Ingram's April 2024

Thought Leader Insights: Leadership Development

Q&A . . . W ith D an S talp Larger companies have more internal resources to effectively develop leaders. Small and medium company have more challenges, as this expert in the field of training has seen.

Q: The modern workplace is con fronted with challenges on recruiting, retention, employee expectations, hybrid and remote workplaces, heavier workloads and a lot more. Is that a dra matically different cocktail than leaders have always faced? A: I think it’s never been harder to lead. What happened in the last four years—previous to this, would have likely taken 15 years. The pandemic, the push for remote work, the supply-chain issues, costs and inflation, interest rates tripling. Normally, that would have spanned over a much longer period of time. That makes leadership much more of a challenge. A: The part that’s exasperating is this: I’ve been doing this for 18 years, but there’s now a whole generation where leaders simply haven’t been developed. It’s kind of like people in Johnson County when they want to buy a house. They want to move in, not have to do anything to it. Nobody wants to do that work. That’s happened with leaders; too many companies want their leaders to be already developed, yet rarely are they being developed. Q: What’s driving that? A: Well, there are peer groups for CEOs, so for the most part that group is doing well. What’s not happening is developing the second-in-command and emerging leaders. They’re not being developed at the same level. It’s almost a Catch-22 situation: There are more challenges than five years ago, and those same leaders are not being developed. Q: Is this across all business lines? A: Here’s some context to that. I’m referring here to companies that maybe have—which is primarily what we have in Kansas City—750 or fewer employees. I Q: Does that then change the nat- ure of development itself?

can’t really speak to the T-Mobiles, but even within big companies, we’ve had so many acquisitions, my sense is that things are slip ping through the cracks at the big ones, too. Q: One would think that senior leaders and owners would see the poten tial perils of ignoring this particular need. A: Well, it could be partly about cost, but I think it’s more that people feel like they don’t have the time to truly be developed. They don’t know how to do it themselves, and don’t want their folks out of office. It’s money and time. To develop leaders, it’s got to be done on a regular basis; you can’t modify behavior long term if you’re not doing it consistently. You have to master it, and that takes time. Everybody is overworked and understaffed—that’s the case even for those up-and-coming leaders. A: What commonly happens, and it sounds good, but doesn’t have legs, is that they’ll read a book together and discuss it. The problem is, they don’t have somebody facili tating that training who actually knows the material. It’s a lot more effective if it’s coming from the person who wrote the book or had been trained with the material. Train the trainer can be a huge mistake, because what you end up with is so watered down before it gets to others that it’s not really worth much. Q: It can be hard for some in the top position to become that developmental figure, can’t it? A: Yes, and most people in that posi tion won’t talk about stuff they don’t like to talk about and tend to talk about what comes easy to them. That’s not leadership training. You have to go both places. A lot of times, people make the mistake of taking someone who is a really good contributor—in human resources, technical or sales - someone who’s Q: So what are companies with less than 1,000 employees doing?

really good at their craft—and automatically promote them to a leadership role. That’s usually not a good idea unless they’ve been assessed for leadership qualities. Q: Why doesn’t that approach work? A: Say I’m a really good engineer, That does not mean I am good leadership material. There’s so much more to it. Leadership means working through people, having a different skill set than someone who’s managing their own behavior. Just because you’re skilled in your craft, doesn’t mean you’re ready to lead. Q: Is it your sense that the failure to train isn’t limited to particular sectors? A: It’s definitely a widespread problem. I can’t think of an entire industry where they’ve just nailed leadership development. There might be a company or two that has things figured out, but they’re not necessar ily representative of the whole industry. Q: What’s hindering the ability of senior executives to identify future leaders, train and retain them so the company doesn’t become a minor-league developer of talent for the majors? A: A lot of times, they’re looking at what it costs to do something, but they’re not looking at what it costs to do nothing. We have assessments we use for clients, and there are some really good pre-selec tion assessments out there. It could be that I have an internal person I consider pro moting, so you take the assessment based on their current role, then put the results into the role you’re considering them for. But that’s only about 15 to 20 percent of the decision. It’s an X-ray. Before we pre scribe treatment or do surgery, we’re going to look at this and make a more informed decision. These assessments aren’t that expensive, compared to the cost of a bad hire. I know someone personally who felt

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April 2024

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