#38: We Promote People Because They Perform But Rarely Prepare Them to Lead (And How to Fix It)

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Eric:  Welcome to the Empower Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Pfeiffer, CEO of Empower. Coaching leadership isn't about titles or positions. It's actually about the influence and impact we have on our environments. This is where we get to learn how to operate well under pressure, lead with confidence, and drive meaningful results.

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There's a quiet epidemic happening in organizations all across our country, and it's not burnout or turnover. Even a lack of talent, though all three of those are present. It's actually what we consider underdeveloped leadership. We promote people because they perform, but we rarely prepare them  to lead.

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Eric: It's because we've built systems that reward performance, but neglect development, we confuse past success with job performance  and achievement with leadership readiness. And as a result, people keep getting promoted to their level of leadership incompetence. Not because they're hopeless, but because they've reached the edge of what their current skillset alone can carry.

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Some of us, myself included, are good at what we do. We were good at our job skills. We were, we excelled in certain areas and, and  oftentimes for some of us, it, it included a mixture of charisma and.

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What makes somebody a good employee does not make them a good leader. But here's the thing, no one comes out of the womb knowing how to lead intuitively. They don't know how to coach, how to communicate, how to build trust, how to develop others. And when we as a society  buy into the idea that leadership is innate, right?

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Their lack of leadership ability. Mm-hmm. Right. So we build a  business and we build all these divisions and teams and PE we can get away for quite some time as long as money's coming into the bank account. Mm-hmm. But over time, what we realize is people are not operating well. Individuals are frustrated.

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It just makes you familiar. Let's pause for a second and just consider this interesting parallel like. You know, we, many of us have gotten together with somebody else and then we have kids and we build a family. And you know what? It's just expected. What? Just because we had kids, just because our family is  growing in numbers that now we know how to parent.

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Um, until it isn't. It looks like competence under pressure. It's real. Leadership looks like it's competence until the pressure  begins to build up. And I, I said that wrong. Lemme say it one more time. We fake it until the pressure builds up. Challenges and underdeveloped aspects of our leadership are suddenly exposed.

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It's  only when something breaks, the money stops coming in. A tough conversation needs to be had, a shifting culture, a high pressure season, people on your team that are experiencing all sorts of dysfunction and causing problems. That's when we realized that the foundation was not as strong as we thought.

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Where's this stuff been? Yeah. Why was I never trained in this? And I often remind them like, Hey, well what leadership class did you take in high school?  What leadership classes did you take in college or graduate studies? And people go through an entire MBA and spend loads of time and money on a degree that oftentimes leaves them woefully under equipped in the essential.

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Because we do believe that without these basic  skills, we are, we're, we're headed toward. Just constant frustration and burnout. So let, let me just say this, at Empower, we believe leadership isn't something you're born with. So like I love that show MythBusters, right? Where they take these kind of preconceived ideas that are really popular in, in culture and then they kind of, you know, either prove them right or they dispel them.

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It's, but it's not, it's not true. We're gonna, we're gonna bust that myth right here. Right now. There's no such thing as a natural born leader. There are people with certain qualities that we associate with leadership extroversion, right? People who like to talk a lot, but I would say more often than not, it's the people who are natural manipulators, narcissists, people who like to be in control, people who like to  tell everybody else what to do.

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Eric: do that? Yeah. Seriously Better. Come on, just watch a YouTube video. Just  read that book. I just gave you that newest leadership book. And why can't, why doesn't that translate into your, into the way you're behaving? So they keep trying harder.

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Dawn: That's right. Uh, and that's what I love about what we get to do and what I, I hope our listeners are hearing in this episode is one, as you said, they're not alone, but two,  that there is hope if you are, if, if you are feeling very overwhelmed, very disqualified, very underdeveloped, and it's, and it's a constant source of shame.

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Eric: I love it. So this is an important kind of mindset shift mm-hmm. For our listeners to consider once you stop trying to prove yourself and instead. Give yourself toward  an intentional developmental process. Yeah. Everything changes. Mm-hmm. Your confidence that your, your personal culture, your capacity to lead more effectively, to influence and impact others in a beneficial way.

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Dawn: Well, I can share a story from my own developmental experience where out of college I had, I had my master's, I got hired  to work at a church and I was working in youth ministry. So I had certain leadership responsibilities, but it was, um. They, they were minimal in scope. Right? I, I didn't have a ton of leadership responsibilities, but what I did, I did well.

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We had tons of fun events. The, the media looked good. My, my very small team operated well. And as I'm sure our lead, our listeners can appreciate maybe you've lived this yourself, if you are good at your job. Usually  they will give you somebody else's job too. They'll give you more responsibilities. And so I very quickly, at a very young age, got promoted into higher levels of leadership, where now I am responsible for other departments.

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I was waiting constantly in my office for somebody to knock on the door and be like. Who told you that you could be here, you are not qualified, and all of these things are falling apart. I constantly felt like I was trying to scotch tape everything  together so that the optics, even though inside I was drowning, the optics from the outside looked like, oh, she's got it together.

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Mm-hmm. And for those of us who are high achievers, high performers. We do not like operating at or slightly below that what we call that radical minimum standard. We like to exceed it and we are accustomed to exceeding it. And so when I was faced with a reality of not only not exceeding it, but falling below my own expectations.

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Stumble and fumble your way into some of it. You're gonna figure some of it out. You're gonna read enough books that you're gonna get some ideas about how to run a meeting and what, what to do, what not to do. You're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna develop some sense of what does it mean to  lead well, and how do you build a team or an organization that can, that can operate well.

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Haven't you spent years developing these particular foundational skills so that you can now achieve more and more like the, the, the problem is when you don't have a coherent  system. To build on everything feels like you're just creating a patchwork of ideas to try and get through the day or the week or the quarter or the year, um, which is incredibly, incredibly frustrating.

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Dawn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think that the worst part is that this, the whole time and this you are, so this is resonates with so many leaders that we talk to, like they have such a similar story.

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'cause they were, they were up against all kinds of frustrations, you know. After working with the, the president of this company for a short while, they confided in me. You know, Eric, I just spent almost two years  going through a high level master's program in leadership at a prominent university in our country, and he said, I can genuinely tell you after the first couple of months of working with you all I keep asking myself is, why didn't we learn this stuff?

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Um, some of the most successful businesses and leaders of those business that we've worked with feel just like the rest of us. I feel underequipped, I feel like I'm afraid someone's gonna find me out. I don't know how to get to the next level of success in this business. Um, because somehow I think we all know  intuitively that the breakthrough out there begins inside of us.

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I'm, I'm curious. Tell me more about that. And so he asked a lot of questions. Well. What I, what I also remember is, is he as asking this question, there's another younger gentleman  at the table who we played with who had ordered food to go because he had to get home to his wife and small children. And so he was just getting into order and he just listened in to the first 15 minutes of our conversation while he was waiting for the food.

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He said, Eric, everything you're talking about, he said like, I. I, I felt like I was so afraid to not hear what you were saying. I said, well, I don't understand. Can you just quickly explain? He said, well, he said, I'm a doctor and I have a specialty in this  particular area. And he said, and, and I'm only like, you know, this guy's only 32 years old.

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And because we're competent in those areas, the assumption is they would make a  great leader. At a next level. Mm-hmm. And, and this young man has begun to tell me how overwhelmed he felt and that he's been like scouring the internet and doing all the chat research he can on how to, what does it mean to be a good leader and how do I oversee this team and how do I develop clear objectives and goals and, and, and how, and he is like, most, most days I feel like I'm hurting cats.

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It's got our leadership operating. And you know, I'm like, dude, just read some of it and if it resonates, let me know. Um, however we can help you and serve you because that's our passion. Mm-hmm. It feels like an injustice. It does As, as advanced as we are in all of our technologies in this country. As many advantages as we have in  so many other areas, and yet we are still woefully.

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That's right. The foundational leadership skills. And I just think it's an injustice that we're trying to rectify. Not because we have all the answers and we're the only leadership, you know, uh, a development organization out there, but because I'm a thousand percent convinced. That there are  not many organizations offering a simple, clear how-to system of unlocking the better leader inside of each one of us.

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It doesn't have to be that way. And I just wanna tell our listeners, it doesn't matter where you're at in your journey of career or  business or what your role and responsibilities are, the realities every single one of us needs this.

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So let me just, let me just say this to our  listeners. Pause and slow down for a second and say, this is not an all or nothing issue is not black and white. This is not figured out overnight. This is not read our book. You know, and you know, any of that stuff. Tomorrow, you're gonna be the leader that you wish you were.

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Eric: Right. Instead of stretching into something new, we know the  old adage what got us here will not get us there. And so when, when we're experiencing those indicators of, of constant or regular. Consistent frustration, uh, we can, we can see those as an opportunity to learn and grow when we start paying attention to these moments, the conversations that drain us, the patterns that keep repeating the parts of leadership that feel heavier than they should, that's where growth is inviting us to do something.

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Um, so here's a, here's just a few things that I wanna encourage us to, to think about. In terms of practical, like just some baby steps. 'cause we're gonna be taking this conversation deeper over the next number of podcast sessions. Um, so we don't wanna, you know, we're just, we're, we're in  the first step in, in the, the pool of this conversation.

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Identify someone in your life or in your business, or in any area of your life that seems to be further down the road than you in that particular area. And imitate  them, right? We say imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Why? Because clearly somebody's figured out something that we haven't. So don't be afraid to identify those people and say, what if I started trying to do a little bit more of what they do?

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And obviously we've got, we've we're just.  So busy putting up every resource we can on, on our online membership platform, uh, in our books, in our masterclasses, in our podcast, and our on and on and on and on. Because our mission, again, is to put this operating system into the hands of as many people as humanly possible.

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Is already movement in the right direction. And, and here's what I want to remind you. If that realization, if what kind of that question brings to light, if it stings a little bit, that's okay.  It's all right if that's like embarrassing or if you feel like, man, I should have figured this out already. How am I still here?

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Like none of us have have arrived. We're not all fully, you know, realized and all of our potentials unlocked. Even as a team, we're constantly helping each other identify our growth edges so that we can continue to take our leadership to next  levels. Um. Dear listener, we love you. We're so grateful. We do this for you.

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Uh, you may choose  not to reveal your, uh, your image, and that's okay too. But, um, you know, we have this huge audience, right? We have over a hundred thousand downloads on this podcast, which is just unbelievable. Um, but gosh, we want to get to know some of you. So, man, lemme add this.

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So, uh, maybe that's a little incentive. Follow us. We'd love  to communicate with you through those channels. Um, and anything we can do to. Put the things that have transformed our life and our leadership into your hands. We want to do next week, we're gonna continue in this series on underdeveloped leadership, talking about why leaders get stuck and don't know it.

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Visit our website@mpwcoaching.com and follow us on socials for daily leadership insights. And remember, be the leader you wanna follow. See you next  time.