Expansive Leader Development, Driving Engagement!

Whether there’s an exemplary top-down approach throughout the organization we’re a part of or not, each of us will be able to achieve better results within our own areas of leadership responsibility when we earn genuine buy-in from the team reporting to us! This particular thing, as much as anything else we can do individually, will have a direct and significant impact on addressing the profitability that’s too often lost to a disengaged workforce.

When Cindy and I wrote what’s now known as our Emerging Leader Development course back in early 2018, I had a relatively narrow target audience in mind; not because I felt like that material we were covering was limited to a specific stage in a leader’s career but because I was so focused on providing tools for folks in those roles I had seen work so hard to earn promotions then struggle mightily with the different responsibility that landed in their laps. Throughout my career in both a large corporate environment as well as with various smaller organizations, I had seen great people excel in one role then run into significant roadblocks in their next role. Those roadblocks were almost always tied to the people they needed to lead - and I can’t say that I ever saw any tools provided internally that equipped those emerging leaders to deal with those roadblocks.

If you’ve spent any time at all around me and Cindy together, there’s no doubt you’ve noticed how much better she is at thinking deeper into just about every scenario we encounter. I generally live by the “hold my beer and watch this” approach (although I haven’t drank a beer for more than 20 years at this point) and she balances me out by considering all the possible ways my big ideas could result in a train wreck AND she helps me make even my best ideas better! Her view on the Emerging Leader Development course was no different… 

From day one, she saw it as a foundational toolkit that anyone with any level of leadership responsibility could apply to earn and/or increase the authentic influence they had with each member of the teams they led. After guiding hundreds of leaders, from potential supervisory candidates to business owners and CEOs, through that course, I’ve seen how right she was! And I finally took her advice a step farther by changing the description it to read:

“Don't let the name fool you! This six lesson course isn't just for Emerging Leaders. We created it to build Effective, Extreme, Engaging, Expansive, Energetic, Empowering, and Enlarging leaders too! It's designed to provide tools that ANY leader can begin to implement immediately so they can overcome the challenges they face as their responsibility becomes more about leading the people on their team than executing a specific task.”

If you want to have the best shot possible at capturing more profit through the “57% increase in discretionary effort” and “20% increase in individual productivity” that I’ve mentioned several times from the HBR article truly increasing employee engagement, I can’t point to anything I’ve ever seen that delivers better results! That said, I’ve never viewed it as the end-all, be-all - and that’s exactly why we launched our Leading At The Next Level program right after delivering the ELD course for the very first time… From there, we’ve been able to provide leaders with the ongoing support they need to address all the different issues they run into along their journey.

While those tools have served many individuals and organizations extremely well, we still saw quite a bit of profitability being killed through the recruitment and retention process so I’ll share how we’ve worked to fix that next time…