Ep. 032 - Why The Wrong Leaders Get Promoted

Welcome back to Brits Elite where we bring radical chase to the world of leadership episode 32 season three last week We talked about the trauma budget how organizations fund chaos put star prevention this week We're talking about why that keeps happening and the answer is uncomfortable We're promoting the wrong people the best clinicians become the manager the best manager becomes the director the best director Becomes the VP we take people who are exceptional one thing and put them in charge or something completely different And then we wonder why our leadership pipeline is broken here's what I've learned in the last decade Clinical excellence does not equal leadership capacity Management skill does not equal strategic vision and being good at your job does not mean you should lead other people Doing that job We've had a leadership famine in health care not because there aren't talented people But because we're selecting developing and promoting based on the wrong criteria today We're diagnosing why health care organizations keep getting leadership wrong Because leadership is a software systems is the hardware and if you promote based on the wrong code the whole system crashes let's go Friends bridge builders. Welcome back again. I am your host Dr. Jake Taylor Jacobs and today We're talking about some really really really important things and it was in the scope of truly developing the next Generation of leaders and I'm not talking about next generation based on age Talking about next generation based on position and ability. I just did a podcast actually my SPD 911 podcast and we talked about a concept called leeway and leeway is having the autonomy the freedom or the Authority to create change or influence change within an organization a lot of leaders think that position brings leeway But leeway someone has to trust that you not only have the best interest of the organization But you have the best interest in the person giving you the authority leeway is that freedom range that you get to be able to Levy change and create opportunities, but position itself does not create leeway just because you have the resume just because you have the title There's a lot of leaders that have accessed because of position, but don't have leeway access meaning you can create change You have access to budget you can sign off on on on a services you can fire people you can change policies That's where the leeway comes in and in this podcast or podcast as we call it leeway is something that we want to make sure that you develop no matter where you are gaining that favor because they know not only are you good at your job But that you're thinking of everyone else who depends on that job or that opportunity to be able to grow listen This season is nothing short of amazing. We're getting amazing feedback for those of you that helped us become the number eight business podcasts in the country I would like to say thank you if you're new to the podcast bread to lead. I just want to tell you one thing Welcome, I call everyone a bridge builder because the objective of leadership is learning how to build a bridge between different people A different generations people of different cultures people of different real religions your bias or your upbringing should not determine how you Lead you want to be a bridge builder that all types of people can bring that can come to you They can come over your bridge to communicate and you can come over that bridge to communicate to them And that's one of the biggest pieces that we want to make sure that as a bridge builder to understand the concept is collaboration Not isolation. Let's give to it today. Listen We're talking about something that I think is extremely important We're talking about Truly understanding that in health care specifically, you know, we promote the wrong people There is a leadership famine and in oftentimes and if you're listening from another industry oftentimes the people that get Promoted are just promoted because of proximity not really even because of capability It's just you were there longest you were there when that leader was going through tough times You were there when they come when they come sold with you or you heard them venting about someone else and by default You get the pity promotion. That's one version. We're like, hey, you're my guy I tried everyone else. It doesn't work. Let me give you a chance Then you have the other Promotions that are they sound good in theory They're really good at their job so because you are an amazing surgeon That must mean that you'll be great as a chief surgeon Because you are an amazing nurse that means that you should be a CNO Because you're amazing technician and stir process and let me you should be the director of stir processing That's not necessarily true There are phases of development that every type of leader needs in order to be able to rightfully promote Till the next space there are specific skill sets that are needed in someone's tool build to truly be able to elevate them to a place of True authority and true success that a lot of people don't take into account and I think it's very important for us to Recognize that we live in the space of what I call the clinical excellence trap and here's the pattern You have the best nurse on a unit you show up on time your your patients love you Your charting is flawless your clinical judgment is sharp so administration says we want to promote you to charge a nurse Congratulations, you just became a manager You are now not only getting paid a significant amount of money now you are leading your peers and there's in this exciting Except no one taught you how to manage nobody assist whether You even want to manage nobody ask if you have the temperament the communication skills or the system thinking Required to lead a team they just assume that because you're great at nursing You'll be great you so you should be great at leading other nurses and then when you get into the position You struggle because managing people is completely a completely different skill set the managing patients Patients do what you tell them to do well mostly unless except if you're my pops You know you go see the doctor the nurse and he did do his own thing. He's in a room right now That's what I'm talking about right now, but but and it's but your staff Your staff have opinions that have egos conflict and competing priorities Your staff sees you as a friction or as a wall that is stopping them from actually getting to their next level maybe You had the only position available you got the only position available to be a charge nurse And they know that there won't be any other positions coming soon So you telling them what to do or they're making you look good It's not in their prior it's not on their priorities list and You have your clinical protocols there. That's the easy part you Technically everyone is supposed to go based on whatever the protocols are but Leadership decisions now those That's messy You can master a procedure You can't master human behavior So you burn out or you become a tyrant Or you quit and go back to bedside And the organization says leadership is so hard to find no Leadership is hard to find when you're selecting for the wrong traits And this is the clinical excellence trap and it's killing healthcare leadership pipelines across the country Matter of fact, it's killing organizations across the country regardless of if you're in healthcare or not We promote technical competence and hope that leadership skills materialize and they they come based on osmosis if I just If they just observe or shadow someone doing leadership things that will pick up But the thing is if I don't know what I'm looking at I also don't know what I should be picking up So you're assuming that they even know what to pick up from a leader that they're shadowing Because nine times out of ten they don't they don't pick it up And that or a fact most people pick up the wrong traits of a leader being brash short with words fight or flight Pick it up or lose it This is the temperament when we talk about really creating an organization historically that has been done But when you look at the top organizations regardless of industry most of them treat their own company like a training university Look at the top organizations They build their leaders from scratch. There's always a next level of development training skill set processing Because you can't do one major you can't do one major training and think that that's it You have to have one training that masters with the next training that develops the next one They went a graduate from that there is something else for them to develop and grow in These organizations treat their their organization almost as if Oracle university amazon university chick filet university There's always levels to the development and if we get caught in this In this clinical excellence trap if we stay there We will continue to hire the best people matter of fact. There's the same That the best coaches in sports or not always the best players And in most cases The ones that are the best that what they do are terrible owners and coaches But the ones that are not as good as the greats or the hall of famous Those are the ones that become extraordinary coaches owners and gms. Why? Because there's a different level if I'm somebody who's used to being the star It's hard to take someone who had an organization built around them To get them to then understand what building a team looks like But if you take someone that was off the bench The 12th 13th man that person had to get up when the when the top leader came to need it to see That person had to go get water for everyone that was coming in that person had to play their role that person Understand the concept of team Reading energies reading people reading plays coaching people when you really want to be out there Now you're telling them what you saw to make them become better see these are the tandem or these are the skill sets That most people don't recognize are being developed So the person that gets the job first or get the promotion of the leadership first is the standout star When your best leader is probably your average ordinary Producer but they help everyone There may be more generic they may not be a specialist but they can do everyone's job And they can navigate people's emotions They know how to move around people they know how to push people to their extensor to their level of of of potential And so if we're only given promotional Roads to those that stand out You're gonna have an organization where that person is going to want everyone to stand around them Not build with them not grow with them not innovate Let me uh Tell you about an organization a system I consulted several years ago They were imaging leaders High turnover in middle management poor engagement scores Projects stalls culture eroding So I asked to see their leadership selection criteria And here's what they assess for promotion years of experience Certifications performance reviews peer recommendations That's all Here's what they didn't assess emotional intelligence Systems thinking conflict resolution Change management capacity ability to develop others They were hiring based on credentials and hoping for capability uh-oh hello somebody. I am talking to somebody now hiring based on credentials and hoping for capability And then they wonder why their managers couldn't handle the complexity of actual leadership Here's the truth The skills that make you promotable are not the skills that make you effective Being reliable gets you promoted building systems make you effective Being light gets you promoted having difficult conversations make you effective Being busy gets you promoted thinking strategically makes you effective We're selecting for visibility and credibility not for actual leadership capacity And then we throw these new leaders into roles without with zero training zero support zero fee bet loops And we expect them to figure it out That's not leadership development. That's That's hoping that somebody It's going to all of a sudden evolve like dornism dornism Just they're gonna evolve Go from a tortoise to an animal to an animal just out of evolution It doesn't work that way Even if you have a leader that is capable I like to come back to sports because just maybe just maybe I get somebody that understands sports enough where it clicks No matter how good the player is The player is still in subject to a subject to the coaches playbook There's a matter how good you are Coaches select players based on their playbook What works within their system So if you were to bring a new leader even if they were capable of greatness into a world that even that doesn't even have a playbook How can you how can you imagine that they'll succeed even Even in the new year they have offseason preseason where you're learning these plays and systems and processes and structure But just hoping that somebody who went from being a tactician or a clinician That all of a sudden is going to become a manager and know exactly how to rebuild that system Of the holes that you have without having any proper training to do it is a synod to believe that that could happen So this is the piece that we have to understand Because in this we can start to diagnose the true leadership famine We have Promotion structures that are based on tenure not capability Compensation models that force people into management to make more money No leadership pipeline infrastructure no assessment no development no succession planning Role definitions that blur the lines between management and leadership And then on the softer side we have Leaders who were never taught to lead just promote it and expect it to figure it out Let me give you awesome context. I said all the time. I said in the last season. I'm always going to reiterate this It takes three months for someone that is even capable to get comfortable in a new environment 90 days Three months. I didn't say pick up new skills learn plays process. I'm talking about just get comfortable knowing who to talk to No one who they shouldn't talk to no one who allies no one who are foes Learning the culture understanding people matter fact as a leader You shouldn't be expected to make any drastic changes in your first 90 days because you have to get a real feeling Assessment of people around you capabilities. Well who's willing? Who's not who has time? Who is there just to be there? There's so many things you have to take into account The first three months First three months just get comfortable The first year it takes a year To become efficient in a new process In a new system a year Four year to become efficient and efficient by definition means your ability to get the job done With little Problems or distractions Anything that's above a little problem or distraction you have to get help you have to have some oversight It takes 18 months to 24 months to become proficient in that new job that role If they already are capable They they were in the role before If they were not in the role before they've never done it before you can multiply that times two or three How long it takes them to actually get settled into the role Where they're comfortable making hard decisions. They're comfortable creating with strategic plans of growth They're comfortable rebuilding systems processes and policies They're comfortable with implementing or integrating new things into their department They're comfortable doing change management. These are all the things that make you or break you Then it takes 36 months and beyond to become a master at running that role That's what someone who is capable again Multiply that times two or three for someone who doesn't have any training or any experience in that role So we talk about it got to get past the figuring out the next one is there's no common language or framework For what good leadership actually looks like what standard are you holding your leaders to there's everyone have their own Typically when I go into an organization it looks like a smorge board of all different types of philosophies and and ideologies and standards and processes How can you run an organization you as the head of the organization everyone should be running your plays You're a language your lingo So if there's no common language if I can go to one leader in one department and go to another lead matter fact If I were to go to in your department and ask all your leaders the same question would they all say the same thing verbatim or would they tell me something different That'll let me know exactly where your organization stands We have cultures that value heroism over system building needing that one person so that one person's covering the weight of a full department and you wonder why they're burning out and leaving or getting any fish in A soft problem that's causing Issues is zero accountability for leadership development. It's treated as optional 90 central Get leadership development on your own, but when you get it on your own I want you to apply it here, but I'm not going to give you a raise for it or a bonus for it Invest in your own development, but I want the best of that development If somebody feels like they invested in their own development as a leader outside of your organization Not how to attend they're not going to be loyal to you When it comes to how to best use that new skill set that they learn here's the point I'm making Everybody typically around the world is human nature we all operate on the feelings of For lack of better words like an IOU system If somebody naturally does something for you whether they say it or not you kind of keep it tally You like me I'm gonna make sure I look out for them Maybe not at the same capacity, but you're you're thinking in your head you're trying to navigate that right What do you think the mindset of your your team would be if they knew that you were investing in their development for their future How much more loyal would they be to the organization They know that you're responsible for getting them better. They know that you you invested in their talent They know that you invested in their skills You're going to get your staff on average to stay or to five years longer Then you would if they feel like they have to invest in their own growth on their own Because there's no loyalty to you Because if all I'm getting from you is a paycheck In nothing else, but you want the best of me But all I'm getting from you is a paycheck not development not career pathways not exposure not experience not cross Collaboration There's not going to be any loyalty and that's exactly why we will always have a leadership gap into in a hospital system And that disconnect is that our hardware promotes based on past performance But leadership is about future capability Our software rewards people for being good doers But leadership is about making other people better And we're running a system Designing to elevate individual contributors and then asking them to multiply impact through others. It doesn't work that way A hard question I want you to ask yourself is do we have the infrastructure to identify, assess and develop leadership capacity The soft question I want you to ask yourself is do our current leaders know how to recognize and cultivate leadership and others Most organizations fail both checks And that's exactly why we have a famine So let's get specific Before we get specific I want to give a shout out to SIPPS healthcare Our health operations company that's constantly building new pipelines of of development and talent within hospitals all over the country And also our technologies thoroughbite design has been implementing the hospital systems And we're excited about our new software because it's the first software in the period of space that helps mitigate errors before they happen if you want to have more more information on that you can go to sipshealthcare.com And find out more information about that And in this segment We're going to talk about what leadership actually requires If you knew to this show This is a pot class not a pot class if you can't tell object or the objective of the show is for you to get information from us Take it and go apply it today I'm on your leadership during our goal is to create a million leaders All over the world that are in this space to create change that they can be Rautical change makers to ensure success For a health care system that's in dire need of amazing leadership Now I want to ask you a question What does Leadership in a health care actually require Not management Not administration Leadership If you don't know I'll give you Five things Five things five skills five requirements And it would be a great leader One Systems thinking Leaders have to see patterns Not just problems They have to understand how decisions in one area impacts outcomes in another They have to think in systems not silos most clinicians are trained to focus narrowly Master your specialty your unit your protocols Leadership actually requires the opposite You need breath integration complexity So if I'm going to promote someone I need to know how well do they think on a systems level Because someone that's in leadership Especially in our industry of health care You want them to be able to proactively think of cars and effect of every decision that's made in every hole That is created how that affects the entire ecosystem The second thing you need to look at and observe if someone actually have it as emotional intelligence You have to read people Navigate politics Managed conflict build trust give feedback that lands have conversations that matter Clinical training doesn't teach this and frankly clinical environments often punish it We reward efficiency incompetence not empathy and communication In leadership emotional intelligence is 100% empathy and communication Trying to trying to gather context Versus the content that's being displayed I understand that you see somebody frowned up But what I see is somebody who's out of their norm today I understand that that person snapped at you But what I heard was that they were hurting somewhere else And I want to dig down deep and figure out what is actually causing them to lash out at work What you see is someone continuously stepping over boundaries What I'm understanding and I'm recognizing is it's not that they're stepping over boundaries Maybe that they don't understand Why those boundaries are there See emotional intelligence causes for you to move your emotions to the side So that you can comfortably and confidently Break down the emotions of whatever you're dealing with or the energy or whatever you're dealing with To come up with a logical solution As emotional intelligence The third thing a leader needs that you should be identifying is change management Health care is in a constant flux Regulations change technology changes reimbursement model changes pacing expectation change Leaders don't just manage stability They lead through transformation And that requires vision Adaptability Resilience The ability to bring people alone who don't want to go If you don't know how to bring people along that don't want to go with you You're going to have a hard time leading Because a hundred percent of the time you're bringing trying to bring somebody along that doesn't want to change That doesn't want to comply And change management is looking at problems that have been there 20 30 years and realizing that your Nunez to leadership you cannot change something that's been there 20 30 years That's in the culture and the fibers in the fabric And the history of all the people that you're leading and expect them to get comfortable at changing and one or two months If I want to if I want to break a habit out of someone You don't break it day one You should pieces of it off a little out of time I like to compare it to sanctification process When you say yes To serving God And then there's this process that happens along the way that over time Eventually you'll become one with him shedding some of the things that you do wrong that you know are wrong off along the way That's what leadership kind is I understand the protocol. I understand what they're supposed to be But if I'm getting into leadership and I'm adopting And I'm inheriting a group of people that I did not choose that did not come through my system I have to build mechanisms that allow for them to weed out The things that are any fish and are wrong about them And to input the things that will make them better producers within our system The force skill set that a leader will need is the development mindset Leadership isn't about being the best It's about making your team the best That means you invest in people You coach Mentor You reiterate over and over and over again You create growth paths You build bench strength and building bench strength means As I have current talent that I trust I do not get lazy as a leader And say hey, I developed the leader now you go develop a leader know in that process I always like to say go three layers down Meaning if I'm a director of a hospital system I want to develop my manager I want to develop my supervisor and I want to develop the next team lead I want to go three generations down So I may be alone in managing and developing my managers But then I co partner and take 20 and take 75% of the role And the manager takes 25% of the role of developing our supervisor Then when it comes to the team lead You may give the manager 50% of the role and you get 50% of the role or 75 and you get 25 Of developing that team lead Now you have three generations that have been bred trained and developed through you That all know the ways of your playbook and your system So that wins when your leader leaves or when the person you depend on leave You have the next man up There's no better compliment that you can get as a leader to know That someone developed them became a great leader in your system And they went somewhere else and flurrest It only scares those that got lazy in their development of their bench talent bench talent That when someone says that they're leaving you get mad and upset because they want to grow in their career I love to see the thriving nature of an organization and where those leaders end up matter of fact There was a there was a study that was done on Xerox And Xerox had a metric that they that they measured And the metric was they knew the strength of their sales team Based on what their sales team leaders and their top producers did when they left Xerox They said you don't know The true strength of your development or your leaders or leader develop or talent development system Until they've grown past your organization You see what they do outside of the system or structure of the world that you curated So they judged the value of their company based on what their top producers went and did after they left Xerox Because Xerox knew there was only a limited amount of top positions that they had So the only thing that they could do is get the best out of that person in the time that they had And let them spin off to go do something that they enjoyed to do or something similar So they were able to truly judge the value of their organization based on the impact that it made outside of the organization And there's so many leaders that are scared that their top leaders are going to leave because you spent so much Quote on quote time with them But isn't that what you want Don't you want people spewing out and becoming disciples of your system in other places It shows the strength of what you curated matter of fact it will and it will attract so many more people to your organization If they knew that this place if you leave this hospital You can go any hospital in a world and get a leadership position because this hospital is known for producing great leaders Or this organization is known for producing great leaders You Want top top people to come from You and you judge a tree by the fruit it bears So what type of fruit are you bearing and what what what trees are they becoming That's how you look at the true development cycle within an organization You won't always have them stay there But when they're there why not get the best out of them Most new leaders have spent their careers being the star But leadership is about being in the business of making stars So even that transition of becoming a star To putting yourself in a position to make stars That's the difference You can't want to be the star and make a star You have to be willing to curate and create stars if you truly want an organization of stars And then the fifth insight That's needed for a leader is your strategic foresight Leaders Don't just solve today's problems They prevent tomorrow's crisis They see around the corners they ask what if questions they build infrastructures before it's urgent Your best leaders are the one that challenge you the most Because those are the ones that make the system better They don't become your yes man And this is exactly why Frameworks like our standby design matter Because you can't just tell people think strategically and expect it to happen You need structure methodology and repeatable processes that teach them how to think strategically And standby design our operating system gives leaders Imperioput of environments a proven system to move from reactive management to proactive design It's not just about operations It's about building the leadership capacity to sustain those operations So we talk about The problem we talked about the skill sets that are needed So let's spend the last function of portion of this pie class to talk about how we fix it How do we stop promoting the wrong people and start building real leaders Well first We have to separate the career tracks Not everyone should have to go into leadership to advance Create parallel paths You have clinical excellence track and you have leadership track and let people choose Accompensate both fairly Stop forcing great clinicians into management roles that they don't want just so they can make more money Find pathways that they can continue to do what they do And get better There's a lot of the leadership that you have in leaders right now in a hospital system That will bring more value to you back on the floor And the only reason they said yes to the management position was because that was the only position that we paid more So we really have to assess what our actual promotional track looks like And really get creative with how we design this promotional track The second thing that we must do we must assess for capabilities not just credentials Before you promote someone assess their actual leadership capacity Use real tools behavior interview situational judgment test 360 degree feedback Don't just look at what they've done look at how they think One of the best part about our next up talent development system that we that we implement into hospital systems We curate and we observe that leader in three dynamic ways We call it our eco evaluate their effort in their engagement Then we evaluate how they how they comprehend in their competence Then we observe them in the actual action to look up to true ecosystem of that leader What is the makeup of that leader you cannot judge that or see that just within the assessment or resume If to see it in action and your talent development system has to be able to promote and develop that in that process and observe it Objectively Third We want to build development on wraps Onwraps We want to build development onwraps Stop throwing people into leadership roles code create apprenticeships mentorships Leadership rotations where people can try it before they commit to it Let them learn in low-stake environments before you hand them a department If you already know in your mind Who would be a great leader next go ahead and put them in your minor leagues like baseball Hey, I see you coming to the big leagues So let me start giving you minor leadership things Let me start developing certain things and getting some of those natural kinks out Let me hire sips health care to actually develop our leaders And put them in an ecosystem or incubator that can help them actually grow and be ready for when it's time The fourth thing you're going to have to do to fix this problem is actually invest in real training Not a two-day seminar Not a webinar Real sustained Leadership development cohort-based programs executive coaching 101s peer learning action learning projects We want to make leadership development a competitive advantage not an afterthought And the fifth and final thing is we want to hold leaders accountable for developing leaders Your job as a leader isn't just to deliver outcomes is to build the next generation of leaders Make succession planning a performance metric Evaluate leaders on how many people they develop not just how many problems they solve If you're not building leaders you're not leading you're just managing This is the shift from dependency to design You've been dependent on Accidentally finding good leaders It's time to design systems that intentionally create them If I'm looking at my leaders now I want to promote them to a director I want to know how many people did you actually develop that became managers that left your facility That left us that became managers How many people did you build in your organization that can operate as a manager right now Because if we promote you to a director can you actually put somebody in place that can keep running it I want to look at the highest places that I put that I'm trying to promote my team I want to see how many leaders have you developed because honestly the highest level of leadership is learning how to develop other leaders That's the key because the uncomfortable truth is this The leadership famine Isn't a talent problem It's a design problem We have plenty of talented people We're just selecting Developing and deploying them wrong We promote based on clinical skills and hope leadership emerges and it doesn't We throw people into roles without training and expect them to succeed and they don't We reward firefighting in wonder why nobody builds infrastructure Because we never talked them how we rewarded them on their basis that they know how to navigate firefighting But here's what I've seen Over decade The organizations that get leadership selections right They're the ones that assess for capability They invest in development and build real pipelines They don't have leadership famine They have a leadership surplus They become talent magnets Because people want to work there because they know that they'll grow there And those organizations don't just survive change. They lead it Because leadership is a software Systems are the hardware And your promotion process is the is the manufacturing line And if you're building leaders based on faulty criteria you're going to keep getting a faulty product So here's the challenge I have for you this week Current leaders Look at your last five promotions Did you assess for leadership capacity or just reward for past performance? Be honest aspiring leaders ask yourself Do I actually want to lead or do I just want the title in the pay Because if you're not willing to develop others you're not ready to lead If you're somebody who states I'm not really a people person You should not be in leadership HR and executives Audit your leadership pipeline How many of your current leaders were actually selected for leadership ability versus clinical competence What does that tell you The leadership famine ends when we stop accidentally finding leaders and start intentionally building them And when we process like that We understand that building talent development systems are no longer optional It should be mandatory If you're in a health care space right now sips health care can help you do it We're doing it for hospitals all over the country truly helping them build their talent development system by licensing our system To the hospital system reach out to us if you want to find out more information I am your host. This is bread to lead the business of health care episode 32 Season three next week and episode 33 we're going to be talking about the culture Architects building organizations people do not want to leave or remember We've got exclusive mass class content this season you do not want to miss or head on over to bread to lead calm To join our community and get access Subscribe sure this within HR executive sure this with someone in your space that needs to hear it and most importantly remember I love you and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it and not only do I love you and there's nothing you can do about it You need to start looking yourself in the eye and telling yourself that you love you Because everyone has the capacity to be able to lead the question is How well will you do it? This is Dr. J. Taylor Jacobs is bread to lead and I'm signing out again Thank you for making us number eight on the list