C: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Courtney.
J: And I’m Jackie.
C: And something that we’ve been thinking about is, what have we been thinking about, Jackie?
J: Well, I don’t know that we have a nice, perfectly good term for what we’re thinking about, but we have really been thinking about leadership development, I guess.
C: What?!?!?! That’s so new for us.
J: We’ve been thinking about leadership development and primarily we’ve been thinking about how it’s organized, like…how it’s done.
C: Gawd, we’re geeks.
J: I know. We’re really are geeks. We are geeking out on this episode of this ShotCast. We’ve been thinking about how leadership is organized and has been for, I don’t know, centuries. At least decades, let’s go with decades. But it’s been organized around categories of action. And I know this is sounding really geeky, but it’s organized around things that you’ll all recognize. Things like building trust or giving feedback or holding people accountable. I don’t know, Courtney, you can probably think of others.
C: No, those are great. Whatever class you’ve ever been to, it’s one of those organization factors, right?
J: That’s right. And you know, it creates this problem of that each of those things, whether you’re talking about holding someone accountable or inspiring and motivating, they all come with their own set of disciplines and forms and structures and checklists. And I think what we’ve been thinking about is that this really complicates trying to learn how to be a good leader. It complicates it because you’re constantly then trying to master all of these prescribed instructions.
C: Yeah. I just had a visual of a college kid and every lesson, every class is like a book and you got to carry it around, right? And you have to have all the information, all the access and at any point in time as a leader be able to remember what was on chapter seven, the third paragraph, because right now that person’s doing that thing that we talked about in class and it’s impossible, right?
J: It’s ridiculous.
C: You can’t carry it around. You can’t access it. It makes it a really tough way to learn to lead.
J: Yeah, I think so. We think so. And this shows up for us when we’re in the classroom. We often get asked things like “What do I do or what do I say when…”, and then fill in the blank of what some employee has done. And of course, the answer is always going to be, “Well, it depends”. I don’t know. Context really matters here. But I think that this question is in part due to how we have been sending people through leadership development. I think it’s in part due to how they have learned leadership.
J: They’ve learned it in these singular disciplined ways, things like giving feedback, having tough conversations, they’ve learned it in this way. And so they feel like there is some instruction book. Your analogy is great of just carrying around the book and having to memorize all of the things that I’m supposed to know about that.
J: I know you’ve seen some things in programs that you’ve been a part of as well. The things that are coming to mind for me, just to kind of drive this point home are…there’s one program out there I know that teaches different types of difficult conversations. There’s like nine different types. And as soon as I saw that, all I could think was how on earth are you going to remember that in the moment you need to have a difficult conversation? How is that going to come to mind? I can’t even, right here in the comfort of our podcasting booth, I can’t come up with those nine different types. I can’t imagine how you’re going to do that when it actually happens.
C: The other thing that comes up a lot is an acronym. We’ve been through a lot of training and acronyms are great because they organize things and they give you labels. But in practice, I think leaders need to show up as a human being in a conversation. You need to be authentic; you need to be real, and you need to be trusted in the moment that you’re sitting across the table from someone going, “Oh, the acronym was stop, S T O P”. You are out of the conversation at that point. It doesn’t come through as authentic. I don’t know if it’s trusted. There’s got to be something else. There’s got to be something better.
J: Yeah, I hear you. And so many of those acronyms, you can tell when you look at them, they’re kind of forced. Like maybe some things were moved around or words. There’s a better word, but it didn’t spell anything. So, I think there’s some forced ones in there. There are also things like multi-step models. For example, building trust, there is a multi-step model for building trust. I don’t know…something about that actually kind of makes me laugh. Or formulas to figure out what kind of situation you’re in so that you’ll know how to act. Again, these are the kinds of things that break down in the wild. They’re really great in the classroom, but they break down in the wild.
J: There’s a guy named George Box. I don’t know who George actually is, but he has a brilliant quote. I should look that up. I feel like the internet could tell me who George is. His quote is “All models are wrong. Some are useful”. I think that’s so perfect. It’s a whole, the map is not the territory. And yet, we have so many of them in the leadership space that people think they have to memorize these things. And when they don’t have the memorize, it kind of locks them up a little bit. So, I think we want to tell people it’s not about – never study those models. Never look at the acronym. But you have to think about what are you gleaning from that? That could be useful information that you roll into a much more natural way of interacting with others.
C: Yeah. And assimilating it into your natural everyday things. We’re going to turn this conversation into a two-parter because we’re going to talk in the next series about what do you do? How do you, or where do, you start when you don’t know where to start?
J: Yeah. I love that. I love that.
C: So, I think that’s all we’re going to do for today.
J: Oh yeah. We’ll leave them hanging.
C: All right. Bye. Cool. I feel like the old people are thinking that we’re like Bobby on that 80’s TV show “Dallas”. That’s all for this episode of our ShotCast, but we always have much more to say. If you want more, drop us a line at slingshot25.com. Until next time.