Effective Leadership

Effective leadership is something every organization needs and we’ve known about the art and science of effective leadership and human team management for decades.

But yet there’s a gap between people in leadership positions knowing and doing. And it begs the question, why? Why is it so hard? What is standing in our way?

Those are a few of the things we’ll explore with Dr. Margie Oleson. 

What You’ll Discover About Effective Leadership:

* How senior management often leaves effective leadership to chance

* The 3 tactical things needed for more effective leadership

* The perils of meeting overload

* How clarity around goals reflects effective leadership

* The 3 things you need to have clarity around goals

* And much more

Guest: Dr. Margie Oleson

Margie Oleson helps business leaders crush their goals by installing processes and habits for better clarity and alignment among the top team. She is a dynamic speaker and leadership expert who shares knowledge from her doctorate in organization development and decades of experience working with leaders and groups in many industries and companies.

 She recognizes that companies aren’t set up to develop leaders or help them adopt the right leadership skills and behaviors. They are left to ‘make it up as they go – learning from past leaders… who were left on their own as well. Having leaders who know how to lead high-performing teams is the greatest strategic advantage for any organization – remembering Wickman (Traction): ‘As goes the leadership team, so goes the company.’

At the heart of her legacy is Top Team Accelerator™, a transformative force driving leadership development and cohesive, high-performing top teams… with changes that last in the future. She also helps leaders fix their meetings, use the Working Genius assessment to improve planning and execution, and right-size interactions across departments to break down silos and increase clarity and alignment.

 Navigating diverse industries from aeronautics to fintech, Margie’s client roster reads like a global who’s who, helping redefine companies in Financial Services, Health Care, Manufacturing, Retail, Higher Education, and Nonprofits / Government.

Related Resources:

If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes.

Contact Dr. Oleson and connect with her on LinkedIn and YouTube.

And be sure to check out her consulting website and her Top Team Accelerator.

_____

Effective Leadership: Bridging the Gap Between Art and Science

Effective leadership is something every organization needs, and we’ve known about the art and science of effective leadership and human team management for decades. But yet there’s a gap between people in leadership positions knowing and doing. And it begs the question, why? Why is it so hard? What is standing in our way? Those are a few of the things we’ll explore when we come back, so stay tuned.

This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line.

I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got another amazing guest for you today. She’s Doctor Margie Oleson, the founder of Oleson Consulting. Margie recognizes that companies aren’t set up to develop leaders or help them adopt the right leadership skills and behaviors. They’re all too often left to make it up as they go along, learning from past leaders who were left on their own as well.

She’s known as a dynamic speaker and leadership expert who shares knowledge from her doctorate in organizational development and decades of experience working with leaders and groups in many industries and companies to encourage effective leadership. It is a privilege to have her on the show today.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Margie.

Thank you Hanna, glad to be here.

It’s really good to have you because you’re so right that people in supervisory positions really aren’t given much help in learning how to lead. They’re left to their own devices, and if they’re lucky, they’ve been able to pick up some good habits from leaders who are effective. But it’s hit or miss in your research and experience. Why is there such a gap between people knowing what effective leadership is and then actually doing it?

And it starts with the healthier I am as an individual, the better leader I am. And the good news is, I don’t have to leave the workplace and get healthy for five years and come back. I can do the things that need to be done. The short list of what I learned through my research and my decades in corporate America to develop well as a leader.

And I think some of what organizations have experienced is this jingoistic word hubris. And since the pandemic and since we’ve had a lot of revolution and things happening that have made changes that were not necessarily intentional or planned out in advance, we’re even less likely to be connected and noticing things like, we have issues in our company that are tied directly to the fact that we’re not training leaders.

And when I talk to organizations about leadership and what leaders need to do to develop, they say, oh, I’ve heard that, I know that we’ve tried that. And there’s this big gap between the knowledge that’s out there and that is available and what they’re actually executing on.

But the truth is, thinking of somebody with your background, they would never hire somebody in a corporation to do their taxes or to be their lawyer to do their legal work. If they hadn’t gone to law school, if they hadn’t passed the bar, they hadn’t had experience in that particular field when they’re hiring for HVAC.

They want someone with those certifications. They wouldn’t bring on someone who is going to make it up as they go along. And then there’s all of these leaders throughout the organization. The greatest investment you can make for your serving clients returns on investment.

The greatest investment you can make is in those people who are leading all the other people. And we are leaving it to chance. And I think some of it is because the individuals who are higher up in the organization don’t want to think about not being good leaders. They don’t want to think that they don’t have this in, you know, taken care of. And then they fill their days with meetings. So many poor, unhelpful meetings, and there’s so much that are on their plates that they think I’ll get to it later.

Or they say, actually, we haven’t had this and we’re doing okay. They don’t even realize all the issues they have in the organization that we can tie directly back to an absence of leadership. So part of my mission is to increase awareness. You can train leaders. It is possible. It is probable. And when people do it, they never want to go back and then try to help them, taking it one step at a time.

Well, I can see you’re very passionate about the subject. That’s coming through loud and clear, Margie, and I respect that. I really do, because in my experience in corporate America, I’ve seen many of the same things. And, you know, basically, as I tell some people, wound up cleaning up behind the elephant because of the mess it’s made.

I’m just curious, though, when you mentioned at the very beginning of your answer about the healthier you are, the better leader you are. Can you tell me more about what you mean by healthy, please?

So there are a few very tactical things that I work with leaders on to set up shop for being a leader. And when I identify that art and science that had already been in place for 30 years by the time I did my doctorate, and now it’s been, you know, ten, 12, 14 more. It’s settled research. And it’s very specific things that if you do them, you will have the result that we’re talking about. But those things and we can talk about what those are.

They require a level of discipline, self-awareness, and humanity that comes from a place that’s not defensive. It comes from a place of carving out time and space, and it comes from a place of thinking of the other people in the organization as human beings and recognizing that they don’t leave their humanity at the door.

Now, some interesting things have happened since the global pandemic. There are more people talking about. We are humans and we have needs, so we’re kind of crumbling a little bit. That foundation of we can’t talk about vulnerability at work or we can’t talk about that we have problems outside, or that what happens at work affects our outside world.

But a leader who is developing self-awareness and is becoming more open and is more comfortable with gray and with things not being figured out and is actually more comfortable with people in general.

I promise that there are people right now on their teams who have strategies and answers to the problems that you have, but you’ll put power structures in place and they don’t rise in those power structures. They’re muted. One of the reasons you hear passion probably is because I was fired and laid off so many times, and I tried to just be quieter and be a better team player and try to think about what is our culture and how can I help organization after organization.

And what I realized was it wasn’t what I was doing or not doing. It was the level of health around me and the leader’s level of comfort with not knowing things and being open to discovery and then working it through together. So I would say anyone that has a day full of meetings has not even had the wherewithal, the courage or the literally the ability to disinvite people from certain meetings or to take certain meetings off the list, or to be open and honest about who’s doing all the talking and what results are we getting.

Until you can do that level, you’re actually not developing as a leader. But the good news is you put a few of these pieces in place and that health starts to come around for you.

Well, that sounds good. Let’s get down to some nitty gritty here. What are some of these specific requirements? I mean, let me put it to you this way. If you are called into an organization, well, first of all, they must have some level of awareness that, you know, we could probably use some leadership development. So, you know, kudos to them for recognizing that.

Or they bring me in for something else or they have a consultant in there that’s working on maybe they’re a fractional marketing person, or they’ve hired a new CFO and they mention me. Maybe they don’t want to think about their leadership development, but they do want to fix their meetings. So they’ll bring me in for that. Or they do want to do work. Genius. I’m certified. So we’ll bring me in. So we start there, and then we begin to think about possibilities and the issues that you’re having and how we can help.

So you mentioned meetings. Is that sort of like one of the number one hot buttons in your experience?

It is. Forbes calls it an $85 billion problem, cost wasted cost in the US every year. And I can tell you that I’ve been in meetings. There I was working with a client, and for four weeks in a row, I sat in on a meeting that had forty people in that meeting each of four weeks. Two people did all the talking, and in those four weeks, they never changed the conversation or moved forward so we can do the math.

Thousands and thousands of dollars are being left on the table every time you bring forty people in, and they’re not getting what they need out of it. And then you have people say, oh, I just don’t like meetings. Meetings are the worst. That’s another example of something. If I tell you how to fix your meetings, it’s very practical, it’s very tactical, it’s very strategic. But you’re going to have to work on some of the politics and some of the organizational dynamics and be open communicating.

But if I tell you the, let’s say, the 3 or 4 things to do, people say back to me, oh, we tried that. Well, they actually didn’t, because if they did it would be working. That’s another gap between knowing and doing. We’re dealing with the brain here, and fortunately, we have 20 years of great neuroscience imaging that I don’t have to try to convince people what we know about the brain now, those leadership days, they’re all about habits.

They’re all about what we learn from somebody else. They’re all about if we learn something in a classroom and we didn’t put it into practice, it’s gone. We don’t even remember it anymore. But what I will do coming into an organization, let’s say we are going to set up the team and the leader is going to develop their leadership.

So if I’m a member of a leader’s team, I need a few things in order to be successful. And then the combination of me and my colleagues that’s going to determine whether or not the team is effective and how the leader leads us as a team is going to tell us what the leader is in terms of effectiveness.

So one thing I need to know is what are the goals? What is the leader going after? And that leader, unless they’re the CEO, that leader is executing on their part of their leader’s goals. So number one, what are we going after? Number. That’s number one.

Number two what is my part in that? And so I have a particular role. You have these goals. What is my part? Number three. Do I have what I need to be successful? Do I have the right equipment? Do I have the right information? Do I have the right skills?

And then number four, how do you think I’m doing? And I’m not talking about quarterly or semiannual or annual performance management. I’m talking about conversations day in and day out, week in and week out that just take the formal down to the informal.

And we’re just talking openly about those goals and the team and my role and then how I’m doing and what I just described can sound so simple or so elementary. But most teams that I work with don’t have that level of openness, and they don’t have that level of clarity. So I developed Top Team Accelerator, and one of the first things we do is develop clarity and alignment.

And then once you have the beginnings of that kind of what feels like sanity. And then we go after clarity and we fix our meetings. You start to develop as a team. So you’ve got these teams going off and they’re trying to figure out how to gel more as a team, how to develop trust. You don’t have to go after trust. You put these systems and processes in place that are the short list of what makes an effective team and an effective leader, and trust develops.

You put in place better meetings, structure and discipline, and many great things happen. Your metrics go up. You. Now what will happen is you’re going to start to not be able to miss that. Someone needs to get off the bus or at least move their feet around. There are people hiding right now who are not as engaged, who don’t have the talent that you need, and your talent might be going out the door because they do.

Everybody wants to be on a high performing team. Every leader wants to be a high performing leader, but you put the systems and processes in place and then bring someone like me in to monitor and to observe, to provide the knowledge, but then give you the reinforcement and then when certain things aren’t happening, those are the stubborn challenges that you go after because of something unique in your market or your company.

But some things take right away, and then you have to put in place what to turn it into habits so that you have structure and processes that six months from now, you’re not going to say, oh, we brought that consultant in and nothing changed. You will start to have this be your new normal. And that’s where you really get to the good stuff.

Those big issues that we have now five generations in the workplace. Die is not developing legs or it’s starting to crumble. Global supply chain, the markets, those things you aren’t solving for your company because your meetings are terrible and you’re not gelled as teams and leaders don’t know how to lead.

We teach them that and they can start to move around and shift their focus away from the day to day fires and start to go after some of those bigger, wonderful things. That is the reason why people start their own businesses anyway.

Very good. Well, there’s a lot there. And I’m just curious, though, about the leaders that don’t want to change. I mean, maybe the CEO has brought you in and asks you to work with some executive vice presidents, or even if it’s a smaller organization, but that the manager is the decision makers that you’re asked to work with in order to improve their meetings, in order to improve their team collaboration and getting them to gel and participate, push back.

And maybe the dynamic has been there on the team so long that people don’t trust that leader. So even if you come in and you coach them, the team is going to say, yeah, well, why are we supposed to believe this? Now? You know what’s really changed. What happens in those situations? Because they don’t they don’t necessarily trust the leader.

There may have been situations about retaliation in the past. They’ve seen how other people have been spoken to and it’s been disrespectful. And so there’s a certain fear. Do they do their job? Sure. Are they good at it? Sure. But is it really bringing forth that extra level of enthusiasm, engagement, and brainstorming? No, no. And so, that leadership spark is not igniting the team. What do you do in those circumstances?

Well, it always starts at the top. And I didn’t like that. I never liked that. I wouldn’t buy that argument for anything. I’m a youngest child of four kids. Everybody always was older than me, had more power than me. No, things do not start at the top. I can, but I can tell you based on research and my experience, if you don’t have that at the top, whatever that is, whether it’s the leader of the team or all the way up at the top of the organization, then you have team members who are rowing in different directions.

Sometimes they get described as digging in their heels, or they really don’t want to change, or they don’t have enthusiasm, but sometimes they’re just trying to do their best. But the way that we approach it is not to. We’re dealing with the brain here with this leader as well. So if I say to a leader, you really can do a better job as a leader. Their brain is going to go, yeah, see you later. Done. Next. So we don’t start there.

We start with what is the situation right now that you would like to see movement on. And then we go after the things that are the low hanging fruit like working genius certification and fixing their meetings and then looking at clarity around goals, even clarity. I once worked with a four person leadership team who sat next to each other physically in the office for a year.

They were friends, they celebrated birthday lunches, and when I came, they were having a transformation that wasn’t taking. It just wasn’t taking. And it had been a year and they and it was a very difficult. Each of those team members had their own teams and then they had the leader.

And when I started the processes to just identify what the goals were and to clarify among each other, they had four different stories they were telling for the purpose of the transformation and how they were going to get there. They laughed. They got kind of emotional. They couldn’t believe that this small group of people who had spent so much time together could tell a different story.

Once we start really going, after establishing that where the leader is headed, everybody can say it and everybody knows what their part is. Even companies that we all admire, they’re written about and they’re and the leaders are featured. Those people have teams that are rowing in different directions. They’re just not telling us that.

I can tell you that most teams struggle with clarity and alignment, and once you start to put those pieces in place without shining the light on someone, that your leadership isn’t going well, your team’s not going well. Once you start to do that, they start to lean in and say, what else can we do? And then if they’re now but I can’t come in and help if you have been assigned to me.

I did have a team at one point where they admitted to me that there was one. One of the leaders was on a performance improvement plan and they were just trying to work through that process. They weren’t asking me to do anything for that. They just wanted me to be aware.

But when we put in place some tools for how to use their meetings to share information with each other and how to ask for help from each other and how to be aligned with each other, it surfaced that this person didn’t need to be on a performance improvement plan. They were actually talented, but they had not been available. They had been disengaged. They had been trying to do the best that they could, and they didn’t feel like they were a part of a team.

Once we start to do those things, I don’t have to say to you, you’re going to be a better team now. They can start to make it happen and it starts to be more natural. They start to lean in, and then we can go deeper and work on some of the things that are going to be harder, like politics, like we have to make priorities and who decides. But initially get some of the low hanging fruit and people get really excited.

Well, there’s nothing that breeds success like success. So I can understand how the low hanging fruit is beneficial and possibilities.

If I can just say one thing about possibilities, if I said to a leader, you can be a better leader. They’re like, yeah, I know, but they don’t really believe it. Deep down, they don’t really believe it. We start to introduce some of the low hanging fruit to them, and it’s even more than that. It is they can get big wins right away. Once they start to have that, they start to tell themselves there’s possibilities. Even if they didn’t ask the question or they didn’t have to say it out loud.

There you go. You mentioned something earlier about a working genius certification. Did I get that phrase right? Can you explain a little bit more? What is that?

Yes. Oh, I love it. So it’s Patrick Lencioni. He is Five Dysfunctions of a team 20 years ago. He’s been with his founders for all these years. The table group. He is an inventive type and he was starting to recognize a gap in organizations. So he had written all of these books. Death by meeting he wrote about CEOs and he there was still something missing and he identified what he uses the acronym WIDGET – that there are six geniuses at play in the workplace, even at home with families.

If you’re planning a family reunion, but in the workplace, where it’s the life cycle of an idea of a question or a problem all the way to bringing it to fruition. And I do this with teams. One of the first things, because first of all, it’s very easy to do and it is very long lasting, but it also can help leaders and teams figure out why they’ve had challenges with bringing something to market, or they have transformations or other changes that are way off schedule, way off of budget because they’re spinning.

So W is wonder the people that ask the questions. I is inventing the people that have solutions. D is discerning the people who just sort of know if something’s going to work or not. G is galvanizing. How do you pull the people together to make it happen? E is the genius of enablement, the people that know how to get things done, and they actually like helping. And then T is tenacity.

Those people that who love to check something off the list and bring it all the way to completion, they’re not even necessarily concerned if it was the right solution, because that’s not their area. They love bringing it over the finish line. And what happens in organizations is depending upon who your leader is or who has the power, they’re the ones we’re always spinning.

We’re always asking the questions and never getting all the way to, to, to inventing and galvanizing. We’re or we’re always helping. But we didn’t really ask the people that know things what the solution should be. So once teams start to set this up, number one, it helps them with their projects and their programs, but also they get really emotional because they feel seen for the first time. And everyone has two working geniuses, two working competencies and two working frustrations.

And we want to spend a lot of time in the areas of our geniuses and make sure we outsource, borrow from other teams if we need to, to get some of those other jobs done. Once you do that, you start to get all the way through the life cycle of something instead of finding yourself continuing to spin. And the team gels more because now they have an appreciation for each other in a way that they didn’t know that the information would be helpful.

How about that? When it comes to effective leadership, what do you think the most important thing is for listeners to understand, and especially when it comes to the gap between knowing what it takes and actually doing it.

So the really the primary capability is self-awareness. But you like I said, you don’t have to leave, go out into the woods for two years, find yourself when you start to put in place the discipline and the structure and the processes that we know will work for you to have a better team, to have better meetings.

You are developing your self-awareness in that process, and I think it can be hard for leaders to think, no, there’s one hundred things I have to do to be a better leader. Why would I even start? That’s actually not true. If you can define for your team what it is that you’re going after and what each part they have in it, and then develop communication where you’re talking openly with each other, ongoing.

You will go far quickly on being a more effective leader. Some of the things you’ve heard over your time as a leader, those were true, but you weren’t appreciating the way the brain is designed. So they send you to a two day training leadership development. They put you in a one year program where every month you’re getting together with other leaders who are in the program, but you’re not actually fixing your meetings and then reinforcing it, talking about it, and processing it.

You’re not actually changing politics. You’re not actually moving through and making sure that there’s more clarity and alignment. You’re kind of learning more about the organization, but you’re not getting into the specifics. So then you go off and you’re a part of this program for a year, and the company says, well, we shouldn’t have to do anything more to help you be a leader. We just did that, but that wasn’t going to help you.

So the things that can help you are the ways to become more aware of how to build clarity and alignment among the group of people that are reporting to you.

And then how can you, if you think about the water line, the depiction of a water line and an iceberg, you only see the tip of the iceberg sitting out and the water line. Think of that as yourself, and above the water line are the things that people can see your facial expressions, maybe some hints about your mood, maybe some hints about your belief system, or some hints about your profession. But underneath the water line are all of your fears and all of your thoughts and all of your history.

The longer that you go after being a more effective leader and going after things like self-awareness, that water line lowers and lowers and lowers. And the more you’re what we call living out loud, the more you can just be open and share with your team and they can share with you. The water line goes down farther and farther. That’s where excellence is. That’s where problem solving is. That’s where the collective genius of all of those people are.

But you’re not hearing from them because you always have to go to those other meetings and they’re not even there. So we want that waterline to go down. We want to feel like we can be more open, and we want to work through things, have confidence, and apply the knowledge, the rigor that’s out in the world about leadership and practice and change our habits.

They say culture eats strategy for breakfast and you can’t change culture. That’s not true. I used to think that. So I get it. Culture is how we’re our leadership habits. We change those habits and we change our culture.

There you go. And I particularly like that you’ve broken some of these things down into some actionable steps as far as how to impose more discipline in, in meetings and get more participation. So I thank you for that. I thank you, Margie. This has really been a very informative and I appreciate your time and the insights about effective leadership.

It’s really very, very important to know what it is and how to get more of it in a practical and a proven way, because it’s easy to get caught up in the theory and it’s like, yeah, but when you go back to the office and it’s same old, same old.

Thank you so much for your time and insights about effective leadership, Margie. It’s really been great. It is really helpful to know more about what it is and how to get more of it. And if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Doctor Margie Oleson and her firm, Oleson Consulting, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next week with another information packed episode of Business Confidential Now. Until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow!

Join, Rate and Review:

Rating and reviewing the show helps us grow our audience and allows us to bring you more of the rich information you need to succeed from our high powered guests. Leave a review at Lovethepodcast.com/BusinessConfidential.

Joining the Business Confidential Now family is easy and lets you have instant access to the latest tactics, strategies and tips to make your business more successful.

Follow on your favorite podcast app here as well as on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Download ♥ Follow ♥ Listen ♥ Learn ♥ Share ♥ Review ♥ Comment ♥ Enjoy

Disclosure:

This post may contain links to products to products on Amazon.com with which I have an affiliate relationship. I may receive commissions or bonuses from your actions on such links, AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU.