Leadership training that won't annoy people, part two: Don't use models or frameworks!

The history of leadership training likely can be summarized as follows:

Once upon a time, we started to do 'leadership training,' which was mostly a series of lectures on abstractions and philosophies about an imprecise and undefinable quality. One day, we decided to make our leadership development less abstract and more "actionable," so we converted our content into a series of catchy acronyms like GROW, personality inventories like MBTI, and decision-making frameworks like 9-Box. For years, our learners nodded along and politely considered using such tools during their day to day, before they left their training session and went right back to doing things in exactly the same way.

Sound familiar?

Managers suffer from framework fatigue and acrostic apathy, conditions that we can only cure by jettisoning models and frameworks from our leadership development programs.

Frameworks and models fail for two reasons. First, they aren't applicable to a specific enough task. In their "scalability," we lose track of why we would want to use them in the first place. Second, it's unclear how we might apply them to the development of a specific skill. How would we use a personality inventory if our task is to manage engineers? Why would we use a coaching framework if our top priority was to lead a team of financial analysts? Frameworks and models exist for their apparently wide usability. Yet because of their wide usability, it's unclear what we should use them for.

But there is another way.

Our task as leadership developers is not to build programs around models like DiSC or Enneagram.

Our task is first to understand the skills our leaders need to succeed, then to isolate tools for the development of these skills.

A tool is that which can be concretely and meaningfully applied to the completion of a specific task. Whereas a framework is defined by its versatility, a tool is defined by its singular ability to be repeatedly used for a clear purpose. The solution to framework fatigue is to ensure that we don't use frameworks: we only use tools.

Contrast this to many contemporary leadership development programs, which attempt to build costly and resource-intensive programs around frameworks like Strengths Finder 2.0 or True Colors. Each of these frameworks could be used as a tool. If leaders identify career planning as a skill need, Strengths Finder 2.0 becomes a viable tool. If leaders identify team facilitation as a skill need, True Colors becomes viable as well. But all too often, we begin with the framework, we don't clarify its relationship to specific skills, and we end up wasting time.

I once knew a leadership developer that was attempting to build the coaching skills of several customer support managers. They had read about the GROW model of coaching, but rather than simply training their leaders on the model, they found a way to connect it to a specific skill: holding regular 1:1 check-ins with direct reports.

The leadership developer worked collaboratively with their managers to develop a new template for employee 1:1s, a template based on the coaching questions found within the GROW model. After holding a brief kickoff training and launching the new 1:1 template, the leadership developer continued to meet with the managers to understand the extent to which leaders applied GROW. They built a team of successful, committed workplace coaches - not because they trained anybody on a coaching framework, but because they identified needed skills and provided a tool that perfectly aligned to that skill.

So let's stop subsidizing the Gallup corporation by mindlessly purchasing Strengths Finder. Let's start to identify what skills our leaders need. It's only then that we can turn our frameworks into tools. It's only then that our leadership training will cease to annoy people.

In the next blog post, the third of this series, we'll turn to the third problem of leadership development: falling for the latest trends while losing sight of one's unique context.

Remember, leaders: Action - not reaction. Because actors win awards. Reactors melt down.

Leadership training that won't annoy people, part one: Don't teach anything!

The greatest temptation for leadership developers, whether they are trainers, instructional designers, HR professionals, or anyone tasked with building up teams, is teaching too many "things." From facts and frameworks to thinkers and thought leaders, this field is oversaturated with perspectives. When we teach too many "things," our content moves too far towards abstraction. Skill gaps continue to expand.

Luckily, there is a solution. Step one in building leadership training that won't annoy people: Don't. Teach. Anything.

But wait - if I don't teach anything, how do I teach leadership development? Stay with me. We'll soon answer that question.

First, let's consider a week in the life of a people leader. Fortune estimates that those in management positions work between 50 and 55 hours per week, approximately 20% more hours than the average American worker.

This is my cat, Cersei. It's a waste of time to try to teach her things.

If we look only at the time spent in office, these 10+ hour workdays involve sending and receiving over 86 emails and attending an average of over four hours worth of meetings (at the middle management level). This work is done while trying to squeeze in time with direct reports. Most highly-rated managers meet for 30-60 minutes with each employee, each week.

A marked lack of time is the stark reality of today's business manager, which might explain why leadership burnout has become increasingly prevalent.

Yet trainers and leadership developers, myself included, have the audacity to try to schedule additional time with these busy, burnout-prone professionals, to teach things about leadership!

We're doing this with greater frequency and with increasingly sizable program budgets. As more companies have established formal programs for leadership development, the leadership training industry has ballooned to an annual worth 3.4 billion dollars.

In this new workplace economy, where time is limited, stress is high, yet leadership training is plentiful, the responsible talent developer has but one ethical choice: don't teach anything.

Today's workplace leader simply doesn't have the space for learning new "things" about leadership. Managers don't have the time or energy for the latest bullet points on emotional intelligence or the most recent commentary on negotiation skills. The latest trends on effective leadership might make for flashy PowerPoints at talent development conferences, but they're bound to have people leaders reaching for their Slack app and scanning for the nearest exit sign.

Teaching things is the work of yesterday's talent developer. Today's talent developer must aspire to do more.

Eight of every ten of today's CEOs sense an impending crisis of skill gaps within their leadership ranks. These CEOs worry that their employees presently lack the skills needed to thrive and compete in an uncertain economic future. Low unemployment and a tight labor market will only exacerbate these concerns.

In this new workplace economy, we cannot afford to teach leaders "things," because learning things will always take a backseat to more pressing priorities. We must resolve instead to develop specific skills.

Today's talent developer can begin to develop skills by asking three questions:

• Given the goals and context of a team, what skills do its leaders really need?

• To what extent is there a gap between the skills leaders have and the skills leaders need?

• To what extent are people leaders personally invested in closing those gaps through skill development?

The sooner talent developers answer these questions, the faster they can stop teaching things, and start building skills. When we teach skills instead of things, leadership training engages and it empowers. Or at the least, it doesn't annoy people.

Skill development demands attunement and patience: attunement to the unique learning needs within the organization, and patience to endure the time-intensive effort required of systems-building. Skill building is a different process than training. It requires a long-term outlook, a systems-wide focus, a commitment to practice, and plenty of space for reflection. Building skills is not so much about knowledge and learning as it is about habits, feedback, and systems.

In the next blog post, the second of this series, we'll turn to problem number two: introducing too many frameworks and models, and its corresponding solution: don't use models or frameworks!

We'll explore how we develop leadership skills not through frameworks or models, but through systems in which meaningful skills can be developed.

Remember, leaders: Trust the process. Because processes are trustable.

Book Announcement: The Problem with Church in Digital Culture

As a Lutheran and a former Google employee, I find it interesting that as fewer people show up at church on Sunday morning, increasingly more are searching for God on Google's search engine.

Most Christian denominations lost 3-4% of their membership between 2007 and 2014, a slide that has accelerated every year since. Based on these trends, some forecast that entire mainline denominations, the ELCA included, may fold entirely by 2041.

The haunted, holy, and hallowed grounds of Luther Seminary

Yet the Google search engine saw three times as much search volume for the query “who is Jesus” in 2017 than it did in 2007. It’s a question that grows in interest every single year in every state in the Union. It is among the most frequently “Googled” religious queries, second only to “what is the Bible?”  The “Googlification” of Christ’s identity and the significance of the Bible points to an accelerating trend: people are developing their faith through questions, asked outside of the church.

They are developing their spiritual selves not through listening to a preacher, but through self-guided exploration. They are, in every sense, searching for God with Google.

Starting with Millennials, the generations that grew up in digital culture are just as spiritually engaged as previous cohorts.

Younger generations believe in God at a rate that is nearly identical to Generation X, the Baby Boomers, and both the Silent and Greatest generations.

Millennials’ willingness to believe in God carries over to a commitment to individual spiritual practices. Millennial Nones (those who check the "None" box on surveys about religion) exhibit the same rates of engagement with daily prayer as church-going Christians.  In 2010, 45 percent of Millennial adults prayed daily. Every week, twenty-seven percent read scripture and 26 percent meditated weekly—all rates of participation equal to more church-affiliated generations.

I am reminded of my generation’s spiritual inclinations each time I walk past office meditation rooms, a fixture at tech offices across the country.  The chief difference between those who came of age in the digital era age and those who came of age before is truly a difference in institutional affiliation—not a difference in faith. The United States is verifiably becoming a “spiritual but not religious” country.

Especially among younger generations, the country is not turning its back on God. The country is turning its back on the church, an institution that has failed to innovate and reinvent itself amid great cultural change. The church of today, with its emphasis on individualized and intellectualized faith, is not viable nor is it sustainable in a digital age.

Yet still, I show up, each and every week. As a true church nerd, I continue to teach Confirmation, to assist with worship, to preach the occasional sermon. I even completed a four-year master's degree in theology to try to understand why the institutional church seems so out of touch with digital culture.

And as I have studied, read, reflected, and written about this topic, I have come up with a hypothesis. The church of today doesn't engage younger generations because it shuts out that which digital culture has come to value. 

With its insistence on doctrine, the church suppresses questions.

With its obsession over institutional survival, it resists forming new connections.

Due to the professionalization of the ministry, the church turns down opportunities to collaborate.

And as church membership declines, it loses the ability to bring creativity to the life of faith. The church of today exists without questions, connections, collaboration, and creativity, four core values of our shared digital culture.

I want to understand how that could change. I want to determine how church leaders could take the best of the Christian tradition and align it with the values of digital culture. The Christian tradition offers a message the world so desperately needs to hear—a message of hope for an age of cynicism, a story of restoration for an age of climate change, a word of unity for a time of political and social division. But that story is going unheard and is often misunderstood.

Today, I am pleased to announce that I have started writing a (still untitled) book with Fortress Press. The book will analyze what ministry means in a spiritual but not religious society. Ultimately, the book will present the thoughtful church leader with a blueprint for effective ministry in digital culture.

So stay tuned! I've launched a new website (www.ryanpanzer.com), and started a newsletter. Follow both for updates on the project. Whether you identify as spiritual or not so much, Christian or None, Millennial or Baby Boomer, I hope you'll consider joining me for the conversations ahead!