Leadership training that won't annoy people, part three: Don't use leadership styles

What is your leadership style?

Are you a challenger? Or are you maybe a bit of a lone wolf? Maybe you're always on, or maybe you are a connector. For your sake, I hope you would identify as a "connector," given Gartner's recent finding that "connector" leaders are, always and forever, objectively the best. You might be authoritative, you might be command and control, you might be a servant leader.

Perhaps you have attended a workshop at your company, led by a highly-paid consultant, who hands you a twenty-item questionnaire and in return reduces the complexities of your work into a single, snappy categorization. An aggregation of the breadth of my own participation in these workshops would suggest that I'm some combination of a type 3-red-challenger-servant leader-ENFJ-collaborator-facilitator. You know, the most common leadership style.

But here's the problem. Whatever leadership style you think you identify with is likely not the leadership style that others would use to define you.

Our leadership styles, which is to say, the way we engage others in the collective pursuit of a shared goal, is highly situational.

Many working parents would attest that the way they engage their kids to get them to bed on time is considerably different from the way they manage their direct reports at the office. The way that I coach my high school football players to be better defensive linemen is vastly different from how I coach my co-workers to be better managers. The way a senior executive directs their team through an intense budget negotiation would look much different from how that same leader would mentor a group of aspiring future executives.

Marcus Buckingham, in his recent bestseller "Nine Lies About Work," concludes that leadership styles are among the most pervasive myths of the workplace. Buckingham writes:

"The only thing that the best leaders share is followers. The best leaders are able to give their people the confidence to follow them into the uncertainty of the future. They all have that in common. But the way in which they instill this confidence varies, leader by leader. Which means that “leadership” isn’t something we can define in isolation of the leader doing it."

-Marcus Buckingham, 9 Lies About Work

The data increasingly suggests that something as complex and context-dependent as leadership cannot be reduced to a set of traits akin to a personality style.

So, if we bring leadership styles into our leadership development efforts, we're wasting time and resources. We're also patronizing our learners by ignoring the nuances of their skillset.

But if we were to cut leadership styles from our leadership development programs, what would we put in its place?

The answer to that question is found in the reason why leadership styles are problematic. Leadership styles don't add value to our work because our work as leaders oscillates wildly from one setting to another. So instead of understanding leadership styles, we need to understand the setting in which our leadership takes place.

True leadership development is less about aligning one's habits to the best of a personality style, and more about attuning one's attention to the particulars of your environment. In other words, true leadership development is a process of thoughtful reflection about an organization's culture, or the processes by which an organization constructs meaning.

To develop leaders, we don't need to categorize individual styles and teach what it means to lead within those styles. We need to help leaders think about the organizational culture in which they operate, and the leadership skills they need to thrive within that environment.

How does our organizational culture inform the interpretation of data? How does our organizational culture facilitate collaboration? What challenges does our culture present to effective communication, clear goal setting, and nimble execution? These are just some of the questions that leaders should be asking when they get together for leadership development. Because when our leaders increase their awareness of their culture, they can identify the skills they need to thrive.

At that point, leadership development ceases to annoy people. At that point, leadership development becomes a joy.

Remember, leaders: Keep it simple. Unless, of course, it needs to be kept complex.

Leadership training that won't annoy people, part two: Don't use models or frameworks!

The history of leadership training likely can be summarized as follows:

Once upon a time, we started to do 'leadership training,' which was mostly a series of lectures on abstractions and philosophies about an imprecise and undefinable quality. One day, we decided to make our leadership development less abstract and more "actionable," so we converted our content into a series of catchy acronyms like GROW, personality inventories like MBTI, and decision-making frameworks like 9-Box. For years, our learners nodded along and politely considered using such tools during their day to day, before they left their training session and went right back to doing things in exactly the same way.

Sound familiar?

Managers suffer from framework fatigue and acrostic apathy, conditions that we can only cure by jettisoning models and frameworks from our leadership development programs.

Frameworks and models fail for two reasons. First, they aren't applicable to a specific enough task. In their "scalability," we lose track of why we would want to use them in the first place. Second, it's unclear how we might apply them to the development of a specific skill. How would we use a personality inventory if our task is to manage engineers? Why would we use a coaching framework if our top priority was to lead a team of financial analysts? Frameworks and models exist for their apparently wide usability. Yet because of their wide usability, it's unclear what we should use them for.

But there is another way.

Our task as leadership developers is not to build programs around models like DiSC or Enneagram.

Our task is first to understand the skills our leaders need to succeed, then to isolate tools for the development of these skills.

A tool is that which can be concretely and meaningfully applied to the completion of a specific task. Whereas a framework is defined by its versatility, a tool is defined by its singular ability to be repeatedly used for a clear purpose. The solution to framework fatigue is to ensure that we don't use frameworks: we only use tools.

Contrast this to many contemporary leadership development programs, which attempt to build costly and resource-intensive programs around frameworks like Strengths Finder 2.0 or True Colors. Each of these frameworks could be used as a tool. If leaders identify career planning as a skill need, Strengths Finder 2.0 becomes a viable tool. If leaders identify team facilitation as a skill need, True Colors becomes viable as well. But all too often, we begin with the framework, we don't clarify its relationship to specific skills, and we end up wasting time.

I once knew a leadership developer that was attempting to build the coaching skills of several customer support managers. They had read about the GROW model of coaching, but rather than simply training their leaders on the model, they found a way to connect it to a specific skill: holding regular 1:1 check-ins with direct reports.

The leadership developer worked collaboratively with their managers to develop a new template for employee 1:1s, a template based on the coaching questions found within the GROW model. After holding a brief kickoff training and launching the new 1:1 template, the leadership developer continued to meet with the managers to understand the extent to which leaders applied GROW. They built a team of successful, committed workplace coaches - not because they trained anybody on a coaching framework, but because they identified needed skills and provided a tool that perfectly aligned to that skill.

So let's stop subsidizing the Gallup corporation by mindlessly purchasing Strengths Finder. Let's start to identify what skills our leaders need. It's only then that we can turn our frameworks into tools. It's only then that our leadership training will cease to annoy people.

In the next blog post, the third of this series, we'll turn to the third problem of leadership development: falling for the latest trends while losing sight of one's unique context.

Remember, leaders: Action - not reaction. Because actors win awards. Reactors melt down.

Leadership training that won't annoy people, part one: Don't teach anything!

The greatest temptation for leadership developers, whether they are trainers, instructional designers, HR professionals, or anyone tasked with building up teams, is teaching too many "things." From facts and frameworks to thinkers and thought leaders, this field is oversaturated with perspectives. When we teach too many "things," our content moves too far towards abstraction. Skill gaps continue to expand.

Luckily, there is a solution. Step one in building leadership training that won't annoy people: Don't. Teach. Anything.

But wait - if I don't teach anything, how do I teach leadership development? Stay with me. We'll soon answer that question.

First, let's consider a week in the life of a people leader. Fortune estimates that those in management positions work between 50 and 55 hours per week, approximately 20% more hours than the average American worker.

This is my cat, Cersei. It's a waste of time to try to teach her things.

If we look only at the time spent in office, these 10+ hour workdays involve sending and receiving over 86 emails and attending an average of over four hours worth of meetings (at the middle management level). This work is done while trying to squeeze in time with direct reports. Most highly-rated managers meet for 30-60 minutes with each employee, each week.

A marked lack of time is the stark reality of today's business manager, which might explain why leadership burnout has become increasingly prevalent.

Yet trainers and leadership developers, myself included, have the audacity to try to schedule additional time with these busy, burnout-prone professionals, to teach things about leadership!

We're doing this with greater frequency and with increasingly sizable program budgets. As more companies have established formal programs for leadership development, the leadership training industry has ballooned to an annual worth 3.4 billion dollars.

In this new workplace economy, where time is limited, stress is high, yet leadership training is plentiful, the responsible talent developer has but one ethical choice: don't teach anything.

Today's workplace leader simply doesn't have the space for learning new "things" about leadership. Managers don't have the time or energy for the latest bullet points on emotional intelligence or the most recent commentary on negotiation skills. The latest trends on effective leadership might make for flashy PowerPoints at talent development conferences, but they're bound to have people leaders reaching for their Slack app and scanning for the nearest exit sign.

Teaching things is the work of yesterday's talent developer. Today's talent developer must aspire to do more.

Eight of every ten of today's CEOs sense an impending crisis of skill gaps within their leadership ranks. These CEOs worry that their employees presently lack the skills needed to thrive and compete in an uncertain economic future. Low unemployment and a tight labor market will only exacerbate these concerns.

In this new workplace economy, we cannot afford to teach leaders "things," because learning things will always take a backseat to more pressing priorities. We must resolve instead to develop specific skills.

Today's talent developer can begin to develop skills by asking three questions:

• Given the goals and context of a team, what skills do its leaders really need?

• To what extent is there a gap between the skills leaders have and the skills leaders need?

• To what extent are people leaders personally invested in closing those gaps through skill development?

The sooner talent developers answer these questions, the faster they can stop teaching things, and start building skills. When we teach skills instead of things, leadership training engages and it empowers. Or at the least, it doesn't annoy people.

Skill development demands attunement and patience: attunement to the unique learning needs within the organization, and patience to endure the time-intensive effort required of systems-building. Skill building is a different process than training. It requires a long-term outlook, a systems-wide focus, a commitment to practice, and plenty of space for reflection. Building skills is not so much about knowledge and learning as it is about habits, feedback, and systems.

In the next blog post, the second of this series, we'll turn to problem number two: introducing too many frameworks and models, and its corresponding solution: don't use models or frameworks!

We'll explore how we develop leadership skills not through frameworks or models, but through systems in which meaningful skills can be developed.

Remember, leaders: Trust the process. Because processes are trustable.