[00:00:00]
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. I'm your host, Perry Moffmer. And today, we're going to talk about how leadership development occurs in a wicked environment. As always, we're going to start off with a couple of quotes to frame up our discussion. The first is by Orin Woodward, average leaders raise the bar on themselves. Good leaders raise the bar for others. Great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar. This next one from Ralph Nader, I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. Finally, the Great War and Venice, growing other leaders from their ranks isn't just the duty of the leader, it's an obligation. I have some data points for you as we get into this discussion. The first one is mind boggling. You can look all these up, but the first one says that there is $31 billion spent annually on leadership development. 31 billion with a B. Now, I would argue that's probably worth it until you hear the next three bullet points. The next one is results do not drive business results in proportion to the cost. That's from another study when they surveyed, I think, 4,000 organizations.
[00:01:25]
Speaker 1: The results from the leadership development did not drive the business results in proportion to the cost. The next group said leader development and talent management rated as the organization's greatest perceived weaknesses. Finally, the statement that organizational survival will be reliant on leaders who are equipped with skills necessary to drive change and transformation. We have 31 billion being spent annually, and yet the consensus is it's not driving or delivering the business results in proportion to the cost. It's still perceived as a weakness for most organizations. With the understanding that the very survival of the organization will be reliant on this being successful. Okay, so there's our framework. Why does it matter? Well, I'm going to give you a list, and I guess at the end of this list, we'll probably talk about why it ow can it not matter? How can developing leaders not matter? Improved bottom line financial performance and profitability, attract and retain talent, turnover and retention. The ability to drive strategy execution, which is increasing and improves effectiveness and efficiencies. Increased success in navigating change, improve your culture, increase organizational agility, drive innovation, improve decision making. What doesn't it impact? I was speaking with a leader of an organization this morning, and I asked him, if you had a solid funnel of leaders developing in your organization, would you need much else?
[00:03:24]
Speaker 1: T heir response was no. Because if we had the certainty to understand that we had done three things identified, developed, and retained the leaders within our own ranks, most other business issues would be non issues. Because we would have the people in place to address those issues. There are very few business issues that come up that can't be solved by great leadership. I'd even say good leadership. We don't need great leaders. We just need average leaders. We need people who want to be leaders and who are supported in that effort. The other thing, quite honestly, that I told the person I was talking to this morning, I'm like, Look, here's the other thing I would recommend to you in any organization. I think it's an organization's responsibility to create the ecosystem for people to learn. It is not their responsibility to force them to do it, especially when it comes to leadership. If someone wants to develop themselves as a leader, then I think it's the company's responsibility to offer the resources, create the ecosystem, make sure that it's available. But it's not your responsibility as an organization to make people do it. It doesn't work that way.
[00:04:51]
Speaker 1: You can't develop someone against their will. I think the first priority, and I'm getting a little off script, which isn't surprising, but I think the first priority is to make sure that everybody understands what they're getting into. What is the organization's definition and expectations of a leader? It gets a little frustrating, right? Because lots of folks just want to do stuff that is already set up. But here's the thing. Most organizations, I would say every organization, has its own unique view of leadership. What does it represent within that organization? What are the expectations? What does the leader look like? How does the leader act? What does a leader do? It's going to be different, even if slightly different, in every organization. Even if it's just 20 % different, that 20 % means a lot. The first step is for the organization itself to figure out what they think leadership is so they can communicate it to other people. They can clearly explain to somebody what it means to be a leader within company X, company Y, and company Z. There is, by the way, no good or bad definition here. It's just, are we clear?
[00:06:23]
Speaker 1: Can we tell somebody what to expect? Can we tell them what we expect? Can we tell them how we talk to people? Within our organization, how does a leader behave? That's it. That's where it starts. We can't have leadership development unless we have that, unless we're working towards a vision for what it represents in the organization. Now, that BOGOE can change because the outside world changes. We've already established, we live in a VUCA world, right? That acronym of Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambitious. It's getting more VUCA as we go. It definitely has to be adaptable. We have to have agility, but we have to start somewhere. Each organization, the very start of it should be, this is how we define leadership. Then build on it. Then you can go find support and documentation and development for people. Anyway, so again, little off ramp back on track. Now, why is it so hard? Well, I just told you one reason, but there's a couple of others. One is it's development and not training. Those are two very different things. I do bristle a bit, so I do get emotionally triggered when somebody says leadership training because we don't train leaders.
[00:07:47]
Speaker 1: Leaders are developed. Now, why is that? Because the difference between development and training is pretty substantial. It's training is more short term, development is long term. You're training a specific skill. We're going to get to this in context of a wicked environment. When you talk about training somebody, you're talking about being able to instruct them on how to do a task, watch them do the task, and determine at that point if they've done the task correctly or not, and give them feedback all in a tight little loop. Now, think about that in context of leadership. Let's pick something. Let's pick a difficult conversation. Let's pick a performance management conversation with somebody who's underperforming. You can probably sit in on the discussion, listen, and give feedback, but will you know if it's been successful or not in that moment? The answer is no, you won't. You won't know for days, weeks, months. And also you won't know if your approach with that person will work with the next person. So you can't say, Well, I did it the right way for that discussion. I'll do that same thing every time. That doesn't work that way, which is one of the very definitions of a wicked environment.
[00:09:19]
Speaker 1: The next one is really job position versus professional career. Training focuses on a job. Development puts the emphasis on building a successful career. When we're developing people, it's also the internal and the external. Training is happening to me, development is happening within me. Specific objectives versus open objectives. Development is less tangible and focuses on philosophical issues, changing habits, improving skills. If you're doing leadership development, you're talking about empowering somebody to make choices every day about how they behave, how they view people, what habits they have, not how they fill out a form, not key strokes, not anything technical. I use the term technical broadly. Then the other is group versus individual. I can train groups of people. It's very hard to develop groups of people. You develop individuals. You can develop them in a group setting. But in development, the emphasis is put on the individual person. There's a great model change model by William Bridges, and he talks about the diagram is saying goodbye, neutral zone, and new beginnings, the way people move through change. The similarity here is everybody moves through the neutral zone at a different pace. When there's a change going on in an organization, everybody doesn't go through at the same pace.
[00:10:57]
Speaker 1: Everybody doesn't go from start to finish in exactly lockstep, Hey, we're all going to march through this change and come out on the other side. It's the same thing with development. You have a room full of people exploring topics of leadership. Everybody's going to be at a different space. I heard a great speaker, she had this awesome saying, it was around change, but it can be applied here. It's that during a time of change, we're all in the same storm, but we each have our own boat. We're experiencing that storm separately, just like in development, we're all at a different spot when we're going to develop as a leader, not everybody's at the same place in their life, the same place of experience, the same place mentally, psychologically, emotionally. It's very individualized. Now, the second thing, we have training and development. Now, the second reason it's a little hard is because we talk about a complex challenge that's treated as a complicated challenge. And those are different things. The main difference between complicated and complex systems is that with complicated systems, you can usually predict outcomes by knowing the starting conditions. In a complex system, the same starting condition can produce different outcomes depending on the interactions of the elements in the system.
[00:12:18]
Speaker 1: This is not a complicated problem, it's a complex problem. Here are the reasons around that. Causality. With complicated systems, there's a clear linear cause and effect. With complex, we're dealing with patterns arising from networks of multiple interacting causes. There's no clear distinguishable cause and effect pathway. We don't know what led to certain things to happen. How many times I've heard a leader in an organization go, I don't know what the hell just happened. They were fine yesterday. I don't know what happened to them between yesterday at five and today at eight. I got news for you, you never will because that's humans, right? Linerity, complicated systems. Every output of the system has a proportionate input. It's Newtonian physics, right? Input in, outputs out. It makes sense. In a complex system, outputs are not proportional. Small changes in one part of the system can cause sudden and unexpected outputs in another. Everybody knows this, right? You have one person in an organization gets aggravated, upset, whatever, and causes a whole blow up throughout the organization. It's not linear. Very small changes can cause big outputs. Reduceability. You break it down into its parts. So if we wanted to...
[00:13:53]
Speaker 1: The Newtonian physics thing. We can't treat leadership development like taking a part of a clock. You take a part of anything, you break it down into its components, reducibility, you look at the individual components, you put them back together and it works again. So if there's a problem, you break it down, find out the part that's not working, fix the part, put it back together and it works. Well, leadership development is complex. It doesn't work that way. You can't assume that one structure has one function as the structural parts of the system are multifunctional. We can never fully understand the inner relationships. When we're talking to people about leadership development, not only are we talking to each one of them differently, but then the way they handle it will be different. Essentially, we're trying to create an opportunity for people to become the best leader they can be. They can't be anything else. Once they opt in, they can only be the best leader they can be, and that's not knowable at the front end. That's the next thing, knowability. In complicated systems, systems actually closed and it can be fully known and modeled. We can see it.
[00:15:09]
Speaker 1: We know how it works. In a Murray Gelman said, he's a physicist and he said about complex system, The only valid model of a complex system is the system itself. Think about that. The only model for any system is that system. What that means is I can't use that as a model for another system. You can see this from a leadership perspective in the news every day. When you see somebody who was wildly successful leading organization X, and they were recruited to come take over organization Y, and then six months later, they're fired because they figured out that they knew how to do it. They took the same steps from that organization that worked that were perfectly good and they didn't think about the new system. They just used the same set of rules and said, Well, this worked at company X, it'll work at company Y, and it didn't. It didn't even come close. That's why sometimes success can be your worst enemy. Now we've talked about the systems, the underpinning of what goes on with leadership development and why it's complicated or why it's not complicated but complex and some of the challenges involved with it.
[00:16:40]
Speaker 1: Now we're going to talk about a little bit about the people side of this. Malcolm Knowles developed the four principles of androgogy. Now, it's the last time I'm going to say it, what it means is adult learning, and it's versus pedagogy. Pedagogy is how we teach children, and that's a different way than how we teach adults. Let me rephrase. It should be a different way than how we teach adults. It's really important if you're going to talk about leadership development, that you do have some level of basic understanding of adult learning theory. It's necessary because we have to craft something that enables people to learn. We're not talking to children with no experience anymore. We're talking to adults with a lot of experience. W hat Malcolm Knowles figured out was there are four things, these four principles of adult learning theory that were really important. Number one, adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction. That doesn't happen with school. The teacher doesn't consult the student and figure out, Okay, what would you like to learn and how are we going to do this? The second one, the adult's experience, including all their mistakes, provides the basis for the learning activities.
[00:18:04]
Speaker 1: You want to bring in people's experiences into the discussion and show that there's value to them. And that's just purely emotional. We want to sit somewhere where we've identified that we've identified we want to learn something. We want to bring value to the table. We want to participate. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life. Whatever you are investigating, exploring in my terminology, from a content standpoint, adults want to know they can apply it that day. I want to learn things that I can go home and use, that I can use tomorrow, that I can use next week that will materially make my life better and make it better for those around me that I care about. That's why when I work with people, for better or worse, when I work with leaders of organizations, the first thing I tell them is I don't give a shit about your business. That's not my concern. I care about you as a human. I care about you as a leader. I want to see you flourish because my belief, personally, is if the leader flourishes, then other people start to flourish.
[00:19:20]
Speaker 1: And if other people start to flourish, the whole organization begins to flourish. And then by the way, that typically leads to better business results. And that's why I say what I say on the front end. I do care about their business. I care about everybody in their business, but I care about the humans that work there, not about the business. Because that's my role. I'm not I don't go in there to try to fix their business. They know more about their business than I'll ever know. They've forgotten more about it than I'll ever know. I can't catch up with that. I'm trying to help them become the best them they can be, to realize and unleash and unlock and leverage all of that potential inside each individual in that organization. Then finally, adult learning is problem centered rather than content centered. What are we solving for? Why are they doing this? I mean, sure, they understand that, hey, this is cool, fun to learn. I enjoy learning stuff. Great. But what problem are we helping them solve? I met with a group of folks in the trades the other day. They're people that ran pretty large scale jobs for a company.
[00:20:43]
Speaker 1: I asked them. I said, This first meeting, we have an hour. We're not going to solve the world's problems in an hour. What I'd like to know is, what would help you if we could figure out? If we could figure out whatever it is you're going to tell me, if we could figure out solutions, tools, resources, for you, that would be beneficial, what things would we fix? What problems would we address? I always carry around a flip chart with me, and I had a marker. Within 20 minutes, I had three pages. That's the starting point. We're not solving it. I wasn't going in there going, Here are your tools. There's a great saying that... What is that that I'm going to get it wrong. Prescription before diagnosis can be deadly. Now, obviously, we're talking about medicine, but it goes everywhere. Just think about it. The number of times you solve somebody's... One of my peers that I work with, he had, I never will forget, it was like five years ago, he said, They provided me with a solution for which I did not have a problem. And we do it all the time. We don't ask enough questions to figure out, What is it you need help with?
[00:21:57]
Speaker 1: It's amazing. Now, think about this. If we involved people in the planning and evaluation of their instruction, and we took their experience as the basis for the learning activities, and we talked about things that had immediate relevance and impact to their job, and that they were focused on problems they were experiencing, do you think that they'd be interested? I think they would. You could flip this around and say, if you're currently running development programs in your organization and people aren't interested, maybe you haven't hit on those four things. Now, here's some other things to consider. This is more about cognitive based instruction versus behavioral based. This one's an acronym, and these are things that you attend to in adult learning theory. The acronym, the word is AGES, A GES, and it stands for attention, generation, emotion, and spacing. The first things I gave you were about adult learning theory. If we go back to the principles of adult learning theory, we have those things that are about the construction of the content and involvement with the person. This is more about how you're going to deliver it. The things to understand about, from a delivery standpoint, if we talk about attention.
[00:23:21]
Speaker 1: So essential for learning is the ability to focus keenly on the instructional material. These are really based in neuroscience. When learners focus on a topic without distraction, the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is responsible for transferring information from short term to long term memory, begins to activate and releases dopamine. If the presented information is interesting and important enough, the hippocampus primes the memory and information for long term memory storage. Think about that. Attention. Now, I will tell you, another part of that you're going to get down here and you look at the E part of this is emotion. If I'm talking about things that people can emotionally connect to. Go back to that first one. Adult learning is problem centered rather than content centered. If it's something that connects with people and they're interested without distraction, it triggers the hippocampus and enables it to be primed for long term memory storage. It's important. Generation. This is opposed to pedagogy. Remember I said that earlier, relies on the sage on the stage delivery, like the teacher up there, the smartest person in the room theoretically. Adults need the opportunity to tie the new information into concepts and experiences they already have.
[00:24:45]
Speaker 1: Generation refers to helping learners tie new information to their personal role or job context. I always tell people, whenever I'm working with them, I'm like, Look, you're coming to the table with a book in your head. You got all this knowledge, you got all this experience, you got all these things already. I'm going to introduce some new stuff to you, possibly. Maybe you've heard of this stuff before. The generation part is, you have to actively figure out what folds together. It isn't going to be all of it. That's what I also tell them. I'm like, look, of all the stuff I tell you, I'm only hoping that you like 10 or 15 % of it because that'll be really successful if you do. Because if you can think about all the stuff I'm telling you and you can think about all of your experience and go, oh, wait a minute. That would really fit. That would help. I could use that and you fold that in, ding, ding, ding, success. We're not trying to boil the ocean here. I went through a 17 month leadership development course with a company, and there was one person in there.
[00:25:52]
Speaker 1: He was awesome, by the way. It was all online. So all the contents online. By the end of the program, he had a binder that he had printed off all of the material. And that binder, I'm not going to kid you, was 6 to 8 inches thick. Awesome. That's the way he learned, right? He printed it out and highlighted it. And he still was talking about a tool that we covered in month two of '17 that he was still using that had changed fundamentally how they looked at projects after it was done. Now, you tell me, there was a lot of content in that course, and there's different things different people took away, but that person got what they wanted. That wasn't all they had to say, but they loved that tool. And then emotions. The right amount of tension builds up the catalyst for lasting learning. We want to evoke a positive emotion and a high rate of U stress. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term U stress, not Y OU stress, but E USTR ESS is essentially the psychological term for positive stress. We all need stress. We learn and grow from stress.
[00:27:09]
Speaker 1: Now, U stress as opposed to chronic stress. Chronic stress, bad. Not helpful. You stress, good. It's positive for us. Think about when you're learning anything or when you're working out or any of those things, your body is in stress, but it's a positive stress you're going to grow from. We don't want to get rid of stress in our lives. We definitely don't want to do that. We do want to limit and get rid of chronic stress. That's a whole another conversation. But we do need you stress in our life. Then finally, the most interesting thing for me, and the thing to really think about if you're creating this stuff is spacing. Now, what this means is the research says that only 10 % of what's delivered within a training session is retained three months later. Now, the better way to present that, and this is why, and I know that this is going to sound horrible, but I think that a one day training, you might as well just light a pile of money on fire. Because there is a forgetting curve. You can look it up. It's a thing. People agree, people disagree, but look it up.
[00:28:19]
Speaker 1: It's interesting. What I'm saying is that if we try to fill up somebody's head with stuff in one day or two days and then say, Okay, that's it. Go back and use this stuff. It's not going to do any good. What they found is that if we do spacing, and that's if we space it out over time. Spacing refers to delivering material over time and allowing learners to revisit the material before adding new information. So essentially, they've done studies and they did this with surgeons. And so they bring them in and give them education, and then they would let them go out and practice for a couple of months and come back and talk about it again. Now, the thing is, they haven't figured out what the optimum time is. They just know that the act is better because it allows the learner to encode the information by building resilient neural pathways. And they say that you should be at least exposed to materials three times. If you think about that from a development standpoint, like if I'm going to have people that talk about leadership development, I want to figure out spacing. I want to introduce them to a concept, then I want to talk about it again and again and again, which will increase the likelihood that they'll actually get encoded into their pathway.
[00:29:39]
Speaker 1: They're going to remember it that way. You can see how it's challenging to bring somebody in for a one day training. Now, all of this leads us to the conclusion that developing leaders happens in a wicked... It's a wicked problem. I'm going to talk about the 10 characteristics. I'm going to run through from Rittle and Webber, the 10 characteristics of a wicked problem. They do not have a definitive formulation. They don't have a stopping rule. In other words, the problem lacks an inherent logic that signals when they're solved. Their solutions are not true or false, only good or bad. There's no way to test for a solution to a wicked problem. They cannot be studied through trial and error. The solutions are irreversible, so every trial counts. Now, think about that from a leadership development because you have to practice in the real world. There's no end of the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem. Again, think about that from a leadership perspective. If you run into a challenge, there could be 15 potential solutions that might all work. All wicked problems are essentially unique. Wicked problems can always be described as a symptom of other problems.
[00:30:54]
Speaker 1: The way a wicked problem is described determines its possible solutions. And planners, and that's those who present solutions to these problems, have no right to be wrong. So unlike mathematicians, planners are liable for the consequences of the solutions they generate. The effects can matter a great deal to the people who are touched by those actions. Again, could you not be more focused on leadership than that statement? Take out planners, put in the word leaders. Leaders are liable for the consequences of the solutions they generate. The effects can matter a great deal to the people who are touched by those actions. Leaders, I'm replacing the word planners, that is those who present solutions to these problems have no right to be wrong. Now, that all leads us to the wicked environment because we know what a wicked problem... How a wicked problem looks, those 10 pieces. Now, we have a wicked learning environment. The reason that's important, in a kind learning environment, there's a feedback loop for the target of learning and the impact on performance is really clear. Things like chess, golf, learning a musical instrument, school homework, any of those things, the feedback loop and performance are clear.
[00:32:16]
Speaker 1: You know almost immediately if it's right or wrong. If you've ever tried to change your golf swing with a golf coach, you don't have to wait and figure out if that swing worked. You take one swing and it's a wicked slice. You can automate. That did not work. Now, a wicked learning environment, the rules of the context are often unclear. The feedback loop for the target of learning and the impact on the performances are delayed, inaccurate, or both. And information is hidden, convoluted, and feedback is delayed. Think about that. We go back to the performance evaluation, or difficult conversation, or anything you do from a leadership perspective, a strategy you want to implement. Well, let's talk about that. It's almost February, but it's January. Everybody's got their plans for 2023. They're implementing them. How long will it take before you know if your strategy is good or not? It won't take a week. It won't take a month. Same thing with people. If I put somebody on a performance improvement plan, how long do I know before I know if it's working? That's a whole another issue because I don't believe in them, but I just use them because everybody knows what they are.
[00:33:29]
Speaker 1: If I have a difficult conversation with somebody, did it work? I don't know, won't know, may never know, by the way. You may think you know. You may think you see their performance go up, up, up, and then six weeks later, down, down, down. You're like, Well, that didn't work. Now, I'll give you a couple of examples of a wicked learning environment. One we've already talked about, medicine. Medicine is a wicked learning environment. If you ever watch any show about anything on TV with medicine, they're always trying to diagnose symptoms. House was a great one for this. It was great because he's a diagnostician. Also, New Amsterdam is a newer one. It's good, too. They present symptoms and then the doctors are basically guessing at, Okay, what could this be? Because it could be a number of things. Then they treat, Oh, that didn't work. Oh, we're going to try this now. Oh, that didn't work. That's why they call it the practice of medicine. It's practice. Then also poker. If you play, hold them. That's different, right? It's not... You don't know if your ploy is going to work. You don't know until the card comes up.
[00:34:46]
Speaker 1: It's different because in chess, all the moves are known. Why this is important? It's important because we want people to understand the difference because we have to take different actions. It's really about where your state of mind is. It's about having the right frame of mind to go into a challenge. Here's the thing. When you get into a wicked learning environment, the first thing you need to do is recognize that it's wicked. You can read a little bit about this on the myth of experience by Sawyer and Hogarth, why we learn the wrong lessons and ways to correct them, because the challenge is we don't normally identify it very quickly. We want to identify we're not in a kind learning environment. Once we identified it, we have to ask ourselves two questions. What's missing from the data that I'm using to make decisions? Then what irrelevant details in front of me should I ignore? Because I don't want to base it on my experience. This is where your experience isn't working. You can also use something called the Kuneven Network, and that is spelled CY NE FI N. It's a Welsh word. It's pronounced Kuneven. It signifies a multiple intertwined factors in our environment and our experience that influences us.
[00:36:09]
Speaker 1: It's how we think and act and interpret things that we can't fully understand. Now, it consists of four quadrants, and you can look it up. It takes a lot more study than what I have time to do here. But the great thing is it talks about these four quadrants simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. Two are kind, two are wicked. Simple and complicated are kind. In those, the actions you take in a simple environment, you sense, categorize, and respond. You sense what's going on, you categorize what's going on, you respond. That's best practices, right? You know what to do. Complicated, you sense, analyze, and respond. I take some sense of what's going on, I break it down, go back to Newtonian physics, break it down into manageable pieces, then I respond. Again, kind learning environments. Now, if it's complex or chaotic, those are wicked, and our actions are different. In a complex quadrant of the Kuneven, we're going to probe, then sense, then respond. Probe, we're going to try something. We're going to try something first and see what happens. Then we're going to sense what the reaction is, and then we're going to respond. We're not going to categorize or analyze because our experience isn't going to help us.
[00:37:38]
Speaker 1: We're actually gaining experience from our probing. Then the last one is chaotic. Act, sense, and respond. Now I'm not probing, I'm actually just doing something. This is in a situation where you have to take action. There's no time to think. I'm going to act and then figure out what my actions caused and then respond again. Again, both are wicked learning environments where we have to do something and not rely on our experience. Again, you can look that up. Qnevan, CY, NEFIN framework. Now, we'll take a breath and consider where our exploration has taken us in context of any experimentation we might want to consider. I would consider three buckets. Those are, from a leadership development standpoint, we have to set aside time. It takes time for people to develop. We can't do it in a hurry. We can't speed it up. I'm familiar with agricultural stuff. You can't over fertilize something. If you do, you kill it. No matter what your requirements are, no matter how much you'd like to, certain things take a certain amount of time. And time, if you have to set aside the time, it presents the opportunity because people need reps at doing the things that leaders do.
[00:39:10]
Speaker 1: And we don't always get those reps because those situations don't come up as frequently as we'd like. That's why time is important. And we can't expect folks to develop a mastery in something they don't get a practice. And since it's a wicked environment, remember that feedback is delayed and accurate or both. So even if I do get some at bats, I get some reps at doing it, my feedback might be delayed and accurate or both. I can't rely on that either. The second thing, we need safety. Practicing leadership is risky because it happens in real time. Most of the time you're trying things that are behavioral in nature, and that requires you to behave in a different manner and you will fail. By that, I mean, it won't land the way you want it to. It's not a bad thing. It's just you're going to try on like you're trying on a new coat, you're trying on a new behavior and it may not fit. You'll have to figure out how to make it fit. What alterations do you need to make and go back to feedback is delayed and accurate or both. It takes time and safety because if I'm learning how to be a leader, I need to feel safe.
[00:40:18]
Speaker 1: I need to figure out that I'm going to take some risks, but I'm not going to risk my role. And it's really all about how folks are supported during their development so that risk can be managed effectively. What situations are you creating and how do you make it okay? And then finally, they need support. We cannot work on ourselves by ourselves. We cannot work on ourselves by ourselves. It takes a village. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to develop a leader. Development never happens in a vacuum because we need feedback and time to reflect. We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on our experiences. Thomas Dewey said that. So again, we need time, which equals opportunity, we need safety, and we need support for leaders to develop. As always, I'll take us out with these three quotes to consider and ponder. Harvey Firestone said, The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. Rosalyn Carter said, A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader... Sorry, yeah, that's what she said.
[00:41:50]
Speaker 1: I'll rephrase. A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be. Roslyn Carter. Finally, Sam Walton said, Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish. Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self esteem of their personnel. Think about the last time you went out of your way to boost someone's self esteem, and think about how you might do it tomorrow. Now, remember, all can, most won, and few do. The question is, will you be one of those relentless few who explore, experiment, and evolve so you have a positive impact on the cognitive, emotional, and psychological states of those you care about? If your answer is yes, then you are leading. I thank you because the world needs what you have to offer and we need it now. Take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
