Paul Doyle from LeaderWork joins us to discuss the often-overlooked blind spots in leadership. Drawing from his extensive experience, he highlights practical ways leaders can overcome common challenges and improve their effectiveness.
Top Takeaways:
- Practical Blind Spots in Leadership: While many leadership resources focus on personal traits and motivations, Paul emphasizes that the real challenge is understanding the specific tasks and accountabilities of leadership. Many leaders struggle because they don’t have a clear grasp of what their work entails day-to-day, beyond theoretical concepts.
- Cumulative Learning and Integration: Leadership training often feels fragmented, with concepts that don’t clearly connect and work together. Paul advocates for an integrated approach where leadership is understood as a system with key branches. This approach helps leaders see how each aspect of training fits into a larger framework, promoting continuous learning that builds upon itself.
- Effectiveness and Efficiency Metrics: Paul highlights the importance of measuring both effectiveness (meeting goals) and efficiency (minimizing resource use) in leadership. Establishing these metrics is crucial for continuous improvement and creating a leadership system that evolves over time.
Transcript:
Vince Boileau: Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of our Coffee Klatsch. This is our series where we bring in people that we think are interesting to talk about issues in leadership or politics or the the community. And today I’m joined by Paul Doyle, who is the founder and partner at LeaderWork. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Doyle: Well, thank you. It’s good to be here.
VB: This is part two, by the way, in our series about leadership. And one of the questions I’ve been pondering is about blind spots in leadership. So there’s a million point two, if my math is correct, books about leadership.
PD: [chuckles]
VB: Let’s just pretend for a second that I’ve read them all. I’m probably an excellent servant leader. I’ve got that down pat, but I’m still probably dealing with issues. What are some of those blind spots? Because the books, they’re not solving the problem, not solving the practices. What are maybe some of the issues that I’m running into on a daily basis that books aren’t solving?
PD: It’s a great question. The impression that I’m left with after these things is that there’s a lot of thought about who the leader is as a person. When I think about what it takes to be a leader, there’s certainly a component that says leader ought to know who they are, but I would never counsel a person to try to be anything other than their genuine self in terms of their personality.
When I was at GHSP, we did a lot of research on which leaders were succeeding, which leaders were failing and why. Most people failed in leadership roles because they didn’t know what the work was. I gave a talk once at an engineering manufacturing company in Tacoma, Washington about the principles of participative management. And I had a young man come up to me afterwards and he was like, “That was awesome. Loved it. I’m fully sold on this… What do I do tomorrow?” And I realized then that the missing piece was the tasks, practices, responsibilities and accountabilities. What is the work that a leader does? Not why do they do it or how they’re motivated to do it, but what are the tasks? And so the LeaderWork program is the synthesis of 40 years of asking that question about the young man who said, “What do I do?”
We had a young man in China when we were doing this with our operation in Qingpu, China. And he had a real interesting point. He said, “I’ve been to 100 leadership training classes in my career. And they’re like leaves on the ground in the fall. They’re all there and they’re all over the place and they’re a mess and I have no idea what tree they came from. But now what you’ve done with this program is you’ve told me leadership is the tree and it has 12 branches. And I know each one of those leaves, what branch to put that on. So now when I go to a training program, I can say this class is gonna help me to communicate better or direct better or develop people better.”
But if learning isn’t cumulative, if you go from learning a thing in one book and think, now I read a different book and I have to learn or do a different thing, I think it gets to be confusing. So when we were at GHSP, we decided that a standard, a consistent set of expectations that then we can go on a journey of learning how to do that thing better was a better way to approach the question.
VB: When I took the course, I found it fascinating when I got to topics like measure, right? “Lagging” versus “leading” metrics for our organization and really starting to map those out along our process was something that we’d never considered before.
PD: Metrics are tough in every area, but they’re critical in every area. If you’re gonna get into any sort of a “Plan, Do, Check, Act” cycle where you want continuous improvement, somewhere in there, you have to get feedback about the effectiveness and efficiency of what you’ve done. You brought up “leading” and “lagging,” but I would tell you the two that precede that are, “Do you have measures that describe the effectiveness of your work? Did you get done what you said you were gonna get done within the expectations?” And the second is efficiency. “Do you have measures that tell you, did you do it with the minimum amount of resources possible? What controls do you have on the work that tell you if it’s effective and efficient and to the greatest extent possible leading versus lagging?” Those are tasks that we can coach people on how to develop them for their teams.
VB: It’s hard to carry them through. If I’m in an organization that maybe hasn’t looked at this before, what are some things that I can do? You know what I mean? How can I go about tackling some of these blind spots?
PD: Leadership is not a training class. It is a business system. But it’s — like all business systems, they have to operate like gears. They all have to mesh together to work. So two nights ago, I was in Detroit and I was asked to kind of give a keynote speech to a company meeting. And I was halfway through the presentation describing LeaderWork when I realized, “Huh, I’m setting up the CEO, cause I’m up here telling the whole company what good leadership is all about. And they may or may not be doing these things.”
To his credit, what the CEO did is he came up and he said, “This has been good information. One of the reasons we brought Paul is because on our employee surveys, we got feedback that our leadership is not one of our strengths. Now we need to learn more about that. And one of the things we wanted to do was start that conversation by bringing in someone who can help us give us content to think about.”
VB: I love that. The idea of just a humility to say, hey, as an organization, we feel like our leadership is not a competitive differentiator. Maybe it could be. And what are we missing? Maybe taking a look and turning the lane and looking at that assessment.
PD: I fully believe that leadership is a differentiator in an organization. And that leader of the company I was talking with, rightfully just said, “Listen, we don’t have all the answers, but we’ve got the question and we have the intention to get better. So let’s go on this journey together.”
VB: Paul, I really wanna thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate it. To see my previous video with Paul, go ahead and check out boileau.co and click on the coffee cup and you’ll find all of our Klatsch videos. Paul, thank you.
PD: Happy to be here. Great conversation, thanks.
