Who Owns the People? Navigating the HR - Leader Tension

It wasn't unusual in the bakery to be in the kitchen decorating a cake for a wedding that was occurring this weekend. And the phone rings and a customer comes in and the question is, what do I do? Do I keep decorating and tell the customer that came in the store to hold on a minute, Do I put the person on the phone to voicemail? For some people, the answer becomes really easy when you handle the customer that's in front of you.

But other times you have to answer the phone, and other times the thing that you're working on in the kitchen is time constrained. And those are the things that I think leaders are struggling with is who do I go to? Where do I go? And that's where I think a lot of leaders are struggling sometimes is they don't get clear direction from their leaders about what do you do?

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.

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All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough. On with the show. Welcome, everybody. Today we are going to be talking about who leads which people, I guess is one.

One way I want to put it, which is there's this tension or push and pull between HR saying, hey, that's a leader's job. A leader should be leading their people, providing vision, developing their talent. And yet leaders are regularly looking for HR to bring some of this expertise, framework, model, what have you, to help them with that leading. And so I think there's some tension between HR providing that content, context, knowledge without taking over the job of the leader, and leaders are busy.

So I think there's also times, right, where leaders are maybe sometimes all too willing to let HR take some of those reins. So we're going to Be chatting about that today. With me today for that conversation is Jill Gosnell. She's currently the corporate training and development manager at Field Aerospace.

Jill, thanks for being here. Welcome. Yeah, thanks Ken. Happy to be here.

Before we get into it, for the audience here who probably doesn't know you, would love for you to tell a little bit about your career story. Tell us a little bit about how you got to what you're doing today. Yeah, so my career story looks a little unique. If you check out my LinkedIn resume, you'll see some uniqueness in.

But I started out with my first sort of grown up job working at a company where I was doing some data entry and customer service. And it was, it was not great. It was not my favorite thing. And I happened to have a really great manager at the time who said, maybe you should go try training, I think you might like that.

And so I worked in this corporate training department that was really phenomenal. It afforded me so many learning opportunities as a young L and D professional. I got to facilitate, I got to design, I got to see the structure of a really well oiled L and D team. I remember one of my first managers recorded on a VHS because that's how old I am.

Recorded my facilitation and the next day we sat in the dark room with the AV cart and the television and a remote where she paused and said, why did you do that? Why did you do this? And we spent six hours going through that videotape was horrifying, but so formative. And so after that I left and decided to run a bakery.

I decided to open my own business as everyone with small children with any lick offense does. Ran a bakery for 10 years. And really that afforded me a lot of opportunity to understand the business side that a lot of our leaders are dealing with. So that when I went back into the L and D space after I sold my business, I really had a different understanding of the demands on their time and the push and the pulls and the things that are taking them away from all of the other things that they want to do.

They want to develop their team, they want to grow their people. But there's a customer, there's a client, there's a report that's due, there's all these other demands. So I went into state government doing work in the learning and development space for state government, a couple of different state agencies, got to work with a lot of different stakeholders and then went to an actuarial, product and consulting firm and had some really good global experience. I really love getting to work with global partners and understanding the nuance between what's a cultural difference versus an organizational difference versus a learning issue versus a performance issue.

And then that brought me into field aerospace, where I'm working in a very different industry. This is an aviation maintenance company. So folks in hangars, and it's full circle. My dad was an aircraft mechanic for 45 years.

Yeah, I get to tell some of his stories when I'm working with my teams now. Fun, fun fact. I didn't know that you started in. I think you had said, like, a data entry kind of job.

Same. My first job out of college, I was doing data entry for the insurance and annuities department of America. It was American Express Financial Advisors for a month that I was there, and then they spun off and became Ameriprise. Okay.

And back then, there was a thing called an I pod. Yeah. And I would plug my ipod in and pretend I was, I don't know, fishing or something all day as I was doing so much data entry. Insane.

Bored to tears. And my boss was like, you should try training. But I only went on secondment, like, part of my time. Okay.

Because they would hire 20 people at a time for our team. And I went and was able to sit in that training room. And then I got recruited into consulting from there, which was. I was all too happy to leave data entry for more or less what I've been doing now for.

Yeah. Big chunk of time. I mean, I'd like. Funny how people fall into these things.

I'd like to think that my boss had altruistic reasons for sending me down to training and not just to get rid of me. I don't know. We'll see if he hears the podcast and says, oh, no, I really just wanted to get rid of you. Yeah.

So you've been in a lot of HR shops. I think you've probably seen this, how this plays out between how are we trying to make the life of leaders leading people easier? And I think something you said when you were talking about your time with the bakery and how you were able to bring that learning into. Back into the world of learning and development.

Because I think we always say leaders are so busy running the business, selling, marketing, whatever their role is, making money for the company. Let's just put it that way, that you know it and I don't. Maybe this is the place to start. Which is this possible idea, wrongly or rightly, right.

That I'm almost too busy to be leading people. Right. I'm so busy Trying to make the company money. I also have to lead people right, Which I'm not saying every leader thinks that way, but I feel like that's this sentiment I think we get at times in hr, rightly or wrongly, I think we've done this kind of expand and contract between HR departments getting really big, then us bringing them back down, us having things that HR was doing, putting that back onto leaders.

Anywho, I think that might be the place to start, which is leaders are so busy running the business. But also isn't leading people a part of that? Yeah, the phrase that. The way that I explain this when I talk to folks about the understanding that I have is it wasn't unusual in the bakery to be in the kitchen decorating a cake for a wedding that was occurring this weekend.

And the phone rings and a customer comes in and the question is, what do I do? Do I keep decorating and tell the customer that came in the store to hold on a minute, do I put the person on the phone to voicemail? Where do I go? And for some people the answer becomes really easy.

They're like, you handle the purse, the customer that's in front of you. And yes, but other times you have to answer the phone. And other times the thing that you're working on in the kitchen is time constrained because it's frosting. And sometimes it needs certain time frames.

And those are the things that I think leaders are struggling with is who do I go to, where do I go? It's not that any of them are more or less important all the time. It's in the moment, which one do I really have the ability to provide, to provide bandwidth to, to provide attention to or what's going to help me? And so that's where I think a lot of leaders are struggling sometimes is they don't get clear direction from their leaders about what do you do?

Right. In my case, I knew that at a certain time of the year, new customers were vital to my business. So if that person coming in, if I didn't know them, I was absolutely going to them first and the phone call maybe going to voicemail, or I might instruct somebody else to answer the phone or what have you. Other times, if I knew that client that I was doing the cake for was particular picky, or maybe they were a long term client and I really wanted to wow them, I might prioritize that one.

And I think that's where a lot of our leaders are struggling. It's not that they don't want to lead it's that they maybe don't know where they should prioritize. They maybe haven't gotten that direction. That is what I was going to say is it sounds like we're talking about a mixture here of strategy and prioritizing.

What is the. Yeah, I like how. I like how you're putting that. In fact, talking about your bakery.

So were you managing. Was it just you? No, I had a team of about seven, and then we always had interns from the culinary institute that came through. Oh, cool.

Regularly throughout the summer. So that was always fun, too. But I'm sure it started as just you. Right.

You had to scale up from You. Right. It scaled pretty quick. Yeah.

I was really fortunate. It was a good time in the market and my location was advantageous. And so we scaled up pretty quick. We went from.

Was just myself and I had somebody helping with some paperwork, and then we went to two people within the first six months. Yeah. And then after that, we. So within two years, we had seven people regularly.

So the reason I'm asking is I feel like more people maybe should work in a small company to maybe get back to the basics of what is leadership. Why do we hire anyone? Why do we add anybody to the team? That's kind of what popped in my head because even as an independent consultant, it's.

Why would I grow this team? It would need. There would need to be so much work that I'm either turning it away and deciding, I don't want to turn it away, I need to bring in someone else in order to scale or, wow, this thing's making great money. I'm simply just spending too much of my time on it.

And this. The equation of bringing somebody else in to do some of the work from a. I don't. Financial or even lifestyle perspective makes sense.

Right. As a. Or there's a market that you want to tap that someone new has an in, and you're like, you know what? That's a.

I want to get into that market and you have that in. And so let's do this. Yeah. The constraints are probably even more real the smaller the company is.

I think the reason that's popping in my head is because I've worked for so many sort of Fortune 500 companies where the teams, the departments are so large that it. You. I don't know. I don't know.

Maybe that it doesn't have that same. No, I think the risk is different. Right. When you're in a large company, if you take a risk in one space, you.

Your other Doing well, departments can support that. In smaller companies, places with smaller budgets, things like pardon me, we'll see if my dog is done. But in smaller companies, they don't have that same sort of buffer to support the risk. And so those decisions become different and harder and more weight gets put on those.

And when you're a smaller company and you don't even have hr, right. There's, there's no escaping who is developing my team, who is providing the vision and leadership, right. And then when we get into these larger, mid sized to large companies right now we have, we have HR in order to probably lighten some of the load in terms of some of the people leadership aspects, right. Which probably historically, right.

Started with personnel, right. Who is simply doing the recruiting, the hiring, the benefits, right. But then in comes learning, development, leadership development, these other fancy fun places that you and I have worked. And again, I'm going to come back to this.

At least what I've seen in the larger companies that I've worked for, this sort of expansion of HR to where we get to a point where there is way too much HR at this company and some kind of a reduction. But where does all that work go? And so then invariably over the next year you hear about, you hear from leaders how much of HR's work is coming onto their shoulders. I'll just give it a second here.

Okay, so this tension is real around the leader's role versus HR's role. Let's. I'm trying to think of a really good use case to dig in to dig into. Anything come to mind for you?

Yeah, I think the one that I see the most often is leaders are struggling sometimes to either have difficult conversations or have performance conversations. And so they really want the HR leader to do it or they want the HR person in the room. And then the conversation starts and the leader goes, you can tell them that, right. And they just take it over to the HR person in the moment.

And those are challenging times. And as an HR person you're like, I want my leaders to be able to have this conversation. And as a leader they're like, I don't know all the legal risks. And so I want you to have the conversation so you can protect the company.

That might be not quite their mindset, but giving them the benefit of the doubt, there's. And leaders, they need help in having those conversations. And as an HR person, as a learning and development person, we have to build that skill set. And that requires support and structure and frankly some hand holding in the beginning until that skill set gets better.

And for things like difficult conversations, sometimes the challenge is they don't get to have enough of those to get good at it. In hr, we often get to see the get to. It's probably get is the wrong word, but we see those conversations more often. And so we get more practice.

And those leaders don't get to get that practice to get good, to get comfortable. And it means they need help even more sometimes. And that prolongs the learning curve for people. And you, as we were talking about what to talk about today, you had talked about clarity.

And so let's dig in on that because I like you were talking about the two different sides of it. One is how many issues happen with leaders and their teams because of clarity. But then you also spun it back to HR around like how HR is providing clarity to leaders. So which side of that do you want to start on?

Do you want to start with leaders or hr? If we can start with the HR side. And I'm going to, I'm going to start specifically with the L and D portion and just share a quick example because not unusual, that I will send out something for a leader to review or a subject matter expert to review. And when I send that, I include these are the things that I want you to look at, right?

Grammar, typos, button functionality, things like that. I include the due date, which can't tell you how many times leaders or others have missed a due date as an inclusion. But then I also will have a conversation with them and say, so I know this is due Friday. I'm going to send you a check in on Wednesday to make sure everything's on track and see if you need anything.

And that sort of clarity for some people, they're like, oh, that's micromanaging. And that hasn't been the way I've had people receive it. Like, they tell me like, I'm really glad you actually said that, or on Wednesday. Thanks for the reminder.

This fell off my radar. It helps them get to where they need to go and getting the review done on Friday. But it also helps me know that everything is on track and if they need anything or I've had a few leaders reach out and say, actually I'm not going to be able to do this on Friday. I've got this other thing that comes up and it just keeps that communication open.

And, and so that clarity of this is how this is going to play out is something that a lot of leaders, when they've tried it, they're like, this has worked really well. But other people look at it like that's hand holding or that's my. They should. You told them Friday they should get it done Friday.

Yes, they should. A hundred percent. The real world is. Stuff happened like that's just the way it goes.

And I know that. So I'm going to plan and mitigate for that. Let me bring this back to what we were talking about in the first part of the conversation too. Which is.

So I'll put it in some of the world that I've spent some time swimming in, like with talent reviews. Right. But I'm with bigger companies. Right.

And I'm asking eight different leaders to fill out possibly a spreadsheet or maybe in an HR system, go through their entire team of sometimes 10 or more people and go through five, six, seven screens to click through with eight or nine things in each screen click on. For this very important process of identifying future leaders, planning for successors. Yeah. It is not their day to day job.

And so to your point with. I'm just gonna just. Yes. Anding your example of yeah, they should have that done by Friday.

But when Jill sales leader gets called to a major client deal that they are needed to help get over the finish line and now it's not done on time. Did she make the right choice or not? She probably made the right choice in that moment. Which is also why we give deadlines with wiggle room.

Oh yeah. Scotty from Star Trek Method. But I like that. Let's.

I want to dig in on. Because I think this is what the other thing you were talking about before, which is clarity versus micromanagement. Right. Clarity versus hand holding.

Yep. Because I think. And you said, which I've heard a number of times too from different leaders, which is as I'm like talking to. I remember I was talking to this, working with this HR business partner and this pretty high level leader that she supported.

And there were some cultural issues they were dealing with and some integration issues they were dealing with. And I remember saying, so who's doing that? The directors should be working together on that. I was like, oh, there might be an opportunity here for you to lean in on providing some clarity and guidance.

It's a literal quote. They should already be doing that. They should already be knowing how to do that. Yeah.

Right now for fun and for whoever's listening. My reaction to that was like, so how's that working out for you so far? How long you been deploying that strategy? So coming back to clarity because I see it and hear it too Right.

Leaders who, I don't know what drives it, but who aren't providing a level of clarity that they absolutely could, maybe should, and maybe in some cases for fear of being seen as a micromanager. I don't know what it is. What's your. Yeah.

What's your thoughts? Yeah, it's a good question. Because I don't disagree that there's probably a fear of being a micromanager, especially when we see this in newer managers. So managers who are maybe their first time people, leaders, they don't want to micromanage.

They want to lead their team or let their team do their things and they know that it's important to empower their teams and so they fall back into some hands off leadership. It happens sometimes when leaders are used to running very senior teams and they're used to working with people who have the rhythm and they've got it and then they go to a team where things are different and so they're not used to going back into that. It also happens when that behavior isn't modeled for them.

If you've never worked with a leader who's provided that level of clarity and they've just drudged it out and figured things out, they don't really know or appreciate the value that clarity can bring. And so the more that they're able to model that behavior, the more they'll see it in their teams and it becomes a ripple effect there. But yeah, I think that's where a lot of it comes from, is they just haven't seen it done before or they've worked with those teams where everybody's in sync and it worked out really well.

And that's pretty rare for that to happen by accident, but every once in a while you've seen it. So what's some of the. Either coaching guidance or since you're an L and D person, learning that you've pulled together to try to drive not only the understanding that clarity is needed, but the how, the how to or impetus to do it. Absolutely.

I don't mind starting with a little bit of humor because this is a topic where we tend to believe that we're doing it right. We all believe we're doing it well. And so there's actually a YouTube video out there. If you haven't seen it.

It's the dad and the kid wrote the instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Oh, yeah? Yeah. If you haven't watched it, go find it.

It's hilarious. But I don't like. I'll Share that. I'm like, this is sometimes how your team receives your instructions.

It's not because you don't know what you meant. It's they weren't in that same conversation with you and they weren't on your hamster wheel. And so they don't know what you're thinking. And so you have to give them that clear instruction.

You have to bring them into the conversation. You have to give them the background that you have that you want them to know. And inevitably that brings up conversations of that's micromanaging. And that'll take too long.

And I love when somebody brings up it'll take too long because then we start talking about rework time and how many hours do you spend going back and having them do it again and. Explaining and bring somebody else in now to. Exactly Right. And so usually that.

That math mets out and they're like, oh, yeah, that's right. And so we then start having some discussions around where clarity crosses that line into micromanagement. And that looks a little different depending on the cultures that you're in. Go ahead.

I think my reaction to that is, well, use some judgment then. Right. I think it comes back to. Not that he's a sponsor of this program in any way, shape or form.

Comes back to Blanchard situational leadership. Yep. How are you telling this person about something that they've done a million times and are an expert, in which case you probably don't need to give them the full instructions of first, unscrew the peanut butter jar. Right.

Pick up a knife. You know what I mean? It is a funny video. I do think people should watch it.

Yeah. But even that if you've been making sandwiches for years, the instructions that those kids are providing probably enough. Right. Because that's the funny thing about the video is the dad is not using any contextual.

No reasoning. He's following the instructions to a T. Absolutely. And with.

From a situational leadership perspective, if you're brand new, then you might actually need that. The other thing that the peanut butter video makes me think about really quickly too, is just modeling. Also, like, I'm going to show you how to do it. And here's the instructions.

Right? Yeah. Those two pairs are super duper powerful to. To give to somebody.

Here's an example of what I expect this report to look like is super helpful. But the other thing I tell leaders when we. You're absolutely right. Because you may not need to give everybody all of those instructions.

For some leaders, that's hard to suss out, especially if They're a new leader or especially if something has been going wrong in the team and they're not quite sure what or where that is. So I've coached them and counseled them. Tell your team you're doing this. Tell your team you're wanting to be better at providing clarity and let them know I might over explain and I want you to help me figure out where that line is between the two of us.

I want to make sure I'm giving you the information you need. It might feel like I'm over communicating or you feel like I'm micromanaging, let me know and I will back off. And the two of you as a leader and the receiver, you can calibrate your conversation, but you have to tell them that this is what you're doing. Like, I want to be better at providing clarity.

I want to make sure you have what you need to be successful. So here's what I'm trying. Let me know how this works for you. And those conversations are a goldmine of information.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. You don't need to hide that you're working on your own development in a specific area. No.

Your teams respond to it so well because they want what I have seen from so many leaders. They've reported back to me. They're like, my team is like, they're really helping me. They want to see you do well.

Like, it's really rare that an employee shows up and says, I'm going to set a dumpster fire today. They want you to do well as their leader. They want you're trying to be a better leader. I would love for you to be a better leader.

This is a win for me personally. So yeah, they're going to help you. If you let them know that and it creates a level of safety then for that employee to go to the manager and say, hey, I want to get better. There's just wins all around.

And I think it comes back to judgment and situational leadership. Where is this person? I think I don't. I'm not like a Blanchard acolyte, so I don't always remember the whole thing, but it's somewhere on a spectrum of an absolute newbie to whatever the possible process or domain or whatever it might be to an expert.

And that there's a continuum there of an expert is going to feel something as micromanagement that a newbie is going to feel is the exact guidance that they need. Where maybe with those expert people you take them more as a partner in it. Hey, here's what we're doing. What's your thoughts on how that needs to be done?

And what. Yeah, that's the other thing for leaders to do is really to validate what their employee heard. Right. So you give somebody some instructions for a project and you want them to do something, and you need to validate that they know what they're doing.

And when you asked, you understand, you got it. What's their answer gonna be? Solid. Yep, I got it.

And then they go and they talk to five other people and say, I don't know how to do this report. Can you help me? But when you ask them, I. When you say very clearly, I wanna make sure we're both on the same page before we leave.

Tell me what you're taking away from today. That's a really safe way for them to tell you what they heard without you being condescending and saying, did you get all that? Tell me what you heard. And then you can fill in gaps as you need to.

But again, you get to calibrate in the discussion. What did they hear? What are. Does that match with what I wanted them to do?

Or did they move something around and I need to move it back? Like, yep, yep, it's a dialogue. And bonus points, frankly, if you take the person who's on the expert end of the spectrum and have them come over to the other end of the spectrum and can you block this person through what to do here from a development perspective, that's how. That's a way to multiply your hand, so to speak, as a leader is can you get your experts to be doing some of the guidance for.

And it's such a great leadership opportunity on a small scale for that expert. It's a chance for them to flex some leadership muscle and try those things out in a safe place where they're not at a high risk. Oh, now I'm leading a team of eight and I have to do this for the first time. I get to do that under some care and guidance.

And bringing this kind of back to full circle with hr, we have to do the same things. We have to work with our managers and ask them, what are you taking away from this conversation as the next steps, Getting that clarity? I want to be a good HR partner to you. I want to make sure you have what you need to be successful in this discussion with the person.

Tell me where you are, where you're going to go from here, and what next steps are. And it may even mean if you know that manager is going to have a conversation with the employee on Tuesday afternoon. It might mean, hey, manager, I'm going to set up a quick 30 minute connect for us Tuesday morning. I just want to check your headspace.

I want to make sure I know where you are. And then mentally as an HR manager, you clear your calendar for immediately after that call. Because you know they're going to follow up right away and say, hey, do you have five minutes to debrief this? Those are the structures that you can put in place to handhold and build those skills.

You need to check in before. Let them do it. Give them the debrief, give them some feedback and continue until they've had a good opportunity to practice this a lot, which sometimes takes years. The thing that popped in my head is from an HR perspective.

Right. Clarity from HR might actually be clarifying what feedback is and good feedback looks like. Because think of words like feedback, or let's even go to a more better example, which is the word coaching, like clarifying what that actually is. Because there's a lot of leaders who are like, yeah, I spend a lot of my time coaching.

And if you were to say, what does that look like to you? You might. That might not be. Words matter.

Words have meaning. Yeah. That might not mean the same thing. And so when you say, let's stick with coaching for a moment.

When you say you need to be coaching your people, what do you mean by that and what are you expecting them to be doing? And are. Do they have the same definition for these words and will they be doing that thing? Coming back to.

I don't know if this is coming back to like frameworks and things that HR as a specialty area can be here to provide is making sure we are clear on what does a good performance conversation look like? What does good feedback look like? Because they are. They are busy and left to their own devices, they're going to do whatever the definition is that they have in their heads.

Yeah. And they're going to do the things that have gotten them whatever success looks like to them in the past. And that might be ending the conversation as quickly as possible in terms of success. So yeah, we do need to give that clarity.

And those clarities is that. I don't think that's correct English right there. I don't. We're just making up words.

It works for me. But that clarity is best given when the stakes aren't high. Right. We know that learning in the moment, in an urgent situation rarely kind of sits long term.

But when we can give them that information and they can Practice it in a learning environment and then immediately go and apply it. There's better stickiness to that learning. And so when we do things like performance management training, throwing in how to have these discussions where they're going to have the performance discussion as part of the maybe annual review process, but that's a little bit easier than 30 minutes before they go and talk to a person and have to have a tough conversation.

You can lean on what that concept or that framework that was taught in the performance management training, bring that back into that conversation just before they have to have a really difficult discussion and say, let's go back to that model, let's reinforce that. And that's the partnership between L and D&HR. Right. Is this is what we teach them as an HR professional, as an HR business partner, what have you, you reinforce that so that they can recall what they learned, bring that back in the moment and they get to reinforce that.

Nice. So I want to get into the advice column here and one, one of the areas that my focus area, passion area, I don't know what you'd want to call it, is supporting leaders who have been recently promoted. And I don't mean to cut out people who have been recently hired into the company. Very similar challenges, but some unique differences when it comes to folks who have been promoted internally.

And so the first thing is, what's one piece of advice you have for leaders who are looking for that promotion, looking to continue to grow and elevate, get to that next level? Yeah, get an external mentor. Go find somebody in the industry that is doing what you want to do. Find them on LinkedIn, go to an event workshop and they're a speaker, what have you and ask them to be your mentor.

Gonna feel like you're asking someone out on a date in high school. It's really nerve wracking, but it's so impactful. And you go to them with, I would like to have a one year like structured mentorship relationship where we meet once a month or a six month engagement where we meet every. This is what I want out of this.

But go find that person who's doing the things that you wanted to do and set up some regular discussions and then get really clear with yourself about what you need from them. Do you need help in strengthening relationships with the people you work with? Do you need help during that transition of they were my peers and now they're my boss or I'm their boss or do you need help with understanding the new landscape that you're responsible for? Get clear about that with yourself but partner with that mentor to get advice from them.

It's an invaluable relationship. And I think I like where you were going with that, which is you need to guide those oh yeah, conversations too. Right. Even more so with an external mentor who's donating their time to you.

Make it so that they can just show up and impart wisdom and not have to do more labor than that. I would add depending on the size of your company, you should probably have an internal mentor too, especially if you're a mid size or larger organization. Because I think. Yeah, I would agree that having somebody internal is also really good.

Especially if you're a bigger company and you've got yeah. Parallel peers that maybe aren't in your department. But yeah, that can help with the internal. You get to say different things to them.

I think both are good. And the internal person can also help you with internal politics and internal. The unwritten rules, maybe at the next level, things like that. Yep.

So for those who have been. Who have now just recently been promoted. Right. Which is a really sticky place.

There's a lot of mindset, skillset, tool set shifts that need to be made when you go from manager to director to be. So what's one piece of advice you have for someone who's been recently promoted? Yeah, I really advise lean into your partners, your HR business partners, your finance team, your IT team, all of those internal experts. Lean into them, set up meetings with those folks.

Understand what they can provide to you. You don't have to do it all like you are not expected to be the end all, be all in your position. You, you need to know who can help you with what and if you are able to navigate that landscape within your organization of I don't know the answer, but I absolutely know who to go to that frees you up so well to be able to do the things that you do need to do. I don't need to know how to run the finance system.

I know that this person in the finance department can do it and I can go to them with questions that I'm not able to self serve on. And my experience has been they are happy to lend their expertise. Right. They're not sitting around waiting for questions but they're happy to share that with you and be that expert because they'd much rather you ask them upfront how to do it right than try and fix the mistake on the back end.

So lean into those partners, take advantage of their expertise. You don't have to know all of the ADA accommodation laws your HR business partner knows that let their years of knowledge and expertise take flight. Lean into that and get curious too. What are the things that they're being held accountable to?

What are their goals? You know, what do they love it when people do who need to work with them? What do they hate when people don't do it? Or a way that they do it when they need to work with them.

Get curious too, because you never know what how that can ingratiate, right? Or make an even stronger relationship so that when you do need to come to them, maybe when it's not convenient, right, there's some benefit of the doubt. Or even better, when it is convenient, they're more than happy to more than happy to help. Anything else that from a leadership L and D perspective?

Any other parting thoughts and wisdom for the listeners out there today? Yeah, and part of this is because the upcoming day is Employee Appreciation Day. But it's really easy as a leader to forget to recognize the good things your teams do. It's easy to take them for granted.

It's. It's easy to overlook that and for that to become the baseline. Like this person's a rock star, so they get paid. They don't need any appreciation.

But if you can be really intentional about finding ways to thank and recognize your team doesn't have to be public. It doesn't have to be a giant showy display. Even a handwritten thank you note with something specific. Hey Kent, I really appreciate the way you set up this podcast meeting and you sent me the outline of how we're going to do this and gave me some specifics to think about.

Was really beneficial and made me feel very comfortable when I came on this discussion. Those kinds of which is all true, by the way. Thank you. All of that specificity, it drives that behavior for that person.

They sit up a little taller, they feel better. It doesn't take a ton of effort. And here's a pro tip that I have used many times and I've told many leaders and it always holds true if you should not go into your HR system to pull your employee's address to mail them the thank you card. Creepy and wrong and a violation.

When you send them a quick message and says, hey, I have something I want to mail to you. Which address would you like me to send it to? Every time they tell you whatever address they want, they don't ask what it is. They don't ask why.

You just I want to send you something. What address would you like? Some people May prefer work address versus a home address and that's up to them, but just send them something as a thank you. It can be a thank you note.

It could be a Dollar store. I had a colleague once, she did such a good job of highlighting things for me and pointing things out and helping me navigate some places. I happen to know she liked beach theme stuff. So I found at the Dollar store a little wooden lighthouse with a tea light holder.

And so I got that, paid the $5 for shipping and sent it to her with a thank you note. Thank you for lighting my way and thank you for making it easier for me to find my way through this thing that we were navigating together. Like, yeah, it doesn't have to be expensive and big. It just has to be specific and intentional.

I would say we don't give enough feedback on the things we're happy about. We think feedback is only for constructive stuff and usually the most we give with feedback is just great job and we don't employ the same sort of feedback model and thoughtfulness that we put behind constructive feedback, which might actually be very helpful to say, hey, so thank you for the pos. You gave me some positive. You gave me constructive feedback or feedback from a positive lens of that email was helpful.

Okay, cool. I know to keep repeating that behavior now, not just, hey, good job with the podcast today. So that's very helpful. This has been fun.

Jill, thank you for coming on today. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Till next time, take it easy.

Yeah, you do. 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 with 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. Sam.