Developing effective leaders is more important than ever, but understanding which skills matter most and how to build them can be challenging. From navigating new team dynamics to giving impactful feedback, today’s leaders need both foundational and modern leadership capabilities to thrive.
In this episode of The Business of Learning, we spoke with Gena Cox, Ph.D., organizational psychologist and speaker, and Jevon Gondwe, founder of Influential Skills, to discuss how learning and development (L&D) can help leaders succeed in today’s evolving work environment.
Tune in now for insights on:
- How leadership skills have shifted in recent years and which foundational skills remain essential
- Key challenges leaders face today and strategies for overcoming them
- How L&D can support leaders in giving effective feedback to improve team performance
- Approaches to measuring the impact of leadership skills training
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The transcript for this episode follows:
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor in chief here at Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo: And I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor. Today we’re diving into the state of leadership, how leadership skills are evolving, what foundational skills still matter most, and how learning leaders can better support today’s managers. Joining us are Gena Cox, an organizational psychologist and speaker and Jevon Gondwe, founder of Influential Skills. Gena and Jevon, welcome to the podcast.
Gena Cox: Delighted to be here.
Jevon Gondwe: Very excited to be honored. Thank you for asking us to.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yes. Thank you. Super excited to have you with us today and just to kind of get the conversation going, I’d love if you could share how leadership skills have shifted in recent years. Because we know a lot’s been going on from the pandemic to all the changes that organizations have experienced. So I would just love to hear kind of how you see these leadership skills evolving and kind of which skills remain essential for leaders today?
Gena Cox: In my sense as an organizational psychologist, when we were in graduate school, we used to have this big book called, “The Leadership Handbook.” Bass’ handbook about leadership. It was about this thick, it was like the bible of leadership. You would … there were all these different theories, so many of them, and the bottom line was always that in the end, effective leadership comes down to two dimensions: There’s the task performance, and then there’s the people leadership. And no matter how the theories, you know, were subtly different. in some ways dramatically different. It was always those things, and I think that hasn’t changed. I think the fundamentals of effective leadership haven’t changed. What has changed is the context for leadership. And yes, there are some new skills, for example, digital fluency and sort of the ability to, to deal with what we know is the coming, uh, the coming are the coming changes that AI will inevitably you know, [have] in the way that we work and the way that we need to lead the people who work. But fundamentally, leaders still have to attend to this task on people performance. It is in the people performance, uh, the people leadership part of leadership. Where I see though that. There is a greater of emphasis on the need for leaders to really pay attention to the needs of the people that they lead. So empathy and creating the kind of environment and culture in which employees’ skills can actually be optimized, and their needs considered as work is being done. And so I think leaders today have got to be more attentive to these broader, sort of contextual kinds of factors, even as they stick to some of the fundamentals and, and certainly the complexity and the speed at which leaders are required to now make decisions and employees are required to do their work is. that is driving the way that leadership needs to be subtly changed in order for the leaders to be effective in this era.
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah. And I, Gena, I couldn’t agree with you more on that. You know, it’s, I would say for me it’s the reason that I founded Influential Skills is because, you know, I’ve seen this gap as, I think everyone on here, and many of the listeners you’ve heard, you’ve seen this, right? Where people have, they kind of climb the ladder based on technical ability and that they stand out very quickly. They get the job done, their performance motivated, and they, they kind of climb the ladder. But at some point, they lack the kind of those, those, those not, I don’t like to say soft skills, but the people skills, the human skills that you need to show up authentically. And if you think about from a culture perspective, um, and how our, our industry, how we have people have changed when they show up to work is they want to be authentic. They want to be able to be on Zoom or be on video or be in the office and have their cat walk by, or, you know, I always call it “cat zilla,” you know, and like, so they’re bringing more of their whole selves to work, and yet if we’re not prepared meet them where they are and be an authentic leader. We’re going to lose people. And in my … you know, if you look at a lot of the Gallup research studies, I don’t think I’m saying anything that people don’t know. But the disengagement numbers right now are, are, are incredible. I mean, I think it’s up at like 60-70% of workforce employees are disengaged and that costs a lot of time [and] a lot of money. It’s a lot of challenging aspects for those leaders. But my personal opinion is this: Is that if you have someone in your team who’s disengaged, you can have a certain level of ownership that you need to have to lean in and understand why and lean into that. Now, if you’re disengaged, that’s a whole different story, right? But you know, but for me then it comes down to what skills do I need to have? So I can bring that person into the environment and help them learn and grow. And this is actually why I developed a specific leadership framework called Building a Culture of Champions. And I may touch on that throughout our conversation today. But the first part of that framework is for me, the foundation of being a great leader, which is be to become what’s called what I call a, a growth catalyst. what that means is, and, and you know, Gena, you kind of touched on this a little bit, this idea with the new age of work and generative AI, things are changing so quickly. We have to make decisions quickly. And in my personal opinion, the only way we can create a great culture and great environment is if we as leaders first focus on our own personal growth journey. We have to be so diligent. It’s about owning our own habits, reading, listening, learning, and doing that in a really strategic way as opposed to what I see a lot right now, which is binge learning. You know, if you listen to this podcast, I hope you actually take action out of it versus the feel-good learning. And so that’s a just a whole different element of, yes, we need to continuously learn, but we also need to continuously apply. And have a process for constantly improving so that we as a leader can add value and show up authentically to the people that actually want to grow and learn from us so that you can become the kind of leader that other people want to follow. So hopefully that helps someone out there.
Sarah Gallo: Definitely, I mean, it’s so easy, like you mentioned Jevon, just to put that professional development on the back burner, especially when everything’s moving so quickly, like you both mentioned. But that’s really not an option, especially for leaders. So, I’d love if we could kind of dig into some of those challenges that leaders are facing right now when managing teams in today’s work environment, any specific challenges you’d like to share?
Gena Cox: Well, I think we can all agree that everybody seems to be facing challenges in the workplace because of the pace and the of of change, and the complexity of some of the changes that we are already dealing with and the ones that we anticipate, you know, executives, CEOs of American corporations when pulled by by Deloitte, the things that they are saying that are challenging them are these big systemic factors outside of the organization that are giving rise to, um, to, to both challenges from a financial and economic perspective for, for those who have to lead that business, and then ultimately affecting the way that people relate to one another within the, the work environments that they lead. And so I find that leaders and managers, regardless of what level they’re at, the big challenge that they’re really dealing with is the complexity of factors over which they have minimal control that are then impacting the way that their employees show up at work and impacting the way that they would work. This is a really big issue when you talk about low engagement levels in the workplace. The other thing that is tracked very closely to these low engagement levels are that there are high levels of grievance, like in the sixties, sort of at a societal level and within employed populations and about 60-something percent of employees say they don’t feel respected at work, which is an area of great concern for me, because I track activity regarding respect in the workplace. And what that tells me is that these are factors that are not necessarily directly, uh, in the control of the leader or necessarily caused always by things that an individual leader is, does or does not do. But it does mean that individual leaders have got to understand these broader issues. Think about what can they do to be part of the solution. When I talk about, for example, the idea that respect is a driver of trust and therefore a fundamental driver of business outcomes, I do that to remind my clients that in fact, one of the main things that they can always do is make sure that every single employee feels seen, heard and valued. Because if 33% of employees who leave organizations say they leave because they feel disrespected at work. And if a majority don’t feel like they’re being respected at work, you know, sometimes leaders, uh, you know, might think that because these problems are in fact so complex and, you know, these are big social factors that are hard to break down. And then they think, well, what can’t I do? I just tell everybody to always go back to the individual level, think about every employee on your team and make sure that he or she feels that you are what I call a designated hitter leader. That you know you have their back, you understand them better than any other person might in the organization, and that you sort of advocate for them and that they believe that you are the one person in the organization who will always do that for them at the individual level.
Jevon Gondwe: Gena, I love that, and I love the statistics that you brought to the table, especially around trust, because I think, you know, you know, can all agree that’s like the first thing to build any successful relationship, and yet we don’t always realize how quickly we lose it. Um, and by not being authentic, not being vulnerable, you know, for me, you know, we’re all, we’re all going to speak from our lens, right? We’re all speaking from our experience. And the number, probably the number one reason that clients come to me is because either organizationally or individually. They’ve climbed the ladder because they’re operational operationally proficient, right? Again, they’re really good at the day-to-day, but they don’t have a plan for growing and developing on that journey. And so here’s what ends up happening and here’s what causes the challenge. If you don’t have a plan to overcome, if you don’t have a plan to develop that scale, if you don’t have then, then what ends up happening is you end up pretending a lot of the time. As a psychologist, Gena, you know more about imposter syndrome than, than I do on that topic, but I think a lot of people, they navigate that and so they try and show up projecting confidence, but really it’s false confidence. They don’t actually know their strengths clearly enough. They don’t understand their opportunities. They don’t, they have a lot of blind spots because they just aren’t aware. And so they’re just kind of fumbling through. And so what I found a lot is people, I’ll meet them, they’re 10 years down the road in their journey, and they’re like, ”Oh, yeah, I know how to lead.” “Really? How’d you learn it?” “Oh, just from doing it,” I’m like, “Okay.” There’s an element that yes, you can learn certain things by doing it, but if you don’t actually learn the proper ways to do certain things, you don’t study it, you don’t research it, then what you probably did [was] you have some bad habits. In fact, Sarah, one of the first articles that I wrote with you all touched on that exact concept of the untrained leader and how you, can you listen if, if I practice basketball for the next two years straight. And I just did it by myself because I’m not, I’m a soccer guy and not a basketball guy. I would’ve form a lot of bad habits and, and yet I might have false confidence because I don’t really know what to compare it to. And I see that happen a lot. People [say] “Oh, I know how to give feedback.” And we may, I think, we may talk about that today too, but you know, I know how to give feedback. I just tell them how it is. I’m like, really? I wonder how that’s actually working out for you. So I think sometimes the challenges that leaders actually have, they don’t even know. Like they aren’t even aware of the problems that they’re causing, which is why then you get that, I think you said Gena, 33% of people leave because they felt disrespected at work. And I would guess that a lot of the times the person who did the disrespecting didn’t even know that they did that. Right. And so for me, it’s, you know, we’ve got to be on a track of developing ourselves. We can mitigate those blind spots and create an environment where you can show up authentically with your strengths and say, “Hey, I’m really good at this.” And you can say to that person on your team, “Hey, you know what? I’m actually not great at giving feedback, but I want to learn and grow.” And if you could help me with that, that would be great. Right? And if we can actually have that level of authenticity in our leaders where they know where they’re really good and they also know where they’re not as good and they’re willing to talk about that, um, it just creates an entirely different culture of safety, you know, which is what we all want.
Gena Cox: You know, one of the things that I think we’re both, um, mentioning and, and. In this conversation is that managers and leaders are operating in a very complex environment. One of the things that I tell my clients with regard to this complexity is that you don’t need to make the mistake of thinking that complexity means that you have to have the answer to every [problem in an] organization, group or what have you. And so while I understand that it, this is a complex environment where you have fewer resources than you need, your span of control is wider than you want it to be. You know, individuals on your team have very particular needs, and you’re trying to satisfy them all. It’s complex, right? So there’s no doubt about that. But there’s, but the, the antidote to complexity from a leadership and management position is sort of to do the opposite that seems to come naturally, which is not to try to control the whole environment and provide all the answers, but to empower the people who, all of the people in your team to do whatever they can to be part of the solution to the problems that you know that have been identified. Right? So leader doesn’t mean, 360-degree problem solver. What leader means is making it possible for every person in an organization to contribute to solving the, 360-degrees of problems that you have. So it’s kind of a letting go rather than a taking on that leaders that will help leaders to be successful in a very complex and disrupted environment. And it is not a natural instinct to want to do that. You know, I was talking to someone the other day and, they… think of themselves as a strategy person. You know, “I’m a strategy person,” and I was telling them a little bit about what I do, which then they categorize as organizational behavior, right? So then we were …they were talking a little bit about, they have this idea that they would like to make strategy for everyone. They would like to have all employees somehow have an opportunity to have input into the strategy of the organizations to which they consult. Great idea. And though, and so then, as we continued the conversation and I said, “Well, you know, there, the line between strategy and organizational behavior should not be so distinct,” because what I’m trying to say is exactly the same thing you’re trying to say, which is that we want to help this company to be successful, but what we have [are] different skill sets that we will bring to the situation, but what we really want to make sure is that each of us gets the opportunity to offer whatever it is we have to offer with our different backgrounds, um, so that you put it all together, you get this best outcome. And it was very interesting because this person kept saying, but, but, but strategy is this organizational behavior is that, and it really just sort of brings on the point with regard to this idea of, as a leader in a complex environment, you want to get everybody’s point of view, everybody’s ideas, or at least you, and you certainly at least want to make everybody believe that they can be part of the solution. So far from excluding people, you include as many people as possible. You empower as many people as possible. You create that, in addition, you create that situation where people can speak up and offer their ideas, and really, as an effective leader, you might be able to sit back and sort of cross your hands because the answers will be coming to you. And the people who bring those answers will be much more inclined to execute them effectively because they’ll have that sense of ownership.
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, if I could jump on that, what … this idea of buy-in, right? And one of the things that I talk about for my framework is called the Visionary Spark. And Gena, that speaks literally to so much of what you were just talking about in terms of we’ve got to number one, know where we’re going. We need to know why. We need to help our people understand their role in their ownership and create space for that, to create space for that buy-in. You know, I see a lot of organizations, they’re wondering why they don’t have people that are bought in and disengaged. Beause they never had the … they never were given a platform to give feedback, right, as an employee, it was like, “Hey, we’re going back to the office.” Did you ask us? Right. Like, did you even at least give us … because even if they don’t agree with the final result, that’s actually okay if at least they had the opportunity to make a case for what they wanted, right? And that may be organizationally, or it could be individually within a team setting, but that buy-in and creating a space for people to have a voice is so, so imperative.
Sarah Gallo: I love that kind of what both of you are saying, and I especially loved what you said, Gena, about leaders needing to give themselves permission to let go and bring other people on. I think that’s huge. And I know we talked about a lot of challenges kind of around a lack of respect.
Employees are feeling lack of trust, and sort of Jevon, you mentioned this perceived false sense of confidence and leaders not really knowing where their skills gaps are. So kind of with all of those challenges in mind, can you share how L&D can help leaders overcome some of these challenges and, and ease those?
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah, I can jump on this one and kick it off. So for me, and I’m going to keep coming back to this concept of personal growth and ownership of development. And you know, I have seen over the years a lot of L&D teams, corporate teams, whatever industry you’re in, you know, we want to try to kind of, what I would say, solve the symptom, right? So meaning, okay, that person, we need conflict resolution. So we’re going to do a workshop on that. Okay. We need … this person has this issue, or whatever. But people typically end up with an environment of mandatory learning, right? So the only way people show up to learn is because they, they have to, right? And so if you think back to school, how did that work out for most people? Right? If they didn’t really enjoy or understand the relevancy of why they’re learning, they tune out. So for me, one of the most important things that we can do is create a culture of learning, right? Or create a growth-oriented culture where there’s an environment of people where they’re growing, they’re learning [and] they’re developing. And one of the best ways, in my opinion, to do that is to help the individuals understand they have some ownership in that personal growth journey and that learning is a mutual responsibility. One, L&D teams have a certain responsibility to create the environment for that, right? The resources, but it doesn’t have to be limited to fixed opportunities. That’s how many times we limit it to training and development only workshop only leadership programs only. But you know how much you can learn by having, knowing what your goals are for learning. Having a vision for your career and even for your life, like do you have goals for your family that apply to your career development and growth? Because this is why I’m so passionate about personal growth because if I become better as a communicator in my work life, I become better as a communicator at home. Now, don’t ask my wife about that, because she may say I’m wrong, but the whole idea here is that if I can find ways as an L&D team to connect the individual person and their vision and their goals to the learning incentives, and then I can create an environment where the, where learning happens either through your system [or] through a workflow, but even through empowering people to have even a small amount of money they can invest or a small amount of time that they can invest in their own personal journey, whether that’s through podcasts, books, or whatever the case may be. We create relevance and then that individual can own the journey for their personal growth versus feeling like the only way that I’m going to learn is if my company is getting me to do learning versus I own my own growth. I own the vision for where I’m going. I’m excited about learning and it’s relevant.
Gena Cox: Yeah. And you know, one of the things that, that I initially sensed, but over the last few years would say, hear regularly from leaders, is that. You know, leaders really need to find a way not just to learn how to sort of do something, but to really to, to, to think. So the whole idea that the problems that leaders are facing are often nowadays sort of new and novel. And so you’re not just, you know, this notion that you, you can just sort of learn something by rote. I’ll teach you how to do something and you do it, and now you will a leader doesn’t seem to be a model for this environment. Instead, what seems to be a model for the best model for this environment from a training and development perspective is to really help people learn how to think, how to think for themselves, how to use available information to think, how to process information so that they can identify the insights that really matter and differentiate, you know, for a group and help the people who they lead, uh, focus on the things that really matter. So one of the things that I think is really important then is this increased emphasis on critical thinking and sort of thinking in a way that can lead this person to lead a person to action. I think anything along the lines of this sort of higher level thinking is going to be very advantageous, uh, for leaders in this environment. It’s pretty clear too that the human connection thing probably the most important aspect of leadership in this, in this environment. So we’ve got a complex technical environment because of AI and other technologies, but we also have a very complex emotional environment for reasons that we’ve alluded to earlier in this conversation. Leaders have got to and be taught to reprioritize anything that they can do to enhance human connection, connection between themselves and the people. They lead connection among the people who are part, the members of their team. You know, when I work, for example, with leaders who are in cybertechnology or cybersecurity, one of the concerns that they cite regularly, which is so fascinating to me, is that many of the errors that are, that are that when many of the problems that occur that, that create big errors from a cybersecurity perspective are often human driven. And at the same time, and so we know this, so it’s not, so the solutions aren’t necessarily technological. The people are using the technology, but the solutions are in trying to get humans to behave in a certain way so that they don’t provide an opening for bad things to happen. But yet in these same environments that those cybersecurity professionals are operating in organizations where often what is part of the culture is that people in the other functional areas within corporations are told, well, when the folks in cybersecurity tell you you can’t do this, or you must lock this down, or you, you need this special permission before you can use that file that that’s getting in the way, let’s ignore that. Or when they send a directive that says, please don’t do this, we are not going to worry about that. [It’s] sort of very disrespectful approach that is tolerated with regard to just this one group. I’m just using cybersecurity professionals, but this is sort of a rampant problem in organizational life, and yet when people have that disrespect, there’s… it is very unlikely then that they’re working sort of together to support the business objectives. You got cybersecurity not being supported by other functional groups, but yet all of you’re supposed to be supporting this company. When I think about human connection, I don’t just think about it in sort of an academic fashion [or] an academic way. I think about it as sort of a foundation for creating the healthy environments in which people can then co-cooperate and collaborate to get the very important business of your organization done. And so, I don’t think we can overemphasize that. Anything that we can do to help leaders understand how better to create connections so that we, we trust one another, we respect one another, then we trust one another. We’re, we’re able to speak up. We can share our ideas even when maybe they’re unfamiliar ideas or not ideas that everybody else agrees with. All of that stuff, the psychological safety stuff, that continues to be, I think a really [a key] bucket of skills that we’ve got to continue to teach our leaders and, you know. AI, I think it’s sort of a given, right, that we now have got to teach leaders, not so much about how to use AI, most of us are using AI in some way. We get the basic idea of, of what’s going on here, but what we really want to figure out is how can AI truly be used in a way that is going to help our team get something done more efficiently. I suspect that the answer to the most effective uses of AI within any one group will come from the employees at the very who are touching, who sort of touching the work, right at, so not from the top, but from the bottom of, of the pyramid. And so what that means is you’ve got to get as many people as possibly involved in identifying, well, what are the things that we’re doing now that we know are wasting time. We know we’re inefficient. We know that we make a lot of errors and say, okay, well let’s just tackle one or two of those and then let me just have the people who are doing this work today have them focus on, well, what, how can AI help us solve for that? We don’t need a big intervention, but we might need, we might be able to do small things and then let’s pull them all together. Maybe we need to get approvals to do whatever. But helping leaders to see what is the path to success for using AI to support their part of the business. I think that is another skill that we’re going to have to, to teach leaders or should be teaching leaders in this environment.
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah. That’s, that’s excellent, Gena. And, you know, things have continued to evolve, right? So much. You know, I want for a quick moment, I want to go back to this, this concept of just creating a learning culture. Because I think just from an L&D lens, like that’s what you want, right? Because if you have an environment of, of people who want to learn, who are excited to learn, the last thing we want, we’ve all done at L&D: You put a program out there and no one wants to do it, right? Like you have an LMS and you’ve got 3% activation rates, right? And so the growth catalyst I mentioned earlier, I break into four parts and this is what I think if every leader, if Irving, just a few leaders are doing these four things. It starts to shift the culture. So the first one is the student of the game, right? This is someone who’s, they’re constantly learning. They’re constantly growing, but it’s not just learning. It’s the second part, which is the performer. So they are learning and then applying it, even if it’s uncomfortable, right? And then the third part is the player coach. So now I’m learning, I’m applying it, but now I need to help my team. Do those first two things, right? And so I’m the, I’m the example. And then the last one is the, is the team first captain, right? There has to be a level of low, low ego humility, that willingness to learn and become better because no one wants to learn from a know-it-all, if that makes sense, right? And so, kind of that low ego for me is such an important humility and that positive attitude. And when you do that with your team and your department, and they then are going to model that, right? Because most leaders model their leaders good and bad. Um, and so if you have that as a model and you help people go through that journey, that’s how you can, you know, for me, start to shift your culture so that people actually have an environment where they want to learn. And I think that overcomes helps overcome not all, but a lot of the challenges that we see.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely I’d love to touch on now around giving effective feedback, because we talked about this a little, little earlier, it’s very challenging. And so, I’d just love to hear how L&D can help address this and help leaders give more effective feedback.
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah. Gena, you want start or you want me to start?
Gena Cox: I can start. Well, you know, giving effective feedback is a problem from time immemorial, right? Even when you have two people together, whether… even as close as relatives, loved ones, siblings, whatever, telling somebody the hard truth or whatever is always the most difficult thing. It’s a very difficult thing and people tend to avoid it because, you know, they don’t want to damage the relationships. They’re afraid that something that they do or stay will inadvertently result in lowering the person’s performance rather than enhancing it. You know, leaders worry about all of these things, but fundamentally, when I think about giving feedback, I, I, will share with you sort of like a, a model for, for, for doing it effectively rather than so much focusing on, on why it is so difficult. The secret, I think, to effective feedback giving is to make sure that at the end of the conversation, the person to whom you’re giving the feedback knows what to do with it, what they can do to make a positive difference with it. Right? So feedback is not just about telling someone good, bad or something in the middle. It’s not just about stating objective facts or giving evidence or any of those things. Really, the efficacy of feedback hinges upon what can the person who is the receiver of that feedback now be able to do that they weren’t able to do five minutes ago? So here’s a scenario that I like to recommend to leaders and managers that works very effectively and, and works in families too. First of all, if you know that you have some feedback that might be a little bit hard to swallow, don’t make it a surprise, you know? Maybe give the person some opportunity to say, for example, you know, “Susie, I wanted to share something with you. What would be a good time? Tell me what would be a good time where you might have about 30 minutes so we can talk about it.” So you put Susie in control because now she gets to pick the time. Susie says two, three o’clock. So Tuesday at two o’clock. You know, you’re speaking to Susie you shared with Susie specifically what it is that you want her to understand. And in doing that, the thing that you say, well, Susie, you know, I don’t know if you realize this, but you painted the wall green when we really need a blue wall. And then Susie will say, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize you wanted a blue wall. Or, oh my gosh, I thought it was blue or whatever.” Susie says what she says. But then the next thing is the most important thing to say to Susie. What do you think that you can do to sort of resolve this, to fix the situation, to solve this problem? So you take the bowling ball … throw it against her head, [which] will cause severe injury. Instead, you just gently pass it to her and you put it in her lap and you say, “You know, Susie, what do you think you can do to?” Resolve this problem, and depending on who’s the complexity or depending on how Susie is responding, it might even be necessary to say, and I don’t need an immediate answer from you, right? You’ve got to give people time to process complex problems. So if you’re giving, you’re giving feedback about something complex, it’s always better to say. You know, how about we talk about this next week when you know at a time that’s convenient for you? I’ll give you a little, it gives you some time to think through maybe what would be the best solution. Sometimes it can be instantaneous, but more, even if it’s instantaneous, people appreciate having a little time where they have a sense like, this is not the end of the world. It’s a problem, but you’re going to help me, let me be part of the solution and solving it. And I will follow up and I’ll have, I’ll be composed and confident at the time that I do that. So next Tuesday or two days from now, you get back together with Susie and you say, Hey, Susie, you know, what are you going to do? And Susie tells you, and you go back and forth. It’s not perfect. You get to some agreement and so on and so forth. I’m using that as an example just because, I mean, not everything requires that much of a process in order to do feedback effectively. But there is a model for doing feedback effectively, even for small things, where what your goals are is that you leave the person empowered, you make them, they don’t feel any worse about themselves at the beginning, at the end of the conversation that they did at the beginning. You let them know that you have their back and that you believe that they have the ability to solve whatever the problem is that you identified.
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah, I really value that structure and that framework. And I think having a framework to have feet to give feedback, no matter what the context, just gives you confidence. Whatever that framework is, you know, there can be, there’s a lot of different, you know, ways around that. Gena, as I think yours is fantastic, I’m gonna take it from a little different lens. Since you gave us such a great framework, my lens is team leaders, team leadership, right? So building culture, that is my focus, my area of expertise. Maybe I could hand handle my brother, I don’t know, or my sister, or my friends or my neighbors. I don’t know. But I know the team leadership component. I, as a leader, I’m working with you. I’m working with my team, and what’s the best way? Here’s what I have found to be most effective. Create the dynamic in the relationship so that feedback is welcomed. What does that mean? That means before you ever need to give any feedback, you need to work on the trust and work on the relationship, and set the expectations upfront. So by the time you give, you know, you often say feedback and we typically referring to constructive feedback, right? Where things are need to be improved, but feedback is actually neutral, right? Feedback is just information that we didn’t have before, which can be positive. It can be, I call it validation feedback. So, hey, this is something that you’re doing well, we need to hear that. And what I’ve found happens more often than not is we only speak up when there’s constructive feedback. what ends up happening is you lose trust with people and you, and they feel like you’re only criticizing and condemning and complaining about them versus uplifting them. so I mentioned the building a Culture of Champions framework and you know, part of that is the growth catalyst growing yourself. But the second part is the champion’s ear, which means you’re really leaning in to ask questions and learn about that person with the lens of that you want to help them develop and grow. The second part. You know is the visionary spark. So now we’re helping that person cast a vision of where they’re at in the organization, their goals, we’re helping them, the language of victory, we’re helping them identify strengths, we’re speaking positively into them. We’re doing all of these things really, really well to build that relationship so that the ultimate thing we can do as a team leader is coach, is what I call coach for gold. And this is where we have a really high standard on their performance and our expectations because we believe in them, which we’ve already demonstrated prior to ever coaching them. so by the time we get to a point of coaching and developing, they really value and they know, and this is probably the most important thing, in my opinion, the most important thing is that they know that you actually care about them. Their goals and where they’re going. And so when you’re giving feedback, you’re so clear already of why you’re giving them feedback. They already know you’re giving them feedback because you want them to thrive and succeed in the organization, as opposed to you’re annoyed or you’re bothered by whatever it is, X, Y, and Z. And so for me, if we get the relationship right on the front end, then that feedback part becomes almost like an automatic, because how? How could you not give me that feedback and that insight, feedback or constructive if you actually cared about my development. And so the only last thing I’ll share on this, for anyone that’s struggling with. Giving feedback because you’re not sure if you should say something. I’ve always been like the nice guy and I’m still nice guy. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t changed. I’m still nice. But what I realized was sometimes 📍 I felt like being nice was to not say something right. And I didn’t wanna rub people the wrong way. But the reality is, the kind thing to do is care about someone so much that you’re willing to share something that they may not, you know, be aware of with the intent of helping them develop and grow. And if that person understands that. You care, then it typically goes a lot smoother. And then if you do it the way that Gena did it, you’re going to hit a home run. Because I think how you structured it, it’s fantastic.
Gena Cox: Yeah. And I so agree with you. I was giving a talk a few years ago, um, and the topic was something like. To do with, uh, leading inclusion because I had a new book and that was the, the, the, uh, title of the book. Anyway, great talk, at least a talk where the audience was engaged. I don’t know if it was a great talk. They seemed to like it, but at and at the end I had people who come up, came up and we were having a, you know, one-on-one conversations asking questions, and so I’m really enjoyable. And a young man came up to me and he said, you know, I have a black woman on my team and I don’t know how to lead her. I said, what do you mean by that? Right? And he said, “Well, I’m afraid to give her feedback because if I give her feedback, she doesn’t like … she would say, I’m doing it because I’m biased, or she might think I’m doing it because I’m biased against her” or what have you. It was really a revelatory comment and he and I had a wonderful deep conversation that went on for quite some while, and I’m mentioning it here because in the research regarding organizational functioning. One of the dynamics that we know regularly plays out that relates to what was previously stated is that people, humans, tend to be, to give people feedback to people who are similar to them. They’re, they’re comfort, more comfortable giving feedback to people who are more, who are similar to them, and as you said might avoid, might think that being nice and avoiding giving feedback is in some way a beneficial thing or a thing that makes them more liked by this other person.
All of those are just normal human dynamics. And so what happens is that the more different a leader is from the people he or she leads or from persons on their team, the less likely it is that they’re giving them feedback. the more likely it is that those people not getting feedback are walking around with blind spots, being unaware what they, of, what they can do in order to be even more effective. It’s a crazy, you know, sort of circular behavior that is counterproductive for the leader, for the employee who doesn’t get the feedback and for the organization where performance does not improve. So you would think that as much as we talked about feedback for decades and, and centuries at this point that we would know how to do it well. But the reason we don’t, leaders don’t do it well, apart from the fact that they might not have created the culture where it would be easy to speak up, is that there are all these interpersonal. things that get in the way. And so leaders just have got to sort of be taught to believe that giving respect, giving feedback is one of the most respectful things that a leader can do for any person who reports to them.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely, getting that relationship right, as you both mentioned is so important and showing employees that I’m giving you this feedback because I care and I want you to do better and I’m on your side. And having that, foundation of that good relationship is so important to make that conversation effective. Before we wrap up today, I’d love to hear how can organizations ensure that they have effective leaders in place … so they’re investing all this time in training their leaders. Do you have any tips on how organizations can measure the impact of their leadership training and, and really making sure that they have the right people in those leadership spots?
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah, I, go ahead Gena.
Gena Cox: No, you go ahead.
Jevon Gondwe: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many different facets to it, right? If, for me, if you look at how do you define a successful leader, right? I mean, that’s, it’s, you know, you can get a lot of opinions on that. Uh, but for me it comes down to what does, what are the results that they’re creating in terms of performance. I do think that’s a component, and whatever that result can be different depending on the organization. But a huge part of it is how are they developing their people? And when I say developing their people, I mean are those people developing new skills? Are they developing new mindsets? Are they developing and growing and learning? And so I’m really big on culture and cultural assessments and getting real feedback. Then from. The people on their team. A lot of times we like to look directly at the leader and try to understand are they doing the right thing? And yes, maybe, but at the end of the day, look at the people on their team and how are they ultimately performing and get their feedback. I’m really big on 360 reviews as opposed to most team. A lot of people only do kind of a one-sided and manager down or team leader down, um, but they don’t go back up, right? They don’t get that 360 kind of perspective. And so I think that’s a, a huge one for me. Is actually getting the perspective of people that are on the leaders’ team and getting their insights on how they’re growing, how they’re learning. Some people do stay interviews, [and they] can be really effective. Exit interviews are good, but I like stay interviews because then you get the people before they, before they actually are leaving and you can catch things there. And there’s a lot that have good feedback and insight you can gather if you’re really intentional about getting the insights from the people on the, the leaders team, if that makes sense.
Gena Cox: Mm-hmm. I so agree with all of that, you know? I talk about respect constantly because I think it’s the most important outcome that matters in organizational interactions. And one of the things that leaders, that their organizations can do to figure out if they have effective leaders. This is on the human dimension, which, you know, I, agree that yes, performance as in productivity is also a dimension. and you can measure that. But, really the differentiator, the, factor that tends to make the biggest difference with regard to whether a team is going to be successful or not, is not necessarily the processes and the procedures. It’s usually the human element.
Jevon Gondwe: Right. So on this human element, what is it? What is it that would then … to indicate to me that a leader is being effective. Hands down, I say it’s whether employees feel respected or not. And as I said before, respected is defined as whether or not employees on a team feel seen, heard, and valued. We’ve all been talking about respect since we were two years old, and our parents taught us to respect our siblings, but most people don’t really know how to operationalize it and what it, what the, are the what is, what are the behavioral. Is the behavioral evidence of that. And so I, of course, have a framework that I can happily send along to anyone who’s interested. I’ll send it off … but really, you know, the most important thing is whether you’re doing this in a written survey, whether you’re doing this in one-on-one conversations, whether you’re doing it in three sixties and so on. I really encourage organizations to focus on asking employees if they feel respected at work, and of course we give them the definition. Are you feeling respected at work? Yes or no? If you are feeling respected at work, what is it that this leader is doing that is causing you to feel respected if you’re not feeling this leader and or your colleagues or your, your business partners or the vendors with whom you work or the customers? Because you always have to tap into the whole ecosystem, not just the manager. [What] in those interactions [is it] that is causing you to feel respected? And if you’re not feeling respected, what is it in your interactions with the manager, the coworkers, the clients, the [customers], the business partners, everybody in the ecosystem that is making you feel disrespected. What would have to change in order for you to feel respected would then be sort of the final question where they tell you how to fix the problem and you put all that together. Really, you have a good sense of what is going on in a team, whether the leader is part of the problem, to what extent the leader is part of the solution or part of the problem. And then more specifically, employees are telling you what you could do differently to make things better.
Sarah Gallo: I love that. Well, on that note, thank you both for speaking with us today. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. could our listeners get in touch with you after this episode if they like to reach out?
Jevon Gondwe: So you can…
Gena Cox: Oh, I was going to say, you can find me on LinkedIn. The most important thing to remember is that it’s Gena with an E. G-E-N-A-C-O-X is my name. You find me on LinkedIn. You can find, find me on my website, genacox.com. And if you want to download that little resource I was mentioning before, you can go to go to www.ginacox.com/25 ways.
Jevon Gondwe: Yep. And for me, pretty easy to find on LinkedIn if you spell my name correctly as well. But G-O-N-D-W-E is my last name, so Jevon Gondwe. And then my website influentialskills.com. Influential can be a difficult word to spell, so you might need a dictionary for that one. But yeah, that you can find me either way and you can connect with me there.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: For more resources on leadership training and development, check out the episode description or visit the shownotes on our website at trainingindustry.com/podcast. And don’t forget to rate and review us wherever you tune into the business of learning. Until next time.
