Will: I’m actually feeling a little bit emotional today it’s my son’s last day at nursery. So, he’s starting big school, in a couple of week’s time.
Rick: I went through that four times and as much as I’d love to tell you, it gets easier, it just doesn’t.
Well, hey, I know we’re doing something a little bit different today. Normally we come in speaking about really big ideas and what we’re hearing and seeing out in the marketplace. But today we’re going to be talking a little bit more about a very different kind of solution that you guys have been working on.
But I think it’s a really great opportunity for. not only our audience to hear about, but, potentially for them to participate in, in the coming months. So, give us a little bit of insight into what you’ve been working on
Fredrik: First of all, this is really us wanting to give back a little bit to the wonderful customers and colleagues we’ve been working with for the last many, many years and, take what we’ve learned ourselves, what we’ve learned with CRF, and with other practitioners and create something that can help develop people in leadership and development.
Will: One thing you may know about us is we’re pretty curious people. And recently we put our heads together and partnered with an organization called the Corporate Research Forum, the CRF. So the CRF is a member organization who do research into a variety of different HR-related topics, and they published quite an interesting paper recently about high impact leadership development and what are some of the things that need to be true to deliver that. And we combined a little bit of their research with some of our experiences, as well as interviewing a number of different practitioners in talent leadership development to identify the things that people are aspiring to, but also the challenges that they’re facing.
And what we found was surprisingly unsurprising. There were a number of consistent challenges that practitioners were facing and we thought, you know what, let’s bring this to life with a classic BTS proposition using a simulation, almost recreating some of the tensions, the trade-offs that people face in trying to deliver high impact leadership development and create that as a platform for people to share experiences, bring in different ideas.
And ultimately, we ran a great event with 250 or so different leaders, hearing a lot of different perspectives about how we can actually deliver more impactful leadership development within our organizations.
Fredrik: So, in a partnership with the CRF, we were asking the question, how can we give back and create a great experience for practitioners in learning and development that’s not just based on seeing presentations of what great looks like, but create a real experience where they can exchange ideas, where they can build capability, think more strategically about their roles in the organization.
So, the process we went through was to review the research that they had done, other external parties had done, and then what BTS had done to kind of get a landscape of what are we seeing out there that makes great leadership development. Secondly, we identified a group of practitioners that were respected, seen as real leaders in their fields, and we formed a steering committee with them, where we actually co-designed the whole experience with them.
What are their challenges? What were the things that they’re working on? What are the biggest impediments for them to deliver more value through the work they’re doing? And what are the successes that they’ve had? And we found the common denominators and then created the experience around that.
And what’s interesting is that as these lead practitioners from the field were working with us, their point of view kind of evolved over time as they were starting to share examples and challenges with each other. And when we were at the event with CRF, they were also sharing their stories and impact from the decisions that they’d been making around these really difficult tensions.
Will: So, the findings fall into two different categories on the what of high impact leadership development and, the how.
What was amazing was how aligned people were on what needed to be true to deliver high impact leadership development. Things like: it needs to be aligned with business strategy, it needs to be based around the current and the future needs of an organization, and we need to make tough choices about where and how we invest.
In terms of the how, it’s things like: we need to make sure that we’re in close partnership with talent learning and the other HR functions, making sure we’re getting leaders to gather the right experiences for future leadership roles.
And then of course, making sure it’s linked to the on-the-job reality. And where things got really interesting and where we found that most people gain value was hearing experiences about how to actually deliver on those was that people were struggling to deliver upon these and bring that theory to life, which was where I think we got most of the insight.
Fredrik: What was interesting is that at the surface, this all sounds pretty straightforward and sounds like the type of things that we’d expect, but the difficulty of actually doing it is what surfaced throughout the process and aligned to business strategy.
Well, it sounds easy, but business strategies are changing faster than ever. And it’s hard often for L&D professionals and leaders to stay on top of that. And a lot of what we spent time on the event is: How do you stay on top of that? What’s the role that you’re playing and how are you enabling yourself to be, current?
And if we use another example, it needs to be based around the future needs of the organization, as well as the current, because strategies are shifting faster. And because strategies are becoming more complex and business models are evolving, it’s actually harder to predict what those future needs are going to be. If we even look back at the AI revolution we’ve had in the last 18 months to two years, it’s very hard to predict what we need people to be great at just even two to three years from now.
Will: One piece that really stuck with me there was that the organizations that were really successful about doing this were the ones that very clearly defined what are the problems for which leadership is the solution or talent is the solution.
So, I don’t know if you remember that conversation we were having with a diversified foods group, and they talked about the need for very bespoke butchery skills. And basically they had a population of maybe four or five people that were real world class experts in butchery and they were just being taxed to the absolute limit. They had no time to do what they needed to do.
And so instead of thinking, well, how do we hire this skill, find new people with this skill (because actually there weren’t that many world class master butchers out there) they realized that most of [the butchers’] time was being drawn into not particularly complex tasks – things that it didn’t require their level of skill to deliver.
So, they initiated a very targeted program of upskilling about 400 or so practitioners who were moderately skilled with these butchery skills so they could actually free up the time of those real expert butchers to focus on what needed to be done. So, you don’t necessarily have to be able to predict the 10-year future of that business, but it’s thinking where specifically is talent or leadership going to be the solution to a challenge, and then thinking about what level do we need of different skills for that gap?
Rick: As functional leaders and L&D professionals, getting people in the spot where they get to use their superpowers more often is I think what you’re really talking about.
Fredrik: The highest performing organizations are making really tough trade-offs on what they’re investing in and what they’re not investing in. But the problem that often leadership development professionals and leaders come into is that it’s not about making the tough choice, but it’s actually getting it to stick. Because very often making tough choices and making big tradeoffs means that someone very powerful in the organization will not get what they want somewhere else. So, building the respect and credibility so that your decisions actually stick is one of the critical success factors.
For example one of the faculty members from an energy company shared they’ve actually created a process in which they rank their stakeholders based on financial impact to the company. So that they have the very clear decision criteria behind what they’re doing, so it’s easier to get people behind it. But it requires a little bit of extra homework – being clear about it and actually using, a process that’s transparent to people.
A related challenge to that is the fact that every single one of the 250 people at the event were saying: we are doing programs and things that are not providing any value to the organization and are practically impossible to stop because someone loves them somewhere in the organization and someone with power.
So, we heard numerous examples of people saying we’re spending half a million here, a million here on a founder’s values program, but the founders are no longer here, it was designed many years ago, or the business has moved on. But it has such a legacy that if I tried to pull the plug on it, it would cost me more than what it does to start something else. So, we talked a lot about the courage of being able to stand behind “this is right now, or this had its time”, and “we’ve got to move on because we have to free up resources for something new”. That’s important for the future.
Will: Some organizations maybe don’t have either the respect or the internal capital to actually make a bold decision like cancelling a program.
But what I thought was really interesting was that example from a cloud software organization where they were noticing that we weren’t getting leaders of the right quality coming through the existing pipeline. And the first line leader program wasn’t delivering what it needed to.
Instead of canceling that program, it was repositioned because what they realized was the program was doing a decent enough job, but the issue was people that were unsuited to management – that wasn’t their passion, wasn’t what was really exciting them – were going through this because they felt that leading people was critical to their progression within the organization.
But instead, by getting clear on that problem, you can reposition that program so that instead it’s about readiness, willingness, excitement to being a people leader. And only if you’ve been through the program, you can make that call about whether you want to be a people leader and actually go on that people leader track.
Alternatively, if you go through the program and realize, you know what? People leadership/people management isn’t for me. They then developed strong, technical expert pathway so that you could have meaningful progression in alternative career paths as well.
Rick: So Fredrik, I’m wondering if you could actually take us a little bit further into, what this solution really looks like.
Fredrik: So, what that looked like in this case we created a simulation where teams of leadership and development leaders assumed the role of running a leadership and development function as the head in an organization that has just, gone through a split up from another organization.
So there, was some legacy and there was some newness to who they were as an organization. And what they had to first do is actually figure out what’s the purpose. And what’s the learning culture that we need in the organization to be successful? And after that, we used AI for them to be able to have an interaction with the CEO on how to understand how the CEO was really looking at leadership, what was required from leadership and how this all fit in with the strategy.
So, after that, they had to start thinking about where do we want to focus? Do we want to focus on the few, on the many, or on critical roles? what are the focus areas that we want to put our money towards and efforts towards? So, we went into a next round where we really had them trade off time and efforts between talking to more stakeholders and go deeper versus evaluating existing programs and initiatives that are in place versus putting in new things into place. And the longer they waited, the more time they spent, and the less time they had to have an impact.
So, it’s really all this tension about when do we have enough information to move forward? What can we stop now to save money? Or what do we need to start now? Because it’s critical for the business to get right. And then the third round of this was really focused around how do we deal with all these surprises and these moments that comes up throughout the year and throughout the execution of what we’re doing that are making it hard for us to follow the plan or creating opportunities for us to have greater impacts as a function along the way.
So common for all this was to create this vehicle for all these fantastic leaders in this space to have conversations with peers.
Rick: So I get, Fredrik, what you were saying, from the top of the show about this really being an opportunity for us to give back to the community of L&D leaders. And I think what’s so great about this, for our audience here is that so many times I think folks feel like they’re on a bit of an island in their organization.
They get very few thank you’s and are very quick to hear about even the smallest thing that goes wrong. So, the opportunity to work with peers to try to solve for some of these challenges in a shared safe environment could really be helpful for a lot of folks.
So for those L&D professionals out there listening, what opportunities do they have to learn from the information that you guys have been gathered?
Will: Well, we designed this initially for use of this industry event. And we’re actually looking to run a few more of those across the globe. Maybe get in touch with your local BTS contact and see if there’s one happening near you.
But we also designed this thinking about how you might be able to use it with your teams. Simulations are such a powerful tool to almost step away from the day-to-day business and think a little bit more big picture about what is the value proposition?
What’s the strategy that we’re delivering in quite a safe experience so people can share ideas that they perhaps wouldn’t do when talking about the day-to-day because you’re talking about a simulated company. It’s also a great opportunity to build capability. We can practice, we can explore how you might engage with stakeholders, and make tough decisions.
What are some of those trade-offs we think we might be dealing with over the course of the year and how we as a team are going to think about making those decisions and navigating through them?
Rick: Wow. That does, actually sound quite powerful and is very timely. This is being recorded in August and for those that are in a calendar year, planning season is coming up. So, the ability to do this kind of work before going into planning I think would be really powerful for folks.
Well, thank you both for taking the time to speak with us today and, thanks for the great work. Because it’s crazy sometimes that those in L&D that focus so much on the development of others get so little development for themselves.
The work that you’ve done here, I know I appreciate and I’m sure our audience appreciates as well. So, thanks for joining me and, I’m sure we’ll talk soon.
Fredrik: Pleasure.
Will: Thanks for having us, Rick.
Rick: Thanks for joining me today. It’s always a pleasure to bring to you our Fearless Thinkers. If you’d like to stay up to date, please subscribe. Bios for our guest and links to relevant content are always listed in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch, please visit us at BTS.com, and thanks so much for listening!
