This is the second article in my Leader as Teacher series.

Part I outlined 1) why its important for leaders to teach (helping the next generation of leaders learn), 2) what they should teach (values, norms, and what it means to be an effective leader in that environment), and 3) what they should not be teaching (functional skills).

Part 1 also started off with this head-scratching quote:

If you are not spending 90% of your time teaching, you are not doing your job.  ~Jim Sinegal, founder of Costco

My first reaction was, "No way!" Then I started thinking about how a leader teaches and I realized it was quite possible.

There are two broad categories of teaching vehicles: 1) leaders doing the teaching themselves, more often through action than pontification, and 2) the "teaching forges" a leader creates, which wordlessly accelerate learning.

In this article, I will cover the first one: leaders doing the teaching themselves.  In Part III of this series, I will cover how leaders can create teaching forges.

Leaders Doing the Teaching, Sometimes with Words

If a leader wants to do this teaching her/himself, here are three vehicles:  Role-Modeling, Celebrations, Drumbeat Messages & Stories.

Battier was walking to the practice gym with the rest of the players, and he said, to no one in particular, "Man, I hate 17 Across."  The senior captain, Steve (Wojo) Wojciechowski, turned to him and said, "You know what I hate more than 17 Across?  Losing." Shane said, "In that one moment, I knew what it meant to be part of Duke basketball."

Role-Modeling.  Are leaders demonstrating the values and norms with their actions?  Are they demonstrating with their actions and results what executives in the organization need to do to be effective?

These are perhaps the most critical questions.

"Do as I say, not as I do" leaders get sniffed out pretty quickly.  They are corrosive to morale and produce rampant cynicism.

I recently listened to a podcast that included Shane Battier, Duke basketball phenom, who went on to win NCAA and NBA championships and build successful businesses. Coincidentally, he had two interesting stories about Leader as Teacher.

Here's the first one: Battier was a hotshot freshman at Duke.  He had been national player of the year and the #1 HS recruit. His first Duke training camp was brutal from a conditioning standpoint.  And it was brutal because that was a key to Duke's success...being in better shape then the other teams. 

They were doing a drill called 17 Across...run 17 widths of the basketball court in 60 secs.  If any player didn't make it, they ran it again, and kept running it until they all did.  Players had nightmares about this drill. 

Battier was walking to the practice gym with the rest of the players, and he said, to no one in particular, "Man, I hate 17 Across."  The senior captain, Steve (Wojo) Wojciechowski, turned to him and said, "You know what I hate more than 17 Across?  Losing." 

Shane said, "In that one moment, i knew what it meant to be part of Duke basketball.  [The senior leaders] set the standard.  They were the first ones to practice and the last to leave.  And a few years later you're the senior captain and you feel this duty to teach the younger guys.  It's not just about winning games or making shots.  Its about how you carry yourself, how we work, the lack of excuses.  That's how tradition is continued.  That's how you pass on the standards, what we stand for."

Reflections for Leaders on Role-Modeling: Which of the corporate values and team norms are you best at modeling and which ones are harder for you?  Is there a written model of what leaders need to do to be great in your company? (Hint: if not, start by getting a model!)  If so, which are your strong suits through which your actions teach others and which ones do you need to learn from other leaders?

What would have to happen on your team or at your company for you to "bring a keg in" to acknowledge and celebrate it?

Celebrations. Follow the money, as they say.  If the members of the sales team who hit their numbers get the laurels and trips and written up in newsletters, but you don't celebrate and reward the employees who demonstrate other values like innovation or customer service or a team-first orientation, people will know what's really important.

Related, the categories at the awards ceremony, if you even have awards ceremonies, speak volumes about what matters.

Ceremonies are important, but what a leader pauses for...what s/he acknowledges, recognizes publicly, continually creates "a fuss" around profoundly shapes organizational behavior.

Taken together, what a company pauses for, what individuals and teams get recognized for, what gets publicly celebrated, and rewarded determines if a value is just "a statement in a frame on the wall" or something that everyone knows is integral to an organization's success.

Reflections for Leaders on Celebrations: What do you pause to acknowledge?  What would have to happen on your team or at your company for you to "bring a keg in" to acknowledge and celebrate it? What award categories are celebrated at your awards ceremonies?  What does your approach to pause and celebration teach future leaders about what it takes to lead and win in your organization?

Here's the heuristic I prep my First Hundred Days clients with: right around the time you feel like you are going to get sick to your stomach if you repeat your drumbeat message one more time, that message is just starting to sink in with the broader organization.

Drumbeat Messages and Stories.  Sometimes you do teach with words.  There are many ways to do this. 

It used to be popular for key leaders to teach in certain new hire programs or management development classes.  This is wonderful, but it's episodic.

If you aspire to teach more, I recommend you think in terms of 1) short-pulse messages, repeated frequently and 2) targeted stories.

Leaders who want to align, mobilize and sustain effort need a drum beat message, something stone-simple, repeated constantly. 

In my First Hundred Days & Beyond program, I encouraged clients to begin to articulate a V₁ drumbeat message around Day 45, depending on the demands and requirements of the situation they are stepping into.

In my view, the two most powerful components of a drumbeat message are Whats & Hows.

The Whats...the mission, the metrics, the priorities.  All are different ways of describing what winning looks like. 

"Ramp is a fantastic company.  I am really proud to work with them.  And one of the reasons I am proud is they have always been very clear about what they are and what they are not.  They have a bunch of competitors and copycats and wannabes over the years who have tried to "Rampify" themselves.  It has never quite worked because Ramp knows they are there to save customers time and money.  They say it ten times a day.  I have heard them say it probably ten times in a single meeting.  And everything is geared towards that, including the comms." ~Lulu Meservey, Transforming Company Narrative.

The Hows...are the values, team norms, winning behaviors...that when done consistently, will lead us to winning.

Shane Battier's second story about Leader Teachers referred to a time after his wildly successful college and pro basketball careers, when he built a successful data-analytics department for the Miami Heat.  Prior to his arrival, the Heat had an almost allergic reaction to using data and analytics to make decisions.

For him, driving change in that situation required a drumbeat message.

"It's your job to remind people every single day why they are there.  It's exhausting and most leaders are not willing to pay the price to... remind their people...why they are there...every single day.  The second you assume you have communicated enough, you've lost.  The great leaders communicate with an enthusiasm and belief, ad nauseum."

Underlining Shane's point about the need for repetition, an Inc. Magazine study referenced in the book The Culture Code asked executives what percentage of the workforce could list the organization's top three priorities.  Executives guessed 64%...64% of the workforce would be able to list the company's top three priorities.

When they asked said workforce, only 2% of the organization were able to correctly list the priorities.

Here's the heuristic I prep my First Hundred Days clients with: right around the time you feel like you are going to get sick to your stomach if you repeat your drumbeat message one more time, that message is just starting to sink in with the broader organization.

If accountability is a key norm or value, and you don't have stories which describe what accountability looks, people will come up with their own definitions and standards, which may be nowhere near the standard you need to win.

Stories. People are hungry for meaning and hungry to belong.  And since the time our ancestors were sitting around fires, stories have been a key way in which leaders teach, help others feel a part of something, pass on culture and tradition.

I would venture to say, trying to teach values and norms without stories, makes something that is already hard infinitely harder.  Leaders need stories about employees and teams who demonstrated those values and norms and set the standards we want to live into. 

For example, if Customer Focus is a key value, and you don't have stories which describe what it means to be Customer Focused, people will come up with their own definitions and standards, which may be nowhere near the standard you need to win.

Back in the day, you would regularly hear presenters and course instructors tell the story of a Federal Express driver who rented a helicopter to make sure a package was delivered to the brand standard of "absolutely, positively overnight." 

It's a great story!  And the fact that he did that 1) without seeking permission from Corporate and 2) was celebrated for it, shows that the company was serious about their brand promise and supporting and celebrating employees doing whatever it takes to, sorry, deliver on that promise.

You don't hear that story as much anymore, but new ones are being told.

Recently a SpaceX rocket blew up after launch.  The explosion was expected, and Launch Conductor was ready with the quip that the rocket just experienced "a rapid, unscheduled disassembly."

In my view, that is in the same league as the helicopter story, because it signals that management is encouraging employees to take big swings, and making clear that when they do, failure and learning from it is not only OK, but an expected part of the journey.

Finally, as a lifelong student of change and leadership, I'll close this article with an apt, albeit, apocryphal quote which I have always loved.  It gets attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, but there is no solid evidenced he ever said it.

"Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words."

Reflections for Leaders on Drumbeat Message and Stories: Do you have a drumbeat message?  For every value and team norm, can you tell a story that illustrates that value in action?

Leaders doing the teaching themselves, through multiple channels is obviously key to teaching future leaders about leading and winning, however winning is defined. 

However, in my view, even more leverage comes from the "teaching forges" that leaders establish, which do the heavy lifting on the teaching front, often without the leader saying anything.  Part 3 of this Leader as Teacher series will describe how leaders can create those environments.

Part 4 will address the inner obstacles leaders need to overcome to teach more often and be more effective when they do. 

Some organizations probably don't care if their leaders are spending time teaching the next generation of leaders.  But some do, and Part 5 will address what organizations who do care can do to encourage leaders to do more teaching.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service that has helped hundreds of leaders get the best start of their careers and given them tools and templates for continued success long past their First Hundred Days.