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.

Book Announcement: The Problem with Church in Digital Culture

As a Lutheran and a former Google employee, I find it interesting that as fewer people show up at church on Sunday morning, increasingly more are searching for God on Google's search engine.

Most Christian denominations lost 3-4% of their membership between 2007 and 2014, a slide that has accelerated every year since. Based on these trends, some forecast that entire mainline denominations, the ELCA included, may fold entirely by 2041.

The haunted, holy, and hallowed grounds of Luther Seminary

Yet the Google search engine saw three times as much search volume for the query “who is Jesus” in 2017 than it did in 2007. It’s a question that grows in interest every single year in every state in the Union. It is among the most frequently “Googled” religious queries, second only to “what is the Bible?”  The “Googlification” of Christ’s identity and the significance of the Bible points to an accelerating trend: people are developing their faith through questions, asked outside of the church.

They are developing their spiritual selves not through listening to a preacher, but through self-guided exploration. They are, in every sense, searching for God with Google.

Starting with Millennials, the generations that grew up in digital culture are just as spiritually engaged as previous cohorts.

Younger generations believe in God at a rate that is nearly identical to Generation X, the Baby Boomers, and both the Silent and Greatest generations.

Millennials’ willingness to believe in God carries over to a commitment to individual spiritual practices. Millennial Nones (those who check the "None" box on surveys about religion) exhibit the same rates of engagement with daily prayer as church-going Christians.  In 2010, 45 percent of Millennial adults prayed daily. Every week, twenty-seven percent read scripture and 26 percent meditated weekly—all rates of participation equal to more church-affiliated generations.

I am reminded of my generation’s spiritual inclinations each time I walk past office meditation rooms, a fixture at tech offices across the country.  The chief difference between those who came of age in the digital era age and those who came of age before is truly a difference in institutional affiliation—not a difference in faith. The United States is verifiably becoming a “spiritual but not religious” country.

Especially among younger generations, the country is not turning its back on God. The country is turning its back on the church, an institution that has failed to innovate and reinvent itself amid great cultural change. The church of today, with its emphasis on individualized and intellectualized faith, is not viable nor is it sustainable in a digital age.

Yet still, I show up, each and every week. As a true church nerd, I continue to teach Confirmation, to assist with worship, to preach the occasional sermon. I even completed a four-year master's degree in theology to try to understand why the institutional church seems so out of touch with digital culture.

And as I have studied, read, reflected, and written about this topic, I have come up with a hypothesis. The church of today doesn't engage younger generations because it shuts out that which digital culture has come to value. 

With its insistence on doctrine, the church suppresses questions.

With its obsession over institutional survival, it resists forming new connections.

Due to the professionalization of the ministry, the church turns down opportunities to collaborate.

And as church membership declines, it loses the ability to bring creativity to the life of faith. The church of today exists without questions, connections, collaboration, and creativity, four core values of our shared digital culture.

I want to understand how that could change. I want to determine how church leaders could take the best of the Christian tradition and align it with the values of digital culture. The Christian tradition offers a message the world so desperately needs to hear—a message of hope for an age of cynicism, a story of restoration for an age of climate change, a word of unity for a time of political and social division. But that story is going unheard and is often misunderstood.

Today, I am pleased to announce that I have started writing a (still untitled) book with Fortress Press. The book will analyze what ministry means in a spiritual but not religious society. Ultimately, the book will present the thoughtful church leader with a blueprint for effective ministry in digital culture.

So stay tuned! I've launched a new website (www.ryanpanzer.com), and started a newsletter. Follow both for updates on the project. Whether you identify as spiritual or not so much, Christian or None, Millennial or Baby Boomer, I hope you'll consider joining me for the conversations ahead!

Introducing "Leadership training that won't annoy people," a blog series

Welcome to the first-ever blog series on the Motivational Clichés Leadership Blog!

In this series, we'll explore how to build leadership development experiences that won't bore your learners to tears! In each posts, we'll ask why leadership and management courses are often viewed by participants as a waste of time - and how you, the talent development professional, can do something about it!

It's no secret that leaders don't love leader training, which is too bad, given how much time and money their employers invest in it.

At best, people leaders tend to view their training experiences as semi-optional diversions from their actual responsibilities. At worst, managers view leadership training as an obtrusive hindrance to their ability to lead effectively. Regardless of how leadership training is received, it's likely that nearly all of the participants will forget everything they learned within two to three weeks, applying little to none of what they were taught.

This is a problem that matters to me on a personal level. As a leadership developer, I build these types of courses for a living. At a practical level, I'm a busy guy and I don't want to waste my time with inapplicable training. At a deeper level, I want to avoid the existential dread that ineffective training can trigger in instructional design types.

It's a picture of one door closing while another door opens. It's a metaphor. That actually happened.

Fortunately, I have the benefit of working with a vocal team and an engaged group of people leaders, willing to provide radically candid feedback on what they like, dislike, and find applicable about their experiences. While I don't claim to have some monopoly on timeless principles for leadership development, I might humbly suggest that I have identified several common mistakes that many leadership trainers continue to make!

As I continue to build and deliver leadership courses, I have identified three common problems with leadership training that leave learners bored, disengaged, and even resentful. They are:

1. Teaching too many things

2. Introducing too many models

3. Pushing a single leadership style or philosophy

Fortunately, each of these problems has a solution, with which you can boredom-proof your leadership training! The solutions are:

1. Don't teach anything.

2. Don't use models or frameworks.

3. Don't promote leadership styles.

But what, you may ask, am I supposed to do if not these three things?

• Instead of teaching things, resolve instead to develop specific skills.

• Instead of discussing models or frameworks, utilize tools aligned to specific skills.

• Instead of teaching another leadership styles framework, ground learning experiences in the specifics of context

In the three upcoming blog posts, we'll dive into each of these problems, their corresponding solutions, and how you, the leadership developer, can take action. Whether you are an instructional designer, a trainer, a people leader, an HR business partner, or someone who just wants their teams to lead more effectively, these posts will inspire you to start dialogues that lead to concrete leadership development outcomes.

In this digital age, there is a better way to build leadership in our organizations. This blog series is about acknowledging that the common way of doing leadership training simply doesn't work - but there is, in fact, a way forward.

The motivational cliché mug from Pine Lake Camp, photo credit: Ben, Robyn, and Baby Cedar Koehler