C: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that’ll feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Courtney. And I’m Jackie. Something we’ve been thinking about is, oh my gosh, we’ve been thinking about so much about this, but we have been thinking about a recent article that we read about how employees want access to training.
Weird. Seems simple enough. It does, doesn’t it? And the article goes on to say that. Executives, like 51 percent of them, aren’t providing it because they think it’s a waste of time. Like, wait, this is my job, what? You think 51 percent of them think it’s a waste of time? Yeah, well,
J: I don’t blame them.
C: Why don’t you blame them? Tell us about that.
J: Well, I don’t blame them because, um, I think that there is a lot of investments in learning that isn’t, uh, particularly effective or useful. I think, I always think about, like, we keep jamming more Play-Doh into the Play-Doh factory, and we’re not getting anything on the other side of that, that is, I think, terribly useful to creating better workplaces, better business results.
C: That’s a big, like, that’s a lot. That’s a lot. So let’s unpack it a little bit. Yeah. So, One of the things, and you guys have heard us say it a lot on the podcast, like we get over enamored with acronyms, techniques, quick fixes, like leadership is a skill. And part of the reason that it might miss the mark is that we just don’t really understand what leadership is.
We have like, there’s a, there’s a big gap between knowing we need it, recognizing it when it’s there. And then. The solutions that we put in place, we get very systemic, we get very left brain, we get very process oriented, and that’s not actually how leaders are made. It’s like, where do leaders even come from?
We’re getting it wrong.
J: Yeah. I think we get leadership wrong right out of the gate a lot. And so consequently, we don’t end up targeting with our learning solutions. You know, of course, now, I just want to point out, we’ve made a, we’ve made a sudden leap into leadership training. And I think that the training that this was talking about was probably a combination of all sorts of training.
Um, but we’re, because we are the people who put leadership learning into the world, we’re going to focus in on leadership training. And we see that, um, there’s a lot of content. We’ve been associated with some of these programs. You and I, we’re both certified in different kinds of, of, of programs out there.
We won’t name them. Um, but so we’ve seen a lot. We’ve been around the block a few times. We’ve sat in on a lot of training. We’ve delivered a lot of training that was designed by other organizations. So we’ve seen a lot and one of the things that we notice that we get you know that we get a little distracted by is this idea of what you just said Courtney all these acronyms and models and techniques and and we miss Making a deeper point maybe a more urgent point with leaders that of what leadership actually is And how they’re going to have to think differently if they’re gonna show up as a leader every day
C: Yeah, and I think the other thing we do You We talk about we have a process called change at last, right?
Like teaching leaders skills, teaching leaders to think different. That’s just one piece of a very big equation that requires leadership alignment. It requires a plan to how you’re going to reinforce that. It recognizes that someone coming into a class is going to spend a day or three or whatever in a situation and then go back to an environment with people that don’t know anything they taught in class.
And so it’s not surprising that that bounces off. You have to take a more, the approach we take is much more systemic to say, are the leaders aligned about it from the beginning? Do you have the right pool of people that are moving in that direction? Are you providing learning opportunities that align with what you want?
What are you doing on the back end to reinforce it? Like the whole system, it’s got to be carried all the way through in order for it to work. So it’s not surprising, like, yeah, you bought a class and it didn’t magically changed the world. Well, how could it? You didn’t look at the whole world when you implemented it.
J: Yeah, and that’s a really old conversation, which is what makes this all the more frustrating. It’s an old conversation that, you know, what the training department would often refer to as the magic classroom. You know, that, that these perhaps these executives in question, you know, somehow hold this idea that you send people into the magic classroom and they come out completely changed and done, baked, ready to go.
And no one really thinks that, that we sort of passively think that. We, we end up sort of falling into this pattern of believing that that is somehow true without really believing it.
C: Or super being frustrated when it’s not true, even though we didn’t really expect it to be true to begin with. Yeah. Yeah.
J: So, I think this is, you know, so it’s kind of frustrating that this is, this is still an ongoing argument. We, because we know, if I can go back to the Play-Doh factory analogy, you all remember the Play-Doh factory where you shoved the Play-Doh and you put the lever down, and then it came out the other side.
I mean, it’s like we keep shoving this stuff in and we’re pulling the lever down, but it’s all, you know, remember how some of it would kind of bleed out the sides and be very frustrating. This is, this is, continues to happen because there’s nothing on the other side of the classroom. Number one, the gazintoos into the classroom, we get that wrong, and then there’s nothing, there’s nothing on the other side of the classroom that really holds, you know, leaders accountable or creates an environment that reinforces those things.
All of that stuff has to be working together or yeah. You are going to be wasting your time with training. Um, and so the things that, if I can just make a comment about gazintoos in terms of what has to happen in that classroom is to open leaders’ hearts and minds to the idea about, it isn’t about technique, it’s about how you think and how you think is, is changing yourself from a, from self-focused to other focused.
Mm-hmm . And that’s easy enough to say. And we oftentimes get, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that, yeah, servant leadership, right? Been around since the early 1970s. But to really take a deep approach to getting leaders to shift out of a self focused way of thinking to an other focused way of thinking and all that that entails.
And we spend a lot of time getting leaders to, when they say, I got this, that we remind them, yeah, you don’t quite got this. And we spend a lot of. to really make that shift.
C: Maybe a way to wrap up this discussion is, one of the first opportunities probably that leaders have to get other focus is the other data point that was in the article, which is 40 percent of employees said that They would consider leaving for a company that offered better learning opportunities that gave them a chance to grow.
So like take the whole, like we kind of are meandering today, but take the whole thing and say, as a leader, it is not okay to run a Play Doh factory that gets jammed up. Your people are starving for access to information. They’re starving for opportunities to grow. They want to be in a place where they know that their growth and development is valued.
You see them and you want something better for them. That’s a cool opportunity as a leader. And it’s one of your greatest opportunities to say, Hey, let’s get focused on what they need, which is a chance to grow in a place that supports them. So I think, man, we had a lot to say today. There’s a lot to say about this.
There’s, that’s, that’s all that’s going to be happening for this episode of our Shotcast, but we always have more to say. So if you want more, drop us a line at Slingshot25.com. Until next time.