The Shift from Doing Work to Leading It with Karina Young

Karina Young: Great leaders empower their teams to show up in their best way at any given moment. They help close gaps and remove blockers that they're seeing for their team. And they help make sure that the organization is operating in a way that gets to the right outcome.

Narrator: You're listening to HR Superstars, a podcast brought to you by 15Five. On this show we talk to strategic people, leaders who are making a meaningful impact in their organizations and and shaping the future of work. So get ready to be inspired and discover the secrets behind building high performing teams and fostering a culture of growth and thriving. The future of HR starts here.

Karina Young: When was the last time you developed your leaders beyond the basics? I'm talking about the skills it takes to truly lead a team or teams of people. Not how to have a one on one or just the essential the feedback, but the skills it takes to conduct work across an organization. Most leaders think they've made the shift from doing work to leading it. It's a common trap I see them fall into, especially first time directors and executives. And the brutal truth here is they haven't. Businesses promote people for execution skills and then expect them to suddenly orchestrate incredible work and outcomes across teams, priorities and constant change. But we never actually help them make that transition. Manager enablement step stops at the basics and we leave our, uh, most critical business leaders completely unsupported. And then what happens? Those leaders who are meant to be driving true business results are stuck in the day to day work. They're solving, they're fixing, they're micromanaging instead of designing and leading a system. They don't realize that empowerment, trust and direction are their biggest assets instead of individual expertise and sole execution. If your leaders are stuck, ask yourself, is my organization enabling leadership or enabling execution? And how would things shift if your approach did too? And here's some real advice on how to make that shift for your company and your leaders. First, let's talk about where I see a lot of leaders get it wrong. And that's in thinking that leadership is all about having the answers. Let me say this loud and clear. It is not. It's a hard truth to unwind ourselves from because we've been set up to believe that leaders are the ones who know and own this single truth that the whole company is waiting on them to reveal to us. But the real job of leadership, the real value those senior lover leaders bring to your organization, is coordination. They don't try to control or uh, know everything. They make sure the right inputs come together at the right time. Across teams, across priorities, across competing demands. Great leaders are willing to make decisions and take risks and delegate. And the magic in that is that when leaders act like conductors, not operators, they build teams that thrive. Don't let a lack of coordination be the reason your business isn't successful succeeding. So how can HR leaders truly enable next level leadership in their companies? Well, it starts with going beyond the basics. The truth is, is that most HR teams today aren't developing leaders for the role we expect them to play. We have to be honest and accountable for that. What we're doing is building strong people, managers. We focus on feedback, basic prioritization, one to one management. What we need to be doing where our impact is most valuable to the company is building system leaders. That means leaders who know how to navigate trade offs. They can sequence work across teams. They can lead through ambiguity. They know when and how to take risk and how to enable people who report to them to do the same thing. If you want more strategic leadership in your organization, you have to start developing for it your HR systems and tools. Those should be taking care of your day to day operational aspects of HR and frankly of management. Your team can focus on true leadership so that the leaders in your company can focus on elevating their skills and learning how to lead systems, not individuals. And ultimately so that your company can deliver the best results possible. HR leaders have to be able to see that through, line, through all of these things in order to level up their impact and how they're developing exceptional leaders.

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Karina Young: I want to come back and talk about this problem that HR constantly sees itself in, which is we are continuing to promote and grow exceptional individual contributors versus looking for leadership qualities and moving people into positions based on a different set of skills, the skills that we actually need when it comes to leadership in our companies. So let's look at what we typically promote people for. Um, when it comes to being a great individual contributor, we're usually looking for that superstar, someone who is just excelling in their role on their own. Maybe they've delivered twice or three times as much as anyone else in their team does as one person. They're someone who is proactive, who is constantly taking on more, raising their hand to say me, me, me, Me, me. They have incredible initiative and drive and they want to grow. All of those things are amazing skills we need to have in our organization and those people should be rewarded for what they're doing. I want you to think about those same skills in the context of being a leader. If you think about someone who is a great leader that you've worked with, do they necessarily mirror that same skill set? Were they always someone who raised their hand to say me, me, me, I can take on more, or were they someone that actually had the foresight to be able to say not right now, that's not a priority. This is what I'm focused on. Were they someone who actually understood the business well enough to know what was urgent and what wasn't? Great leaders that you worked with were probably not people who you thought were just successful on their own, but they were people who knew how to build and develop great teams, how to hire people for the skills the they didn't have that they needed to grow, how to develop people who they saw potential in and how to be accountable for things even when they go wrong. They could set their ego aside and make it about the bigger picture than just themselves. That's a completely different profile than this individual contributor superstar we often look for. So the next time you're in a promotion cycle and someone is coming to you with that next director, that first time executives as an HR leader, I want you to sit back and really think about what are the skills that they're anchoring this promotion on and is that the right signal that they're going to be a great leader? Now, uh, it doesn't mean that you can't promote this person. It's certainly reasonable that this person, the right next move is for them to be a leader of the team. But what you get to raise to your organization is that the development and support this person is going to need to be exceptional as a company wide leader is going to be different. This person is going to need very clear role guidance on how their role is changing and what they're expected to do. They're going to need continual support from their own leader, from the business and from HR on the skills they're going to have to develop. They're going to need constant signals to know are they on track or off track. Moving someone from a manager, senior manager into a director or executive is a significant shift in their career and HR needs to make sure that their companies are showing up for these people well, that they are there for them to support them through this development and transition. Not to just say, good luck, see you when a pip comes around. But you want to move people into these positions where you feel they're going to be successful. You want to set them up. Well, they need that guidance. And we are just so quick to forget to give it to them, um, or to not take the time. There's too much going on. They'll figure it out. They'll learn on the job. Excellent leadership isn't just learned on the job. A small technical skill, yes, maybe a thing that you might do and repeat over and over again can definitely be learned on the job. But that strategic mindset of a leader has to be trained, coached, nourished in order to really thrive and deliver the results that the business needs from their highest paid, most impactful leaders. If you're an HR leader listening to this, remember you are a steward of the company's assets. That means it's people and it's money. And you need to think about that when you're growing and developing leaders. Am I bringing the right care for my people, for their growth that they need at this stage in their career? Am I ensuring that the investment we're making in these people is going to yield the best outcome possible? If you're saying no to either one of those, you have to slow down and you have to think about a new way to approach leadership in your organization. I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of, uh, coordination as a leader, that moving from execution to exceptional coordination is the skill that great leaders need in their organizations. And you might think, well, why does this really matter? Like, coordination sounds like something someone early in their career should be doing. That's not a term for an executive leader. That's where I want to reframe us around what coordination really means when it comes to being an executive or senior leader. Because coordination is about giving up your individual control over everything. The control to know the right answer, the control to be able to deliver the thing in the way it should be done yourself. Great coordination takes direction, clarity, and trust in your team. And that's hard to do. Exceptional leaders don't come in and just fix everything that people on their team are messing up or make sure everything is just absolutely perfect before it heads up to leaders. Great leaders empower their teams to show up in their best way at any given moment. They give them the right information to know what's important and what's a priority. They help close gaps and remove blockers that they're seeing for their team, and they help make sure that the organization is operating in a way that gets to the right outcome. Whether that is good for their team, good for someone else's team. If that means giving a top project to someone else, they're willing to do it. If that's the right person and the right team to lead it. If that means delivering hard feedback to their team about what needs to change so they can be more effective, they do it. If that means being able to say this isn't a priority, I'm going to help defend deprioritizing this project so you can work on something else, then they'll do it. Being a leader is about willing to have those hard conversations up, down and across a company. It's about being willing to make the tough decisions in a moment when it feels like there is pressure and stress around you. Coordination is about living in the center of chaos and being able to take a deep breath and find a path forward. Not just sit there in the center of it and let it overwhelm you, let it take you over, but to know what is the right risk to take. How can I delegate, and how can I help everyone move forward together? Great leaders don't operate as individuals. They're thinking about the team, the bigger picture, the bigger structure. And that's an important mindset shift when you're used to being the star player on a team, the one that gets the accolades for what you did on your own, to suddenly move that mindset to one where the accolades I'm going to get are about what I'm building and designing and enabling, not about me as an individual. Great leaders care about how the rest of the organization views their team, how they view their impact, not them as an individual leader. They see themselves as part of this bigger system and operating in it. And that's what enables those great teams to thrive. And that's the kind of skill sets we need to be developing, we need to be hiring for, and we need to be nourishing in our leadership.

Narrator: When it comes to manager effectiveness, where should you focus your time and budget? How can you tell the difference between an effective manager and an ineffective one? And how can you replicate the success of a good manager at scale? If you find yourself asking these questions a lot, you're in luck. We wrote this guide to help you answer those questions and offer practical tips and tools that can help you measure key talent metrics, improve manager effectiveness, and create a continuous learning environment for your managers. We'll drop a link in the show notes for you to check out.