Leadership Development as a Business System with Paul Doyle

In this episode of our Coffee Klatsch, Vince sits down with Paul Doyle, founder and partner at LeaderWork, to discuss how companies can manage their leadership training as a business system, not just a training program. Paul shares how his team developed a comprehensive leadership system with measurable results that can positively impact leaders at every level of an organization.

Top Takeaways:

  • Like any other business area, leadership training should involve measurable metrics to determine efficacy and progress.
  • The principles of leadership are the same from the CEO to the front-line manager.
  • LeaderWork is a 13-month program based on years of research that takes leaders through 12 elements of leadership with 90 specific tasks associated with them.

Transcript

Paul Doyle: I advocate thinking about this not as a training program, but as a business system. And so you wouldn’t have a quality system without metrics. You wouldn’t have a quote system without metrics. You wouldn’t have a new product development system without metrics. Why would you have a leadership system without metrics?

[intro sequence]

Vince Boileau: Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of our Coffee Klatsch. This is our series where we bring on people who we think are interesting to talk about business, leadership, politics or the community. Today I’m joined by Paul Doyle, who is the founder and partner at LeaderWork. And LeaderWork is a group of people that have gotten together to make leadership more effective. Paul, welcome to the show.

PD: Glad to be here. Thanks.

VB: I’ve been associated with this LeaderWork program for a little while now. I do a little bit of coaching with it, but for our audience who hasn’t heard about it before, tell me a little bit about it. What’s LeaderWork all about?

PD: When I was at GHSP, we had a very, very rapid growth rate, and the leadership team decided that there was no way that we could sustain the growth that we were having if we didn’t have a leadership team that was going to be able to support and deploy the plans and the intentions of the business. And so we made a decision to treat leadership not as a training program or as a topic, but instead as a business system. Something that we were gonna actually actively manage, have standards for, have expectations for, have data that we collect about how effective and efficient it is. And so we went on about a seven-year journey to identify, what are the behaviors that leaders do that contribute to a disproportionate degree of success? We’ve turned the lessons that we’ve learned there into, first of all, a training program that we call What Leaders Do. And we’ve also turned it into now a leadership development firm where there’s a group of about 24 people who, as you said, are interested in making leadership better. I would qualify that to say we’re interested in making it more effective. It’s not about good or bad or things like that. It’s about what works and what doesn’t work.

VB: I’m curious, as you were going through this discovery period at GHSP looking for what habits make up for a good leader? What are the dos that we have to be focusing on? What were some of the things that emerged that surprised you, or what were some of the behaviors in general?

PD: One of the things that we tried to do was not focus on maybe things that you might call “attributes” of people, but really focusing on very specific describable behaviors. When we did that, one of the questions was, “Well, when you talk about top leadership and middle leadership and frontline leadership, are they all these behaviors gonna be the same?” And what we found is that, at the element level—at the core level—that there are 12 elements that have 90 specific behaviors inside those 12 elements that are true at the CEO level, and they’re true at the frontline leader on third shift.

VB: This is a big program. It sounds pretty deep. Put us at ease a little bit, though. This is not a one-day retreat, it’s not an over weekend. We’re not gonna, you know, sing kumbaya and do trust falls and then come back better leaders. How long does this course take if I were to sign up?

PD: The program’s a year-long program, it’s actually 13 months. So we go through an introduction where you and your boss would come in and we would go through what’s the process, what’s the instructional methodology, what’s the expectation of the coach, how do they need to support the person when they get back. And then we take each element per month. And so there’ll be a day-long session during the month that 12 people in the cohort will come together in a collaborative kind of fashion, practice the stuff that they have been reading about in advance of the class.

VB: There’s a lot of leadership materials out there. LeaderWork is the only one that I’ve come across that bothers to take metrics going in and going out, right? We’re taking a process-based approach, just like we would managing any other portion of our business to try to see improvement here.

PD: I advocate thinking about this not as a training program, but as a business system. And so you wouldn’t have a quality system without metrics. You wouldn’t have a quote system without metrics. You wouldn’t have a new product development system without metrics. Why would you have a leadership system without metrics? And then, based upon the challenges of the coming year, where do we need to improve leadership? Well, now we’ve got feedback from the people who are experiencing it. And rather than saying, “We’re gonna generally develop leaders over the course of the next year,” we can put targeted programs. We might focus on the elements of Organize, Measure and Direct and say, “Those are the ones that we want to get better at.” So, again, think about it in a business system, not as a training program. And you have to have controls on it to know if it’s working.

VB: So Paul, this course sounds fascinating. I’ve already been through it and I recommend that other people go through it, too. If they want to sign up, how do they go about doing that?

PD: The easiest way is just to go to our website at leader-work.com. There’s a landing page there that would describe how to apply to get into the program, and you’ll be contacted immediately from someone on the LeaderWork team.

VB: If you’re watching this on YouTube, go ahead and check out the link section and you can pop right over to the website. Well, Paul, this conversation has been awesome. Thank you so much for joining us.

PD: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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