Courageous Leader BLUEprint™ – 11th edition

Welcome back leaders!

This is the eleventh edition of our Courageous Leader BLUEprint™ newsletter. 

Every three weeks, you’ll get quick, thoughtful leadership insights without the fluff.

Read time: less than 7 minutes

This edition of the Courageous Leader BLUEprint™ is about empowering those you lead.

Specifically, the importance of empowering your team members through training.

Empowering through training is the courage to invest in the mastery of the people on your team.

Some people may wonder why this requires courage, yet I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard misguided excuses and hesitations.

↓ Let’s address some of the most common excuses and hesitations for failing to train ↓

1- If I train them, they’ll take my job

This seems valid, at least at surface level or with short-term thinking.

It takes courage to put people in a position to succeed long-term.

Ideally, the person who eventually steps into your role will be prepared to do so.

Failing to prepare your replacement is not only a disservice to them, but also a disservice to your organization and the people your organization serves.

Organizations failing to do so are giving up a competitive advantage without a fight.

When we train leaders, we emphasize the importance of developing “bench strength.”

The idea isn’t for them to take your job today, it’s to prepare the next generation of leaders to take on their new role when the time comes.

“True leaders don’t create followers. They create more leaders.” – Tom Peters

2- If I train them, they’ll leave for a better opportunity

Another valid point, at least at face value.

Much like the first excuse, this one is rooted in short-term thinking.

The reality is that when people acquire a deeper skillset, they become more marketable.

And yes, some people will leave for better opportunities that are currently available.

However, you can increase the chance of retention with the right culture.

Money isn’t everything.

People would rather work for a company that cares about them for slightly less money than one who sees them as a number.

If your employee leaves, I hope you have the courage to wish them well and help prepare them for the next chapter.

That employee may leave, but how they are treated on their departure matters:

• They can become a great referral for your business, or they can torpedo you

• They can be much more likely to return to your organization when the right opportunity becomes available again, or they can use their skillset to help your competitor

Losing qualified people is always a risk.

But the real risk is in tolerating a culture of status quo where people never grow.

“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay” –Henry Ford

“Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to” –Sir Richard Branson

3- Training them to do things I can do will take too much time

This is probably the most common excuse – a lack of time.

In particular, this is one of the main obstacles we see in leaders who struggle with delegation.

Training can no doubt have a short-term impact on productivity – both yours and theirs.

But, as their competence and confidence grow, so does their ability to complete tasks to your standards.

Think of the time investment this way.

• They develop career enhancing skills

• Once trained, they save you time by completing tasks you would otherwise have to do

• The compounding time for each task will diminish your stress and free you up for high-quality leadership activities

While the end result can be great, the process can be a struggle.

Never forget:

• You can delegate authority, never responsibility

• You must give them clear training, resources, feedback, and support

• You must be patient as their competency levels increase

If you still can’t get past the fact that a short-term time investment will yield greater long-term results, no judgment here.

Even though it’s a legitimate time waster, it’s actually solidly rooted in human nature and our craving for dopamine.

When we complete tasks that we could/should train others to do, but are “easy” for us, we get a hit of dopamine.

Think of this ridiculous example.

Your organization has put you in charge of determining how to communicate a major change in policy and you must give a short presentation on your plan tomorrow.

But there’s one problem: you have a junk drawer with multiple sizes of paper clips. Small, medium, large. The madness!

Instead of investing your time on your leadership role (determining how to communicate the change) you spend it organizing the paperclips (a task that could easily be delegated if it were even important enough to do so).

While the stress of the plan still looms over your head, you at least have the short-term dopamine fix of completing a minor task.

Does this sound ridiculous or familiar or a little of both?

Oftentimes the courageous choice is to give up the short-term dopamine and train our people.

The long-term rewards will be much greater if we do so.

4- I’ve tried training them before – it didn’t work

We hear this one too often, and it is because most training is akin to a shotgun, hope-for-the best, one-time approach.

The truth is that most companies go about training completely wrong.

In this case, we’re typically not talking about internal training. We are talking about subpar experiences from training companies.

Most times, training does not work for one of, or a combination of, two reasons:

• They hired someone for a one-time event, not an intentional process

• There was no associated follow-up, coaching, or accountability

Training works when it’s treated as a process, not an event.

Here are three critical keys from our process that you can use, even if you don’t hire a firm like ours to help you:

• Reinforcement

• Application

• Accountability

We view accountability as building people up, not just looking for who is to blame.

As General Norman Schwarzkopf put it, when the leader fails, so do their people.

Earlier we said you can delegate authority, not responsibility.

Oftentimes, leadership development fails because organizations delegate authority to external training providers, a keynote speaker, a workshop facilitator, a retreat host, an online learning platform, etc.…but they do not take responsibility for holding leaders accountable for results of the development interventions.

This is akin to setting your money on fire🔥

It takes courage to understand the concepts your leaders are being trained on, more courage to live those principles out in your own leadership, and even more courage to hold them accountable for living out the principles.

Training doesn’t just build skills.

It builds three essential, interwoven elements that help people build their careers while contributing to the organization:

• Judgment

• Decision-making

• Problem-solving

Training is not optional leadership work.

It IS leadership.

If you don’t build your people, the system will break them.

Who is one person you can intentionally train this month, and what is one skill you’ll help them build?