Improving YOUR Profitability By Building Better Leaders
I want to circle back to what I shared with you as we began this look at What's Killing Your Profitability:
Organizations of all sizes invest significant amounts of time, money, and energy in improving their processes with hopes of becoming more profitable. Sometimes this is based on the goal of becoming best-in-class, but sometimes it is just to stay competitive with customers or to attract talent. All too often, though, the things that can have the most immediate impact on profitability (as well as the lives of everyone involved) are overlooked or entirely written off because those things are considered to be intangible. What are those things? Those are the skills needed to build an organizational culture that produces world-class results and makes the best people in your respective industry beg to be part of your team! Those skills tie back to a word that's frequently misused: leadership...
Just in case I haven't been clear enough in addressing each of the issues responsible for killing so much profitability in every single industry we've dealt with, I'll stress once more how much of that lost profitability can indeed be captured by building better leaders! That said, this is not and cannot be done by poking the issue with a stick. I've seen far too many organizations attempt to pull a deck of slides from the Internet, read it as quickly as possible to their supervisors and managers before going through the rest of their canned message in the quarterly meeting, and call it done. That's not how any reasonable person would approach learning something we consider a hard skill, so why in the world would anyone think it could possibly build a better leader?
Truth be told, I don't think that even the ones who take that approach expect it to work! I'm also convinced that most of them don't understand the real impact each of the profitability killers we've looked at can have on the bottom line, how to measure them effectively, or how to truly teach the supervisors and managers on their teams how to prevent them. That's exactly what I want to give you a framework for as we tie this all together.
Cindy and I have seen a common theme through conversations with executives in large organizations. They've explained that while they have some solid leaders on their teams, many have come from different backgrounds and have varying views on what the organizational culture should look like. To compound that issue, each of them has far too much on their respective plates to hash out a path for calibrating their views with their executive peers or to create a package that could be passed along to every other leader within the organization. And that's precisely where we were able to help!
For more than twenty years now, Cindy and I have invested heavily in our own leadership journey. While a lot of that was just to survive in our roles early on, the last ten-plus years have been focused on how we can pass what we've learned on to others in a way that they can achieve measurable results. Since starting Dove Development & Consulting, we've worked harder than either of us ever thought we were capable of to create our own brand of experience-based leadership solutions that serve leaders at any stage of their careers. In many cases, we can provide a complete and comprehensive package to help address each of these profitability killers at all levels of an organization. In others, we tailor those solutions to meet the organization's specific needs-improving their profitability by building better leaders.
With that in mind, let's look at the strategic approach we use to address those profitability killers!
A Top-Down Leadership Approach
If the owners or executives in any organization want to have the best shot possible at improving profitability by building better leaders, they will need to be just as engaged in developing their own leadership and communication skills as they are in providing any kind of resource to the key people on their teams. For what it's worth, building a strong leadership culture and capturing the profitability that's lost without great leaders in place is no different from implementing any other type of initiative.
When I was tasked with rolling out one of the first Lean Manufacturing initiatives in a nearly forty-year-old facility, with the majority of the folks I needed to participate having close to that many years of service (and being in my mid-twenties at the time), I got a hefty dose of how getting the best results really does start at the top-because the top managers in the building had almost no interest whatsoever in supporting the initiative. This was something mandated by the corporate office but was very unlikely to get visibility regularly. And even when it did, productivity and budget numbers would still get far more attention! Unfortunately, that initiative required a lot of time and resources on the front end, with the potential for seeing a positive return later-assuming any changes were sustained. There were a few areas where I worked with the most progressive thinkers in the place and achieved some solid results. But in far too many departments or work cells, the people I was attempting to help dug their heels in to stick with the status quo, mainly because the supervisors and managers they reported to had no interest in the initiative themselves!
Through this process, I've shared quite a bit about the success I saw our behavior-based safety process achieve. While I won't pretend that we had complete support from every member of the local management team or even the corporate level, we did have enough to gain some significant momentum and make a positive difference in the site's safety culture. Even a few in leadership roles backing the process led to significantly more success than I saw with the Lean initiative, which had almost no support from the top.
When it comes to building a great leadership culture that permeates all levels of an organization improving profitability by building better leaders in each part of the workforce, the best approach is to always start at the top! The biggest challenge has been with far too many owners, executives, or even long-term managers believing they're already great leaders simply because they've been in their roles for an extended time. Friends, sitting in a garage for the next ten years WILL NOT turn me into a car, and being in charge of the business my daddy's daddy started a hundred years ago WILL NOT make me a leader! Here's where I'll insert a statement from John Maxwell again: "Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less..."
As we prepared for the fourth annual full-day leadership development event that we host locally (back in 2018), Cindy and I received feedback from a friend who was the CEO of a local business. He mentioned that he had never seen a peer group for executives and owners focused exclusively on building better leadership cultures. Like so many other times when someone commented on a gap in resources for their leaders, we went to work immediately to create a single session on the tail end of that annual event to provide him and other high-level leaders in the area with what he felt was lacking. Since that onetime session, we've launched our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank, which we offer publicly and to our corporate clients to provide ongoing support to owners and executives so they can be intentional in their top-down approach to leading their organizations. More recently, we've backed that with our IMPACT Leadership Academy, which provides mid-level managers and newer executives with the tools they need to capture profitability by becoming great leaders at that stage of their careers.
Through these intensive models, we've helped organizations realize a substantial return on their investment of time and resources into becoming better leaders! That said, there will be times when we can only control from us down. We've built programs and systems that can address every individual profitability killer we've worked through here, regardless of how anyone we report to chooses to lead-or not lead-so let's start working through each of those.
Expansive Leader Development-Driving Engagement!
Whether there's an exemplary top-down approach throughout the organization we're a part of or not, each of us will be able to achieve better results within our own areas of leadership responsibility when we earn genuine buy-in from the team reporting to us! This particular thing, as much as anything else we can do individually, will directly and significantly impact addressing the profitability that's too often lost to a disengaged workforce.
When Cindy and I wrote what's now known as our Emerging Leader Development course back in early 2018, I had a relatively narrow target audience in mind-not because I felt like the material we were covering was limited to a specific stage in a leader's career but because I was focused on providing tools for folks in those roles who I had seen work so hard to earn promotions, then struggle mightily with the different responsibility that landed in their laps. Throughout my career in a large corporate environment and with various smaller organizations, I have seen great people excel in one role and then run into significant roadblocks in their next role. Those roadblocks were almost always tied to the people they needed to lead-and I can't say that I ever saw any tools provided internally that equipped those emerging leaders to deal with those roadblocks.
If you've spent much time around me and Cindy together, there's no doubt you've noticed how much better she is at thinking deeper into just about every scenario we encounter. I generally live by the "hold my beer and watch this" approach (although I haven't drunk a beer for more than twenty years). She balances me out by considering all the possible ways my big ideas could result in a train wreck. She helps me make even my best ideas better! Her view on the Emerging Leader Development course was no different.
From day one, she saw it as a foundational toolkit that anyone with any leadership responsibility could apply to earn and increase their authentic influence with each team member they led. After guiding hundreds of leaders through that course, from potential supervisory candidates to business owners and CEOs, I've seen how right she was! I finally took her advice a step further by changing the description to read:
Don't let the name fool you! This six-lesson course isn't just for Emerging Leaders. We created it to build Effective, Extreme, Engaging, Expansive, Energetic, Empowering, and Enlarging leaders too! It's designed to provide tools that ANY leader can begin to implement immediately so they can overcome the challenges they face as their responsibility becomes more about leading the people on their team than executing a specific task.
If you want to have the best shot possible at capturing more profit through the "57% increase in discretionary effort" and "20% increase in individual productivity" that I've mentioned several times in the HBR article by truly increasing employee engagement, I can't point to anything I've ever seen that delivers better results! That said, I've never viewed it as the end-all, be-all, and that's exactly why we launched our Leading At The Next Level program right after delivering the ELD course for the first time... From there, we've provided leaders with the ongoing support they need to address all the different issues they run into along their journey.
While those tools have served many individuals and organizations exceptionally well, we still saw quite a bit of profitability being killed through the recruitment and retention process, so we've worked to fix that as well...
