Strategic Support for Leader Development – AXIOM Insights Podcast

Scott Rutherford
Welcome to the AXIOM Insights podcast. My name is Scott Rutherford. This podcast talks about trends and best practices in supporting organizational performance through learning. In today’s episode, we’re talking about leader development, and a discussion that explores how what companies are looking for in their leadership programs and their leadership development programs has shifted over the course of the pandemic, and how leadership programs are being developed to fit the needs of the emerging new workplace. So I’m joined by two of my AXIOM colleagues, Herb Blanchard, president of AXIOM Learning Solutions. Herb is an industry veteran with decades of experience in L&D talent solutions and human capital management. And I’m also joined by Susan Franzen, Vice President of Strategy and Leadership at AXIOM. Susan works with organizations to define and clarify organizational strategy to align learning initiatives to strategy and to evaluate program effectiveness. This podcast comes to you as AXIOM recently announced a new offering called Curated Leadership Programs. As background – AXIOM has worked with organizations to support leader development over many years, though, as we’ll hear from Herb Blanchard, the type and nature of these engagements has shifted recently, over the past two years. And that’s laid the foundation for AXIOM to serve a more strategic role in the development and delivery of leader development.

Herb Blanchard
What we’re seeing now is a need for leadership, leader development was strong prior to the pandemic, it’s going to come back stronger, I think the data will prove that out. So now we’re having not just leader development, but how to be better leaders and a time of change how to be better leaders in a hybrid environment in a remote environment in a in an ever changing environment. And we’re having, we have this war on talent going on where it’s now absolute necessity that you become a better leader in the time when there’s a war on talent.

Susan Franzen
I think you’re right Herb because, you know, what we’re seeing different is that you have to lead differently in the future workplace, and you even have to figure out what the future workplace is going to look like. And that takes a certain level of leadership skills to do that, you know, everybody wants to have a custom solution. But what we’re hearing more of now is that people want to have proven processes, proven methodologies, proven content, but they want it tailored to their specific needs. And so I think that’s where the curated leadership piece comes in. Because we’re pulling from multiple proven models and approaches based on what the client is telling us they want and what they think is going to be best to get to their outcomes. So it’s not a prescriptive model where it’s one size fits all, but it is really about how do we help position leaders to be successful in the future workplace with existing proven approaches, and a way for people to interact with that in different ways in new ways that are a little bit more exciting.

Scott Rutherford
One of the reasons organizations are seeing the Curated Leadership Programs idea as exciting, is because it means each individual company doesn’t have to do their own homework to understand and navigate all of the potential paths, models and avenues that are under the large umbrella of leadership. Instead, they’re turning to experts like Susan Franzen to help them understand what’s relevant.

Susan Franzen
They’re sometimes coming with a particular challenge. Sometimes they’re coming and saying we don’t know exactly what we need. So there’s a very consultative partnering approach with this where we try to work with them to identify what are the outcomes that they’re looking to do? What are some of the beliefs behaviors mindsets that they feel need to change in order for their leaders to be successful in the future? And then we work with our internal team to brainstorm what are the best models and approaches that are going to get them where they need to be?

Herb Blanchard
On a number of occasions, Scott, we’re working with clients who think they have to do the due diligence, and they have to do all the research prior to engaging us in having that collaborative discussion. We’ve got a lot of the research from large consulting firms, including McKinsey, including Deloitte, including PwC, that have done all this research. And to a certain extent, we have, Susan, some of the content.

Susan Franzen
Yeah, we’ve been able to do a lot of that research and aggregate the content into e-guides, into other platforms, that then become the basis for facilitator and participant guides and for learning. So an organization can look at something like an e-guide and say we need this piece, this piece, this piece – and then we tailor that learning program directly into it or they might say, hey, that’s is great, but we’re also experiencing this other thing. And we can research that and come up with a good solution for them for that as well.

Scott Rutherford
One of the opportunities companies are looking to explore as they tried to meet the demands of the emerging future workplace is to develop a leader development strategy that engages new employee groups. Whereas before the pandemic, arguably, leader development may have been offered to groups of senior leaders or designated smaller groups of high potential junior staff. Increasingly now, organizations are looking to provide leader development to broader groups, including mid level managers.

Susan Franzen
I want to be clear that AXIOM can offer leader development at the executive senior leader level as well as the mid level and the supervisory level. But when we started doing our research about the market and what the market needed, and we talked to AXIOM clients, and we talked to learning leaders around the country, what we found was that there was not a lot of live-delivered programs for supervisors and and early middle managers.

We’ve got content that is scalable, so it can be tailored to the executive leadership space, but it can also be scaled to the supervisor space. And so what if we were to focus on developing a three or a six month curriculum for supervisors and mid-level managers that then could be tailored to an individual organization’s needs. And we’ve gotten some incredible feedback from that. In fact, one of our clients in Higher Education said that they searched and searched on the internet to try and find something where it wasn’t just self-paced eLearning. And not that there’s anything wrong with that. But a lot of times supervisors need to actually practice these skills. And so they came to us because one they had worked with us in the past and two, we offered something that nobody else seemed to be offering at this time.

Scott Rutherford
So what’s the experience of participants in this type of program? As Susan explains, these are facilitated programs. And so they’re led by experts with domain expertise, but also who have the ability to create a conversation among the program participants of conversation that’s designed to draw out the best from each of the members of the group, and facilitate rather than acting as an instructor.

Susan Franzen
Yeah, so I think it’s the difference between facilitation and training. So I’ll say that, you know, me talking as much as I’m talking on this podcast is uncomfortable for me as a facilitator who is used to just throwing out questions and getting other people to talk to, to me and to others in the room to surface the wisdom of the group.

And so, our facilitators have deep experience in leadership, in operations, in cultural shifts, cultural transformation. And so they’re not just trainers who stand at the front of the room and spout theory and hope that some of that lands on the supervisors and the participants. But we’re really about how do we introduce concepts in a new way, using some learning sciences, using some very unique approaches, so that the individuals in the program are actually interacting with that content and bringing in, they’re linking it back to their previous experiences, they’re finding ways to relevantly bring it into their current work environment. And they’re bringing real world problems into the session. A lot of people have heard the term “flipped classroom.” And we’re big proponents of that. So we do a lot of front-loading with pre work, to have people come into the program with a basic understanding of the concepts so that we can use time when they’re with the other participants to really leverage an anchor that and practice those skills. You’re not going to find us standing at the front of room or being on a Zoom call, and just you know, spouting theory, that’s not who we are, we’re really more about how do we get you to tell us how this works in your environment? And what doesn’t work in your environment? And then how do we help coach and guide you to find a way that a model or a process works for you?

Scott Rutherford
There was an article published recently by the MIT Sloan School of Management, called “Why Distributed Leadership is the Future of Management,” written by and I’ll give credit to MIT’s news writer Meredith Summers. I’ll put a link to this article in the show notes for this episode at axiomlearningsolutions.com/podcast.

But let me take a minute to share an excerpt from the Sloan article. It says, “successfully leading a company into the future requires adopting a strategic mindset and working in flexible teams,” and that “that agility requires a shift from reliance on command and control leadership to distributed leadership,”  which it describes as, “collaborative autonomous practices managed by a network of formal and informal leaders across an organization.”

So as we’re talking about leader development in broadening the leadership capacity of the middle management layer of an organization, as the Curated Leadership Programs intend to do, this notion of distributed leadership requires new leadership abilities at all levels of the organization. So what it’s saying is that strong organizations need to empower employees to be able to lead from all levels.

Susan Franzen
Organizations that are sort of built on a self-sustaining model, really focused on having people lead from where they are. And so whether you have a formal leadership title, or you’re an informal leader in the organization, we can develop those skills, because we don’t know where the future leaders are coming from, right. And if we’re not giving people the opportunity to be exposed to these leadership concepts, and to understand why what they do works, or why what they do doesn’t work, we’re missing the opportunity for leadership to grow as part of the organizational culture, and the future success of the organization.

So even if you look at the military, you know, the traditional theory is that military is very top down. But when you look at across that, it is very distributed. So people have the authority to lead from where they are to make executive decisions in the field, on the battlefield, in in the work environment. And so we want to encourage that in organizations as well, because their strength in that they’re strengthened empowering decision making and leadership down to the very lowest possible level in the organization.

Scott Rutherford
We’re talking mostly here about private companies. But as Susan mentioned, these concepts apply to other organization types, the military, and higher education.

Susan Franzen
When I work with higher education clients, I do focus them on trying to eliminate some of the hierarchies between faculty and staff, and tenured and non-tenured faculty, really try to get them to understand that you can lead from wherever you are, very effectively, you don’t need a title, you don’t need to have formal recognition, what you need are the leadership skills that make you stronger and help to move the mission of the organization forward.

Scott Rutherford
So as we’re talking about this type of facilitated live leader development program, I wanted to ask, what’s the time commitment? Not only how long do these programs take to complete? But how long does it take to get started?

Susan Franzen
Well, that’s a great question. So we, we do offer sort of what we call one-off programs where somebody says, hey, we need a program on communication. And we don’t necessarily take that at face value, we will parse out what exactly is happening because a lot of times communication is suffering, because there’s a lack of trust. So we try to get to the underlying root cause and address that in the one-off programs.

Where we really shine is in our longer term leadership programs where we’re using spaced learning. So we’re having sessions at intervals, where the participants come in, they learn something, they go back out, they try it. We also integrate social learning where they might have to go teach what they learned to someone else and explain it to them, and then bring feedback into the group, the next session to talk about what that experience was like for them.

So we do like that, at least a three month program, a one year program for mid-level managers and leaders is really appropriate. Supervisors, we’re finding three to six months is probably what the organizations are willing to invest in at that stage of their career. And we like to have cohort based programs. So that would be a group of up to let’s say, 25 people, who are going through the program at the same time. What that allows us to do is to build a program where they’re building their professional network at the same time that they’re learning. And so they’re able to have these other people who are learning things at the same time, maybe experiencing the same challenges. So they’ve got a built-in support group. And we’re also building leadership capacity, because now we’re expanding professional networks. So now I know who to go to within the organization for different things. If I hit a wall, maybe somebody in my cohort, or my peer coaching group has an in with that particular leader or that particular situation who can guide and advise me.

So you, it could take, I mean, we’ve done a lot of existing content, so we could plug in a standard program pretty rapidly, I would say within a month or so. But if we’re going to be really tailoring it, it might take us you know, maybe two to three months to get the materials tailored.

The other thing that I think is really important is we don’t like to plan too far in advance, because we want to go where the learner is and meet them there. So we have been known to change out topics, midway through a program because of what we’re hearing. For example, we had a client that we did a strategic planning session for them. And the leaders were really struggling with that. And so we decided, okay, what they really are struggling with is the change management piece, which we had not planned until the end of the program. So we brought that in earlier as the next session. So we just kind of flipped things around. We’ve also based on feedback from the client partner and the learners, we’ve sometimes completely scrapped a next module and built something new to meet them where they are with what they need.

It’s not like we’re building a one-year program before we even start the program. We’re building it just-in-time based on the learner need. And even if we’ve got multiple cohorts going through a program, we might be making adjustments in each of those programs a little bit differently. So for organizations that are looking for sort of a consistent approach, we can do that. But we prefer to be more learner centric, and be able to have that flexibility and adjustment.

Scott Rutherford
That all, of course, builds on the initial needs assessment, the initial intake, which going back to what Herb said, toward the start of the podcast, you know, the initial conversations that have driven leader development practice at AXIOM over the years has been based on based on where the need has been identified and defined.

Susan Franzen
Right.

Herb Blanchard
And I want to also mention is you and Susan talked about curated approach, and in the clients enjoying the curated approach. The other part of our approach, Susan, is the business of brain science, right, and the talent that we’re bringing to the table. So if you look at Susan’s team, you have PhDs, you have people with degrees in psychology, as much experience in psychology as they have in learning and development. So it’s as much about the human brain and how the human brain learns as it is, not just throwing in the word ‘leadership.’

Susan Franzen
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that’s how we make that distinction between a facilitator and a trainer, where a trainer is somebody who learns content, and then goes out and teaches it. A facilitator is someone who has this very broad toolkit is incredibly well educated, and is able to, to just – this is the art of it, they’re able to just kind of jab and weave with wherever the participants are going. But they’re leaning on education, they’re leaning on work experiences, industry experiences, and obviously, you know, learning and development practices, adult learning theories, brain science, and learning sciences. All of these things come together in sort of this magical art form that we produce in the programs.

Herb Blanchard
A lot of our clients don’t want to they take learning and development so seriously in the art of producing leaders so seriously, then it’s almost important for them, not necessarily to be known just for what they do, like retail company knowing for what they sell, but they also want to be known for producing leaders.

Scott Rutherford
As Herb says demonstrating the ability to develop leaders both contributes to employee retention, reducing attrition and turnover, but also serves as a point by which companies can make themselves more competitive and attractive to new talent.

I should also note that AXIOM’s leader development programs are delivered both directly by AXIOM to client companies, but also through a number of AXIOMs strategic partners, including some of the world’s largest professional services and consulting firms.

So my thanks to Herb Blanchard and Susan Franzen, and thank you for listening. I’d love to know what you think about this podcast. What topics would you like to hear about next? And would you be interested in joining me as a guest on a future episode? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me by email at info@axiomlearningsolutions.com. Or you can simply use the Contact link on the website. And please be sure to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Your ratings will help other learning professionals connect with future episodes. Talk with you again soon. Thanks for listening to the AXIOM Insights podcast.