“If I want something done, I have to do it myself.” We hear that refrain too often from leaders, frustrated that their senior people can’t seem to get the job done.
Leadership is a cornerstone of a successful organisation, especially when it comes to the top executives. However, those executives often come to their roles ill-prepared for the tasks of leadership, to manage others and themselves. Something, somewhere, has been missing in their development and it is costing organisations.
We decided to take a look at our data collected over years of coaching assignments – SMG conducts more than 300 coaching assignments per year – to see if we could identify the gaps in executive and leadership development.
What we found surprised us.
The leadership issues that leaders are struggling with in the middle rungs of organisations are often the exact same issues that are being faced by CEO’s and their top teams. This tells us that these issues are systemic!
The problems to be solved
From our coaching report data, the following issues arose as consistent themes:
- An inability to lead one’s self and develop the emotional intelligence to be able to take different perspectives.
- An inability to influence others and foster relationships.
- Silos between and within teams.
- A lack of trust in teams, with people feeling they can’t speak openly.
- Lack of commitment and accountability.
- An inability to adapt leadership style to suit the other person in the conversation.
- Inconsistent motivation and/or inability to motivate others.
- High levels of stress and burn out and a lack of tools to combat these.
- An inability to constantly adapt, and lead others through change.
When we took this list to some of our clients, every single one of them agreed that these issues were relevant at all levels of their organisations. And this was universal across every industry and sector.
What surprised us was how little progress had been made throughout leadership careers. We had expected that, as people moved up their organisation, they would master certain leadership and management skills and the issues they faced at higher executive levels would have changed and grown in complexity.
Why the gap exists
The fact that this did not happen tells us two things, one of which is that people management is hard. People often say that the hardest part of their executive careers is those elements to do with people.
The second thing this research tells us is that there is a development and training gap right through that middle layer of organisations. A layer which we have identified as the most critical time for developing leaders.
People receive training and development when they are identified as ‘high potential’ and given their first team to lead, as first line managers. But that “Management 101” training does not equip them for the rest of their career. They sink or swim.
Those “middle rung” years are very busy. These people are expected to multitask, continuing to perform roles as technical specialists (as lawyers, accountants, or in sales, for example), while also taking on the demanding task of leading and managing others.
They often need help from their own managers or the human resources team.
If they get to senior levels of an organisation, they can arrive unprepared and – even when they are offered executive education – have missed out on the development of some foundational competencies.
As well as putting those people under personal and professional stress, this lack of development exposes organisations to weaknesses that can lead to underperformance, workplace dysfunction, low employee engagement and high staff turnover. The cost of these issues in financial and human terms is substantial.
Tackling the issues
Now the research has told us what the issues are, how should organisations go about tackling them? The solution is to provide training to those first-time leaders once they have been in their role for six to 12 months. They are excited about their new opportunity and they have had a taste of what it is actually like to be in a management / supervisory role, but haven’t picked up too many bad habits yet. This is a crucial time as their technical prowess cannot solve the people issues they are now facing.
The key is to address the gaps and provide a foundation at the start of their leadership career, rather than trying to plug the holes a few years later.
By doing this, organisations will create a critical mass of skilled people, an alumni group, at that middle level, to support each other and drive the organisation forward. A company may have one CEO and a handful of senior executives, but it could have a cohort of 40 to 50 empowered mid-level leaders who can create change and solve organisational problems.
Conventional wisdom says that role modelling needs to start at the top and cascade down. In a perfect world, this is certainly the way to go. But these days, how often is that really achievable? By starting in the middle and creating a cadre of effective managers who can lead their teams and who don’t need to rely on their often unprepared leaders to help them resolve their leadership issues, the organisation creates a ripple effect of high performance leaders role modelling down and at the same time, releasing their own leaders to deal with strategic organisational issues which is where they should be concentrating.
We have used the findings from our research to reconfigure and re-target our successful leadership program ‘The Focused Executive’ – based on Virginia Mansell’s book of the same name – and are rolling the program out both here and in Asia. This program is aimed at developing a strong middle layer of self-aware, adaptable and resilient organisational leaders through applied, practical learning built on adult development principles.
SMG has created a diagnostic tool to help identify the extent of these issues within organisations. To request a copy of the tool and a complimentary analysis of the results follow this link and use the subject heading ‘TFE diagnostic’ https://smgrp.com.au/contact/
