Consider these two, somewhat challenging statements:

The leadership ranks in any organization are constantly churning with exits, promotions, and new hires joining. Every leader knows that a big part of leadership is training other people to be good leaders. 

~Bob Kierlin, founder of Fastenal

If you are not spending 90% of your time teaching, you are not doing your job. 

~Jim Sinegal, founder of Costco

Quotes can be found here.

Do you agree that teaching should be a top priority for leaders?  If yes, what percentage of senior leaders would agree and are acting accordingly?  How many CHROs or VPs of Talent Development have built 'teaching others' into their competency models or promotion criteria?  How many of the thousands of coaches working with these leaders have 'teaching' on their list of competencies for what it takes to be an Effective Executive?

I think a huge opportunity is being missed here because most of the leaders, CHROs, and coaches I have worked with are not trying to ensure leaders are prioritizing teaching others.

I will break this Leader as Teacher topic into a series of articles and publish them over the next few weeks to make each shorter and easier to consume:

1) Why Leaders as Teachers is important and what leaders should (and should not) teach

2) Teaching vehicles leaders can use

3) What organizations and leaders can do to help make teaching future leaders more of a priority

The best thing a human being can do is help another human being know more. ~Charlie Munger

Leader as Teacher vs. Leader as Coach: Splitting Hairs?

Leader Coach is a popular topic these days.  Is there a meaningful distinction between Leader as Teacher and Leader as Coach?

I think there is.

Generally, coaches...whether outside coaches, internal coaches or Leader Coaches...are encouraged to be agenda-neutral, and to let their clients bring the topics they want to work on.  The Leader Coach is instructed to assume the role of asking questions and drawing distinctions.  Not true for all, of course, but generally true.

To illustrate, a  best-selling book on Leader as Coach recommends that leaders should, after centering their employee, open with the question:  "What's on your mind?"

Further underlining this agenda-neutral stance, the subtitle of the book is "Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way you Lead Forever." 

Leader as Teacher is the polar opposite.  Teachers have a syllabus! Leader Teachers are crystal clear on what they want people to learn. And the best teachers throughout history have all had a burning desire to communicate their knowledge to others.

What does a Leader Teacher's syllabus entail?  Each leader and each leader's situation is different, but the general content will be clearer after answering a few questions:

• Does Johnson & Johnson or Apple or your company want there to be a "way of leading" there?  Or are they and you OK with people leading however they want to?
• If less leadership variability is desired, what are the guiding principles leaders should be following?  What standards of leadership excellence are expected? Are there any leadership best practices that are broadly leveraged?  Is "the way we operate" understood and are leaders held accountable to it?
• How would up and coming leaders or outside hires into the company learn that way of leading?  Diffusion?  Trial & Error?  A training program?

My argument is the quickest way to get the organization aligned and working together towards a common purpose is to make sure 1) the organization has defined the pillars of leadership excellence for their company, as well as some supporting best practices and 2) leaders know it is their responsibility to ensure their leaders, especially the new and up and coming leaders learn that content and ways of behaving.

 Many have Values Statements, but there are still too many who have not defined the standards of effective leadership for their organization.

What Leaders Should Be Teaching: #1 The Elements of Effective Leadership

There are two main topic areas leaders should be teaching:  1) the elements of Effective Leadership and 2) how to walk-the-talk on Values & Norms.

If the leadership and executive ranks are constantly changing, new leaders need to learn how to operate in order to be successful.  Diffusion, trial & error, and training can all contribute, but they are too episodic, too haphazard, too slow in my view. 

The organization's leaders need to be teaching other leaders the standards for effective leadership.

If you agree, know that this is impossible without a defined model of what constitutes effective executive leadership in that organization.

The good news is that many organizations have defined leadership models, perhaps none more famous than Amazon's Leadership Principles. 

But the lion's share of organizations, leaders, and coaches have not defined a clear set of Leadership Effectiveness competencies.  Many have Values Statements (see next), but there are still too many who have not defined the standards of effective leadership for their organization.

Here are a few of the Effective Executive Leadership competencies I use with my clients:

• effective strategic framing & prioritization
• evangelizing/communicating for enrollment
• creating an effective Op Review cadence and dynamics
• building high performing teams
• stakeholder assessment and influence
• managing one's own emotions and showing resilience, especially in the face of set-backs and resistance to change
• cultivating a "generosity gene" 

 

In Mr. Mandela's organization, hate was not okay, and who better than him to teach his leaders that?

An Example of Teaching an Element of Leadership Effectiveness

Let's take the first one on the list: Effective Strategic Framing & Prioritization.  If a leader wanted to teach the standards and best practices for that, how could they go about it? 

Of course, the ways to teach this are legion.  I will just touch on two: templates and orientation.

Templates.  A team that has been together for awhile will already know what the expectations are for strategic framing excellence, whether it is for three-year planning, product positioning decisions, or investment.

But when a new leader joins the team or when a leader moves into a senior position under a leader, how do we ensure he/she knows what is expected, the best practices, the standards?

If a new leader joins your team and Three Year Planning sessions are coming up fast, share a shell PowerPoint deck with the slides you would be expecting to see for the new leader's area.  Better yet, give them some sample decks that have been presented in the past so they can see the story line and level of analysis.

Is that every thing one needs to know about strategic framing?  No. Semester long MBA classes are taught on the topic.  But it's a start.  And one that will help a new leader level-set on expectations.

Orientation.  Sometimes even more important than the content or information or "the what" that is done is the spirit with which an exercise or activity is approached.

Music teachers know this.  There are the notes on the page and then there is your feel, your approach to the score.

When Nelson Mandela was still alive he was asked — after such barbarous torment, how do you keep hatred in check? His answer was almost dismissive: Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate.

Can you see how that orientation could have a profound affect on the output of strategy setting? 

In another organization, hate might be a perfectly fine emotion to leverage in strategy development..."chips on shoulders put chips in pockets."

In Mr. Mandela's organization, hate was not okay, and who better than him to teach his leaders that?

I prefer the term Winning Behaviors over Team Norms because it makes clear the connection between the consistent behaviors of the team and success/winning.

What Leaders Should Be Teaching: #2 Values & Norms

Values. While many organizations have not yet defined leadership competency models, it is quite common for organizations to have coalesced around a set of Corporate Values.

Here is one company's defined and published values:

• Doing the right thing
• Innovation
• Simplicity
• Collaboration
• Openness
• Volunteerism
• Enthusiasm
• Respect

Whether this is a good set of Values is the wrong question for us.

Here are better questions to ask about a company's Values from a Leader as Teacher perspective:

• What does each one mean? 
• As a leader, how do I live them and model them? Specifically, what behaviors are consistent with the values and what would a leader be doing if s/he was behaving inconsistently with the values?
• When two values create a potential bind...Doing the Right Thing vs. Respect or Simplicity vs. Innovation, how should a leader resolve the dilemma? 
• Is it okay if one leader interprets the values differently than another leader?

It is leaders that need to teach other leaders the answers to these questions. Because when an organization has a defined set of values that all leaders understand and role model, it creates a powerful, cohesive organizational culture. 

If the corporate values are right for the competitive environment a company is operating in, that cohesive culture should improve execution.

Norms. In addition to teaching and role modeling Corporate Values, leaders often need to create a dynamic and a culture on their respective teams that is different from the larger corporate culture. 

Perhaps, in their area, mistakes are more costly than in other parts of the organization and they have to be more buttoned-up and more certain before making a decision.  Or perhaps experimentation and rapid cross-team learning are the keys to success.

In the team building work I do using the Rocket Model, the behavioral standards for a team are referred to as Team Norms.  Agreed to Team Norms are one of the eight critical building blocks of high-functioning teams.

Though they mean the same thing, I prefer the term Winning Behaviors over Team Norms because it makes clear the connection between the consistent behaviors of the team and success/winning.

Each leader has to define what winning is, and what the winning behaviors are that, if done consistently, will lead to success.  Then they have to role model and teach those winning behaviors, and hold the team accountable to them.

One place this is particularly important is for leaders moving into new jobs.

There are lots of reasons to install a new leader.  But a common reason is because the last leader could not get the organization and the outputs to where they needed to be.

In these scenarios, driving change in the time frame expected will always necessitate defining what the team has to do to win...not just the priorities it has to focus on...but how the team shows up and how they roll...and then holding people accountable to what are likely significantly higher standards.

To illustrate, as my First Hundred Days clients are getting to know their teams and seeing them operate, I ask them to begin writing down behaviors they need to see More/Less Of for this team to move faster or be more successful.

Examples of More Of themes:  Transparency, Accountability, and Data-driven. 

Examples of Less Of themes:  Not Saying Yes to Every Request and Stopping the "Your-End-of-the-Boat-is-Sinking" Attitude with the rest of the team.

Finally, since "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,"  sometimes the most important winning behaviors that need to be taught are how to bounce back from mistakes and losses. This is especially true if you need more innovation or speed and are doing a lot of experimentation.

For my money, there is no better example of learning how to bounce back from defeat than what Hall of Famer Chris Bosh said he unexpectedly learned from basketball legend Kobe Bryant.

The time spent back in the MASH tent doing surgery on one or more of your wounded functional leaders means you aren't leading the larger mission.  You aren't evangelizing the preferred future.  You aren't assessing stakeholder needs and enrolling those stakeholders to support the change. What you're in fact likely doing is slowing the team down and putting at risk the change mission you're currently driving.

What Leaders Should Not Be Teaching: Functional Skills

Robin Daniels, CPO at Zensai, had a post on LinkedIn that caught my eye.  He lists all the areas of domain expertise needed to be a CMO. 

There were 25. 

As he said, "Yeah, nobody knows all those disciplines."  Plus, they are changing too fast to keep up with them if you are not doing them regularly

If you are a GM or CEO/COO, the situation is 10x worse. 

A leader needs to 1) know how the pieces fit together, 2) hire good people to execute the pieces and, 3) as Frank Slootman says, "monitor the output."

If the output is not right, and you determine the root causes are functional skills that were never as good as they needed to be or are not keeping up, you have a tough call to make.

Because a decision to spend time teaching functional skills, if you are even still qualified to do it, is a decision to take on huge opportunity costs. 

The time spent back in the MASH tent doing surgery on one or more of your wounded functional leaders means you aren't leading the larger mission.  You aren't evangelizing the preferred future. You aren't assessing stakeholder needs and enrolling those stakeholders to support the change.

What you're in fact likely doing is slowing the team down and putting at risk the change agenda you're currently driving.

There are exceptions of course (recent promotions, for example, will need time to learn the ropes and get up to speed), but I am willing to bet if you are trying to retrofit someone's functional skills, you have the wrong guy/gal.

You may disagree, which is fine.  But if you do decide to invest in the rehab, my suggestion is that you make sure you, your boss, and HR are aligned on...1) the potential return and 2) what won't get done while you try to turn your leader around.

In Part II of this Leader as Teacher series will address the second statement at the top of this article, that leaders need to spend 90% (!) of their time teaching or they are not doing their jobs, and how that is actually achievable.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and the designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get the best possible start in challenging new roles.