TD Magazine: Swap Frameworks for Skills-Based Leadership Development

The following article appeared in the February 2020 edition of TD Magazine (link for ATD members)

The right environment gives people managers the tools and confidence to be successful.

Perhaps when you think of leadership development, you first think about frameworks or models—a clever acronym that describes four steps toward leadership success or a personality inventory that describes a person's greatest strengths based on a set of multiple-choice questions.

As a designer of leadership development programs, I've seen a rising trend of framework fatigue from leaders wary of having the complexities of their vocation reduced to advice from the latest airport bestseller. There's a different way to do leadership development, one that grounds learning in role-specific responsibility and contextual reality.

What it is

Skills-based leadership development is an instructional design philosophy for management training. This development method jettisons frameworks, models, and inventories. Each is replaced by the concrete skills required to perform as a leader in a specific context. It begins with an intensive analysis of the most important skills required to lead in a specific role and the selection of a particular skill on which to focus.

How it works

Skills-based development is effective because it acknowledges that the nuances of people leadership limit the applicability of models and frameworks. Rather, this approach provides a consistent environment in which people leaders can reflect on the specific competencies that matter to their success and listen to how peers are applying the skills in similar contexts.

It doesn't require a training team to teach anything. Instead, it entails the training team creating an environment where leaders synthesize different perspectives into a concrete skill development plan. The training team provides a space in which leaders supply the learning on a peer-to-peer, role-relevant basis.

Guidelines

I create learning experiences for people leaders in Zendesk's customer advocacy organization, a global business comprised of hundreds of customer support professionals. After extensive interviews between the training team and dozens of people leaders, my organization mutually identified coaching as the most critical skill to people leader success. In my department, most customer support advocates are first-career professionals, and most managers are first-time people leaders. We made coaching the focus of our leadership development efforts because it is a powerful source of learning and innovation in an environment of rapid growth and constant change.

With a skill or set of skills identified, the leadership developer sets out to build consistent opportunities to explore, reflect, and self-evaluate on the selected skill. We provide this opportunity through a quarterly coaching skill development meetup, each of which examines a different dimension of workplace coaching. Some explore coaching questions, while others explore coaching in the context of a particular conversation.

Prior to each meetup, the training team enrolls managers in a carefully curated learning path that includes articles with third-party perspectives on coaching skills and podcast-style interviews with managers from our organization.

In these interviews, we ask managers to describe what the skill means to them and how they plan to apply it. We also encourage them to candidly describe the challenges associated with using and developing the skill.

Usually one month after publishing the pathway, we host our quarterly skill meetup, during which we provide managers with three to four case studies related to the skill of workplace coaching. Reflecting on the learning path content and their own experience, managers work as a team to develop a coaching action plan and script coaching conversations for each case study. The meetup concludes with action planning; managers identify how they will put their learning into practice with their team of customer advocates, when they will apply what they have learned, and what may stand in their way.

Between meetups, our learning management system suggests role-relevant resources based on an individual's evaluation of their current skill level. Our LMS curates learning content from a wide spectrum of online resources—from TED Talks and podcasts to blog posts and courses.

What does this look like in practice? One first-time people manager was unfamiliar with workplace coaching before we adopted the skills-based approach. Through the program, the manager discovered the importance of coaching to managing a team of customer support professionals. The manager realized how her peers were applying their coaching skills to career development conversations and envisioned how she might do the same. Via case studies and action planning, she developed a specific and measurable plan for developing her own coaching skill set. Six months into this initiative, she is holding regular coaching conversations with her team and attending recurring meetups to understand how to apply coaching in other contextually relevant scenarios.

Results

While the program is still relatively new, we measure its success based on the number of managers who have made progress against their action plan within 30 days of the meetup. Long term, we plan to encourage managers to rate their coaching skill level on approximately a quarterly basis so that we can track the extent to which participants put the learning into action.

A skills-based approach enables managers to continuously improve the skills that matter most within their context through a synthesis of perspectives and ongoing self-reflection. The next time you're asked to contribute to a leadership development initiative, ask yourself what skill matters most to your learners, how internal and external thought leaders are thinking about that skill, and how you can create an environment that promotes dialogue and reflection. The approach moves leadership development from an abstraction to a concrete driver of business results.

Checklist: Skills-Based Development Process

• Conduct a needs analysis to identify the most critical skills for leaders in your organization.

• Create consistent opportunities to build the skills—self-paced and with their peers.

• Measure the progress leaders make on their action plan and monitor how they self-evaluate their skills over time.

• Pivot toward different skills as the organization's needs change.

Resources

Bika, N. n.d. "How to conduct a skills gap analysis." Workable. https://resources .workable.com/tutorial/skills-gap-analysis.

Buckingham, M. n.d. "Lie 9, Leadership is a thing." Marcus Buckingham Blog. www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/lie-9.

Degreed. 2019. "Skills: Measure What Matters," May 9. https://blog.degreed.com/videos/skills-measure-what-matters.

Coaching high performers, part one: Why leaders overlook their greatest coaching opportunities

In today's workplace, how much time do you think a typical manager invests in coaching their highest-performing team members?

With all of the hours spent by people leaders in meetings, project updates, and planning sessions, there just aren't many hours left in the week for workplace coaching. And the hours that are available for coaching typically go towards those who are struggling to meet the expectations of their role.

This imbalance is nothing less than a squandering of talent, an utter waste of opportunity. And through my next four blog posts, we're going to explore how we can do better.

But to consider why it's such a problem for our highest performers to receive little to no coaching, it's useful to consider the wide world of sports.

I'm a football fan, specifically a fan of the Green Bay Packers, and an admirer of the G.O.A.T, quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Who do you suppose receives more coaching throughout a week of practice: Aaron Rodgers, the star quarterback (QB) and former league MVP, or Tim Boyle?

For those who do not follow the Packers, Boyle is Aaron Rogers' incapable backup QB who will be fortunate to make the team next season. While Aaron Rodgers led the Packers to a 13-3 season, it's likely that had Boyle started all 16 games, the team's record would have been closer to 3-13.

Even if we know nothing about sports, we know intuitively that Rodgers, one of the most successful and highest-paid players in league history, receives far more coaching than Boyle. The coaches build their gameplan around Rodgers. Rodgers receives nearly every repetition with the first-team offense. Rodgers receives constant attention, feedback, scrutiny, and encouragement from the Packer coaching staff. The staff of the Packers knows that their ability to achieve the team's goals is inextricably connected to Rodgers' success. They know that when Rodgers elevates his game, the whole team is more successful, so they direct their coaching energy accordingly. Meanwhile, Tim Boyle stands on the sidelines and takes an occasional repetition with the scout team.

But if the Packers were coached by today's archetypal workplace manager, journeyman backup Tim Boyle would receive the overwhelming majority of the coach's attention.

Boyle's performance would be observed closely, the coaches would work with Boyle to set goals and develop plans to achieve those goals, they would hold planning sessions to get Boyle to a serviceable place, and would regularly check-in with Boyle to discuss progress towards developmental milestones. The coaches would go to extreme lengths to improve Boyle's performance.

All the while, Aaron Rodgers would stand on the sidelines, making impressive throws that largely go unnoticed by his staff of workplace coaches. These workplace managers would put almost all of their coaching energy towards Boyle, mistakenly believing that if they can elevate Boyle's performance, the team will have greater success. In this hypothetical scenario, Rodgers would likely decide to leave the Packers for a more appealing career opportunity, putting the fate of the organization in the hands of Tim freakin' Boyle. But hey - he's been coached up, so surely he's ready to lead the Packers back to the Super Bowl!

When workplace leaders fail to invest significant time and energy in coaching their highest performers, they miss out on opportunities for team growth, innovation, and shared performance improvement.

In the next blog posts, we'll look at why workplace coaching efforts should be almost exclusively focused on high performers. We'll explore how coaching high performers leads to innovation, how it provides a competitive advantage, and how it drives engagement and retention with the team members you most want to engage and retain!

I wrote this post the week before the Super Bowl. I certainly watched. And predictably, we didn't see Chiefs backup, journeyman Matt Moore, at any point during the game. That's because Patrick Mahomes, a true rising star, was leading the Chiefs to victory in their biggest game in decades. As the new face of the highest-level performance in the league, Mahomes receive the highest-level coaching in preparation for the big game. To build championship organizations, we should follow in this example.

Critical thinking, part four: What critical thinking really looks like

Our present-day, project-based work culture is predicated on hustle and hurry.

In this project-based workplace, our sense of value (as understood by oneself and one's employers) is increasingly determined by task completion. The most highly-regarded team members are those who get the most done: the reps that close the most deals, the agents that take the most tickets, the engineers who complete the most tasks (eg, cards) in a time period known as a "sprint."

The indicators of hustle and hurry are widespread, particularly in the words we use to describe our work. Much of the business blogosphere is dedicated to improving efficiency and helping employees to work faster. Much, if not all rhetoric from business leaders is focused on increasing velocity. We use terms like "accelerator" to describe organizations that help firms get their start, and adjectives like "rapid" are used to define everything from prototyping to feedback.

But there's a problem with the need for speed.

Speed and efficiency come at the expense of our ability to think critically. When we are moving fast, we are unable to systematically sort through evidence and data and to make well-reasoned decisions.

When we are moving fast, we are depending on System I mental processes related to intuition, assumption, and emotion. Meanwhile, we are suppressing the System 2 processes defined by logic and problem-solving. Daniel Kahneman, in his best-seller Thinking Fast and Slow, describes our aptitudes for reason and logic as strong, yet somewhat lazy. Most of the time, our mind is content to trust the rapidity of System 1, and to let System 2 lie dormant in a state of blissful slumber. And the consequences of this can be severe: we make mistakes in planning, we are overly-beholden to initially positive impressions, we make decisions to mitigate loss but not to actualize gains, we are beholden to unconscious bias.

In the automation-driven workplace, AI has eliminated mindlessly transactional jobs. If the demands of the workplace are indeed shifting from that which requires the rote and repetitive towards that which requires the complex and consultative, we don't need more speed. What we need is the space to think critically about the depth of change around us.

And that is the most visible indicator of a workplace that thinks critically.

If we truly coach our teams to be critical thinkers, we will know it not through improved speed and efficiency. Our decision-making will be slower. Our execution may become less efficient. Time to project completion will increase.

But there's a tradeoff. We'll make fewer errors in planning and forecasting. We'll act less frequently out of inference, and ensure our behavior is consistent with the data. We'll make fewer mistakes, we'll engage more contributors in the collaborative process, and we'll continuously evaluate the efficacy of our processes. Each of these takes time and energy - but each is worth pursuing in and of itself. Each is necessary as our careers require more complex problem solving, and less button-pushing.

If you want your workplace to be more adept at critical thinking, you might take three specific actions. These actions may not gain you friends, followers, or a seat on the hot-shot panel at an upcoming conference. But they will defend your team's capacity to think critically against the ever-encroaching bias towards velocity. These three actions are:

1. Gently challenging leaders who demand increased speed. When a leader states that something must become faster, ask them to describe the costs of greater velocity. What may we fail to consider? What assumptions might grip us? What biases may become more pervasive? By asking this question, you aren't advocating for lethargy: you are promoting critical thinking about the trade-offs between speed and quality.

2. Encouraging your highest performers to slow down. Often, the most productive performers on the team move the fastest. Give them permission to pause, reflect, and do some critical thinking of their own. Encourage them to consider what they might gain by being more deliberate, analytical, and intentional - and how they could share those gains with the greater team.

3. Setting an example by narrowing your priorities. Critical thinking is essentially an exercise in elimination. We can't think critically about an endless to-do list. In the AI-disrupted workplace, we must learn to ruthlessly prioritize those tasks that will have the most benefit for our stakeholders: our colleagues, our team members, our communities.

Critical-thinking is becoming ever-more important. But our preference for speed is inhibiting our ability to pivot from task execution towards creative problem-solving. If a leader is really successful in building a culture of critical thinking, they'll know it by one visible indicator: their organization will be slower.

And that will make all the difference.