Leaders Don't Stop Learning

Karen Frost: Welcome to the Coaching Outcomes Podcast with me, Karen Frost. Two decades ago, I discovered the perfect synergy, drawing on my background as a senior leader and bringing it together with my dedication to seeing people grow and realise their full potential. Since then, there's been no turning back. As an executive and business coach, I found my passion and purpose, my, my mission to leave a lasting impact on people's lives professionally and often personally too. Join me as I explore the transformative influence of coaching and leadership development. One conversation at a time. I'll touch on the latest leadership trends, invaluable insights and practical tools by drawing on first hand experiences and showcasing inspiring stories of those I've had the pleasure to work with or, or alongside. It's good to have you here.

Mark Barnett: The best way to assess how you think you're doing is to get feedback from your peers, the people that you work with day in, day out, and allow you then to tailor your approach. I think people shouldn't be frightened to get that, uh, feedback. Some of it can be positive and some not so positive, but we, you need to be open. What I'd say is, no matter how senior you are in the business, use the opportunities.

Karen Frost: Today I'm with Mark Barnett who is a senior leader with an FM company

Laura Pearson: based in the uk.

Karen Frost: Mark is a great believer in leadership development and executive coaching for his senior leaders and has advocated this over pretty much the whole of his career. Today he's going to be talking to me about why that is important to him and why leadership development and coaching is an essential part of the development of his senior leaders.

Laura Pearson: Mark, thank you for agreeing to do this. You and I go back a few years now and we worked together for a number of years, but I've always known how important you thought the development of people was. It's in your DNA, isn't it, the way that you think about it?

Mark Barnett: Yeah, very much, yeah.

Laura Pearson: That's why I've invited you today to have, uh, a conversation about why is there an importance investing in leadership development for your leaders within your organisation? Let's start with that question. You have invested over the years in, uh, previous organisations and this organisation, you've always wanted people to do leadership development. Can you explain a little bit more about why this is important to you? Yes.

Mark Barnett: So I think in terms of the importance I play on it, I think is all down to how it felt for me personally over the years. The people that I've worked with across two or three different organizations, I always felt that they've invested in me as a person.

Karen Frost: What did that investment look like day

Laura Pearson: to day for you?

Mark Barnett: I really felt that they took time to get to know me, understand my kind of personal life situation, family, but then most importantly, how could they invest in my development in terms of within their organization, building really strong working relationships with the team, but that then moved on to uh, how could they work with me to develop me as a professional and support me throughout my career? I consider myself fortunate to have worked with a number of really good people over the years, some of them of which I'm still in touch with that go back 25 years or so.

Karen Frost: What is the essence of leadership development for you, Mark?

Mark Barnett: I guess the essence of it all is that we often think when you're in a senior leadership position you can stop learning. You actually you've reached the top and actually it's as if you're now the complete finished article and I've never seen it like that.

Karen Frost: Uh, and how do you keep yourself honest with that now you're in a senior role?

Mark Barnett: I think you've got to always be open to continually learning. The development opportunity brings an opportunity for you to assess how you think strategically about things, areas where you want to improve your leadership skills. If you're not constantly assessing your leadership approach, the strengths and weaknesses you have, there's a danger that you retain yourself as the same person from the start of your career, through the whole of your career. So I think you've got to be mindful of how do you use development to tailor those skills and the approach pertinent to the situation. So I'd say that uh, as a starting point, I think also in terms of the development workshops that yourself and your team led with the likes of myself and others was an excellent opportunity for self reflection and awareness, really understanding. You might think that you're a really good leader, but actually how do you test that? Uh, through profile assessments, insight profiles and Myers Briggs 360 feedback. I think that's really underestimated. Nowadays the best way to assess how you think you're doing is to get feedback from your peers, the people that you work with day in, day out, and allow you then to tailor your approach depending on what that uh, feedback is. I think people shouldn't be frightened to get that uh, feedback. Some of it can be positive and some not so positive, but you need to be open to that to develop as a leader and make sure then that the decision making and things that you take are very much based on the approach and situation that you find yourself in.

Laura Pearson: That's really powerful. Tell me about the moment where that

Karen Frost: really came to life for you.

Mark Barnett: One of the key things, when we started working specifically together a number of years ago, and not just for myself, but the wider team, really came on the back of the COVID pandemic. I had senior leaders covering the whole of the UK in probably the most difficult and unprecedented situation that we ever thought we'd find ourselves in. And we came together as a team on a daily basis. And I very quickly saw after two or three days that it wasn't a business call we were having, it was a call we were bringing colleagues together, people that were able to use that kind of point of contact, uh, on a daily basis with their peers, with their colleagues, to share how they were feeling personally. And then the business side of it came afterward. Investing in the people, the team that I've been privileged to work with all these years, really came on the back of that daily interaction with the team. And that went on for at least 18 months.

Karen Frost: What difference did those calls make for you personally as a leader?

Mark Barnett: It was at that point where I thought, I need to invest even more in the team than I've been doing. I want to do it from a personal perspective in terms of one to one coaching with yourself, giving all the team the opportunity to talk about their own development with yourself, rather than just directly with me alone. And I guess the rest history, because that was the thing that was pivotal in all of this and we've moved it forward significantly since then.

Laura Pearson: What specific differences do you think it's made to them in terms of them as human beings and their performance for the organization by having that approach to their development and investing in them?

Mark Barnett: I think it gave them an opportunity to focus on themselves in terms of the very nature of the jobs we all do. And particularly through that pandemic period, I was concerned from a health and wellbeing perspective that people would let the job overwhelm them. So I think focusing on themselves first and foremost from a health and well being perspective, and I think it's always important that it's in that order. And then once you've got yourself to a position of confidence that you then start to look at the development side of things. So I think confidence, self awareness, planning time for themselves and structure in their working day so that they had time for thinking, they had time just to step away from it rather than that, uh, vicious hamster wheel that we've all been on from time to time.

Laura Pearson: Yeah, and that's actually how we design those programs, wasn't it? Although There was leadership development in it. There was an awful lot of health and well being in it because of where in particular that senior leadership team were at that time as well, because it was. Yeah, absolutely in the middle of the two lockdowns. I think we started it off. Yeah.

Mark Barnett: And I think the other thing it did was it encouraged peer to peer relationships. They existed in terms of a, uh, structure and from a business context. But the personal relationships that then developed on the back of that uh, were really powerful. And then added to that, having that independent person in yourself, that uh, safe space for each of them individually to work through things with yourself, I think was also invaluable together through the discussions

Laura Pearson: that we had before we ran out that ah, particular program. The whole thing around health and wellbeing and the leadership element of it. Those leaders that were reporting into you were in different parts of Scotland, the North and Ireland at the time. You did want this whole thing about breaking down the barriers across the geographical areas. What sort of impact do you think that had not just in terms of the relationship they built, but on the business as well in terms of that performance as a consequence of doing that?

Mark Barnett: I think often when you've got a business like ours, there's a danger that, you know, people look after the area of the business that they're in. And the usual term of everybody operates within silos. And I think when you operate in silos you can feel isolated and alone and feel that you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders when you've got maybe quite a significant bit, uh, of business that you've got to try and find a solution to. I think the team dynamics changed completely. It went from a team of people that I led and people felt needed to come through me previously to breaking down that barrier. They then truly engaged at all levels and I would be invited to sessions with them as a team as opposed to me organizing everything directly. So I think the team dynamic completely changed. There was working relationships that were formed very quickly. There was importantly, there was issues resolved by that new sort of group coming together as a team rather than trying to resolve things in isolation. That was really powerful. And I even had people that weren't directly part of the team asked to join the various sessions that we had. Because people said to me from the outside, I don't know if you really appreciate the power of the team that you've created and how everybody's on board with everything that's been tried to be done. I'll look back on that, uh, with Real pride. Because it wasn't something I got from a textbook. It wasn't something that somebody told me to do. It was something that I just felt I had real trust and belief that it was the right thing to do. And I got a huge amount out of it because I saw a team through a really difficult period in Covid, come right through the end of that, uh, with such energy and drive and passion for delivering the task in hand. In terms of memorable moments in my career, that's certainly something I'll look back fondly with. It was a great time.

Laura Pearson: And actually that legacy of all of that with a senior leadership team has continued because we then think about the program after that and now subsequently. The third one is that when we're working with them, um, we notice that they come together as a group of senior leaders within your organization. They may know people's names, but they don't know who they are and the nature of the particular accounts that they've got or whether it be functions that they're looking after. But those communication barriers break down across those clusters. You know, instead of working in silos m, they soon start to help each other very quickly. Even this third one we're doing now, we're really quite at the start of it, but we're already seeing. And I think that's because of the role models and um, encouragement from your senior leadership team, nominating people to come onto the leadership program and encouraging them to connect across the northeast, to Scotland, to the northwest or wherever it might be. So it wasn't a one off legacy, was it? It's continued, hasn't it?

Mark Barnett: I think through the discussions yourself and myself and Laura Pearson had as a follow up to that initial cohort. We did, yeah. What was kind of uppermost in my thoughts were that there's a danger that this development just happens at a senior leadership level and you've got the key members of the team thinking they're just focused on the top level. I wanted to take it right through the organization and let all key members of the team appreciate the role they had to fulfill and how invested we were in their future. Because we talk a lot about talent and succession, I was proud of the succession plan we had put in place. But the talent and succession plan needs to start at the bottom and go to the top rather than top down. These various additional cohorts we put in with, uh, middle management, the next level of management down, and then supervisory level. We wanted to demonstrate that wherever you were placed in the organization, we were invested in your Future. And we were going to put all our focus into driving for those that wanted a career, the best opportunity to succeed and for the ones that wanted to come in and do the job to the best of their ability. We need people like that. Absolutely we do. And there's people that don't want to be developed at the scale that others do and that's fine. But yeah, that personal investment at all levels, uh, I'm really proud of what we've done so far and it's good to see that it's continuing.

Laura Pearson: Good. You touched on it earlier. The thing we wove into these programs was that each individual also had personal coaching so they could in a confidential way talk about the objectives that they got for their development. But more importantly, from a health and wellbeing point of view, they could also talk and sort out. That was another thing that you really advocated in that. What was you thinking around that and where were the benefits of us actually adding coaching into the leadership development?

Mark Barnett: I think it's probably similar to what I said that uh, giving people the opportunity to have that uh, kind of safe space to reflect on where they were on that journey. We've got a huge amount, not just in the business but in the world today around mental health. Mental health is as big nowadays as physical health. And I think there's been a, uh, reluctance over the years for people to talk about it, particularly with the line manager. If people were struggling from a day to day basis. Given the scale and complexity of the jobs that the senior leaders were doing, and given that I'd been in uh, most of those roles throughout my career, I know how difficult a task is. I wanted to create something with yourself that gave people the opportunity to, in private, in confidence, talk through how they were coping with a job. Some of the challenges that maybe even had from a personal point of view, let them see that we were invested in understanding what happened. On the back of that is some of them had different coping strategies, some needed more one to one coaching than others. The big feedback from them was that they were appreciative of the fact that we placed their well being at the forefront and you were invested in giving them time away from the hectic day to day business job. So I think the benefits are you've got an engaged team, individuals that trust and respect what you're trying to achieve. The byproduct is that you've got people that love to come to work, they feel supported, they feel they could trust you to have a conversation about things that maybe before they might not have been able to do. I think if we then go on to the coaching element and all that wonderful stuff we did around preferences in Myers Briggs people have really taken to that to understand the dynamics of everybody's different and people know that everyone's different. But to put the theory behind that uh, that's that uh, kind of thought was really powerful. And you could see people's thought process and behaviors change when they realized that people's preferences were quite different. And I think and that glued the team together even more powerfully than it did prior to these sorts of things happening. So I think the benefits were huge. I really do.

Laura Pearson: Ah, we noticed because using something like a psychometric at the beginning and in that instance we did use Myers Briggs subsequently to that your organization has made a decision to shift to a Scottish owned convention. And again this last group that we're working with because we've done insights rather than Myers Briggs is exactly the same thing happened is that they understood there was significant differences between them. But how do you celebrate those differences? It gave them a language to talk about where their strengths lay and where their gaps were. But where other people in the team could fill those gaps in terms of their knowledge and understanding. They are quite powerful things to use within those programs. And then bringing those into your coaching as well. Because your coach knows a lot about you once you do a psychometric, don't they? Because they've got something that tells them a lot. Because you give feedback on them as you coach to each of those individuals that helps build the relationship. Before you even get into doing any leadership development work as well which works.

Mark Barnett: It gave the coaching piece a frame of reference for those individuals to not talk about theoretical element but just to say I've looked at your profile, these are the preferences that you have. Let's talk about that. So it was unique to the individual rather than it just being about a theoretical discussion. It's quite incredible when you then see that play out in the workplace because whilst maybe some of their teams haven't been on that uh, coaching and development, you can see that their whole approach has changed and been influenced by that training and development they've been on. You can see them looking around their team and trying to second guess if some of their team did do the profile assessment where they think they would fit in. It's been really powerful. I was in one of the sites recently and up on the wall there was a number of the theoretical models that you'd taken some of the team through framed up in the person's office, the change house and various other things. It made me feel delighted that the messages and that investment in people's development had been taken to that next stage where people were proud to put it up in their office and say, look, this is what the business helped me to achieve. It's been, I don't think we should underestimate, estimate the value of what's been done thus far. It's been incredible.

Laura Pearson: And they've got that for life then, haven't they?

Mark Barnett: Absolutely.

Laura Pearson: Okay, so here we are a few years on from when we started. I'm just thinking about senior leaders coming through organizations and thinking about how they develop themselves and how they develop their teams. What sort of advice would you give them from your knowledge and experience of the stuff that you've done with values based leadership?

Mark Barnett: Difficult one, isn't it? I would go back to what I said at the start, which is that it should be continuous learning. Despite the fact that you might think that you've achieved the goal in your business life to get to the most senior position, the learning shouldn't stop. And the thing that I found quite insightful years ago when you and I started working together was when I talked to some of the senior managers in that business at the time, it was incredible that the number of those individuals that had executive coach and mentoring, they'd been on a lot of the kind of profile assessments that we started to look at for the team. And I was quite shocked by that because some of them were at chief exec level and more and they said no, uh, I've always had a coach, I've always invested time in these specific areas. And I was quite surprised by that. So I suppose through that experience and knowledge you then say it's not at a, uh, certain level. Continuous learning is for everyone and embrace it. The other thing I would say is it's really important to obtain feedback. The peer reviews that you have, use the reviews with your line manager every six months on an annual basis. And advice I've given to people in the past is that these kind of pivotal steps in your working life are so important you'll only get out of it what you put into it. Uh, the key thing in my career is I had a conversation with my line manager before I moved into the private sector. Ah, he said to me, what do you want to do with your career, Mark? And I said I want to get into general management and I want to go into the private sector. And I'm thinking of going away and doing a master's degree and he said, because of the job you've done here, we'll put you through your master's degree. And I'm pretty sure once you get that, uh, you'll move to the private sector. And that's exactly what happened. Now if I hadn't invested in that conversation with that person at the time, I probably wouldn't be where I am, um, today. What I'd say is, no matter how senior you are in the business, use the opportunities as part of your discussions with your line managers on a month to month basis. Seek feedback, see how they can invest in your development in your career. I can remember that session like it was yesterday. I'm forever grateful for the person that invested in me because that's been a huge part in me getting to where I wanted to get to. Uh, that for me was a golden nugget in terms of my career. Yeah.

Laura Pearson: Brilliant. That whole thing about taking ownership of your own career and getting the support from your organization, if it's there, is fundamental. We spend a lot of hours doing our jobs. You know, it's important that we get that development as we go along.

Mark Barnett: Yeah. Ah. And it's also about having a plan. Not a plan that's so rigid and inflexible, but you need to have a plan so that you can then measure the progress that you're making along that road. And I think also a great believer in the people that wait for something to happen rather than taking control of it, uh, and trying to make it happen. The people that take control of it tend to be the ones that are more successful.

Laura Pearson: Yeah.

Mark Barnett: Ah. And by taking control, that means investing in your future, making sure that you build those relationships with other people in the organization so that they're invested in your future to the extent they can be and want to be. And I think the rest takes care of itself, to be honest.

Laura Pearson: That, uh, really good advice about the rest then. Takes care of itself.

Karen Frost: Brilliant.

Laura Pearson: And it's worked for you in your career and it's working for those people that you've left a legacy to by the way that you've approached it with them who've worked for you.

Mark Barnett: Yeah. I think the other thing I would say is though that there's obviously times where, and I've been fortunate not to experience this too much in the past, but there'll be occasions where the other people in the organization aren't invested in your future or in your development. And I think for me it's about trying to seek out, uh, individuals in the organization. It doesn't necessarily need to be a line manager but take the time to seek out who those key people are within your organization. Even if that starts in mentoring and coaching capacity. You know, that's been an eye opener for me as well. I've been mentored by various people throughout my career and I've been a mentor for a number of people as well. Through investment and time you get a huge amount from that. Uh, they're not as interested in your development and investment as you would like them to be. Don't see that necessarily as a negative. Use that as an opportunity to find somebody in organisation that is maybe more invested because of their experiences in the past.

Laura Pearson: And again I think that's fantastic advice for people because if there's blocks, you know, find other doors that you can go through. Mark, that's been really fascinating listening to that and understanding some of the journeys that you've been on of which part of them I've been on with you and a lot you've done on your own with your senior leadership team. So can I say a huge thank you for that. I think there's lots of good information and lots of advice being imparted there and we appreciate it.

Mark Barnett: Thanks Karen. And I suppose it's the final thanks from me because as you said at the start, we've worked together over a number of years and the bit that I'm particularly delighted about is that it ah, hasn't been just what you've done. For me personally the impact that you and your team have had across the organization has been excellent. The number of people that we've put through the coach and the development, the people that we continue to put through the coaching and development I see is very much part of the future in a really sustainable way. What you bring as a person, as a team, as an organization to companies like ourselves is fantastic. And I think in probably 5, 10 years time this will be something that is just going to be part of companies DNA rather than something seen as a bolt on organizational development.

Laura Pearson: And I think that's what we're aiming to do is to encourage companies to do that and um, to become true business partners to organisations like yours so that we know and understand not just the organisation but the people within it. So thank you very much for that.

Karen Frost: Thank you so much for listening to this coaching outcomes podcast with me, Karen Frost. Hope you enjoyed it. Take care and goodbye for now.