Stop Producing Managers and Start Producing Leaders

I was recently in a store when I heard a manager speaking with one of his staff members. The tone of this young manager was so reminiscent of an attitude I wrote about in a blog back in October of 2017. It was called, Employees Are a Dime a Dozen. And in that article, I talk about how managers relate with staff members, with their team members, and treat them with such levels of disrespect sometimes that it affects the whole operation. Aside from the attitude of the manager, there are some real inherent risks to your business when you produce managers and not leaders. And on Marc Haine Live, Welcome to Marc Haine Live Episode 22. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up some core skill sets to help them work on their business, not just in their business. I'm your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. Thank you so much for joining me here. And as always, you can follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and I played a little bit with TikTok but not really. I'd really like it if you would throughout our conversation today drop your own thoughts and comments in the box below so people can benefit from your experience as well. And of course, if you like what we're talking about today, please go ahead and click the thumbs up button and ring the bell. As anyone with any kind of experience will tell you, leading people is so hard. You have to adapt your communication style to the personality types of the employees. You have to shove whatever's critical to you at the moment, whatever, whatever's on your agenda, whatever crisis you're in the middle of, you have to shove that aside while you make the issue your employee's having as important to you as that person is to you. And that's a challenge. Add to that that you have always got to be the picture of decorum and patience throughout the whole process, throughout the whole transactions. These are things and well, I would say these are awarenesses and skills that one picks up through experience. In my 35 years as a leader, I had to learn it. I had to learn it the hard way. But it's not necessarily the case where leaders, when they get promoted, don't have to do it the hard way. There is such a thing as training. And yet, we still promote people who are great performers. I mean, there's no doubt about it. You see somebody who's rocking their world and you think, this person, if I promote this person, maybe they'll rub off on the other people. But it's plain to see that not Even though they're top performers, the top performers don't necessarily make great leaders. And it's unfortunate that most of us in leadership positions today will probably put your hand up and say, I was never trained. I just kind of got into it and I was expected just to perform. We don't train people to be great leaders. So, I'd love to know from you our question of the day. So, what was it like for you when you first got promoted to a position of responsibility? Put your comments in the comment box. Please share because this is really interesting. When I've done speaking to associations and to organizations, I will ask leaders and managers how many of them were actually trained in preparation for their role as a leader? And virtually no hands ever go up. I remember personally, I remember my first role as a manager. I was working at a fast food chain. I can't really say what it is. I don't think I can say what it is because the double arches will give it away anyway. But I was promoted, I felt, because nobody else wanted the job. I was 18 years old. I was three years into my job. I thought, and I thought you know them asking me if I wanted to become a manager was kind of a rite of passage. I thought this was a magical cure to me developing. I thought you know if I become a leader automatically I'll be developed. I'll get more out of it and so on. What I didn't realize was as much as I thought it was going to be easy, it. It was such a big challenge. I mean, I thought at the time that I had worked with my team for well over 3 years. We knew each other. We knew how we worked. We knew our personality. We knew our strengths. We knew our weaknesses. And more than that, my team knew me. And I thought this was going to be a cinch. I figured my team would support me and my team thought I had their backs. What that meant to each of us was entirely different. The definition of what that meant was entirely different. They thought I would have their back in different ways than I knew I could give them and watch their back. And I thought that they would support me better than they thought they could. It was tough. It was really tough. And as a brand new leader, It was a really tough adjustment to make. And without leadership training, I was out there on my own. I went from being a pushover thinking, hey, everybody's my friend. This is going to be easy. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be fantastic, to turning into a tyrant because I felt people were taking advantage of me. Nobody was listening. And gosh darn it, they were going to do it my way. As it turned out, as skilled as I was in my job, that got me the promotion in the first place, I was horrendously unprepared to take on the leadership role. It was terrible. And so, I had to adapt and I had to learn the hard way. Just as a little reminder, I do want to just remind you that today's episode is brought to you by the Speaker Presentation App, which is an app that I created for speakers and presenters to be able to keep them from breaking the fourth wall. Go ahead and check out the website that you see on the screen. The fourth wall is something that I learned in theater, but it pertains to speaking and doing presentations as much as it does speaking and presentations. So, go ahead and download it. It is available on iOS and Android-powered devices. And it is at the App Store and on Google Play. So, visit speakerpresentationtimer.com. So, you have a great performer. You think to yourself, it would be awesome if the rest of the team could perform like this person does. You promoted her but then nothing happened. Even worse, you started to see conflict and performance issues all through the team, not just through Not just through her performance but through the performance of the whole team. Hello! Good morning, Anna! Thank you for popping in. It's so nice to see you. Anna has been virtually on every broadcast I think since number 8. Anna, thank you so much for popping in. It's so nice to see you. I hope you get a lot out of this as well. Anna is a leader in a golf club as the Director of Food and Beverage. And she does an awesome job with leading. And I know that this actually, this episode came out of a conversation I had had with Anna in that she knows what it's like to have ineffective leaders leading her, right? So, what I'd like to do today is I'd like to talk about some things that you can do to turn your great performers into great leaders. First of all, if you were to hire an electrician, if you had an electrical company and you wanted somebody to help, you needed the extra help, you had a job to go to, would you just hire somebody off the street and say, hey, go wire the house? Chances are no, you wouldn't. But yet we'll take somebody, again, great performer, and we'll say, we want you to become a leader. Right. And we don't train them. So how do you expect them to perform at an optimum level if you don't train them? You recognize this person was a wonderful team member and an excellent contributor to your business. I mean, that's the reason why you promoted them. And I think it's really essential that when we do this, that we treat them as such. We give them validation that we went to them and said, We really want to promote you. Could you please? Would you take the job? We love you. We love what you do for our business. We want to reward you. We want to give you the extra responsibility. But then, it's incumbent on us as leaders to invest in them and get them trained as leaders, not as managers, as leaders. And I think it was Stephen Covey who said, that managers manage things, leaders lead people. I hope I attributed it to the right person. I'm not sure if I did. And that gives me an— that's an interesting definition. Managers manage things. So managers will manage schedules, managers will manage job tasks, managers will manage equipment maintenance and repairs, even though they might not do the work. They manage those portfolios. But they lead their people. They lead their people. And it's essential that when we promote people that we give them that skill. Point number 2. I've seen managers who have higher expectations for the people that they lead than they do for themselves. And I think it is really important that managers and leaders walk the talk. Model that behavior you want from those that you are leading in your teams. Part of the issue I see is that in many organizations, even though we talk a good game behind closed doors, when a crisis hits us, we vocalize and we act entirely different. I have seen the nicest managers in front of house standing there being so nice in front of the customers. But then behind closed doors, they're cursing, they're disrespecting, they're saying awful things. And so, we need to be able to talk about our team members even when nobody is watching. With a level of respect and with a value towards their contribution. It is so easy in a manager's meeting, and I've seen this time and time again. Oh well, Sally just really sucks. She's so stupid. She doesn't get it. Well, Steve, you're gonna have to do something about that girl. Right? And then, I can't help but wonder if you're a junior leader, in this team, how you face that employee afterwards. I cannot believe for a second that somebody can honestly behave one way behind closed doors and have feelings one way and not have it manifest itself when that person is facing her. If behind closed doors we're talking about Sally, about how much she is such a loser, and then we go face to face with her, are we in a mindset? Are we in Are we prepared to help Sally on her journey within our business? Or have we just given up? And a lot of that comes in those vocalizations. And I think as leaders, it's incumbent upon us to lead those conversations. It's incumbent upon us to set those standards of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable because it is way too easy. I hope this makes a little bit of sense. I do cover a lot of what I'm talking about right now in my upcoming book, Lights! Camera! Action!, Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theater, which is due out in November. I actually just signed off on the final proofs. I'm so excited about it. And the book is around operational excellence. And I use the examples of live theater to highlight business practices that I think are show-stopping, if I can use that phrase. So in the meantime, if this is of value to you, please feel free to click the like button and share it with someone who could benefit from this information. I can't tell you how many times I've done a presentation in front of a group of people, a group of employees, and the comments come back. And the comments are such that, oh, I wish my boss was here. Oh, my boss needs to hear this. Or I have people who need to hear this message. I wish they were here. So go ahead and share the information. It's good for you. It's good for them. And from that, we can then share our own experiences and we can share our own lessons. So point number 1, point number 2, point number 3, really important that you evaluate and invest in your own capacity. I think it's important that you take on the mindset. most leaders do is that I won't ask my team to do anything I wouldn't do. By investing in your own development, by looking at how you do things and saying, what can I do better? You show your team how important being a lifelong learner is. By going to your team members and having them contribute to solutions teaches them That everybody is part of a solution. It's not just because you make all the decisions because you wear the tie or you're wearing the suit or you have the corner office or whatever. A lot of these people have so much information because they're grassroots. They're working with the people day in, day out. And so you could take advantage of that. And it proves that you have a level of humility. That they get to emulate as they become leaders. When we turn around and say to our leaders, let's solve the problem together, you not only eliminate them being dependent on you as a leader for all the answers, but you empower them to say, I trust you to come up with solutions. So, let's do it together. And that brings me to my final point. Be there as a coach and a mentor. Your new leaders will face situations that they've never had before. They'll face— they'll be face-to-face with things that they never imagined would ever happen to them. Things that they don't see when they were just an employee. And it's important that we take the time to sit with them, to meet with them, to get them to understand certain things that happen. And so being a trusted person that they can talk to, to confide in and get advice from will make such a huge impact in the future of their abilities. It'll help with their development over the long term and being able to sit down. And I truly believe that annual reviews, making time once a year for your team is not good enough. You need to be working on a weekly basis with your team, setting goals, setting objectives, brainstorming, finding out what's going on. And Simon Sinek said it best. He was talking about empathy and he said that when a lack of empathy is When you go to somebody and you say, John, your sales are really low. Get them back up or you're fired. As opposed to, hey, John, I noticed that your sales have dropped the last quarter. Is there anything I could do to help? Is there something wrong? Can we sit and talk? Can we figure this out? Is a much better approach. And you can do this with your leaders. I know from my own personal experience, when I became a leader, I felt abandoned. I felt like I had nobody to turn to. I had the type of manager who cursed everybody up and down. So, he definitely didn't have an open-door policy. And it was a really tough adjustment for me to make. So, the 4 points I covered today in today's video is train your new leader. Make a commitment. Make a plan when you decide to promote somebody. And then, you sit them down and say, John, I want to promote you. And here's how we're going to get you up to speed. Get them trained. Invest in them. One of the best ways I suggest that people get new leaders up and going is I suggest that you enroll them in Toastmasters. It seems a little bit far-fetched, but Toastmasters will teach confidence. It'll teach people how to get their voice. And by doing that, You will give them a skill that they don't otherwise have. Point number 2, walk the talk. Whatever you suggest for your team members, you have to walk the talk. You have to be the role example. You have to model the behavior that you need from your team. If you want everybody to be on time, it's just not good enough anymore to yell and scream and say, be on time! Be on time! You have to be on time. If people are forever waiting for you because you think, oh, okay, they'll wait, they'll wait. I'm the boss. It doesn't really matter. It does. You set the tone. And then point number 3, invest in your own capacity. Do things that build you up as a better mentor and a better coach. And of course, that's point number 3, is to be a coach, and a mentor. And there's nothing more rewarding at the end of the day. I remember when I first came to Alberta actually back in 1999. I was working at a casino. I remember sitting down with my team of supervisors and I thought, I said to them, I said, my definition of success as a leader is the legacy I leave behind. It's the fact that I remember I had one particular supervisor and she gets so frustrated over people and how they thought about things. They They, they, uh, she, she got frustrated with, um, with the interpersonal conflicts that she kept seeing all the time. And I would sit down and I, I would always use the word perception. What is their perception? This is your perception. What's their perception? And I remember she came into the, into my office and she says, I know it's perception, but I'm so tired of hearing that it's perception. But it was a lesson that she That's what she took and she took on and it carried her through her career. If this has been helpful, why don't you give me a thumbs up if this was of value to you? And as always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, please feel free to book yourself on my calendar. The link is below. It's meetme.so/MarcHaine. Marc Haine. And set up 30 minutes. I'd love to get some time with you. We'll set up a Zoom call. We'll get some FaceTime. Zoom time. We'll get some FaceTime on Zoom. Ah, technology. But do it. There's no guarantee that I can help. But just having somebody to talk to, somebody to brainstorm, somebody to kind of listen to what you have to have, what you have, what you're going through, I might be able to lend some insight. And if I can't lend this insight myself, I certainly know people who can. As always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so, why don't you hit the subscribe button down below? That'll give you first dibs whenever I bring you some fresh content. And it, you know, I'm hoping that I can give you some more information that will help you You work on your business, not just in your business. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and dare to be the exception.