When it comes to business, great leaders aren’t born, they’re made. So how do we ensure we’re doing what we can to empower our employees? Deb Calvert, bestselling author and president of People First Productivity Solutions, joins us to discuss the importance of leadership development in your business. We’ll cover all the latest trends in training and development—from engagement to productivity to the best tactics for developing the millennial workforce into the leaders of tomorrow.
Tell us what you think!
Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, this is your host Brandon Laws. I’m with Deb Calvert, she is the President and Founder of People First Productivity Solutions. She’s a keynote speaker, a UC Berkeley instructor, and author of the Discover Questions bestselling book series. Deb, it’s awesome to have you.
Deb: Brandon, thank you! It is awesome to be here. You are on a hot streak, you’ve had some wonderful guests lately. I hope people are backtracking and picking up on all these!
Brandon: I appreciate that! So, Deb, where are you coming from? Are you coming from California?
Deb: I am! I’m near San Jose, California.
Brandon: Excellent. So we’re here to talk about the case for leadership development and business. We hear with our clients, our audience members, training and development is so hot right now, especially as we look at the landscape of the future. I keep hearing the stat, by 2020, 50% of the workforce is going to be millennials. Why is it so important that we start developing and thinking about these emerging leaders in the workplace?
Deb: Well, first and foremost, we’ve got to think about this audience because they are the workforce of the future, and if you’re not developing this workforce, they aren’t sticking around. Let me string together a couple pieces of research that I think really nicely answer your question.The human capital trends report for 2016, the one that Deloitte does annually—of course this is with all sizes of business and it’s global—they found that 89% of businesses are seriously worried about their leadership pipelines. 89%, which, first of all, says that there are that many that are worried about it, there aren’t people that are truly developing leaders. Put that side by side with the training industry magazine trends report, it was issued in winter of 2015, still pretty recent. It said that high potentials at dozens of top global companies were unsatisfied with the development efforts implemented in those companies to the extent that it was the cause for their early departures. So people are leaving because they’re not getting developed, and if you’re not developing people inside your own company, there’s no place to go and find these young, talented leaders. There’s no way that they’re just going to come out of nowhere. So it’s a big problem.
Brandon: Those stats are so high. So they’re not being developed, they’re leaving. Are they just going to go to another business where they’re not being developed? Isn’t this a problem across a lot of companies? Though, I imagine some people are doing it right.
Deb: Yes, some are, and some are doing it better than others. I’m sure there’s a gold standard, and even in that gold standard it’s not that leaders are developing and there’s so many of them that they’re planning to go around everywhere.
So, millennials. They’re talented, they’re smart, they’re capable, they’re confident. So if they’re not getting anything at Company A, they’ll move onto Company B where they get something. And when it fulfills what they’re looking for or when they’ve maximized everything that they could get, they’re looking for the next thing, Company C. And it might not be better, maybe it’s just different. So they are forced to cobble together their own development as opposed to getting a streamlined program, something that’s unified that’s progressing and helps them to develop within a single organization.
Brandon: In the research you’ve done, you alluded to the fact that people are leaving because they’re not being developed. Do you think that’s one of the main causes of people leaving?
Deb: It is, that’s what pretty much all of the research is telling us. And it doesn’t have to be formal university style development the way that big, big corporations might do. I think this is even more significantly a problem for smaller companies, because resources are even thinner and you might not know exactly where to go to even get started on developing other people. You’re just trying to keep the business afloat this year.
Brandon: That’s such a great point, the lack of resources. How have businesses traditionally developed their leaders if at all? Really, have they in the past?
Deb: I think one of the questions that that begs is have they really developed them as leaders or have they had more management development programs.
Brandon: Very different things.
Deb: Yeah. I mean, even in universities, you can go get an MBA. There are programs that teach you how to be a good manager. But leadership is something completely different. Leadership is what inspires and challenges and innovates and brings the future together the way that you want it to be for your business.
Brandon: How do we make the case for development? It seems like, with development, if people aren’t thinking of it like, Hey, we need to do this, there’s going to be a gap, our leaders are going to lead, we’re going to have emerging leaders that really need to step in and take these positions, how do you make the case if you’re an HR Director or somebody who’s in charge of developing people, how do you make the case to the executive team to put resources or put together a program?Deb: That is such a smart question, but I think it has to go backwards, so bear with me while I stair step through it.
People at the top, people who are thinking about strategy and are tasked with delivering on whatever the shareholders want, if you’re a small business, as I said, you’re looking to keep the numbers right today to stay in business.
Okay, so what do you care about? You care about top line revenue, bottom line revenue. You care about customer satisfaction and you care about productivity levels of the workforce. Those are the three things that are going to drive long term success.
So if we’re working backwards, how then? How do I increase productivity, how do I increase the level of customer satisfaction, how do I impact top line and bottom line revenue? And there is one answer to that question. Lots of research I could give you to back this up. The one thing that drives all of that plus also drives employee retention is a higher level of employee engagement.
And let me define employee engagement, because it’s one of those terms that gets thrown around. The definition I like to operate with goes like this: employee engagement is a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels toward his or her organization that influences them to apply additional discretionary effort to their work. So, breaking it down: emotional connection. I like it here, it feels good, I’m going to stay here. There’s the retention and you get the institutional knowledge built up. And then, that additional discretionary effort yields higher productivity. Customers who are more satisfied and the long term impact of that is your top line, revenue, and your bottom line, profit.
“Employee engagement is a heightened emotional connection that an employee feels toward his or her organization that influences them to apply additional discretionary effort to their work.”
Okay, one more step backwards then that we have to take. This, I hope, is sounding pretty good. How do you, then, this is the ultimate question, if employee engagement drives all of that, then how do I get employee engagement? And there is some fascinating research, in fact, some new consolidation of this research in a book that just came out last week. It’s by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, and that book is called Learning Leadership, and I highly recommend it, it’s a great read. But it is based, in part, on their research over the past 30 years about what drives employee engagement and they put two things side by side. They looked at 10 demographic variables, things like how long have you been with the company, what’s your job title, demographic characteristics, to see if there was more employee engagement that came from people at certain levels or with certain tenure within the company. And they laid that side by side, those 10 factors, with how does the person that you report to behave, looking at leadership behaviors. And it was staggering, because if you add up all 10 demographic factors, there’s less than 1%. In fact, it’s 0.2% of an impact you could hope to yield with all 10 factors together, you get barely any increase in employee engagement.
But, out of their 30 leadership behaviors, any one of them yields a double digit increase in the level of employee engagement. So, very simply stated, when managers adopt leadership behaviors when they have been developed as leaders, you increase employee engagement which increases retention, productivity, satisfaction, and revenue.
Brandon: How do you track all of that, though? Because if we’re talking about asking for resources and making that case, if you’re a business with a lack of resources, you’re just small in general, how do you track those things? When you put it to practice and you have the research and data behind it it becomes easier to make the case, but how do most people track those data points?
Deb: Right, well I do think that most companies have some metrics around most of these. Certainly your revenue and your profitability. Maybe, depending on the size of your organization, you’re getting some form of customer feedback, and all of the great new software that’s out there makes it very easy even for small businesses to get that piece. In terms of productivity, well, depending on what you make, that’s probably going to be pretty self-evident too. And retention, I hope that at a minimum you’re tracking, if you’ve got even five or more employees, how satisfied are they, how long do they stick around. Then you’re asking what’s the metric for employee engagement. And although there are formal surveys and depths of things you can do, I think it’s about talking to people. You just talk to your employees—How are you feeling about work today? What can I be doing to make your work more satisfying? Maybe it’s not a pure metric, because it’s anecdotal, but that’s where the evidence is. And I do think it’s the obligation of every business owner and manager to be doing that kind of work. That’s why I call my business People First Productivity Solutions, it boils down to putting your people first.
Brandon: That’s such a great point, just really asking them and asking the right questions to see if they’re actually engaged. If that’s the piece of information you’re going to use to ask for resources and get the resources to develop your people, it’s a really good start.
Have you had any success with asking a survey or maybe asking certain questions? You alluded to a couple of them, but maybe there’s something you recommend people ask?
Deb: You bet. Let me talk about two things. First, Gallup, which does an annual report, and they interview people who have left companies and they ask them, Why did you leave? And then they peel it back. They ask questions like, What caused you to leave or to start looking for that job that ultimately led you to leave the company? And what they found out is that pay is #5 on that list and the first four, the top four things, year after year, that cause people to leave their employers is a lack of engagement. It’s things like, my boss never talked to me, I didn’t know what my career path was, I didn’t know if I was doing a good job or not, nobody ever gave me feedback. So it’s all about the dialogue.
So there’s that research. What question do I recommend people ask? It’s simply this: What would help you to feel more engaged and more challenged and more excited about coming to work every day?
Brandon: So we talked about making the case for it, but how do we actually develop these people? Could we talk about that a little bit? I’m sure you have tons of ideas about how to actually develop these future leaders. There’s so much technology resources, there’s so much information out there. What is truly the best way to develop some of the upcoming leaders?
Deb: You have to trust people. So anything I say after this is dependent on thinking about how much you are willing and able to trust people. Because to develop them you have to be willing to let them stretch and you have to take a little risk with them. So of course you have to be sensible if it’s something that has high stakes and you’re talking about a person who’s truly not ready. Well, we’re not going to throw anybody in the deep end, we’re going to help them, we’re going to get them there incrementally. But you do have to trust in order to delegate for development, to give people a chance to prove themselves, to fail forward and learn as they go. So that’s the first piece.
The second piece is, break it down – what is leadership? How is it different from management? I think there are 25 differences which, if people are interested in that, I can tell them where to go for an infographic. But leadership is not the same as supervising. Leadership is about inspiring and reaching out further to innovate and being able to have a sense of yourself leading as opposed to command and control managing. So understanding that first and modeling it, no matter what your job level is, modeling leadership so that people see what they’re inspiring toward, what the example ought to be.
So, trust, modeling it, understanding what it is, and then, finally, making some space. If people are so burdened every single day by the workload that they can never have time to develop themselves, then this will seem disingenuous. So how can you thread in some development with the work? Because the two things going hand in hand is where the real experiential learning takes place.
“What question do I recommend people ask? It’s simply this: What would help you to feel more engaged and more challenged and more excited about coming to work every day?”
Brandon: I want to get your take on this. So I’m of the belief that if you can empower people, they can become leaders really without necessarily having a leader title or a manager title. They could truly lead if they feel that they can rally people and if they’re empowered to do so. And you can do this without really formal training, I believe. What are your thoughts on that and what are some ways we can empower the people?
Deb: You’re very astute. Back to what you asked earlier about millennials, that human capital trends survey that I referenced, it said, look, there has to be a dramatic shift in the workplace. They called it the new organization. And what they said that is, is it’s built around highly empowered teams driven by a model where younger, more globally diverse leaders, even leaders without titles, leaders coming from every different level, have opportunities to step forward. So in essence, the new organization is made up of people who feel empowered, enabled, and ennobled to lead in any situation, whether or not they have a title. There’s an investment in them to that extent.
And companies are doing this, you hear all those stories, they become practically urban myths, but they’re true. Things like Google giving people a whole day every week to work on projects that matter most to them. That’s a new organization model.
Brandon: Yeah, it certainly is, and I’m really wondering when you translate it to the smaller business who is pretty much our audience, if you’re not a big company like Google, how do you dedicate time to do things like that so they can be empowered to try new things and inspire people to inspire themselves, really?
Deb: Yeah. I work with a lot of small businesses, family-owned businesses, so I’ll tell you about one recent example. Where I live is halfway between Silicon Valley and the agricultural salad bowl of the U.S. So I work with a lot of produce and ag accounts and I have some small growers, family-owned businesses. And in this case, it was a family owned business with two brothers and a father, the father hoping to get the two sons more involved as leaders so that he could continue to step back. And underneath the two brothers there were four supervisors who oversee the labor. Depending on the time of year, that’s highly valuable. So the question became, there’s this one supervisor, how can we help him to develop, how can we give him some room to grow, even in the busy season when he is out there in the fields and having to see what’s going on with the labor.
And I just sort of turned that around when I said, what couldn’t he do? You want him to eventually be able to do almost anything in the business, because your plan is the two sons ascend. But they’re going to be the business owners, not the folks who are operating. That means the crew chiefs have to be able to step in. What is it that he couldn’t do? Let’s build the boundaries that way.
And it just changed the whole conversation, because anything they put on the “he could never do this” list, I challenged it. For example, he could never go meet with the bankers. Are you sure? Why not? If that’s true and we isolate that piece out, what else then could he do? What’s left? And it was a lot, a whole lot!
Brandon: If we look at the development programs that are out there right now, the really unique and innovative ways to develop the emerging leaders, what are some of the hottest topics out right now? And the ones that you’re doing for your clients?
Deb: Yes. Leadership at every level is a hot topic right now. Thinking of yourself as a leader even before you ever ascend into that role is a very hot topic. I work with a lot of youth, even people as young as eight years old, because there’s such an interest in positioning leadership as accessible to anyone and everyone. So as a topic, what is it that people – could they look at for themselves look up ‘leader at every level,’ there’s tons about that. And look up emerging leader. In essence, that is applicable to anyone at the frontline, but it also applies to people like me who have been around for a while. There’s nothing about leadership that is ever fully mastered.
Brandon: You’ve said you work with an eight year old. How do you see if they have the leadership capabilities that young or do you really feel like you’re sort of born with leadership capability or it’s a skill that can be developed? I know there’s assessment tools out there that can help sort of measure that. But what is your philosophy on all that?
Deb: Yeah. Well the 8 year olds I work with, it’s a soccer league that has this wonderful initiative to make winners on and off the field. It’s very cool. But here’s a cold hard fact for you: Brandon, every single leader who has ever been or ever will be was, in fact, born.
Brandon: That is true!
Deb: And, every single leader who has ever been or ever will be, intentionally chose to adopt certain behaviors that would cause others to willingly follow them. And those behaviors can be learned, and I have seen many, many leaders at every level choose to more frequently exhibit those behaviors and become stronger as leaders.
Brandon: If somebody’s listening right now and they’re like, I really want to become a leader, I want to be empowered, all those things, what are some of the steps you think they can take to either develop some of those leadership skills themselves or if they’re going to take it back to their team and say, Hey, we need to really have a philosophy on leadership development.
Deb: Well, okay. So I have a couple of tools, and certainly there are many others out there, but this is what I know. I have a program that I offer, it’s an 8-part email – free – emerging leaders training course. So people sign up for it, they get emails, eight in a row, they have assignments, and it familiarizes them with what leadership’s all about and how they can begin to emerge as a leader. So that’s available. On top of that, for people who want to bring leadership development into their own organization, over on my BrightTalk channel I have a webinar that is dedicated to this. And I do a lot of free consultation, so anybody who wants to talk more specifically about their own needs or their own challenges, they should feel free to contact me and I’ll help them. This isn’t about charging an arm and a leg for it, this is about Hey, I believe in this and I’ll have a conversation with you and it’s not going to cost you or obligate you to anything. I just think there ought to be more leaders in the world.
Brandon: I totally love that. You know, Deb, one of the things that first drew me to your company was the fact that your company name is People First Productivity Solutions. One of the taglines we tend to use, and really the philosophy that we use, at Xenium is It’s About People. It’s like you really can’t get business done without really good people, and people that are really empowered to do great work and lead. I just really love your message and I think it’s a good one and people need to hear it.
Deb: Thanks Brandon! I like what Xenium’s doing too, and what you’re doing in this podcast.
Brandon: I appreciate it. Anything else you want to tell listeners before we get off?
Deb: I think the parting message I would say is whether you know it or not, you already are a leader. People watch you, they follow you. Your choice, the difference that you have to make in the world, has everything to do with whether you are leading with purpose and knowing where you’re leading or not.
Brandon: Awesome. Deb Calvert, President and Founder of People First Productivity Solutions, thank you so much for joining the podcast! Really appreciate it.
Deb: Thank you!
Articles & Resources
- Get the free Emerging Leaders training course: http://bit.ly/20O8iJC
- Link to the BrightTALK on how to build the business case for leadership development:https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13989/195203
- Article on Youth Leadership Development: http://bit.ly/1Wq4OO
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Follow Brandon Laws on Twitter @BrandonLaws
Follow Deb Calvert on Twitter @PeopleFirstPS
Visit the People First Productivity Solutions website