Seth Dobbs (he/him): Is your team prepared to face change? Do you anticipate and plan for change or has the thought of change not even really crossed your mind? And how prescriptive are you with your team and how much room do you give them to adapt? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the principle driven leadership podcast, where I share a principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader, in building organizations and teams, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The steps we’re taking today involves how creating more leaders helps your organization adapt to change.

So my friend, Kamaria worked at a regional logistics firm we’ll call Logistico. Well, Logistico had served the region for decades and in more recent years, as part of that had built a custom technology platform to optimize their processes and use of their storage and trucking resources. That was actually so successful, that they decided to spin off a new business unit to productize and market this platform to other regional logistic firms outside of their market. So Logistico promoted Jeremy, an internal candidate to be the EVP leading this new business unit. And Jeremy brought my friend Kamaria to build and lead the marketing team. Now, even though the business unit was new, the EVP had laid out how Kamaria’s team should be structured prior to bringing her on. She felt that was a little odd since she was already a VP and thought she would be building her own team, but she ignored a little bit of doubt that came because of that, because the opportunity itself was exciting. Jeremy had a clear vision and more, had a very clear and detailed plan to execute against that vision.

And as Kamaria was onboarded, all of this was laid out for her in surprisingly specific detail. It started creating more worry in her mind as again, she was a VP and didn’t expect to just be handed what felt like a to-do list from her boss. She chatted with some of her new peers, the VPs of operations and technology and product and so forth, and learned that they all had similar experiences. But again, the excitement and opportunity to bring a game-changing product to market carried them past that nagging bit of worry on what level of detail is coming from Jeremy, their EVP, and what that might imply for their future. They all just hoped that once things were really moving, they’d be able to take on more of a true leadership role and not just be doing what Jeremy said.

So Kamaria started transferring folks from the core company, as well as hiring new team members to fill out the structure that Jeremy had provided for her. But she soon realized that the plan wasn’t working well. It called for hiring predominantly inside salespeople to cold call and work through digital marketing sales channels. And while these salespeople were helpful and somewhat productive, they weren’t all she needed. In fact, she realized in pretty short order that what she really needed was outside salespeople, the folks to go visit the facilities of potential clients and to do the hands-on selling face-to-face. Even though the Logistico product had a great track record for them,

she found out that most of the regional logistics buyers made decisions based on relationships and trust, and that required onsite visits to build. This was easily fixed. Except the Jeremy’s plan that had laid out for Kamaria didn’t include these hires. And he was inflexible when she asked for change. Instead he told Kamaria to figure out how to make her team do better. She chatted with the VP of product who relayed a similar experience and that some of the feedback he received from the field was that the new software platform’s algorithm didn’t do a great job at optimizing in regions that weren’t densely populated. These rural customers were actually very interested in the platform, but needed some changes to suit their needs. When he went to Jeremy for this, Jeremy rejected the idea outright and reminded the VP of product that his job was to build the specified product as he had laid out.

The product launched, and they did manage to get a few clients who are very happy. But at that time, as they were coming to market, an unrelated startup launched that provided third party logistics capabilities for consumer packaged good companies that didn’t have the ability to ship direct to consumer.

Kamaria and some of her peers saw this as disruptive, but potentially high value if they could convince the startup to integrate with their platform. This could both accelerate the startup and bring a bunch of new customers into Kamaria’s organization. Unfortunately Jeremy’s strategy and possibly ego dictated that this was not an opportunity to pursue. He told them that the strategy was to use their platform to support other independent regional logistics firms. And basically they needed to get back to work at it. At this point, the VP’s all decided just to keep their heads down and do their jobs.

And of course, morale went downhill with that. And not too long after because of mediocre results, the parent company’s senior leadership decided to pull the plug and shut down the new business unit. And Kamaria and others had to look for new jobs.

So I’m going to state something that might seem obvious. Change is inevitable. I think we all know this, but we often seem to forget it when change disrupts what we want to do. Knowing that change is inevitable, how do you prepare for it? How do you prepare your team to face the unknown? This is where the third core principle of Principle Driven Leadership comes in, that leaders create more leaders. I’ve spoken this season a bit about the need to face reality, but with Kamaria’s story that wasn’t so much the issue. Instead, Kamaria worked for a leader that wanted followers, not leaders reporting to him. He laid out every detail for his executives to follow and gave them no room to use their own expertise. I have to wonder why Jeremy would hire an executive in the first place

if all he was going to do with them was tell them what to do. But more importantly, in any situation as a leader, why do you want to be surrounded by people that are there to only do what you tell them? It doesn’t matter if you’re leading executives, individual experts, people that are new in the workforce, whatever. Building a team of followers limits your ability to reach your vision and narrows the diversity of thought to only a single path to that vision. That’s typically not enough.

The thing about followers is that they’re there only to execute a plan they’ve been given, but can’t, or don’t, won’t use their expertise to adapt to new information and change. Building a team of followers might be fine if you expect things to remain the same, but I’d suggest questioning that expectation if you really believe it. Leaders, on the other hand, will provide input, they’ll raise issues, help you face reality and are able to have the difficult conversations that are necessary to embrace change. They focus on outcomes and will seize new opportunities to reach those outcomes when circumstances change.

But if you aren’t able to embrace change, if your team isn’t empowered to recognize and deal with change, you run the high risk of your organization becoming irrelevant. When your team only engages with you to agree with you, when you start hearing phrases like “that’s above my pay grade”, you have an organization of followers, not of empowered leaders.

Getting this right for Jeremy really involved changing the way he was engaging with his team. With Kamaria, instead of prescribing an exact hierarchy, jeremy could have given her a budget and targeted outcomes centered around revenue growth and let her solve for that. The VP of product shouldn’t have even had a talk to Jeremy about new requirements, unless perhaps a change in budget or timeline was required to implement it. And Jeremy should have made clear the desired outcomes that the team working together to create new streams of revenue in a new area and let his team adapt to the world as needed with their expertise to meet those outcomes. This is why leadership skills and empowerment are so important.

It lets you put the power to recognize and respond to change in the hands of people closest to the change, which is the most effective place to handle it. And as for the new opportunity that group saw, this is another reason why you want leaders, not followers. They were bringing a threat as well as an opportunity that Jeremy wasn’t close enough to see.

This is great behavior, regardless of whether or not their solutions were the right one, raising this risk and opportunity. Great. Now many years ago. I made a very similar mistake. I was pretty new at leading and gave a key person on my team step-by-step instructions of what to do, and worse, I didn’t even give all the steps at once. I actually doled out a few steps at a time as previous ones were completed. Now in the end he did everything I asked. I wasn’t happy with the results because of course I hadn’t thought of everything and things change along the way and the steps weren’t everything that was needed. Now fast forward, where I have changed and grown a bit and a few years later to a manager that was newly reporting to me.

Previously, she had been working under a micromanager and switched to working under me about halfway through the year. My first review of her was probably one of the worst she’d had in awhile. And not because she was particularly bad at her job, but she had done the things her previous boss had asked, but hadn’t achieved the things that we really needed. In fact many of our client projects were suffering.

And in a couple of cases, there had been some changes over at the client that she didn’t adapt to because she was following the program her boss had given her. So she was not happy with the review and I told her “look, my main measure for you would be revenue growth and client happiness.” I didn’t really care how she got there if she worked within budgetary constraints and stuff like that. So it took a little bit of learning and back and forth to really understand what I meant. But once that was settled, things went great with her and she achieved all the targets she needed and it was well reviewed throughout the years after that.

Now I spent a bit of season one talking about empowerment. I just want to recap briefly that you don’t empower people to do what you say. You empower them so that they have the autonomy and alignment to drive towards outcomes. This is in large part, why leaders create more leaders because beyond a certain point and typically much earlier than sometimes you’ll want to admit to yourself, you can’t keep on top of everything in your scope. Particularly not if you want to expand the scope of your leadership. So building a team that’s aligned with your vision that understands what outcomes you’re trying to achieve and why, and has the autonomy to adapt and to resolve problems, is what empowerment and leadership is all about.

And if they have the autonomy to do the same with their team, you’re really building a powerful team, a powerful system.

Change is inevitable. It’s not a question of if, it’s not even so much a question of when, but more a question of how will you recognize and handle change when it comes? Developing leadership skills across your team, creating more leaders and empowering them is one of the best ways to be prepared for change. And when you see that your team’s not just raising issues, but handling them without your intervention and still reaching the desired outcomes,

still achieving forward motion, this is great. This is the real sign that you’re truly creating leaders, not just followers.

So, are you engaging with the folks you lead in a way that makes them leaders or followers? Do they have the flexibility to deal with changes that arise? And if not, what changes can you make today in how you interact with your team to better prepare them to face change? Thanks so much for joining me, please subscribe, comment, and share with a friend

if you liked it. And send thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And we’ll address a few towards the end of this season. Join me next time, where I’m going to analyze the motto, “bring me solutions, not problems.” What happens when your team takes that a little too, literally.