LUMINARY PERSPECTIVE

Our Job Is to Deliver Breakthrough Moments

Tacy Byham

Breakdown or Breakthrough?

Tanya worked in supply chain management for an aeronautics manufacturer. She excelled in her job as an individual contributor and had a real knack for anticipating things that might become problems later. So, when she was promoted to her first leadership role—and was relocated to Florida, an added perk!—she felt both proud and ready. It was her time.

When she met with her team, a group of more seasoned contributors, on her first day, Tanya talked about how excited and privileged she felt to lead them, and acknowledged their unique role in the organization. So far, so good. “They were smiling, nodding, and asking great questions,” she recalls.

Then it was her turn to listen.

The team took turns reporting on projects, accomplishments, and bottlenecks: One talked about the new vendor exploration, while another shared progress on the inventory management system. Then an associate passed out the team’s monthly dashboard, a common report that had been distributed to the operations team earlier that day. When Tanya saw the report, she panicked.

And in a single moment, Tanya damaged everything she’d worked for until that point.

“WHAT?!?!?” Her shriek jolted the team out of their collective happy place and into a defensive crouch. “This report just went to MY boss? Who else on our team read this over?” she remembers exploding. “I complained about the grammar, the graphs, the formatting, and the data. Everything.” She publicly yelled at the associate for letting the document out the door.

When Tanya shared this story in a leadership training session—between deep gulps and face palms—the pain of her mistake was still fresh, even though it was eight years later. “I was labeled as a hothead and a perfectionist by everyone on the team,” she says, noting that even worse things were probably said that she wasn’t aware of.

All it took was one moment—one breakdown—to destroy her reputation. And it took her years to recover it.

We all have moments when our surprise and emotions get the better of us. But that’s exactly where training kicks in. With the right training, we can rewire ourselves to do better.

As learning and development professionals, this is our gift to give. We help people, especially leaders like Tanya, develop the foundational skills that serve them in every moment of their jobs. We help them deal with those big, scary, stressful moments, when they don’t know where to turn for help and they need help fast. We are their lifeline and their coach so their pathway to success is easier the next time around.

And when we do this well? We turn breakdowns into breakthrough moments. Instead of spending years overcoming a bad moment, we give them the tools to make the best of each experience.

The Crack in the Foundation

Our challenge in 10 simple words is to “match the demands of the business with ready-now talent.” We’ve devoted our careers to pursuit of this straightforward ideal. We build visions of robust talent pipelines, with multiple qualified people ready to step up to any given challenge.

Can it happen? Absolutely. According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2021, about one in 10 organizations (11 percent) says it has a “strong” or “very strong” bench. But most of us aren’t doing that well. In fact, bench strength is at its lowest level in the last 10 years.

Where are the other 89 percent of us going wrong?

As you dig into this “Learning and Development Basics” section, you’ll find three clear differences in the practices and programs that result in a robust leadership pipeline, based on success rates of more than 1,700 organizations (Neal, Boatman, and Watt 2021):

1.   Shorten transitions to help leaders become successful in new roles quickly. Ninety days or less is ideal.

2.   Give leaders self-insight via a high-quality assessment as a catalyst for development.

3.   Deliver personalized, relevant leadership development experiences that support people in key moments.

Each of these topics deserves its own chapter, if not a full book or semester of university study. And yet, I urge you to pause for a moment of reflection. If you were to assign a letter grade to your company’s adoption of these principles, would you be an A student or a C student (or worse)? And what impact does that have on the speed and quality with which you fulfill your mission of “matching the demands of the business with ready-now talent?”

Let’s build a case for the cumulative power of these three practices.

The Urgency of Successful Transitions

As we learned from Tanya’s story, you can make a mistake on your first day in a new role. And it can haunt you for years. Yet companies rarely apply a sense of urgency to support leaders in their transitions. That’s why our first pillar of foundational training is around support in transitions. For example, here are a few things some of our research has revealed about leadership transitions:

•  On average, it takes four years for a first-time leader to get training, leaving them to sink or swim (DDI 2019).

•  The longer it takes for leaders to get up to speed, the more stressful it is. More than a third of leaders at every level describe their transition as overwhelming or extremely stressful. Five percent frequently dream of quitting (DDI 2021).

•  The stress isn’t temporary. Regardless of how long ago it was, leaders who report long and stressful transitions are significantly less engaged in their roles. They’re more than three times as likely to report burnout compared with their peers with low-stress transitions. Worse, they feel less accountable for being a good leader for their team and find their work to have less meaning and purpose (DDI 2021).

Are you likely to hear about any of this? Probably not. For many people, especially leaders, it feels too risky to admit they’re struggling. What if their boss holds it against them? What if their team loses confidence in them? What if they don’t get a raise or promotion because of it?

So they put a smile on and stay silent. They assume there’s something uniquely wrong with them, because everyone else seems to be fine (even though they’re experiencing the same thing). And eventually they leave, opening up yet another gap in your pipeline.

And don’t expect the leader to be the only one who leaves. The risk stretches into their teams as well. A single disengaged leader has a compounding effect on the organization, and their poor skills can drive talented people out the door long before they throw in the towel themselves.

As learning and talent professionals, this is where we have the power to change things. If you wait to deliver training until someone asks for it, it’s probably too late.

Our job is to anticipate what’s ahead for these roles and create development experiences that prevent leaders from falling into deep pitfalls. We need to give them the foundation they need before they know they need it.

“Know Thyself”

Stepping into a new role is like being asked to fly a plane, despite never having done it before. You might have ridden on the plane and worked in a support role, and you might understand how the plane works. But as you sit in the pilot’s seat, you realize you’re suddenly responsible for hundreds of lives on board. It’s a totally different experience.

There’s very real risk in not knowing if you’re capable of doing something. Simply “faking it until you make it” doesn’t work. Leaders may not only be missing some key skills—their previous instincts may also be wrong. They may have to unlearn things that were strengths in a previous role because they’re now liabilities.

Leaders don’t want to fly blind. They want to know that they can handle the responsibility. And if they have a weakness, they want to fix it. The last thing they want to do is fail, especially in front of their team.

That’s why our second pillar, high-quality assessment and feedback, is so important. In fact, assessment is one of the top requests leaders would like more of from their employers (Neal, Boatman, and Watt 2021).

But not all assessments are the same. What leaders are telling us, loudly and clearly, is that they want objective feedback on their skills. In our experience, high-quality assessments should:

•  Be competency based.

•  Offer an objective view of strengths and development areas.

•  Pinpoint the exact behavior that a leader needs to focus on within a competency.

•  Give insights about readiness for future roles.

•  Support development after the assessment.

When done well, insight from assessment data drives the success of your development program. Leaders know why they need development, and how it’s going to drive relevance on the job. They can accelerate their success by understanding where they need to pull back, where they need to focus, and where they need to add something new to their leadership repertoire.

The results are undeniable. On average, combining high-quality assessment with any development program boosts bench strength by 30 percent. Furthermore, HR leaders with strong formal assessment programs say they can fill 56 percent of critical leadership roles immediately, compared with 43 percent at other organizations (DDI 2021).

In short, assessment helps you answer the fundamental question: Does our development strategy help us match the demands of the business with ready-now talent? If you’ve done the assessment, you can answer that question easily, proving the value of the investment in learning and leadership development.

Create Experiences for the Moments

Earlier, we mentioned that the third pillar of creating a robust leadership pipeline depends on delivering personalized, relevant development experiences that support people in key moments. When we talk to most L&D clients about this, their mind first goes to the type of technology they might use.

Technology is certainly an important part of the equation, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. People aren’t asking for what technology will make learning personal and relevant. Rather, they are wondering what they can learn that is personal and relevant to their problem right in this moment.

It might sound a bit basic, but it’s one of the most common fundamentals of learning that I see companies overlook. So often, we get caught up in the details and tactics of the huge array of learning options that we overlook our real goal, which is the impact we have on people’s lives and the moments within them.

In what ways are they struggling? How can we design learning experiences that go beyond conveying information to changing their behavior in those moments? And how do you measure the impact of those moments?

For leaders, these moments might be big changes that happen over time, like taking on a new role or driving a transformation. Or they might be small and quick, like resolving a team conflict. Or they might be large but urgent, like reacting to a crisis.

The mistake we often see companies make is trying to deliver the same type of learning for every moment. For example, they might offer only live group courses, which are great for learning proactive skills during big moments of change but are rarely timely enough to solve on-demand problems. Or they might swing the other way completely, offering only on-demand courses or microlearning. While these approaches can be helpful for giving quick advice, they are ineffective at building major skills.

In short, you can think of it like a pendulum, with each extreme living on either end. In addition, companies may offer multiple types of training content, but they come from different sources. For example, they might develop a few courses in-house for proactive moments and supplement them with an online learning library. The problem? If the content is inconsistent, leaders are likely to get mixed messages.

Instead of swinging wildly across the pendulum, L&D professionals should be looking to find balance by focusing on key moments, then designing consistent content that meets those needs but offers flexibility in timing and modality.

Let’s take a look at a couple examples.

Moment 1: Stepping Into a Leadership Role for the First Time

Becoming a leader for the first time is a big moment of transformation that changes a person’s career. And they need a lot of support to develop in these moments.

Here are a few considerations for meeting new leaders in the moment:

•  Group or individual? Ideally, this is a moment when leaders really benefit from learning together. It helps to share challenges and build a network with other new leaders who can support one another over time. However, it may be a challenge to build cohorts that help leaders as quickly as they need it. So you may have to consider providing individual learning first, and following up later with group experiences.

•  How fast? As we learned from Tanya, speed is critical. If you have identified someone in advance as a high-potential leader, you can start building skills before they get into the role. If the promotion is a surprise or fast decision, start developing them as soon as possible.

•  How complex are the new skills they need? Leadership requires learning significant new skills, and leaders will need to put in significant time to master them. Learning theory won’t be enough. They will need the opportunity to practice.

•  How personalized should it be? It’s crucial for first-time leaders to build a core set of skills and have an approach that’s consistent with the organization’s leadership culture. However, as they are building their own leadership brand, personal insight is critical. Each leader might also want to explore some specific topics where they are personally struggling.

A lot of companies we’ve worked with try to meet these needs by building great onboarding experiences. Ideally, they kick off with an assessment to personalize the experience, then bring leaders together to learn and practice new skills over a few days or a few months.

While these onboarding programs are excellent, I caution L&D professionals to make sure they move fast enough. Many hold onboarding only once a year, or they wait until there are enough people for a cohort. But that can leave leaders waiting for a long time. In many cases, it would be best to provide some on-demand learning to get them started quickly, even if they go through a larger program down the road.

When leaders are met in this moment, it can change the entire course of their career at the company. But the big mistake is that many companies stop with basic training.

Moment 2: Resolving a Team Conflict Right Away

While proactive learning is extremely helpful, new problems pop up all the time. For example, a leader might have a conflict on their team, and they need some guidance to resolve it.

These spur-of-the-moment issues create the “Google problem” for L&D professionals. Basically, every employee’s first instinct is to type their question into their browser and click on whatever comes up first. The problem? They could find literally anything. It could be bad advice. Or outdated advice. Or simply an approach that doesn’t fit within your company culture.

These moments are common, and they are worth our attention. We need to be better than Google. We need to provide resources on demand that people can trust to help them in these critical moments. Consider how new leaders would answer these questions about their development:

•  Group or individual? For the moment, individual is fine, although they may need or want to practice their skills with a group later.

•  How fast? Now!

•  How complex are the new skills they need? At this point, they should be building on their foundational skills. As long as what they are learning is consistent with what they learned in those core skill-building programs, they should easily be able to expand their skills.

•  How personalized should it be? It doesn’t necessarily need to be personalized, but leaders may benefit from tools that help them quickly assess themselves and their situation. For example, if they need to resolve a conflict, they might benefit from a tool that helps them quickly assess their natural approach to the topic.

So, consider this the moment where you pull out all your digital tools! How can you leverage 10-to-15-minute microcourses to quickly build skills? Employ digital tools that can help employees understand their approach and, ideally, help them quickly practice their newfound skills.

Above all, make sure that what you put together is proven, so leaders can trust what they’re learning in the moment. Otherwise, they’ll be off to find their own approach!

Making Development a Way of Work

These are just two examples of the many moments leaders experience. But they illustrate a few key things:

•  Think of the moment of need first and how to solve that problem.

•  Build your content and approach on the same foundational set of principles. Otherwise, leaders will get mixed messages.

•  Fit and flex the modality for the moment, rather than dictate how people learn. Going all-or-nothing on any side of the pendulum leaves huge gaps in development. Rather, you can flex the modality to meet people with the speed and type of learning they need right now.

When you do this well, you can achieve a big goal: Making development a way of work. When you meet people in their moment of need—big or small—you teach them how to truly integrate learning into their job, and not as something extra.

Our Calling Is to Deliver Breakthrough Moments

In the rest of this section, you’ll learn a lot about the fundamentals of learning, including the science, the history, and the strategy behind it. But as you dive in, I hope to impress upon you the importance of the human moments in all that we do.

As learning and development professionals, we aren’t here to just convey information. We work to create breakthrough moments of learning that change how people view themselves, their jobs, and their relationships (at work and often outside it). We can ease their stress in tough moments and prepare them to achieve great things.

When we do that well, we’ve done so much more than effectively build a skill. We’ve changed lives. We can spark a hunger for learning and constant improvement. And when we do this not only in individuals, but throughout organizations as well, we can alter the trajectory for success in our entire companies.

And that’s why we have one of the best—and one of the hardest—jobs in the world.

About the Author

Tacy Byham is passionate about empowering leaders to declare their true worth and ignite their impact in the workplace, from the start of their careers all the way to the C-suite. She is CEO of Development Dimensions International (DDI), a global award-winning leadership consultancy that helps the world’s most successful companies transform the way they select, develop, and accelerate leaders. An internationally recognized presenter on leadership, Tacy co-wrote the global bestseller Your First Leadership Job, and her featured articles have appeared in Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc., as well as numerous blog postings on LinkedIn via the Forbes Coaches Council. Tacy also launched the #LeadLikeAGirl movement, which provides women with practical strategies and real-world wisdom to ignite their careers. Learn more about Tacy and DDI at ddiworld.com.

References

DDI. 2019. The Frontline Leader Project. Pittsburgh, PA: DDI.

DDI. 2021. Leadership Transitions Report. Pittsburgh, PA: DDI.

Neal, S., J. Boatman, and B. Watt. 2021. Global Leadership Forecast 2021. Pittsburgh, PA: DDI.

Recommended Resources

Byham, T.M., and R.S. Wellins. 2015. Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Paese, M.J., A.B. Smith, and W.C. Byham. 2016. Leaders Ready Now: Accelerating Growth in a Faster World. Pittsburgh, PA: DDI Press.