Leadership Is an Ecosystem, Not an Event: Rethinking How We Develop Leaders

The development of new leaders to take on that vision and take on vantage point is where we need to build an ecosystem for leader enablement. And so what I advice I give to business owners, AKA leaders, what advice I give is you need to spend 50% of your time working in the business, I.e. Manage that single shift, but 50% of your time working on the business and that's how are we growing?

How are we getting better? How are we reducing headaches? How are we managing expenses? Or how are we growing profit?

Hi there and welcome to the Step up podcast. I'm your host, Kent Knievel. Every week I talk to experts who focus on helping leaders step up their leadership game and leaders telling their stories of growing up through the ranks. If you're new to the show, do me a favor and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

One last thing. As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, focus area of mine is supporting newly promoted leaders. One in three promotions fail because we never teach newly minted VPs how to stop being a director or a newly promoted director how to stop being a manager. That's you.

Or if you support a leader who has been recently promoted, I encourage you to visit my website at Kent Coach Toolkit and download a free copy of the Promoted Leader Toolkit filled with practical advice and tools to help new leaders stick the landing and truly step up to their new leadership level. All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough. On with the show. Welcome, everyone.

This week we're going to be talking about the expectations we have of leaders and development of leaders, right? And they're one and the same because if we have expectations, we might need to have some development to help people get there. And with me for this conversation today, I'm really excited is Justin Roscoe. He's the VP of learning and org development at California Credit Union, where the weather is oh so much better than it is here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where it is never not winter.

April 2nd on the day we're recording and 36 degrees and it even snowed one more time overnight, though it didn't stick around. And I'm very jealous of Justin in San Diego. Justin, without further ado, welcome to the show. You so much happy to be here.

And yes, I am in San Diego. Native to San Diego, actually, which is pretty rare. But you are right, it's where it's never not winter for you. It's never not summer.

We'll do a. I was gonna say, as much as I am loving the sunshine that we have all year round. I also don't know what snow is. Like, so fun for five minutes or so or a month or two.

It's once you get to month six, it gets to be a little much and everybody should take their turn shoveling some snow just to see. Yes, indeed, you do take a shovel to snow. Yeah. And yeah, I haven't been to San Diego in a long time and I was about to ask is it, is it like the Bay Area where it can get really cold or not?

Sounds like it's never not summer. So we have our days as people like who aren't familiar with San Diego or Southern California for that matter. And they always ask, oh, the weather. I love San Diego.

And we get to talking about it and eventually it comes out that we probably have out of the 365 days a year, we probably have 250 days of just glorious sunshine. The other hundred days or so we'll mix in some cloudiness, maybe 15 days total worth of rain. So it's not terrible. I don't.

Well, someday I will move out there. And so for we'll keep you around a little later today to do our full weather podcast that I'm starting to launch. But before we get into our topic today, I would love for you to introduce yourself to the audience. Just give us a sense of who is Justin, what's your, what's the career been like?

How did you land in a VP of learning and Org development role? Yes, I'll be happy to dive into that, Karen. It's been a little over 20 years now in the financial services industry, the last 15 of which have been in the learning development side of things. And as most people in my profession, it's all accidental.

I never planned for this. I never wanted to go into training or learning and development when I was younger. It's just one of those things where I happen to be split. Speaking at one of our quarterly sales meetings and the presentation that I delivered, I guess caught the eye of at the time.

My training manager then called me the very next day and said, hey, we have an opening on our training team. And I loved what you had to say in the presentation that you did yesterday. Any interest in a role in learning development? And I remember almost nearly been and I said no, I had no, I'm in sales.

Let's continue down the sales road. And it wasn't for another day or two that a very trusted HR leader that I was very close with, she called me and she said, justin, rethink this for real, this is a career for you. This is an opportunity for you to really flex your skill set and being able to translate information for others to be able to grow in their own careers. This is the role for you.

Just meet with the training manager and have a conversation. And so we did. And as they say, the rest is history. So I got into the learning development side again about 15 years ago as a classroom trainer and eventually worked my way up to, to be that team's training supervisor and grew my career into not only with a different company, starting up a training program from scratch for.

And I did that for several years until there was a change in leadership that prompted me to look for an opportunity where in my current role where I'm the Vice President of Learning and Organizational Development for California, as you mentioned. So I have been in this role now for four years and my primary responsibilities are leading the employee training and development efforts for about 530 employees. And we focus on all types of training, technical training, new hire onboarding, and then of course, the topic that we're going to be talking about today, one.

Thing you didn't mention is I see you have a role with perhaps your local or regional society of HR Management Group. Is that correct? Nice. That's true.

For 2026. I stepped into the board role of the Vice president of certifications. So everything that San Diego Human Resources Management, I guess certified only through the SCP program, but also their CP program. All those certified individuals, if they have questions on how to recertify or if others are maybe newer to their HR role and they're curious about getting certified under the SHRM group, that's where I step in to allow myself to dive into their needs, what their goals are and really support them every step of the way.

That's my purpose for asking that. And that wasn't just to put you on blast. But you're not the first person I have worked with or come across who made their way to the HR side of training and learning and development from the. What I'll just call the business side of training or sales.

So it sounds like you were in Sale, you were in sales, then sales training, and then got crossed the threshold to the HR side of learning and development. That's a great brief description of it. Yeah. And I'd imagine the reason I bring that back to Sherm.

What's your sense of. I think I, I find it to be somewhat common, but there are people who go to school specifically with the idea of instructional design, learning and development. Is it like what's your sense, is it 50, 50, 60, 40. I'm seeing that that trend actually really pick up especially in the last few years where now a lot of these four year universities are offering programs centered around human resources management or the business side of running and development.

And it's wonderful to see because that's not really an option that when I entered into school, it's not an option. Master's programs only. Yeah, it was a generic. Yeah, it was a.

Exactly right. It offered the masters or the specialized certifications that are common out there in the L and D industry. But as it stood at the time it was just a generalized box of business management or administration, maybe with an emphasis on organizational psychology. But now you can major in, as you mentioned, instructional design.

So if you're a creator, if you want to focus on the learning and development of others, that's a great opportunity for someone to enlist in into a particular major. Right. Or if you want to go to the human resources side, you can actually get your four year degree in human resources management, which is fantastic. I love that this, this has become like a target focus for a lot of younger individuals and giving them options for those people who love helping other people and love being that support and resource and they just have that people person mentality mixed with this idea of contributing towards strategic objectives.

Human resources is a great match in right now. I would say take some. If you're going to take the direct path into hr, take some business classes as well. Because I would wager you found this to be helpful in your career is when you have spent some time in the business and then cross over to the HR side.

Right. You're. You just bring a better, better, more robust understanding of what we're all here to do and how the business actually runs and how the business makes money. Because if there's anything I think those of us who have been or are still in HR probably get the most grief for is not understanding the business in that.

Yeah. Could not agree with you more than what you just mentioned right there. You place that wager. That is a safe wager to place.

Business acumen is incredibly important for human resources professionals nowadays. Right. Understanding not just what the business does, but how it makes money is exactly how we connect our HR processes, our HR related initiatives. That's how we connect them to the larger strategic goals for the organization is by first of all understanding how our decisions of rolling out this new program or, or changing the way that we do performance reviews, how does that contribute to the larger scope of the business the best way to do that is to know what each role within the company does.

So switching our focus to leaders, right. I think in your role, I'm sure you spend a lot of time thinking about not only what do we need out of our leaders today, but trying to as best we can. And these days I feel like it's getting harder and harder, but as best we can try to forecast where are things going and what is it that we need from our leaders? Three years down the line, five years, who knows how far it's even reasonable to try to think?

You know, we wanted to start our conversation today talking about what is it that we actually expect of leaders. Obviously, there's certain givens, right, that we expect out of our leaders in terms of managing people and, but there's nuance, right. And we'll probably get into some of that today. So where did you want to start that conversation?

You know, let me, let me go ahead and grab my crystal ball real quick. You talked about forecasting into the future. I, I think that to your first comment, it's a little, I don't want to say foolish, but it's going to be an empty exercise to try and predict what leads will be there for leadership and leadership development in the next three to five years. Because technology is changing the way we do things in the next three months, let alone the next three years.

So it's just, it's going to be an exercise all for not if you try to make that prediction. So let's focus on the now and focus on what we're seeing as a trend for leaders and leadership development for that matter. And for me, what I've noticed in my little own crystal ball of my world is that leadership expectations have blown up and exploded faster than leader preparation. And that's where we, I can kick things off, if you will, is that we've raised those expectations of leaders, especially those middle management leaders.

In our organization, we have a couple dozen middle management leaders who are responsible for leading their individual teams and then they all report up into a larger hierarchy. But we've raised those expectations for leaders because the workforce has changed, right? The demands of the workforce, you look at most job applications these days, and if work from home, remote options aren't anywhere included in the job description, a lot of times people will just pass by it because that is now a foregone expectation for employees in the workplace.

Leaders need to adapt to that. Oftentimes we just say, okay, here you're going to have a, we're going to move to A hybrid model. Going back to, by the way, the original thought, Kent, of, okay, we can't make HR policy or procedural changes without knowing the true needs of the individual business lines or business units. Because if we do make that change into a hybrid model, how does that impact everybody else?

Can we still get our jobs done with this change into a hybrid model? It's important that first of all, again, going back to that original thought, we have to understand the workplace, right? We have to understand how the business operates and how it makes money. But then also, how do we prepare our le.

Our leaders and enable them to be able to work under these new conditions and lead successfully under these new conditions? So again, the expectations have changed for leaders far faster, generally speaking, right? Some organizations do really well. I like to think that we do as well.

But leaders, they tend to get drugged behind after. So I'm, I'm kind of curious and I know you gave one example of like, where is the work getting done and how does that change how leaders lead and what we expect out of them? What are some of the, like, what are some of the other kind of from tos that you're currently seeing? Right.

When you say we're raising the expectations, what were they and what is it now? But we used to ask leaders now, going back a few years here, but we used to ask leaders processes and manage productivity. And as a result, leaders were trying to manage employees by doing exactly that. Being a manager, right.

Being a true leader. Now, nowadays we ask our leaders to be able to look to the human side of the employee, right. And make sure that we're meeting the needs of both the human and the worker. Right?

So we have to have that balance. And if we don't, employee productivity, employee engagement falls, right? So it's almost just about being caught up in the middle for leaders, where they're absorbing pressure from every direction. Have you, do you feel like you've seen that come from.

Maybe there's like a cyclical nature to this too, right? Where as a support function, hr, right. We as a company is growing as leaders, our business side, leaders are feeling overwhelmed. We start to push perhaps more onto hr, right?

And then the HR department grows and then the business is. Hang on a second. The HR department's not producing any money, and now look at its size. That's a huge cost.

So then we start to shrink the hr. Where does that work have to go then? So we start moving some of that work back to leaders. And I can't remember what the question was going to be, but I'm wondering if this is resonating with you because I feel like one thing I heard when I was at Cargill in particular, I remember a leader saying, or might have even been Buffalo Wild Wings when I was there saying to me, like, like, where did HR go?

I feel like we're being where did and where does. It feels like HR is getting smaller and the work is being moved over to us. And I think I always felt the tension of what are you really offloading to someone else that you probably should be accountable for anyway? But I don't know.

I feel like there's this sort of ebb and flow to. I don't know if it's the size of HR and what they're doing and then where the work goes. Yeah, let's, let's talk about them both. So let's start with the size of hr.

Right. I agree with you that in the past HR teams seemed, at least on the surface, to be larger because we, we were so compartmentalized. We had one group for payroll, one group for all the workplace laws and employment laws. We had a group for HR operations with running through the HR IS systems, and we had another group for kind of HR strategy.

And so we had all of these different legs to hr. But over the course of the last several years. Yeah, I agree with you. They seem to be getting smaller because they are being recognized as a cost center.

Right. They're being recognized as a cost. And so I want to challenge that a little bit and say that really comes back on the HR leader. Right.

Whoever is pursuing the function of human resources, why aren't we taking the time to communicate the value and measurement format of what we are doing on a daily basis? Right. Yeah. We may not be contributing to profitability directly.

How are we indirectly contributing to that profitability? Or better yet, how are we reducing cost? Right. How are we reducing.

I was going to say, are we challenging ourselves enough to say, is what we are doing in hr, is this adding truly adding value or is it helping in some way add to the top line or reduce the expenses that are hitting the bottom line? I agree. Right. It's about making sure that we are not letting someone else tell our story for us.

Right. So there's an old saying that if you're not at the table, you're likely on the menu. And so HR needs to make sure that they are the table with the leadership team having those big conversations about changes to make through the organization. And one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that you're telling your story correctly.

Don't let others tell your story for you. And so we can do that as HR representatives. We can do that by communicating, again, the measured value that we are bringing to the table, whether it's indirectly contributing to profitability or indirectly reducing expenses that we're seeing across the company. So reduction in turnover is a great story to tell.

So if we are. Now we, you know, instead of seeing a, you know, 32% turnover year over year, and we've reduced it down to 21%. Okay, that's, that's great. But make sure that your executive team knows.

And there is. I can't remember the name of the group, but I was just looking at this research. It's some, it's. I think it came down to it's.

And I don't know if it's leader replacement cost or all employee replacement cost, but it's roughly 2.5x, right? It's, you know, 250% when you lose someone, right. Because of, you know, and it's.

And, and everyone's like, well, how do you calculate that? Well, it's. It. You'd have to look at each person and with a leader, it's almost easier to show where it's, well, that lead, you know, and let's pick on sales.

Well, that, that salesperson was involved in some pretty giant deals. So now all these deals are at risk. Right. That person had a team.

They've already lost two people on that team. Plus that team's gonna be wondering, who are you now gonna fill that role with? Who's either gonna make my life easier or harder? So where is there more loss on that team?

It's a, it's a ripple effect of when a leader, if a leader turns over in particular. Right. I think it's easy to show that. But so on turnover, getting back to leaders a bit here, because I think that's a really good use case of where the expectations are changing and shifting.

Because. And I think this is where my question was coming from on this sort of ebb and flow or push and pull, which is. And we do hear leaders say, gosh, that used to be HR's responsibility or. And I'll bring it back to the restaurant industry for just a minute.

It's pretty widely known it's something like a third of the U.S. population got their first job in the food service industry in some way, shape or form. You know, I used to be a host and the very first question, and I would be there before the server's shift would start and servers would come in.

And the very first question I was asked every day was by every single server walking through the door, every single was, which manager is closing tonight, which managers are on duty? You know, who, like what managers are here and who's closing. Right? Because that nowhere can it be seen more on the faces of an employee of like that is going to make or break their shift.

From an engagement perspective, you know, nothing makes or breaks that more than which managers on duty. You know, is it the good one or is it the knucklehead? Right? And.

So there's sort of, you know, so on the one hand, isn't that HR's job to work on turnover? And yet here's my, my little example which I'm, I was seeing your head, you know, nod and you know, seeing you smile. Well, but if how a manager behaves directly affects whether an employee is engaged, happy to be here and developed, then why wouldn't it be a manager's responsibility? You know, why wouldn't we have some level of expectation of managers when it comes to turnover?

Great question. I think it's a good use case when it comes to like a measurement, a measurable thing and expectations. I am, I'm nodding along here as you're talking and you probably saw me smile just because that is far too long. I know that story, right?

Is okay, which manager do I have to deal with? Right? And as the employee, I'm thinking about the moment because I'm, I'm working shift to shift, right? And, and that's the problem with most leaders is they're also thinking shift to shift.

Whereas leaders don't often get taught or get developed to think strategically about the global picture. And so in short, they are managing again, going back to leading versus managing. They're managing their day, they're managing those six hours of that shift in order to get to the finish line, which is, you know, close the doors for the evening, right? Wrap up, clean up, get everybody out of there safely.

And that's where unfortunately leaders have, I don't want to say have fallen short because it's not the leader's fault per se, but it's the system's fault in the sense that the system does not prepare leaders to think always about the bigger strategic picture. Right? So leadership development is oftentimes seen as an event and not as an ecosystem. And when that happens, you get those leaders who are actually just managers, right?

They are just managing the day to day where we as leaders, and I've said this to my team, I've said it to my peers, is that when you're in a leadership position, you are in fact a business owner. Yes. Think about what a business owner. Think about what a business owner does.

A business owner has a good product to sell, right? And in my case in learning and development, my product is education, right? Information. So you have a good product to sell, you have to market it well.

You have to manage expenses and reduction. You have to create a system where customers come back. And in my case, again, even though I am overseeing the learning and development at a single organization, I still need employees to register themselves and sign up for my courses and to take the training that is out there in my catalog because I got to create that repeat customer. Same thing a business, business owner has to do, right?

Manage those expenses, you know, have a good product, tell a good story with marketing, be able to create repeat revenue or repeat customers. And so often leaders forget that or they're not taught that. And so the, the forgetting side is, is kind of a more simple fix because it's okay, let's just pull out something that's already inside of you. You've had it before.

Let's just get you back to that point. But the development of new leaders to take on that vision and take on that vantage point is where we need to build an ecosystem for leader enablement, not an event of leader enablement. And so what advice I give to business owners, AKA Leaders, what advice I give is you need to spend 50% of your time working in the business, I. E.

Manage that single shift, but 50% of your time working on the business. And that's, how are we growing, how are we getting better, how are we reducing headaches, how are we managing expenses, or how are we growing profit? And again, it comes in the form of unique metrics for every leader within their own respective department or within their own respective line of business. But it's the mindset of splitting your time to not just work in the business, you've got to work on the business as well.

Oh my gosh, so many thoughts running through my head. I was glad you went to the space of like, business ownership. Right. Because one of the things I was thinking was I feel like almost everybody should either own and run a business or have a P and L at some point or, you know, to really, truly understand top line to bottom line, how is this running?

So, so glad you went there. Which made me then wonder, have you run your own business or, you know, where, where did this? Because I think it's a beautiful Insight. So you know where in that.

I. I don't know that I hear from a lot of HR people, so maybe it's your industry. I'm not sure. Or did you run a business at some point?

I just. Now I just have to know. I did not run a business. So I going to.

I went to the University of San Diego. So as much as I was born and raised in San Diego, I didn't even leave for school. I think that's a ringing endorsement for San Diego is what I'm hearing. Yeah.

Hey, there we go. So I. I went to school at the University of San Diego, and during my education there, I was able to take. There was actually an organizational development and strategy class that just.

I don't know, for whatever reason, plumped into the back of my brain. And when I got into a leadership role, I pulled it back to the front of my brain. It was back there. It was lodged way in the back, but I was able to retrieve it and bring it back to front.

And in that role, there were a couple. And I guess the way it got ignited was that there were a couple of employees that I oversaw. So I got promoted into a supervisor lead for the trading team across California. And a couple of those individuals that I was overseeing who were in my leadership purview, they had been with the company longer than me, they were older than I was, and they always had this question of, why did you get the job?

And it didn't. And one of the things that I was explained to them and I. And I did this through the art of just asking questions, seeking to understand. And I said, okay, well, tell me, what's your vision for the.

For the team over the next 18 months, over the next three years? And both of them, both who were indicating that I shouldn't have gotten that role, they just didn't have an answer to that question. I said, I never thought about it. I've always been focused on the training that I'm facilitating that day or that week.

And I said, that's. That's part of the reason why I feel I'm in this role is because we have to think forward. Right? If.

If you are. Even if you're just standing still, you're eventually moving backwards, Ken, because other people. Well, and I think that's a really interesting leadership lesson that goes beyond you being in HR and leading. Right.

I think it's. I think, for sure, in the US I think a lot of organizations rest on a player, coach, model when it comes to leadership. Right. That a leader has Their own accountabilities that are identical to the accountabilities of the people they're managing with the additional accountability of managing those people.

And I often wonder, I can make a case to go either way. I often wonder, is this an org design principle in order to save some headcount by having a manager hold on to accountabilities of their people? Or is it, you know, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Or is it right?

This classic challenge of it is hard as you evolve in your leadership to leave the old thing behind and, you know, elevate that level of leadership. Right? Because I think what you were just describing was that sort of elevated thinking of. And so if I could sort of put words in your mouth for what the story you were saying is.

What you were saying was, I have been thinking about how I'm going to lead this function and you are thinking about how you're doing your work. Right. And that you can help others do this work. I am thinking about where this entire function is going and how it serves the business.

I think you summed it up nicely. That's, that's a great way to look at it. You know, as far as kind of the day to day, I agree that it's important, but you can't as leaders forget about that bigger picture. Right.

So to answer your question as to, you know, whether it's organizational, why do we have these player code positions available? Some organizations will say, well, it's because I can get two birds with one. I can get someone to produce, still have goals, still meet sales quotas. And then at the same time they happen to be probably the best at sales.

And so I also bring them in as to lead others and in theory pass off your best practices to those other salespeople so you can all hit and surpass quotas with that. I see a few challenges. I don't make all mistakes, not yet because they can be done well. But I do see a few challenges.

Number one is that if you are expecting someone to be a clear coach, it's important to reduce their required quota because if you don't give them. And again, going back to 50, 50, 50% in the business, 50% on the business. If you don't give them the flexibility to be successful in the working on the business side, you're setting your organization. Up, you know, kind of coming back to our expectations of leaders.

Right. We're expecting them to. I'm going to kind of, I want to kind of move us back to that a little bit, you know, we're expecting them to lead more of the human side of the business. Right.

And attend to the engagement of their people. The, you know, which, which then if from a metrics perspective you're looking at things like retention and productivity, yada yada, if they're carrying too big of a quota, they're always going to get dragged to that. Right. It's sort of like I, my quick analogy is I always, you know, when people say, like I've always said, your one on ones are not a place to talk about development.

You should schedule a meeting to talk about development because one on ones are where the best of intentions on development go to die. Because you should be talking about the business during your one on one and it will end up always taking precedent in that call. And you will perpetually, in the last five minutes of your one on one say gosh, we didn't get to development. We'll talk about that next time.

You know, kind of put that in the same bucket of if leaders are, if they are carrying too big of a quota they're going to always gravitate towards that because if they don't hit that, that's going to hurt the business. Right. So I think there's, it's sort of this double edged sword. Yeah.

Survival at that point for, for the player coach. If they have too big of a quota it's, they're going to trust me, Ken, if I have the opportunity to, to be a leader. But I'm being asked to also meet a quota. That is true of full time salespersons and I have to choose between putting food on the family or food on the table for my family versus enabling others to put food on the family for theirs.

Yeah. Which one do you think I'm going to choose? Right. And so as an organization we have to make sure strategically from the top down set those leaders up for success.

And, and one of the best things is to, is to regulate your expectations of leaders. Right. Enable them to be successful by removing certain processes in this case sales quotas. Right.

The, the other thing that I can't help but think about, have you ever heard of this? I guess it's an older saying but as in the workplace, as people elevate into leadership roles, the saying says what got you here won't take you there. You've heard of it? I see you nodding along but it effectively it means that you have to as a leader unlearn a couple of skills to be able to open space for the ones you need to be an effective people leader.

And that's really where the concentration needs to take effect. Otherwise you're going to be left with a bunch of the Peter principles being scattered throughout your organization. And for those of your listeners that may not know what the PETA principle is, right, it's getting yourself promoted into a role that you're not ready for and therefore you're going to promote yourself. And I, I, I think most organizations miss the opportunity to also help people with that evolution at that point of promotion.

Um, but before I, I, I'm like looking at the time and I'm like, oh my gosh. So we are getting close here and I want to make sure we have time for the advice column. So I want to come back to, you know, right at the beginning we were talking about what we're expecting of leaders and leadership development. Right.

So, and I, I, what's what I find to be so interesting about my time in leadership development? And I'm, I'm sure, you know, I'm betting you'll feel the same. It's, you know, and thinking about kind of a holistic competency model for an ex, for a moment. We always, you know, while we try to teach certain things around strategy and decision making, I find that we end up spending 80% of our time on people leadership principles.

Right. On developing your employees, engaging your employees, influence things that are very human to human. Right. And so we are contin, you know, and to your point earlier, right, it feels like where the expectations are continuing to rise.

And frankly, I think with AI, just take that as an example. I think things in the ballpark of EQ and frankly, just general social skills are going to become an edge for people and going to become more edge for people who want to continue to rise, required for those who are in leadership. Because what's primarily going away are human to computer activities, not necessarily human to human activities. Right.

And so, you know, coming back to what you were saying is, you know, we're raising that level of expectation. And I was sort of asking at the beginning, well, what is the expectations that we're raising? And I think what you were saying is just to narrow it in, we're raising a lot of the human, you know, the human to human expectations. So I'd just be curious, you know, what are some of the other.

Places you're sort of in your role, sort of diving in and trying to drive that leadership development, you know, leadership evolution to how are our leader leaders attending more to the well being, engagement, you know, et cetera, of their people? Right. The. So as I dive into that.

I was reflecting on how you loaded that question up for me. And one of the things that I slightly disagree with is you said that emotional intelligence is going to become like an edge for certain leaders to kind of get ahead and to be successful. And the only thing I'll disagree with is that it's going to become, I think it's. Now I'll take that, I think it's here already.

And so you talk about, and you inquired about kind of the, the role of the leader today as it exists in this advanced tech literate that we are in. And the best leaders blend the emotional intelligence piece, the human to human connection with the use of technology. Right. AI tools and I'm just going to hit on AI tools because it is such a hot topic and it likely will be for the next few years.

AI tools help to amplify leadership, meaning that they can free up time for that, coaching for that, listening for that decision making. All of those human pieces. What used to be called soft skills are now being referred to as power skills because it does take the understanding of how to create connection with your employees in order to be a successful leader. Emotional intelligence, EQ becomes more important as technology accelerates the work, right?

Whereas a lot of people are saying, okay, AI can help me reduce. So I'm able to now focus a little bit more on being successful and catching up and playing the rest of my role here. Whereas really AI shouldn't kind of begin to replace leadership, but it helps to raise the bar for it, right? So we use AI technologies and other automation tools to be able to give us that opportunity to work on building connection with our teams.

It's really important that we focus our energy on creating that level of connection with our employees as leaders. So again, I touched on this earlier, we can balance the two, right? In order to be able to successful leader, you have to not just lead the worker, you have to lead the human behind the worker. And, and the best way to do that is just to, to become familiar with who they are and tailor your leadership skills to their needs.

So I have multiple employees on my team, all of which define success a little bit differently. I have to make sure that I have six different definitions of success in order to connect to six different people. Before we get to advice, I wanna, I wanna ask your question on something here. Cause I'm thinking back to my, a couple different stints I had in talent management where we are, My role was to help leaders or help identify successors and you know, being able to get results Is sort of a table stakes, right?

Like if you can't lead and get the results that are needed, there's not a ton of leeway for that. Right. And yet, I mean, I'm in talent conversations and those that can do both get the results and are phenomenal. People leaders just have always sort of outshined those who don't.

And yet every organization has people, has leaders who are great at the results, not that great at the people side. And so one way that it was described to me especially as we were sort of like defining that year's expectations that we were going to be measuring people against was. And I don't know if this was right or not right. This is kind of where my question is like is do you see it this way too?

Where as much as we've tried to push and encourage and coach organizations into weighing behaviors equally to what, you know, the what and the how, that the how is weighted as equally as the what. And yet, you know, I'm still in leader meetings where we're saying the people stuff should is the differentiator. Right? And I'm like, I wonder if that waters down the level of expectation on it that we should have because it is, it is the differentiator, right.

When someone can do both, it absolutely differentiates. And yet I feel like that language even kind of lowers the level of expectation on it. So from, from a global organizational perspective, I think it's important that you have leaders who are able to deliver. That's why you select certain people into leadership roles, because the expectation is that they're going to deliver on the metrics.

The bottom line now, leaders as the individual be the piece that I'm seeing that there's a small gap is that it's this concept of you can't manage what you can't. Or excuse me, you can't manage what you can't measure. Yeah, that's what it is. You can't manage what you can't measure.

Right. And, and so often leaders, they, they forget about that piece of it. Right. It kind of almost goes back, Kent, to the understanding the business component side of leadership.

Right? Because businesses have to, they have to create this, this value. And at the end of the day, that is greater than the cost of said value. Right.

In order to do that as leaders, it's, it's important that we know what those measurements are to be able to achieve them. And a lot of times we just get lost in the day to day and we get lost in working in the business that we forget about how we are managing others to outperform the expectations of those measurements that we're up against. All right. And so it's.

No, no, please, please, please. Sorry, I, I could go on. And it's just, it's making sure though getting back to enablements, right? It's making sure that we are teaching strategy as one of the leadership competencies.

Right. You mentioned leadership competencies earlier about developing others or in this diversity of thought being welcomed into their team or making sure decision making is a critical piece of the training. Right. But it's also about enabling that strategic thinking and the vision oriented leadership.

I feel like we could keep going and so maybe, maybe, you know, maybe we'll do a part two. But. Yeah, I guess my little final thought on that is I do find it fascinating that now I understand that to an extent, but I feel like we have a lot less tolerance for leaders who miss their goals but are phenomenal people leaders than we do for leaders who hit their goals and maybe aren't as great on the people side. Please.

I will challenge that with asking report into that leader. What's more important, right? Because the, the expectation is you have frontline employees who are coming into the positions that they were hired for and they are the ones who are going to be producing the output. Right.

Then the leader can theory is supposed to create an environment in which those employees can be successful. And so if you have a great people leader, one that the employees are excited to show up and produce for each and every day over the course of time, you will get a much higher productivity rate than if you focus on a leader who is excellent at being productive and producing. And their employees are just meh about showing up to work. Right.

They're, they're just. I could live with it, but I'm not excited about it because those are the employees that are going to have, well, they're going to have a high turnover because the engagement is not there. They're going to feel like, okay, the next thing that goes wrong, however minor, may be just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back causing them to exit the company. Right.

Or they're the easiest ones to be poached out of that company. And if you have employees that are strongly connected to their leader, it is a lot more difficult to remove those employees, whether by accident or design. If I'm not careful. I'm going to ask another question and we're going to just keep recording.

So getting into the advice column section, what's one piece of advice you have for leaders out there who are seeking that next level up promotion in their career,. I say be the leader before you're assigned the leadership title. And so that what that entails is you stepping forward to take on new challenges, new opportunities without being asked for it. So it's constantly raising your hand and indicating that hey, I can help in this area and here's how.

Right. Your work will speak for itself rather than you having to prove it in a 60 minute interview. Right. You've already proven it on the job each and every day showcasing what talents you can bring into a leadership role.

Again, rather than having to figure out a sales pitch. I think I need an interview. So I, I think it's just about, it's about doing the work and the expectations of the leader that you want to be. I think I read some more today.

Somebody was talking about how they, you know, one of the simple ways to identify, you know, the next level of leaders. Right. Or those who are truly coming up is that their impact goes beyond. Right.

Their impact goes beyond their, their current role, which I think fits nicely with what you were saying. And so for those who were. Cause it's, you know, my, one of my big focus areas is that we don't really teach a leader on day one of their, you know, they've just, you know, I've just been promoted from manager to director. And we don't necessarily teach them how do you stop being a manager?

Right. Or they've been promoted from director to vp. We don't really teach them how to stop being a director. What's your advice for those who have just been promoted?

It's, it's been long stated in the workplace that you're, this is coming up as an employee, if you are looking at your manager, it has long been affiliated with the role of the manager that the manager has to have all the answers that he or she was so good in their role, which is why they got promoted. So they know everything about the department or about the function. So as leaders, the first thing we need to unlearn is that our value comes from knowing all the answers. That's not.

Our value comes from the value that we place into our employees. Right. So the more that you invest and the more value that you put into your employees is where you create value as a leader. Unlearn the fact that you have to know all the answers because that's just not the case anymore.

Right. Vulnerability goes a long way and creating that human connection that we were talking about earlier with your employees. And part of Being vulnerable means that, you know what, Hey, I don't know. But let's together, let's figure this out.

Now. You're creating a sense of inclusion and belonging. You are giving your employee a little bit of autonomy when you say a phrase like that. You're also giving and flexing on the employee's competency that they bring to the table when you use a phrase like that.

So it's this idea that we don't have to be the end all, be all. As managers, we have to create a space that others can feel successful. And one of the best ways that we can do that is to just focus on the employee as a human as much as we focus on. I love that.

And I think it's level agnostic. Right. I think you have to kind of recalculate the meaning of like the definition behind those pieces at each level. Right.

Because it's going to happen each time. Right. It's. I know all the answers now that a director needs to know.

And now I'm promoted to be a VP and I need to enable other directors right. On. On how to answer those questions. And you know, I just keep picking on that level.

But like, it's level by level. It's the, it's. It's almost the same problem. And it's interesting how you need to be very deliberate about attending to redefining those pieces at each level so that you can make that evolution at each level.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Leadership is a skill set. It's not a title.

It's not about hierarchy. It's about your behaviors, your decisions, and frankly your consistency. Well, Justin, before we get into hour three of this recording, I'm just gonna kind of leave it there. So thank you so much for coming today.

I really appreciate it. Like I said, I feel like I could have kept going. Really fun conversation. Absolutely.

Thank you. A lot of great conversation coming from you as well. So I appreciate you kind of taking, inviting me on and then taking an interest in, you know, kind of my vision, on what constitutes good leadership. So very grateful for you having me on.

And, and you know, if we want to do a part two, it sounds like we would keep going, just say. Thanks, take it easy. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you for listening.

I'd encourage you to head on over to my website, Kent Coach, and start a conversation with me there or check out my promoted leader toolkit at Kent Coach Toolkit. Before you go on. If you your day, please take a moment to leave a rating and a review wherever you listen to podcasts, click the five stars. That helps.

Put this podcast in front of more ears. Till next time, take it easy.