excels does not meet expectation. Excels. And she said, Rob, what’s this all about? This is May. I said, well, you remember back in October you didn’t do this one thing correct back then, and you haven’t done it correctly since.
And to her defense, she said, Rob. You never told me I didn’t do it wrong. You didn’t address this with me. So anyways it was the best and worst experience because I felt so bad for her as a person that I treated her this way. And it, it’s one of those things that I would never have changed for myself because it just changed the trajectory of my development and my career that I needed to experience that to make the headway, to be able to do some of the things I’m doing today. So best and worst, all at the same time.
Russel Lolacher: Way to hold a grudge too. I mean like obviously you remember this bothered you and then it just needled you every single time since then.
Rob Lion: Yeah. No, I love it. And I, full disclosure with students, with clients, I’m always willing to be vulnerable, always willing to share, to help build that bridge. And I share this with every group I work with because it’s… we’re not good at confrontation and accountability and feedback, and so I want to normalize the fact that I started at the bottom and I’ve grown the skills to be where I am today.
Russel Lolacher: Fair, but you’re not uncommon, Rob. I mean, how many people are in leadership positions that have no leadership training and shouldn’t be in that position to begin with because they were a bum in a seat or they wanted to get paid a little bit more. So now they’re in this role where they could do a lot of damage if they don’t get the support… which leads us perfectly into our topic today, which is leadership development.
Rob Lion: Yes.
Russel Lolacher: It may be obvious to some to define what leadership development is, but I still find it really interesting to make sure we set the table with my guest and understanding how you would define leadership development.
Rob Lion: I’m sure that definition will have changed over the course of my career. At this point, it is, I think about it in terms as the activity and effort based on the quality of the inputs for a person to begin to build the skills, the knowledge, the wherewithal to incrementally increase their impact on others.
So ultimately, enhancing their efficacy as a leader with with respect to the people they’re working with.
Russel Lolacher: Okay. How do you define that? Separating the word leadership with development? And the reason I bring this up is because we had some previous conversations and I’ve read a bit of your work. You talk about leadership not being simplistic. And yet we don’t even define leadership, nevermind simplicity about it.
So what are we talking about when we really talk about leadership then to get to understanding development?
Rob Lion: Sure. We’re talking about a range of, and I sound very textbooky, competencies, perspectives, practices, skills that relate to outward of us as well as skills internally as it relates to what that leader is and the responsibility of that leader to accomplish certain tasks. So really, as you mentioned there, alluded to there is an element of agility and being nimble which is one of the first lessons that we encounter when we talk about leadership and leadership development because you talk about it as in people don’t have the prep. Very true. So where are they heading with trying to figure that out? Well, we know in most situations the leaders above them aren’t all that helpful in terms of onboarding and integrating. Not to mention if they’re an internal lateral position or like a promotion, giving them some cover to be successful in that position.
So what do we do as humans in terms of whether it’s leadership or anything else? We look to emulate, we look to base our of our direction based off of our positive and negative experiences of the past. But often when we do that, we’re looking at things as very black and white. And very similar to how people present things and say books, right?
Mainstream books, they present just do this, and that will work. And the reality is no, it’s not. It’s super nuanced, it’s context specific, it shifts by the day. And that’s one of the things that a leader has to fundamentally appreciate is how this one size fits all approach is not gonna serve anyone well.
Russel Lolacher: Love that you said that. I have had some frustrations with a reoccurring question I see online, which is what’s your leadership style? And I’m like. If you have one style, you’re a horrible leader, like it is a Swiss Army knife. It is adjusting, adapting to your point about the scenario or the area, the situation that you might be in.
The situational awareness, self-awareness. We’ll get into all that in a little bit, but it’s this confusion piece. Why that’s a, it’s this confusion piece where we don’t seem to know what leadership actually is. And I wanna, I’m curious about your thoughts on this because to your point, leaders are looking for modeled behavior, but leaders need leaders and they’re kind of being not helped a lot because at the top we are calling productivity leadership.
Rob Lion: Mm-hmm.
Russel Lolacher: And they’re completely confused. Just ’cause somebody delivers a thing does not make them a leader, and yet we will call them leaders, which allows them not to have to fix those human centricity focuses that adaptability focuses unless it’s about delivering a thing. So how do we work with an environment where we’re focusing so much on leadership development and yet executive is defining it completely different than how we’re supposed to be defining it.
Rob Lion: Well, let’s start with that question in and of itself, right? That just demonstrates to us like we still see this conversation about. What’s leadership versus management? We, this, how do you define your leadership style? This is where we are as a greater populace with respect to being prepared and capable to, to lead, right?
We’re at a very elementary level. We value people going to school, trade, school, college, what have you, to learn their, to get their engineering degree, to get their welding certificate, all these things, but we still haven’t integrated this and prioritized this as an a true factor to help enhance leadership.
And because of that, it’s to each to determine what that means. And if they’re not very reflective, I think they get hung up in the, what I was mentioning earlier, that retrospective of this, is what a good leader has done in my life, and this is what a poor leader has done in my life. And without any say 360 degree feedback or anything like that, they might think they’re going down the good leader model path, but they might actually be exhibiting the behaviors of the poor leader model in the past. So it’s a very complex thing that, what I think about, and I’m thinking about this a lot right now, is what is the person leadership identity mindset.
Mindset and how does that relate to how they actually practice leadership? And I, I. I, I would propose that if my identity is not high enough and we don’t know what this number is yet, as a leader, I’m not going to live it and coach it to my people at the level we need to have as a target to break the cycle of, you got it. I believe in here’s your keys, here’s your name tag, and go for it. But that’s where we’re still at.
Russel Lolacher: I don’t mean to attack you because you’re a professor, but do you think some of the bigger problems happen to be in post-secondary? Because I mean, to be honest. To be honest, we’ve got business schools that barely think leadership is a course you should take. Meanwhile, you have to take a completely different leadership program and I can’t tell you the reoccurring jokes that are, Hey, you wanna see a horrible leader?
Get somebody that got a degree or a master’s in it. Like I’ve heard that joke more than what, a few times.
Rob Lion: Those that can’t play coach, right? Like the same thing. Yeah. And we’ll never get away from that. Look I think we’re doing a good job in some spaces, but not all spaces. And I think, to your point, there are business schools that the amount of development that comes into the curriculum, we’re not even talking about leadership.
We’re talking about. This is, I refer to it capital T training, lowercase, lowercase D development in one of their HR classes. And that might be even a class or a section. And that’s it. And then you think about this in terms of the continuum. Then you find some people that will teach a leadership class, but they’ve never, same thing as business and entrepreneurship, they’ll teach these classes, but they’ve never owned a business. They’ve never started a business, they’ve never led an organization. And so, this is the best they’re doing and they’re trying their best and I respect that.
But to your point, there’s a lot of truth in this that, that if we’re teaching from frameworks and very strict, empirically based theoretical frameworks and saying, this is how it’s going to be, our students quickly figured this out, that this guy really hasn’t, or this woman hasn’t been in the trenches, hasn’t experienced this stuff, so they take it with a grain of salt to some extent.
And that’s actually why we’ve had a lot of gravity in our program is that we try to spend a lot of time in the gray and, and because we’re both practitioners and scholars and more so practitioners, like, that’s what’s at our heart we try to clarify that there’s a lot of ambiguity here. But you know, just the other side of it, this is true too, we’ve had people that, that don’t have the advanced credentials that come in and they just talk war stories based on their own personal experiences. And that doesn’t help people either. And we get feedback from students that say, hey, look, this guy’s just complaining about his old bosses and how to do this so and so.
So it’s, it’s a complicated question to answer, but to your point, there’s a lot of validity for us to unpack this because A- students are spending a lot of money to get this specialization when they do come into my program, because we do offer suites of leadership pro classes. And we do need to prepare them to leave here to be at some range of level of competence to, to go out there and be ready to tackle those things that they’re… it’s like I’m buying a car ’cause I want to get to work. Well, if the car doesn’t have tires on it. It’s not that beneficial to me.
It’s the same type of concept with people pursuing education.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. Fair. To your definition of leadership development, I hear you and I completely understand what you’re saying, but the more I hear about and understand leadership, this show certainly helped over the last three years, is that I feel like there’s less and less boundaries between leadership development, professional development, and personal development.
It all feels like the same damn thing because to be a great leader, you have to have some pretty strong foundational human skills that doesn’t seem to be understood when it comes to job descriptions. And yet to be a great leader, you need that. Do you find that it’s becoming more and more that way?
Rob Lion: It’s a reflection of our handle of our language. So one of the things we often talk about, right on day one as we start working with groups is that, let, we have to acknowledge something that we do not hold. Even though we speak English, we do not hold a common language among us as team, as members of this organization.
So if I even take something as simple as the concept of motivation and I have 10 people on my team, I’ll have 10 different definitions of that. So now blow that out against anything that wasn’t taught in their craft. Engineers, they’re prepared, they got their education. When they talk about these concepts that are central to their profession, they know what they mean, right?
But it’s when we come outta this stuff where we’re not coming through a standardized, centralized concept that the language is all over the place. And to your point, some people are intermingling all of those things. And, and what really needs to happen to build high impact, highly effective leaders is a refinement of what are those three different concepts and how do they factor into a person’s development so that, so that they are becoming prepared to do the difficult things that they need to do. And some of it is professional development, some of it is self-development, some of it is leadership development, or even I’d change it to systems development. How are we leaders really at the helm of leading a group to navigate the waters ahead.
But most of the problems in the organizations I work with are systems based problems where humans are complicating it. And so the behavioral aspect comes in. So, the more we could help people understand and slow down their pace of work to understand, look, you’re hired in this role as a leader, that means you have to have some sort of understanding on how to steer this boat.
And it’s just not about the mission of the organization. Your leadership is a part of the mission of this job, and so it’s really tough to do that when people have this mindset that, oh I’m just way too busy to take time out to do anything.
Russel Lolacher: Don’t get me started on the blind spot of too busy. ’cause I’m like, are you too busy? Then you’re not a leader. You’re time management. You’re not… because you don’t have the capacity. You’re literally giving an excuse as to why you can’t. So thank you.
Thank you for getting to that and defining sort of where we, we need to look when it comes to leadership. I’m curious though, as I often say on the show, relationships at work, the first relationship is with yourself and. To go down the path of leadership development to really get context around that, mindset is everything. And a lot of people don’t have the right mindset ’cause they’re drowning.
To your point, they’re too busy or they don’t have a leader that leads above them. ’cause at the end of the day, leaders are employees too, but we don’t seem to remember that. So where do we start when it comes to motivation and mindset to be the leader that we’re intending to be.
Rob Lion: Gosh, that’s really tough, right? Because if you don’t have it modeled from the top and coached and brought down, how do you know that’s even relevant and important, especially if you’re a new leader, right? And, and we don’t know what we don’t know, right? And so how do we make some inroads on that?
Part of that is this desire to seek more within ourselves. That it’s, it ties to mindset, but am I just going through the motions or am I actually going to be conscious and aware of who I am as a person in this organization, in this world relative to beings and things around me? So I think there’s a level of consciousness or self-awareness that relates at that level that we need to be aware of first, because then it comes into it, it will lead into, well now if I’m looking at myself as similar and different than people just walking through the mall, what does that mean about my work? So I might be similar or different to people that I’m working with, but what does that really mean and why does that matter?
So I, I love your work because you’re very philosophical and I love going down that path because that’s a part of this is starting to unpack what’s my philosophy of who I am as a being and what’s my relationship to things around me. It’s awesome when we, even for one of our classes where we’ll introduce emotional intelligence and people will read Goldman’s book or something. For some people that’s it.
That’s what starts to change, that shift of self-awareness. But, day one on a job, as part of your onboarding, you don’t have a leader saying, Hey, we think you should start with this book, or we think you should start with this curriculum. So, and I don’t, I’m not against that. I think there’s some value in that because we have to plant that seed.
But once again, that’s looking up and that’s them having the wherewithal and insight to say this is important to us. But the other thing is that we don’t have to rely on what the other leaders are saying or doing. So our practice is based entirely around partnerships with organizations.
We’re not doing as many trainings and things like that. It’s more of an engagement where we’re working through their challenges and their obstacles and training will be integrated, but it’s not a come in and leave, it’s a partnership. And this is where I think we need to get our mindset at is that, look, I’m Rob.
I am an expert widget maker in this leadership position. I know this as well as anyone else if and better than most, but Russ, Russel, I need you to come in and help me with those pieces of leadership, those pieces of getting my team to be more successful, to grow commitment, to grow motivation, these things that these are outside my wheelhouse.
And so I think it’s important that we have the shift in our mindset as a, at an organizational level, that these partnering with these people is key to cultivating this in our organizations because we really don’t have the chops internally unless we’re a really large organization.
Russel Lolacher: Doesn’t that, and this is gonna sound horrible, doesn’t that just outsource leadership? Like, to be honest I hear this, I’ve heard this from some, I think it was Scott Stratton that said this, you can’t hire an actor to go to a conference and then come back and go, how many relationships did we build?
So for a leader who’s good at widgets, again, we’re talking productivity, not leadership, but they hire somebody or they bring somebody else in to go fill my gaps. Make… be the leader that I’m not. That doesn’t build, that doesn’t fix the problem of somebody in a leadership position that’s not a leader.
Rob Lion: No, and I’m not proposing we outsource the leadership role. What I’m proposing is when we are self-aware enough to know that we’re not doing the right things. It’s about seeking assistance, right? It’s like if, hey, I wanna lose another 10% body fat. I just, I need a trainer to do that, right?
To help me be focused. And that’s the same type of thing, like we’re personal trainers for organizational success essentially, right? And, and there’s some beauty in this, but there’s also a risk in this too. And I’m not saying all trainers, whether fitness trainers or organizational consultants are on their game.
Like there’s a lot of rehashing the textbook and the certification tools and stuff like that, that, that don’t add value to organizations. It really does call for due diligence in terms of shopping around. But my point is that at some level, some of us are architects of systems and that we can bring some structure, we can separate those words exactly as you mentioned, leadership development, personal development, self-development, and tease those out in certain pieces and help the leaders focus over here, not so over here, so that they can start to begin to build the skills and integrate this in a way that it becomes almost like a central concept to its culture. And so now when we’re hiring, we’re screening against these principles. When we’re onboarding, the principles and concepts are integrated and it’s lived throughout the organization. And we see this a lot with organizations that are very strong in brand as it relates to identity.
So what is our leadership identity or our culture identity that we espouse for this organization that we’re gonna hold onto and that’s gonna be the backbone of us. So that’s all I’m proposing. I’m not proposing outsourcing someone’s difficult conversations, although I do work with leaders… Call it the Batphone, where because they don’t have the ins and outs or maybe the education or the experiences, they’re like, Hey Rob, I have to put this person on a performance plan. I don’t know how to have this conversation. I don’t know how to structure this meeting, things like that. So I get a text, like we jump on the phone, little quick coaching.
I call to mini MBA, right? And so that we give them what they need and then they’re off and running and it’s like circle back and let me know how that went. And so… But I need to call someone to fix my heater in my car. You know what I mean? Like it’s the same thing, like we need to turn to people that can offer us the services and assistance and perspective.
That’s why coaching’s become so popular, because we can’t do some things ourselves.
Russel Lolacher: Do you find motivation an interesting one? It’s funny because it’s on a spectrum and people go, you’re a leader because you’re a leader, you need to have this fuel in you to be a B leader, to be a C leader. Like there is this expectation of this aspiration of this motivation to move up this jungle gym or this ladder or whatever.
But not everybody, especially generationally, has the same motivation behind them. So to go back to your point about self-awareness, I know myself, I know I’m not motivated, but I’m a leader. I’m not fitting the mold of the expectation of the organization or what a leader should be. How do we tackle that?
Rob Lion: Yeah, what you’re talking about resonates more along the lines of drive to me and, and there is a difference for motivation and drive. It’s, it’s having open and honest conversations and candid conversations. If I’m trying to figure out who’s gonna lead this team, I’m looking at a couple of my members that are internal as well as a couple outside I, at least internally, I’ve test driven them, right?
It’s like an internship or a test driving a car. I know what they’re capable of, but once again, if I don’t possess the skills to have these conversations, to cultivate and to create expectations and give them targets. How do I expect them to show up at that level if they don’t have that drive? And just because they have that drive, we’ve seen a lot of things go wrong with drive that things, you run off the rails and things like that because that drive isn’t focused or directed in a manner or in the direction we want it to go.
So it, I, to me, a lot of it comes down to knowing others, knowing yourself, having good quality communication so that you could collectively set expectations, vision, goals, things like that. And for a lot of people we do some goal work with organizations and I personally am not a goal person. I’m not goal oriented in the sense of, I have all these goals I wanna accomplish and this is how I’m gonna do it, stuff like that.
But that doesn’t mean my team doesn’t need it. For me it’s innate, it’s really natural process. But it isn’t for them, and they can’t read my mind. And so when we’re bringing people in, it’s important to have these clarifying conversations to set them up for success. This is, to me, what we’re ultimately talking about, right?
Is how are we setting people up for success? Whether it’s a new hire with no leadership roles, or it’s a new hire that is gonna be the leader of this division. What are we doing to set them up for success? And to me it comes back to that backbone of what is our identity as it relates to our culture and practice for leading people.
Russel Lolacher: And to your point you nice segue, Rob, is that this isn’t all about us. I mean, as much as leadership development, we’re not islands over here. So as we work to define and we’re understanding our self-awareness and we’re understanding our own leadership journey, how are we bringing our teams into this? Are they part of the journey?
Are they an other within this org this part of it? Or how do we engage our employees on our own leadership journey?
Rob Lion: Yeah. Have you taken an inventory of all the difficult aspects of the organizations I’ve worked with because these are all parts of those conversations, right? Like leadership. Is a much as much about your people and yourself as it is in essentially the task of the mission you’re looking to accomplish.
Your goal as a leader, in my opinion, is to create the conditions to create that environment for people to be successful. H how do people, how are people successful when they don’t have the tools or the information to do the work Well? If they’re not competent, how do we bring their competence up?
And so this is, to me, what you’re talking about here is a shared journey. And this is where I love leaders, that role model this stuff, right? So monthly meetings, let’s say, and as, and also it relates to their one-on-ones. We’re carving out a part of our time to talk about self and team development, and whether that’s the materials we got from a workshop. Whether that’s, what are you reading now. Whether that’s, let’s listen to a 15 minute podcast on what we’re talking about here in discussing… this, to me, is an important part of that value added experience for employees, that it’s going to keep them at organizations, but the byproduct of that is that you’re creating rapport, relationships, growing trust, as well as you’re growing this ground step so that you can more naturally have these feedback and accountability conversations. So I believe in the leader being vulnerable, opening up, not disclosing their whole ,life story, strategic sharing and then bringing people in as a part of that journey, right?
At some level, we need to know what’s best for X. When I say X, that can mean this engineering design, that can mean the service line we’re providing for our customers or our clients or, and know best for moving the team forward. It’s the leader needs to be, and I could appreciate this because I had a client that once said, we’re talking about goals and it’s like, Rob, I can’t even look that far ahead.
Because my head is so down day to day of what’s going on now. So this is a real difficult concept talking about goals, right? We wanna create that space to do this so that they are looking over all their people’s heads to see what’s coming down the way. And part of that is building self-sufficient members of your team.
But it’s for most organizations, you can’t hire self-sufficient members. You have to cultivate and grow them based on what your organizational priorities are.
Russel Lolacher: And I, I always love the idea of bringing up vulnerability because I think nothing builds relationship better than understanding that as a leader, I don’t have all the answers either. I am also on a leadership journey. I didn’t come in here fully baked and ready to go and have all the answers for you.
One of the best experiences, I had an executive do a presentation. Super nervous. She was not her. She very introverted, not her realm, but unlike most executives who talked about their leadership journey, she talked about all her failures and all the jobs she didn’t get. Up to that point, every executive sounded like they’ve gotten every job they ever applied for in their entire lives since they worked at McDonald’s.
And she was literally like, I really wanted that one. And I didn’t get it. I wasn’t ready. And the amount of people that crowded her after that going, I see myself in you and now you’re giving me a North Star, that is attainable because I also can fail and still be in a position that you’re in. So I love the idea of that because it only fosters engagement within the team and the larger organization.
Rob Lion: Yeah, some people respond to hustle and drive talk and… you know what I mean? I don’t like it. And I think it’s really few and far between. I think most people respond to compassion elements of the human condition. And that’s sometimes part of our problems in organizations is that we’re so work and busy oriented.
We’re not human oriented. And so people that might be having tough times going on in their life don’t know how to navigate things because they might not have someone back home to talk about and at work they might not have someone to talk about there. So at least we cultivate. So you mentioned motivation, that’s an area I spend a lot of time on. We cultivate the grounds at work, hopefully for people to feel heard so that they can navigate their own paths, right? Just because you’re in a relationship doesn’t mean you’re not lonely at home. So what’s to mean that everything’s good at home? What can we do for people that are giving the best parts of their day to our organization so that they can feel supported?
So that they can feel like they have enough energy at the end of the day to go home and tackle home things like that. And so I think it’s really important that we’re cultivating that space. But it’s so easy going back to that busyness, right? And we did a really good job of this during COVID that, oh, I’m so busy, and the self-talk and things like that, that we have to prioritize, or at least I believe this, and I know you believe this too, that a part of our job is the development of our people and this organization in this other space. Because if we don’t do it in this other space, we’re gonna run out of people to do the work we need to do. We might get performance out of them and grind them through it, but we’re gonna lose them in the end because they don’t feel valued, they feel run down, things like that.
And that, I believe is really the grounds of what you alluded to earlier, where these newer generations are not as interested in leadership roles because they’ve seen what’s happened to their parents. They’re starting to get a taste of it as they’re starting to come into these new jobs. They go in for these interviews and these organizations talk about their brand and their principles and their values, and they’re like, man, I can’t wait to work here.
Then they start in the first week and they’re so let down because they haven’t been socialized with the team that they’re not seeing any integrity. They’re starting to talk to people and they’re like, don’t talk to that guy, he’ll throw you under the bus. All these other things, and so I, it, people deserve this.
We deserve this. We need this. Because people actually like work. Like I look forward to work. I go on vacation and there’s parts of work I miss. And it’s not out of a habit, it’s out of a part of my meanings tied up and my part of my identities tied up in helping others. And so if that wasn’t fun, then I wouldn’t want to do it the same as when you go to the office. If that’s not fun, you’re not gonna want to do it. It’s gonna pull more out of you than you’re possibly able to give. So, and fun’s not a difficult concept. It’s different for different people just as that journey of development is. But I really, truly believe that organizations have an obligation to integrate this stuff as a part of their identity, as a part of, you know this organization as an organism, right? Even though it’s just an entity.
Russel Lolacher: Team seems like a logical understanding of bringing in as a leader, bringing in, developing, working with their journey as well. I get it. Totally understand that. But there’s also the colleagues, there’s also the people above you. You’re in a leadership journey, you’re learning, but they may be on a different journey or they may be at a different part of their journey, regardless of what their title says.
How do you bring them in on the journey with you or do you not?
Rob Lion: You try, right? I get this question a lot. How do we, is the concept of leading up or managing up? In some instances, sometimes it, which really helpful and has worked really well with a lot of our people are some of the personality and behavioral assessments we use so that they can learn more about themselves.
And then begin to recognize their team members. But then they figure out, oh, the person that’s above me, they’re, this is their tendency. And if I could start to dance according to that or communicate according to that, I’ll have better luck. And they actually do because they start presenting information in different manners in different ways so that they respond better.
And it’s a beautiful thing when it works, but then there’s other people that are just not interested, right? And so I’m gonna grow me, and I’m gonna grow my team. And this kills me. I’ve had clients over the years where we would go into the organization and their C-suites not involved.
In fact, it’s just one division or something like this. And this is a smaller organization, so there’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t be involved with it. And they’re handling this development in a pocket and that’s just the part of that is a mindset. It’s part of, it’s a value belief, right? And sometimes we just have to build the best team we can. Which is part of building our efficacy as a leader. And then we need to look for a new position because that is not a fit. And unfortunately we can’t change their viewpoints, their beliefs. And so, and we see this a lot. We see actually, when you think about the hierarchy, we see certain leaders that are turning over good people consistently.
They chalk it up internally as bad hires, but if you did the exit interview, you’d learn that, there’s no psychological safety or there’s no equity, or he’s absent or she’s absent. Things like that. And the different groups like HR and the COO and these other people know that this churn’s happening because of this person, but they’re not addressing it.
And so I, and I don’t know. It’s a tough situation, so sometimes what we just have to do is leave. Unfortunately, I love this organization. I don’t love how I’m being treated and I need to find another opportunity.
Russel Lolacher: So where do we start, Rob? Like as someone who’s looking, maybe they just started their role, maybe they’re middle management and they’re going, okay, I’m not getting what I need. I can, to your point, I can only control what I can control.
Rob Lion: Yep.
Russel Lolacher: Where am I starting? We’ve talked about self-assessment, we’ve talked about self-awareness.
Is that the first step on this journey?
Rob Lion: Wow. That’s, I wonder if that’s, you have to have some level of self-awareness to realize what’s not working out here. I think so. So that’s part of it. I, we have to be careful of who we talk to. Because just as I mentioned, be vulnerable and bring your team in. There’s certain things you don’t talk about, and this is one of those things, right?
Let’s not throw our leadership under the bus here to our team so that we look better. I think we have conversations. We find people that can relate to us. Sometimes our friends and family aren’t the best connections. Sometimes it’s a mentor from a previous job. Someone that what we’re looking for is gaining perspective because there’s some self work to be done here too, because some of it could be also to what extent is it me that’s the problem here? Because you notice our conversation is always about everyone else, right? And that’s a real convenient self-preservation approach. So what is it that I’m contributing into this that might be contributing to that problem? And so maybe a 360 degree assessment from your team in certain key areas would help you figure that out.
Having a mentor or a coach that you’ve had relationships with that knows you well, can walk you through this. Be wary of, you could pull in some friends if you want, but be weary of people saying, you know what, they’re just wrong. You’re right. Because that’s what friends are supposed to do, right?
And I don’t recommend really your significant other too much unless you work with them, because they really don’t necessarily know what you do and don’t do once you leave the home. So that’s a really tough question to ask. I think continue reading, continue listening to these things, podcast, stuff like that, gaining perspective.
But what I like to remind people is that so, so our organization has several tenets, and these tenets are core beliefs that we try to ground people in to change their perspective of understanding of life and the world. So that they can move forward in a different direction. So one of them is vulnerability does not equal weakness, and we’ve already talked about weakness and vulnerability.
So the one, another one as it relates to what we’re talking about now is your perception is not reality
Because for how long have we been told our perceptions are reality? And there’s some, there’s some nuance there. It’s our reality but there’s a big difference between our reality and everyone else’s reality.
And starting to understand what that difference is super important in terms of realizing that I’m just a small piece, small cog in the overall gear of this organization, and it will be fine without me. It has been fine without me. And so there’s some self-realization that needs to start to occur in terms of who I am.
Is this working for me? What other options exist? I know it’s not a super concrete answer for you because it’s a super hard question to answer. But if I had a a couple hours I build you a program to, to work through that. That’s kind of what we do. I need a little bit more lead time here, Russel.
Russel Lolacher: Communication’s always something that comes up for me ’cause… so my big three big tenets for this show is self-awareness, situational awareness, communication. Know yourself, know who you’re around and how to connect. How does communication fits itself in here? Because if we’re on a journey, it’s, we’re not like, as we said earlier, we can’t just do it in a silo somewhere.
We have to be engaging. But that comes with communication. So how are we communicating to our teams? How are we commun, how are we showing up? Presenting ourself that we’re on this journey, just to give anybody listening an idea of, okay, how do I start engaging those around me to support me or to connect with me as I’m on this?
Rob Lion: You are right. Communication is the foundation of all of this, right in one aspect. Think about it. If you ever go to a conference, there’s always communication workshops. You always find communication consultants because it’s something we haven’t figured out and we don’t do very well. So it is key to understand the nuances of communication and how humans behave as it relates to communication and if you can do some self-development work, if you could read about some behavioral profile things, if you could learn more about this… What you begin to learn is that people are not the same as me. That there’s some people that have behaviors and tendencies and communication practices similar to mine, but most people don’t. And another part of that is, I communicate with others in a manner that I would prefer to be communicated to. So how I package a concept and send it your way is really biased towards my mindset, my beliefs, what words I put value on.
And so now your task is to decode that based on a different filter. And so this is where communication fails, is that we aren’t on the same page with many of these things, and this is where tools that help with communication assessments and personnel pieces and things like that are really powerful because now really quickly I learned that Russel is different than I in this manner.
And because of his behavioral profile and communication tendencies and preferences, if I want to connect with him, if I even want to lead him in a certain direction to make a decision that’s in a certain weight that benefits me. I can present information in a certain order. I could package it up in a manner that he can take and it would make sense to him.
But how do you do that if you don’t have that foundation? Like I think about people that I’ve worked with over the years and had conversations with, especially salespeople. And they’re like, oh, I don’t need any assistance in terms of reading people. What I do works.
And what they’re really doing is they’re really hammering and leveraging the charisma element that’s resonating with a portion of the public. It’s not resonating with everyone. If they would pause and take some development into consideration, they would learn that there’s different profiles that they could connect differently with through different tactics.
So you’re right, communication is the foundational piece even to myself, right? I have to be skilled at communication with myself, but I also, that is really reliant on a level of self-awareness and consciousness, right? Because we hear people in the trauma space and the mindset space talk about like things like room rumination and things like that, right?
And if I don’t have a level of self-awareness, I don’t know how to monitor myself as being a participant of rumination, negative self-talk, things like that. And so what you’re talking about here is all really integrated and important, and then it spills into your team. How does this relate to your team and when you have self-aware leaders? Isn’t this true? When you’re a self-aware leader, you begin to quickly recognize on your team who needs work in that area? And then that’s where you use your vulnerability, cultivate that space, integrate it into your one-on-ones, be a part of their journey. There’s nothing more beautiful than a leader that’s really worked hard, is insightful, is patient, is humble, and then they start to take their followers, their team members under their wing, to start to cultivate some of that in them. So that, not that they want to be so they look like the leader, but so that they can flourish and thrive and be a better version of themself for their family, for the organization, for all these other things.
Russel Lolacher: I’m sure I have a million more questions, but that’s a great place to wrap this conversation up with. Thank you so much, Rob. I appreciate your time.
Rob Lion: Hey, thanks Russel.
Russel Lolacher: That’s Dr. Rob Lion. He’s a Professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University. He’s also the principal at Black River Performance Management with specialization in leadership and organizational development as you heard from this conversation. Have a great day, Rob. Thank you so much.
Rob Lion: Thank you.