Hello, everyone. Welcome to Real Talk with Tia and Jill. I am so happy that you're here with us today. So you all know that this is a live show. And today Jill is on the road traveling for one of our clients who really fits what today's topic was going to be, which is for lessons, leadership development fails and food companies. And unfortunately her internet is not working well. So I decided to come live, talk a little bit about what this topic is. Maybe we'll do it again in the future. But this topic was really important for today because you all know that we have been preparing for our annual leadership summit. And we have a session there called leadership is not a side hustle. And we're going to talk about why it's so important for leadership to be embedded into your company systems. And today was about these four lessons that we've learned, right, as we worked with organizations and lessons that organizations learn on why it's so important to focus on development for your leaders. So I wanted to just briefly talk about it today and make sure you have the information to sign up for our summit that's happening on April eighth. So I'm curious. Of course, I can still see your comments. This will still be on our YouTube channel. If you're watching it, hopefully it's from our website. It's still on our YouTube channel. And the audio will probably still drop on our podcast. So if you're listening through our podcast, hello, you'll hear my voice today. So I don't wanna leave you hanging on the four reasons leadership development fails, because I know that's why you're here and why this topic is interesting to you. One of the things that we hear all the time is, you know, my leader does not support me, or my leader is not a great leader, or my leader, even if you promoted someone, we hear, man, I promoted this person and they did so well in the role before, but they're not doing well in the role that they're in today. And it's because, and especially in the food industry, but we see it across all industries, is that we get promoted based off of our technical skill. So our ability to solve problems, our ability to learn systems, our ability to apply our technical knowledge. If we're really great at that, organizations will promote you. And then eventually a lot... Many, many people either burn out because they don't have the right leadership skills or they run and run into a position that they're not performing well because they don't have the right leadership skills to perform well at the role. You know, I know I just thinking about my career, I can think about a handful of people that kind of fall into this bucket of and they are so smart and so capable. but they are not great leaders. And many times it's not their fault, right? The organization did not decide to invest in their leadership skills before they moved them into a leadership role. They sort of expect them to figure it out when they become leaders or some organizations do provide leadership development, but they wait until people kind of get into this role. And then they haven't had time to practice or build up that leadership muscle. And so sometimes they fell, they fell at that role. I think last week we were talking about how leadership is a muscle, like these leadership skills, you have to practice, you have to work at it. You have to figure out how do I influence in these different situations that might be different than how my peers influence in the situation because the goal is to be authentic to yourself and to lead from your own sense of self, not someone else's. And that takes time and practice to do. And for leaders who are promoted because of their technical expertise, they haven't actually been practicing those leadership skills. So they lean into where they feel most comfortable. Sometimes those leaders become micromanagers. Sometimes they don't actually do the work of their leadership role. They're actually doing the work that they used to do, which kind of takes away from their team or tells their team that they don't trust them or they're not supportive of them. You know, and many times the leadership stuff is not taking place and therefore they end up not doing well in that role. Or they have a leader that identifies, oh, you need some leadership skills. Let's go and do that. Let's practice on that over the next year or two to kind of grow your leadership skills and your leadership muscle so that you can continue to be successful at the organization. And sometimes that works really well. So those are some things that we see and it's we're not kind of making it up or it's not just based on what we see, but there's also data out there. And so some of the data that we see that we wanted to share is that according to LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, leadership development is the number one priority for learning leaders. Yet only twenty nine percent of employees strongly agree that their organization invests in their career development. So everyone agrees that leadership development is important, but we see that organizations don't invest in that. Gallup research shows only forty four percent of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, which makes meaningful development difficult. because they don't even know, right, from an expectation standpoint, from a clarity standpoint, they don't know what is expected of them. And sometimes that makes it difficult to grow and to develop, especially from a leadership standpoint, because you don't know which way is your north. And so we see this, and we especially see this in the food industry, where we have this incredible investment in technical capability. I just think about being in food safety and quality when we say, We need support. We need support. We lean on HACCP, you know, HACCP certifications. Oh, we need to go to more technical training. And those things are important, right? Like we need those things in our organizations. People have to be technically sound. But no matter how technically sound I am, if I can't influence the organization, if I can't motivate my team, if I can't allow my team to work in a space that they have true ownership, we struggle right we don't have strong teams high performing teams and ultimately profitability suffers right we have a lot of waste we um productivity drops right all those all those things that we've talked about so today we're going to talk about four reasons why i'm going to briefly go go through them so that you'll have them and think about hmm am i missing am i missing something Well, the first one is that leadership development exists on paper, but not practice, not in practice. And a lot of times we see that because we have, you know, technically organizations might have some development tools. They might have performance reviews, right? That's working, that's giving you feedback and helping you with future direction. You might even have some individual development plans where your organization might do this for some people, might not be for all people, or they say, hey, if you, want an individual development plan, reach out to HR. We're happy to support you. So it exists, right? But it's really just kind of there on paper. Or you might have competencies, right? A lot of organizations do have competencies, but they really only show up on paper. They're not really there to help influence how the organization moves and works. It's not really like that guiding light for them. It comes up once a year when you do your performance review or when you look at your individual development plan, and then it's never revisited again. One of the research from Corporate Leadership Council found that fewer than one third of employees say their development plans meaningfully influence their growth. And so I've been in organizations where individual development plans, one hundred percent influence my personal growth. We talked about it all the time. It was one of the first conversations that you have with any any leader that you're meeting with for the first time. And many times you're meeting with your manager's manager and on up to talk about your individual development plan at least once a quarter or once a year, depending on depending on how they influence your your development and your growth. When in some organizations I've seen where it never comes up, it might come up when it's time for you to have a promotion. Then everyone kind of looks at it or it never comes up or you never use it to drive your to drive your growth. It's just their own paper. So it exists. Right. But it's not a part of your practice. You're not actually using it to drive growth. You're not actually using it to identify what skills are missing. either from the organization or from an individual person that you need from them to be successful. You really just have it so you can tick the box and say, right, yes, my organization has individual development plans. Yes, we do performance reviews. Yes, we do this. But in reality, you're not using it as an actual practice, as an actual system in your organization. So that's one of the reasons why, you know, leadership development fails within organization is because they're not actually using these tools the way that they are intended to, the way that they are designed to help drive growth. The second reason, and I talked about this a little bit in the opening, is that companies develop technical skills, not leadership skills, right? We lean so heavily on those technical capabilities, but we don't think about how is this person going to translate this technical knowledge into words, sentences that other people can understand, number one, that is clear, but also that they are inspired and motivated to move forward with that detail. And that's just influence, right? Like there's other leadership skills around how do I make sure that my team feel nurtured? How do I make sure that we're working well as a team? How do we make sure that our leaders are building relationships inside and outside of the organization? So that's reason number two. I know I talked about it a little bit in my introduction, so I won't harp on it. But this is a big, big reason that in food and other industries that we struggle with leadership development and why we find that it fails. I will also say too, sometimes organization will say, yes, we know that we've been looking at technical skills. So we are going to do this big workshop for leadership development around insert, breaking down silos or communication or change management. Those are some of the ones that we do here at Catalyst. that people are most interested in. And they do this workshop and then they go back to their lives. They go back to their work and they continue to heavily lean on technical skills and not leadership skills. And that goes to our first reason of leadership development is on paper, but not there in practice. Is that one big workshop that you do for your group, whether it's once a year or once a quarter is not going to actually shift your leadership or shift your culture if you're not actually practicing it in between those big moments. Now, we offer workshops. You all know that. And they are extremely meaningful. They can be transformative for your organization. But if you're not doing anything in between those workshops, then you're really just doing, it really turns out that it's as if it's just on paper versus actually a practice and your team is actually practicing those leadership skills to drive meaningful change. So that's number two, companies develop technical skills, not leadership skills. Reason number three is HR owns development instead of leaders. And so HR is entirely responsible for development. So they build the program, they manage the training, they track development plans, and none of that is really owned by the leader. What we say is that development truly works when it's owned by your leaders, when they own their development, when they're tracking their development plan. And then the company has systems to ensure that people are owning it, right, are owning it and doing it. So I told you earlier that I worked in an organization where development plans were a part of our practice. So when I am traveling to corporate, my manager is saying, hey, you need to connect with these people and you need to make sure that you review your IDP with them, you know, your individual development plan. And me and my managers, you know, looking at it before we go. And then they know that I'm talking with them when I connect with them one-on-one. My manager, especially early on in my career, is saying, hey, have you connected with these people? Go ahead and settle some time with them. I want you to review your individual development plan with them. That's early on in my career so that as I grow, I'm doing those things naturally as I meet new leaders. That's me owning my own development and really owning those development plans. You know, one other thing that we see as we look at HR really owns this development is that the leadership development might not be one hundred percent relevant to what you're doing. This is actually at the base of why Catalyst was created. Why Jill and I decided to create Catalyst is because we've been through leadership development. You know, I've had some great leadership development. But the problem is that it doesn't quite relate to the work that I do in food. And so I have to do what I call mental gymnastics to be able to say, okay, how do I hold people accountable when they don't report into me? Or even though I just went through this whole leadership development on holding people accountable and corrective actions and all these other types of things. But we know in food many, many times the function that's trying to move people forward don't necessarily have direct accountability to the team. So you have the influence in different ways. Sometimes development programs don't cover that. And it's really hard for people who never worked in an environment, has never worked in a plant, who's never worked at corporate trying to influence plants and vice versa. If you've never really done that work, it's hard to... It's hard to kind of visualize what happens or know what should happen or know how to shift development to support that type of work. And so when we created Catalyst, we wanted to make sure that we structured it in a way that people can come up with practical solutions. Solutions that they can apply immediately to the work that they're doing. And that it doesn't feel like extra work, right? It doesn't feel like extra gymnastics to be able, mental gymnastics to be able to figure out how do I do this in my role? And so we... We know that when leadership development actually works, it has to be owned by the leaders. They have to be able to understand what they need, right? And then tailor that development for it. We do this all the time, all the time with our clients. We help them develop their leadership development plans. We help tailor what they do for their people and for their culture. And that's when we see the most benefits. So reason number three that leadership development fails could be that your HR team owns all of the development without the involvement of the actual leaders that need to execute. And then reason number four, leadership development isn't treated as a business system. I've thrown in system a few times. This is so important. It really should be a business system. And it's rarely treated like a core business capability. Organizations track production metrics, safety performance, operational efficiency, but few organizations actually track whether leadership capability is improving. We talk about this a lot when it comes to culture. A lot of people say, well, what KPI should I have around culture? What KPIs should I have around food safety culture? And we always talk to them about, well, how are you tracking your leader, your leadership development? You know, outside of, oh, we did this training, check, check, check. But how are you actually tracking and monitoring and have metrics around how often your leaders are connecting with their team and their people and the type of conversations that they should be? Those are the type of metrics to look into. And every organization is different, right? So some of the metrics that one organization does around leadership development might be completely different than what you need at your organization. We help organizations take a look at where are they today and what metrics do you need to track over the next year, two years to understand how that leadership capability is shifting and how your culture is ultimately shifting. This is a big one, right? This is a big one. A lot of people say, which I don't really like this phrase that much, but it is true that people track what matters, what they care about most. And it's true about your organizations, right? That's why a lot of times we're trying to find KPIs to track things like leadership development and to track culture. Um, but the problem is when you're talking about human behavior, it's harder to track and the KPIs don't look like the KPIs we're used to, you know, we're used to seeing like numbers and are we above five or less than five, you know, versus. Which could be a number, right? Like how many times are your leaders connecting with their people each week? Have they actually had conversations about this specific topic? Um, you can even track what teams are giving feedback, what teams are saying which teams are staying silent. Just things that you might want to know about your organization, figure that out, and then treat it as a business system where you are talking about it on weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, just like you talk about the other metrics that are important in your organization. And I would say it needs to be more than your engagement scores that you do every two years, three years, right? It needs to be so much more than that. We talk about food safety all the time. Your food safety culture metrics cannot just be your audit scores, right? That does not tell you about your food safety culture. That is the same thing for your overall culture. That's the same thing for leadership development. It can't just be your assessment scores. first of all, they're a super lag metric. And most of the time on engagement scores, if you are starting to trend down, you've probably been trending down for a few years. It's just people hadn't actually marked that on your survey. Once you see those things start to show up on your survey or your assessments, most likely you're already down that path and it's going to be that much harder to turn the ship, right? To shift your culture back to where you want it to be. So reason number four, one of the most critical ones, leadership development isn't treated as a business system. Okay, so you have the four reasons. I'll go through them again so that you will have them. Reason number one, leadership development exists on paper, not in practice. Number two, companies develop technical skills, not leadership skills. Number three, HR owns development instead of leaders. And number four, leadership development isn't treated as a business system. These are four common reasons why leadership development fails within food organizations. But we want to shift that right. We want to shift and create this leadership shift so that we can start having happier teams, more productive teams. You know, we have a lot going on in the food industry and a lot of it is externally happening. We want people to show up happy to work. You know, we want people to be engaged and we're having a massive retention issue. happening that needs to stop, right? Otherwise, we're not going to have people to work. And food is so important because we're feeding the world. So we need people to be happy and show up in these roles. And we all want to be happy at work and thrive at work because that impacts our personal life. So we need this leadership shift. shift and our theme this year at our leadership summit is all around reimagining our leadership reimagine how we show up how we interact with one another how we build relationships how we develop our leaders and that's what we're going to talk about on the summit at the summit on august Like I said, this topic really flows into one of the sessions that we're doing called leadership development is not a side hustle. And we have amazing leaders talking about this and how they have really used leadership development as a business system and how they have helped grow their leaders, really incorporating leadership development within their organization, not just on paper. So we want to see you there. I'm going to actually put up a QR code and in the show notes for the podcast, I'll have a link. We would love to see you virtually at our leadership summit where we're going to have conversations like this and other conversations focused on how do I show up differently as a leader? How do I reimagine who I am as a leader to drive culture forward, to be a better leader and obviously to love the work that you do. So we're together April eighth. This is one of our topics that's going to be there that we're going to expand on. And next week on Real Talk, we're going to have a guest on Lawrence Harvey. He is amazing. He is actually going to be one of our speakers at our summit as well, that he really focused on unconscious and conscious bias when it comes to leaders. You do not want to miss this real talk. You do not want to miss this session at our leadership summit. His background, we've already put information out there about it, but he's been doing this for several years. His background is actually a police officer. And when you think about bias and unconscious, unconscious bias, right, that's a huge part of police training. And so he's kind of taken that and shifted it to think about leaders within industries. And we're so excited to have him on Real Talk next week. We're super excited to have him at our Leadership Summit. So please join us. The QR code is up. The link is going to be in our show notes that you can register and join us there. Okay, with that, I know we missed Jill today. I know she's probably listening or gonna watch this afterwards, but we are excited to continue this conversation and to see each of you at
