Let’s start with leaders
A leader makes or breaks the work-life experience of their team members and the results they produce. Research proves, most people don’t leave companies – they leave leaders. Leadership success takes two things: desire to succeed and the ability to succeed. Yet most organizations promote their best technical professionals into management and leadership roles, without ensuring the person 1) has the desire to motivate, engage, lead, delegate, coach, teach, manage the performance of others and 2) has developed the attributes and skills required to do it effectively.
The truth is some people don’t want to manage and lead other people (in fact, some people I’ve met in leadership roles, tell me they don’t even like people). The other truth is that you don’t know how to do the things it takes as a great manager/leader if you’ve never had high quality training.
The sad truth is very few organizations provide high quality leadership and management training to their emerging, new and experienced leaders. Many who do, didn’t get the ROI they were expecting because they did not set their people up for success by providing the follow-up coaching / support needed to replace the old habits with new ones.
Next, let’s talk about individuals at work
We assume that all people come into the workplace with highly developed emotional intelligence, communication skills, conflict resolution skills, time management, prioritizing skills etc. (aka: attributes and skills for personal effectiveness).
The truth is they don’t, if they’ve never had high quality personal and interpersonal effectiveness training.
Here’s why...
I am a huge fan of the phrase that “as children, we learn what we live and then we live what we’ve learned”. Childhood is where we begin to develop our attributes and life skills. Childhood is where our most deeply engrained habits of thinking, being and doing are formed. Unconsciously, we take these habits with us into adulthood and without even realizing it, we act them out in our relationships, workplaces, families and communities.
Some of these habits help us to create productive work-lives and work-places and some – get in the way of our “success”.
The moral of the story is that we unconsciously live out these habits - until - we consciously choose to change them. So, building on the phrase above: As children we learn what we live and then live what we learn. As adults we get to choose to learn to live differently. Once you’ve made this conscious choice to change your habits, you have two options:
Option One :
Learn through (a lot) of trial and error. What I call “learning the hard way”.
Option Two :
Admit “you don’t know, what you don’t know”, find someone who does & learn from them
Both are valuable and important ways of learning. However, from experience I HIGHLY RECOMMEND OPTION TWO. It’s more efficient, far less painful and the BEST investment you could ever make. For organizations it’s a survival skill and the only way to truly thrive.