Leadership Development - Stoked Style!

Barbara does an amazing job of bringing in her years of experience in leadership development and telling us exactly what it boils down to. Accepting who we are now, getting a clear picture of where we want to be in the future, and doing the HARD work to get there.

"A big part of my job and my passion is helping people shift from "this state" to "this state" and recognizing that it's an emotional, psychological journey that needs coaching, support, and a strategy."

Transcript

Organizations come to us because they recognize that the current state isn't working. They see that there needs to be a different future state, but they need the strategy to see what the future state should look like. And then that 90% of the work is the growth in between.

And so that's what I do, what we all do here at Stoked is navigate that 90%, which is so hard. Because for human beings to make that shift, you have to let go of a previous version of yourself. 

So there's this gap that exists, you know, as an individual, I want to be in one place, but I'm currently in another.

As an organization, you know, there are similarities. Recognizing that the future state needs to look different.

So in leadership development, a, you know, a commonly held belief that we reinforce is what got you here won't get you there. It's a book by Marshall Goldsmith, but it's also just a kind of a mentality that you need to embrace when you're in leadership development.

Or if you're a person who wants to experience change. So all of the things that made you successful, whether it was, you know, the behaviors, or the tools that you brought to work, or you know even, for example, just being a person who likes being praised.

Those things have to shift when you come into leadership roles. It's the same thing with a culture that wants to be more innovative.

Those things that once were the most important things, they aren't important in this new future state. And so a big part of my job and my passion is helping people shift from this state to this state and recognizing that it's an emotional psychological journey that needs coaching support and a strategy.

I've always kind of been obsessed with self-improvement, and this started at a really young age. Around five, was like I had this acknowledgement that I wanted my life to be different in some way.

And so it first started by acknowledging that my family didn't have a lot of money, and so I thought the key to having a different life was money, and so I spent all of my time collecting money.

So it started as coins and I had like a bank of coins, like, over two hundred dollars, and this is like six years old. And so I had a reputation from a young age of like pushing other people.

My friends will always say, "Like you've been the person who saw something in me before I saw it and you would push me to go there," and oftentimes we would go there together.

I remember trying to figure out what I wanted to do in my life since you know I was six, right, and I had one of my friends parents tell me that you'd be great in HR, and I was kind of like, "No, I'm a CEO," like I had this mentality about myself for many many years.

And so I went to school, I went to undergrad for business, and then I was introduced to Industrial Organizational Psychology in undergrad my last year somebody told me about it they're like, this is made for you.

So it was HR, but like, with a cooler name. And I was like, okay this is about the study of human beings at work. And there's specifically an area around kind of organizational behavior and the role that leaders play.

And I was fascinated. One because I had always filled that role, not always successfully, but always found myself in a leadership role.

And two, because I recognized how important it was to the success of any company

So for like a large company, a company of over a hundred thousand people, there are over five hundred people that are in executive positions, and so those five hundred people play a critical role in the success of a business.

Like you can think about your own experiences with leaders, they play a crucial role to anybody's employee engagement, to the results, everything.

So when you're in a large corporation, a publicly-held entity, your board of directors, your shareholders, they care a lot about leaders.

It becomes a risk that you need to mitigate at all times. But then there is another side of this, which is helping to bridge the gap.

Bridge the gap from somebody who, you know, aims to be an executive leader but currently isn't. And that's a huge transition and that is, even though the strategy part is crucial, 90% of the work shows up in the gap in between.

Leadership development is actually a huge industry because public entities recognize the power that one leader possesses for the health of any organization.

It's actually a forty billion dollar industry, and most medium to large sized organizations spend between five hundred thousand and two million dollars a year, with specific leadership development programming.

So everybody recognizes that this is a huge need, and that it's a huge gap, but not everybody is willing to put in the time and attention into that 90% of like the gritty, messy emotional failure space that we really thrive in.

I think people come in to work with us with an assumption that it's gonna be hard work, but no matter what, they can do it right.

Because they're really successful people, who have been successful, for, you know, several reasons, they have the evidence to show it.

To actually see the transition, to actually see the change, you're not going to be successful, and you have to be okay with that.