On a new segment of People and Performance Playbook on the Truly Human Leadership Podcast, we hear from Praisy Isaac and Jami Dix of Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute.
They expand upon the most recent PPP newsletter article, "The $60 Billion Problem: What Most Organizations Get Wrong About Leadership Development"
They specifically discuss why leadership development should be like Russian nesting dolls. Layered development, that addresses the heartset and mindset, as well as the skillset of leaders.
You can listen to the episode through the link in the header above or through your favorite podcast provider, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Audible. The transcript of the discussion is featured below.
Transcript
Jami Dix: I am Jami Dix. I am a Senior Consultant at Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute. I think the favorite thing about my job is delivering training. I love to watch people have the light bulb moment for them personally, and then I just think about the impact that we can have even longer. Just having a group of people go through something together. And the difference that that can make on their team or as an organization, as a whole.
Praisy Isaac: I love that. I'm Praisy Isaac. I'm a Consultant here at Chapman & Co. I would say my favorite part about my role is working with clients and helping them do whatever it is that they are looking to achieve in the cultural leadership space. So, if that is helping them with their strategic plan, or helping facilitate a session, or even just like helping coach someone through a problem or an issue, I really enjoy helping people grow and, you know, be better. OK, I have a question for you.
Jami: Yeah.
Praisy: If you had $60 billion, with a B for boy, what would you spend it on?
Jami: I saw this question come through on Teams this morning. And the first thing that came to my head was therapy for all.
Praisy: OK. Why?
Jami: Because I think in the work that we do with leaders and individuals, you can see what makes a person a person. And we are all coming to this life in this work and our roles with different levels of education, experiences, how our parents raised us or didn't raise us, all of this stuff that I think for a lot of people, we just sort of bottle up and set to the side and think it doesn't have anything to do with us. And yet I see over and over and over again, not just with people in training classes, but with leaders unable to address some of that impacting them. And then impacting their team. And I just wonder if we took a second individually and really worked on our internal self, how much of a difference that would make in organizations.
Praisy: I feel like you just gave a preview to what we want to talk about today. I know that question was probably a little random, but it came from a statistic that I recently learned about, how much organizations globally spend on leadership development. That's training workshops, coaching, whatever it is. But they spend that much money annually, which tells me a couple of things.
One super-duper important. It is not optional. If people are spending that much money, definitely something that people prioritize and want to see the ROI in. We hear from a lot of leaders on what they're still looking for. They're looking for people to give them more loyalty, be more accountable.
Jami: The accountability one comes up a lot. How do I hold my people accountable? Or we're going through a ton of change in our organization, and my team just doesn't know what to do.
Praisy: Ownership, inspiration, things I feel like you can't train. It makes me think about we're spending this much money on development, but then we're not necessarily getting the outcomes that we're looking for. There is like a little bit of a gap there. I think that was interesting to me. And I think we're going to talk a little bit more about why we think that gap exists.
Jami: If you think you need training, you might, you truly might. But I also try and encourage leaders to think about why are you calling us? What's the deeper reasoning behind it. Because if you see people not engaged in their work or being a self-starter. Change is hard for many people, including myself.
But when a change is happening and you see somebody really unable to move forward, it's likely not a training situation. And I think that's when we think about training. For us, it's not just about the skill. I want to understand what's in somebody's heart. I want to understand how they're approaching or thinking about a particular situation, and then we can get to the skill piece of it.
But I just see so many organizations wasting money, and I'm not interested in wasting organizations’ money. I am interested in having a true impact, which means sometimes we need to go deeper than the surface.
Praisy: Something about what you said struck me in this is the difference between leadership and management. Management to me is we go and we find the thing, we check the box, we determine that we addressed it. But I think leadership is going deeper to understand why is this happening. How do we help really get to the root cause of this and help people really show up?
Jami: Sometimes we hear from leaders, too. I'm a mom to two kiddos. Jordan just graduated from college. Joe is going to be a senior, so on the tail end of school. But there were so many times in their careers that I would get frustrated with the teacher because some kid would do something, and then all of a sudden the whole team is punished.
And I think how that translates into today and into organizations is leaders will say this person is terrible at their job. We should probably get really good at communication and feedback. And so, they want us to train the people on feedback and communication, which we can do. But I would offer can we talk to the leader first? What's stopping you from providing that feedback?
How do you see that person? What do you think about feedback generally? Because I can give you a three-step formula to deliver feedback. But if you don't think that person is capable of change, or maybe not receptive to the feedback, that's a whole different conversation. And yet we slap a training Band-Aid on so many things that I just think are not ready for it.
As we think about leaders and the audience being a Truly Human Leader podcast, you might be thinking about what am I supposed to do? And I would start with them. I would actually say, I think a lot of people get so good at their job that we then promote them to leaders, and we actually forget. Many people forget to tell those leaders your job is fundamentally different.
You used to be in the in the weeds, doing the work, working in the manufacturing floor, working in a distribution center, working whatever. And now you have people in your span of care, and you haven't figured out how to get out of the weeds. And I think that's part of the challenge is as a leader, your job is fundamentally different.
You have to develop your team, and I think many leaders call like, let's give them training. And I would say, let's just pause that for a second. Because if you think about your job being different, your success as a leader is measured on how well your team is doing. And so, you have to be able to help them grow as people, as individuals, and hopefully honestly as leaders someday.
That's the ultimate success, I think, of a really good leader is that people in your span of care outgrow, maybe even you, outgrow the role, outgrow the team and they go and do great things. But that doesn't happen if you're still in the weeds doing the work. And so, I think it's really important just to name that first. First stop is to start with a leader and think about how they are approaching the work.
Praisy: Before we talk about maybe the development framework that we've written about, I also feel like it's important for organizations to pay attention here because when you don't have leaders developing others like you are talking about, a lack of engagement from the team, from the workforce, potentially retention issues. If people don't feel seen, cared for, developed, they're going to go somewhere else to look for that opportunity.
Then I also think about, if leaders aren't developing others to sort of become leaders, then you don't have a bench. Three to five years from now who is going to take over and run the business, right?
Jami: The other thing that came to my mind when you were saying that, as we often asked, groups, what do great leaders do? No one ever says micromanage. There isn't a single person on this planet who's like, please tell me every single thing to do every minute of every day. They're not out there. And I think it's really easy to say this generation this and this generation that.
That's not been my experience. And I think it's just a really human issue here is it's not about what generation somebody is a part of. It is what do you believe to be true about this person? And do you understand, as a leader, your job is to help that person?
Praisy: There's a lot of research around this, but, self-determination theory, where in order to be truly happy or find fulfillment in life, people want autonomy, to feel competent in their work and have a sense of belonging. No one wants to be micromanaged.
They want to feel like they are seen for who they are, they're deeply cared for, and they have something that they find meaning and value and feel like they're contributing successfully to the organization. And so, even the psychology, I think, agrees with why this is important for leaders to pay attention to.
Jami: It's also why leadership is hard. We live in the land of people and performance in harmony, and so we're constantly navigating that tension. But it's not just about caring for the people, but we recognize that leaders have deadlines and financial targets that they need to hit and all of these things.
And then you have people who want to have autonomy and be cared for and be able to be their whole person at work. And I think leaders are truly just struggling with like, what does that even look like?
Praisy: It's a big calling, right? And I think that's why we're in this space, and that's why we often tell people, you said this, it’s a journey. And we're always becoming who we are. It's going to be a lifelong thing. And I think that is also helpful because I think it lowers the stakes to feel like you've gotten there.
Jami: On my best day, I'm actually able to really care for people and make sure that they have what they need to do a really, really good job. That's an ideal situation, but we're not always going to have our best days. And I would say don't completely throw out this idea of caring for your people because you can't do it perfect every single day. That's never going to be the case. It is a journey every day, and no leader is going to reach it.
Praisy: If we talk about developing leaders, an image that comes to mind is those Russian nesting dolls. If you don't know what that is, I j ust had to learn about them, they're usually wooden pieces, and there's an outer doll. It's beautifully decorated. You open it, and there's another doll, and then you open that doll, there's another doll and it sort of keeps going.
But I think the point here is that when we think about development, we focus a lot on the outside doll, so the behavior, the thing that we can sort of see and measure on the outside. But if metaphorical doll on leadership, you see that there are some beliefs, there's a mindset that drives the behavior.
And if you were to open that doll, you see, well, there's some deep-rooted values and experiences that have driven this. And so, I think our point is, or our hypothesis is that, if we are developing leaders and we want that behavior to truly stick and we want to really see change and make people feel seen and cared for, we actually have to dive deeper than the behavior. We have to start at the heart set. So, Jami, would you tell us a little bit about heart set?
Jami: I think a lot of organizations spend a ton of time, energy, effort on the skill set piece of training, and while that is great, I think they're missing two really key components of this work in terms of behavior change and having impact. And just like those Russian nesting dolls, that would be the heart set and the mindset all before we get to the skill set.
Remember at the beginning when I said I would give $6 billion to therapy? Because I think the minute some people hear heart set, they're tuning us out because it feels scary and it feels really hard. I’m not asking you to unpack your own stuff, all of your childhood trauma, all of the things that have happened to you.
That's not what I'm asking about. What I'm asking you to think about and reflect on is what's really important to you? What are your values? What do you want to be in this world? How do you want people to remember you? I've had more conversations lately where it's interesting to think about people starting to think of their legacy as leaders.
And I just have this dream. Can we start thinking about that question in our 20s? Don't wait till you're 50-60, near retirement to decide now I want to talk about caring for my people. The world is on fire.
People want to be cared for now. And I think as a leader, just your ability to show up in those conversations as a real human. The other thing I would offer about heart set is that is you don't have to fix anyone's heart or have the answers for everyone's heart. Just sit with them. Let them name something that's important to them.
Let you talk about what's important to you. That's what heart set is all about, being very clear about those things for you as an individual. And everyone has different things that are important to them as an individual. That is all heart set.
Praisy: There's a couple things that come to mind for me. One is, as you are talking, it makes me think about how deeply personal the work of leadership is. You can't come and perform leadership at work. You really bring your whole self. And if we think that we're a certain person at work and then we go home and we're a different person, I think it probably works for a little bit of time, and then you start to see it bleed over both ways.
And so, I think the most successful leaders I have seen really try to show up as their authentically full self. And the person that they are at home is the person that they are at work because they're really living out their core values. The other thought I'm having is especially for our listeners that are maybe a little bit more data-oriented is Google did a study a while ago on their engineers' project, Aristotle.
And so, they were trying to figure out what are the predictors of team success and team performance. The top one is psychological safety, but one of the factors was meaning. And it makes me think about if you know what matters to you at your core, you can live that out at work.
And that will show up in the team's performance. Because I think people are more motivated. They find that the work is personal to them. They care deeply. You get the discretionary effort. You start to see people align around shared meaning. I think it does show up in the business results.
Jami: I think one of the saddest things I hear from leaders sometimes is for some people they feel like they can show up to work as their whole self. I joke with people that I work with, you get 100% of Jami all the time. I don't know how to do two different people, but how lucky for me? I think if we could get leaders to truly understand what's in their heart and not hold other people to that exact same standard for them. You probably have different things in your heart, and that is OK.
But this idea of just taking the time to really understand what's really driving everybody. My sunshine and rainbows, like high aspirations for our world is it would be better if we could just truly understand that about each other and take the time to do it.
Praisy: Where do you think leaders should start if they're really exploring the question of heart set? What is a question that you would have them reflect on?
Jami: We’re sitting in this conference room, and I know Bob Chapman used to say write your own eulogy. That's something that feels very dark to me. I don't want to do that right now, but I do want people to start thinking about, how do you want to be talked about?
What do you want people to say about you when you're not in the room? I don't think anybody would say I want people to say I was the hardest driving leader. I held people accountable, I fired people, I did this. I don't think that's true. I think most people would say I want to be known as a caring leader who met people where they are, who developed them, who gave them the autonomy to grow, and I helped them do that. So that's where I would start answering the question, what do you want people to say about you? What kind of leader do you want to be known as?
Praisy: I love that. It reminds me of Maya's quote, people don't remember what you said or did, but how you made them feel. And I think that is like the biggest, most powerful message we could ever send with our lives.
Jumping into mindset, Jami, tell me about mindset.
Jami: In some ways, I'm like, is it the same as having a bias towards something? Or just the stories that we tell ourselves that are in our brain about anything. Again, it’s important to start with your heart. What is driving you? What is important to you?
Because that often shapes, if not always shapes, what you believe to be true. And so some of the mindsets I think that we talk a lot about at Chapman & Co. is everyone is somebody’s most important person or somebody's precious child versus you do marketing, therefore, I believe this about marketing. And that makes it, I think in some ways, easy to be much more dismissive of somebody versus actually, no, that's Praisy and I know that Praisy cares a lot about the work we do at Chapman & Co., therefore X. That would be a mindset I think that we hold a lot around here.
Praisy: Span of care.
Jami: Span of care would be another one. When I see subordinates, or just even direct reports, I don't love. Span of control would be the other one. When you are leading people, how do you actually see them? Do you see them as something to control, like your span of control, or do you see them as somebody to care for?
Bob used to say how you think of how you lead, and there's so much truth to that because I'm going to come out of a conversation really different with people in my span of care versus people in my span of control. Those are just words that I would never use. No one wants to be controlled as a grown up.
Praisy: I think a real example of that would be if I thought about somebody as a resource, someone to sort of allocate. When the times are tough or their performance is not great, I might think, we're just going to reassign them, we're going to get rid of them. We're going to try to fix that resource.
But if I were to shift my mindset and think, well, that's a person in my span of care, I would wonder, what's going on? It would shift my behavior to want to understand, to be curious, to want to support, to want to help them grow. And I think even before I do something, just think about your reaction, your response is totally different.
One is get rid of them. One is get close to them. Try to figure out how do I help them be better?
Jami: I think the question I would ask myself in mindset is what do I believe to be true about this person, this situation? What do I believe to be true about that? And then you need to check it.
Praisy: And skill set, tell us about skill set.
Jami: These are the things we want people to do. You want to have better listeners on your team. Let's give them some training on listening, which we can do. You want somebody to give feedback. You want to be able to get better at managing conflict. I think probably the easiest example, just to walk through, maybe all three of those: conflicts.
I grew up in a house where we swept all conflict under the carpet. That carpet is so lumpy still to this day. We don't do it. We just didn't. Loving parent, mostly normal household, but we didn't do conflict. I was also recognized and praised for being a “good girl.” I'm using air quotes. Doing what I was told, not questioning authority.
That's just where I grew up. Fast forward to a grown up. My mindset is we don't say hard things to people. That could hurt them. You could be wrong. They could leave. My mindset is that's a really tough thing. I could sit in a client training class on feedback, and I could give you the situation, behavior and impact, or I could check my motive and figure out how to have that conflict, but I'm likely not going to do that skill because my heart isn't quite there yet.
And I think that's why it's so important to understand what is really driving somebody. And as I think about conflict and feedback now, I'm like, I do care deeply about people that I work with. I am not serving them well if I'm not willing to provide the feedback that they need to hear in the spirit of their growth.
Not because I'm trying to be hurtful. I would never try and intentionally hurt somebody. Am I going to mess it up some days? For sure. Might I hurt somebody? Probably. But my core and what I believe about the relationships I have on our team is that they're so solid. I don't think people would walk away feeling that.
And if they did, then we clean that up. Yeah. But I think it's a good example of where your heart is on something, what you believe to be true, and then getting those aligned and then we can talk about the skill.
Praisy: It also sounds like in that situation like the discomfort there around giving the feedback is less about that person, but it’s your own stuff.
Jami: For sure. Yes, it is. It is deeply, deeply in Jami. It's not really about the other person at all.
Praisy: I think that maybe the takeaway here is it is really important to know what skills to do, what behaviors to do. It's really helpful to have concrete, measurable, objective things that we do in the spirit or in service of a different culture or different leadership journey. But I think those skills, without the alignment of the heart set mindset make it really performative.
And I also think, the reality is the training session could be great, and I could understand all of the concepts, and then I go back to my day-to-day where I'm inundated with stress, pressure, changes, and I will revert to what my mental model of how I deliver feedback is, which for me is avoidant.
But if I really want to be better at feedback, I have to dig deeper and think what is it about feedback that makes me want to or not want to give it? What do I believe about people? What do I believe about myself? What do I believe about relationships? Whatever that is.
But it's super important for me to tackle those deeper drivers in order for me to feel comfortable and confident giving feedback, especially when things get really hard.
Jami: I think about just the earlier question of what do you want people to say about you as a leader? I want people to say she was always honest with me. She was always honest about my behavior. On the places that she knew I needed to get better, she always shared them with me, and I don't know that people would say that yet.
Praisy: Maybe.
Jami: Or not, I don't know.
Praisy: I mean, I think this goes back to what we said. This is a journey. Even for feedback for myself, so scary, so freaking scary. There was a time when I had to give feedback to a Partner here, a Senior Partner, and I was terrified. All the beliefs that you said, they don't believe me.
My opinion doesn't matter. They're not going to change. And I had a really amazing leader at the time who just challenged that thought there of what if that isn't true? What if they need to hear this? What if you need to say this so you start to feel more confident in your ability and your thoughts?
And this leader sat with me. They helped me think through what's your message? What do you want to say? What's the intention here? How do we think about how they might respond? They went with me to the meeting, and they just were my support in helping me actually deliver this feedback message.
But I think from where I started to where to that time in place to where I'm now, I've come such a long way. I know I have a lot of work to do in this specific space, but I think it's important to recognize the progress you've made.
Jami: I think the other thing I would name, and what you just described, is you've done some internal work yourself. And I think that's why I sort of offhandedly, jokingly said therapy. But I do think there is a lot of internal work that leaders need to do just to understand themselves. I don't like throwing around the word therapy because it is super important and necessary, but I do think it is just getting really clear about what's important to you so we can be better for our people.
Praisy: Maybe to wrap up this framework, when you think about heart set, mindset, skill set, it isn't just a woo woo, EQ, emotional intelligence. I think all of that is truly, really important in order to know what's my belief about this and what is driving this belief? But I think it's important to think about this as a development framework. This is how we grow and develop.
If you think about development, it's like going to the gym. It's a thing that you work on, and you build your muscle in, and you start to get fit at. And so, thinking about this heart set, mindset, skill set from that perspective, I think it gives people grace and helps them be OK with progress. And we measure success by progress, not by the output. And I think it also helps us as leaders, and then us as team members start to do this work collectively.
Jami: The only thing I would tack on to that is thinking about the business side of this. Like it isn't just because it's a nice thing to do or people feel good after they have done this work. It's because we all work in different organizations that we want to be successful. And I think about business being the most powerful force for good.
You as a leader have a massive opportunity, in this work, to help do that so that you can run a really incredibly successful business. It's not why we do it, but that is another output of doing this incredible work.
Praisy: What would you leave, maybe a leader that's listening to this and/or maybe someone that is like sitting at a program level, what would you leave them with?
Jami: If a leader were sitting there asking themselves what could I do? Where should I start? What do I do? I would start with yourself. Start asking yourself what are the things that are important to you personally? And then I would challenge you to share that with your team. Do they know these are the three to five core values of me as a person?
Where do you think those came from? Share the story. Where do you think those came from? Why are they so important to you? And then invite them to have a conversation with you about it. I think the other piece here is asking your team what you're doing really well, and where they think you can be better as a leader and receive the feedback in a way that allows them to know we can tell John the hard stuff, and he's going to just really sit with it and listen to it. So that's where I would start as an individual leader.
Praisy: I love that. Another thought that's coming to mind is for organizations, maybe you are a talent leader or you lead learning and development, whatever that might be. You might be wondering what could you do at the macro-organizational level? And I would maybe give an example of the Grand Canyon was formed by rivers, over time, sort of eroding this big rock away into this beautiful structure.
And that's how I think about culture within our organization. It is going to be really hard for a leader to want to show up authentically, give the feedback, hold their people accountable, really think about harmonizing people in performance if the systems in which they live and work in are going against what they're trying to do.
It's going be really hard to sort of swim upstream and push against the power of this big river that, sort of, crafted the Grand Canyon. We would encourage you to think about what are the systems in which your people are working? What are you rewarding? What are you measuring success against?
And is that aligning with what you want your leaders to be doing? The other thing we would maybe also encourage you all to think about with your leaders is not just giving them training on skills, but helping them, do some individual work through coaching, getting them the right feedback, through 360 feedback, running assessments to really get deeper and get more concrete about what is it about their specific personality, the experience that is driving their behavior. I think that can be really, really helpful.
Jami: I'm curious how you want to answer this, too. I've been doing this work now for about 15 years, and I think up until probably the last three or four years, like when we really started developing heart set, mindset, skill set, the version of this that I wish somebody would have told me earlier is the hard work because I think it's I think it's so easy to go and get a certificate in something. And I took this class. And I don't know that we need to connect it to a deeper place. And I think it's less about the certificate of completion of a class and more about I am just a better human for this because I did some of this work. That's the piece I wish somebody would have said earlier.
Praisy: I love that. I think if you were to ask me that, I would think about the importance of progress. I think I talked about it a little bit before as well, but I am so binary of you did it or you didn't do it. I'm so check-the-box, and I have this degree of or desire for perfection or whatever that is.
I forget to think about how far I've come. Growth is measured by progress, not by checking the box or achieving something. I think it's good if you are starting this work and you're really thinking about heart set, mindset, to drive your skill set to really recognize the amount of work that you've put in and the progress that you've made thus far.