Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney has his team watch a movie together the night before every game. The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted this ritual, noting that after the viewing, Swinney “holds a meeting to impart a lesson or theme drawn from the film to motivate, inspire or focus them on the following day’s challenge.”
This is great leadership.
Is this exercise about football skills? Executing plays? Blocking and tackling? No. Dabo is training his players in principles of leadership that will help them on the field—all the way to the National Championship Game, apparently.
What are you doing to develop your leaders?
Think about your leadership training. Before you became a CEO, did you go to CEO school? When and where have you studied to become a better leader?
Most leaders I know answer “no” to the first question, and have to think hard about the second. I recall that in my MBA program at the University of Maryland, we had only one required class on leadership, and I took a second optional leadership seminar – over two years of study.
Most people get promoted into their current leadership position after being a top performer in their last role. A boss notices how well a subordinate is doing and thinks, “She’s so good at selling; let’s put her in charge of sales. At least she can model what it means to be a great salesperson.”
So now we have a successful, highly-skilled person in a leadership role, but they’ve never received training on being a great leader. They are proficient in the skills required to do the job. But the skills of recruiting, training, retaining, challenging, holding accountable, inspiring, teaming – and the myriad other leadership skills needed to get the most out of others—not so much.
It is time to be intentional about developing your leaders.
Chief Executive Magazine just spotlighted the importance of leadership training. Two interesting takeaways:
1) The 10-year market cap growth of companies with strong leadership development programs was double that of companies without.
2) #2 on the list of the Top 10 Causes of Leadership Derailment: Insufficient Training/Development.
And check out this list of “Superboss” traits published by Harvard Business Review—leadership development among them: “Like highly skilled craftsmen, superbosses give protégés an unusual amount of hands-on experience but also monitor progress, offer instruction and intense feedback, and step in to work with them side by side when necessary.”
Yes, you are responsible to make sure the leaders under you become better leaders.
What? You have too many other priorities? Here’s some good news: it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. You can provide customized training to your leaders without much heavy-lifting on your end.
Let’s say Jeff and Stacy are two leaders who work for you. You want to help grow their leadership skills. Try this framework:
1) Give Jeff and Stacy a copy of the classic (and short!) One-Minute Manager.
2) Direct each of them to read a chapter and be prepared to give a 5-minute summary.
3) Schedule a lunch to discuss the chapter.
4) Over lunch, have Jeff and Stacy provide their summaries, and then be prepared with discussion questions such as the following:
• Which of the leadership principles will be easy to do?
• Which ones will be difficult? Why?
• Which one do you want to focus on in the coming week?
• How will you try to implement this principle in the upcoming week?
5) Follow up at the next lunch: How did it go? Where did you have success? Setbacks?
6) Repeat.
This process is flexible enough to work with other content. You can start with an article, podcast, or TedTalk.
Or be like Dabo, and use films. One CEO I know hosts a movie night at his house once a year to watch and discuss We Were Soldiers with his executive team. Other movies with plenty of leadership fodder — Master & Commander, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, The Iron Lady, Braveheart and The Homesman.
Make leadership development a priority. Great leaders intentionally leave behind a legacy of other great leaders.
————————————————————–
(BTW— Do you have favorite movies or books that you use to teach great leadership? Send them to me. I’ll share them in a future post.)