8: 3 Leadership Skills You Didn't Know You Needed

Ever wondered why some leaders transform teams while others simply manage them? This episode promises to uncover the often-overlooked leadership skills that can catapult your ability to inspire and drive change. We'll explore three critical skills that aren't commonly taught but are essential for unlocking a team's full potential.

By harnessing these skills, leaders can avoid becoming mere referees of challenge and instead drive teams toward collective success, proving Aristotle's wisdom that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

References
What Makes Leadership Development Programs Succeed
Why Most New Executives Fail

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I am a Confidence and Success Coach for leaders, Organisational Development Consultant and independent Leadership Circle Profile® Certified Practitioner. Information shared about this tool is courtesy of Leadership Circle®, all rights reserved. www.leadershipcircle.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Underrated Leadership Skills for Success
• 8:05 Empathetic Leadership
• 15:26 The Power of Storytelling and Facilitation
• 23:15 Unlocking Leadership Impact Through Connection

Transcript

Jolynne Rydz: 0:36

Welcome on into this episode three leadership skills you didn't know you needed. I'd love to start by asking you what leadership skills do you want to develop? What are you working on right now? This is a really common question that comes up in performance development discussions and also in things like job interviews and recruitment processes, and a lot of what people answer, I've noticed, is things like I want to be a better coach, or I'd like to get better at presenting and public speaking. I want to have more influence and be better at negotiating. I want to be more strategic with my thinking and make better decisions.

Jolynne Rydz: 1:19

In my work as a coach over the past decade, I've come across hundreds of leaders and their challenges and their goals, and one of the beauties of being a coach is that people really open up and are really honest and raw about what it is they're looking to achieve, but also where is it that they're getting stuck and why. This is beautiful is. It allows me, as someone who loves observing human behavior, it allows me to see patterns, and so what I've noticed over the years is that there are leaders that they get all right results right, they're learning and doing what they need to and they're doing the job fine, but it's nothing spectacular and that's okay. If that's where you want to be and you've got other things in your life that light you up, then that's great. We do actually need leaders performing at that level. And then there's other leaders, ones that you know even if they weren't paid, they would be doing some kind of leadership role because it just lights them up. It's what they're here to do, and they're the kind of leader that is able to engage people's hearts and their minds and bring their teams together in a way that unlocks their passion and their skill and bring them together to focus on a common goal. So what I've just described is something that's often referred to as transformational leadership that ability to really harness that energy of a group and direct it towards a shared goal. And so what I've noticed is this pattern that there's actually three skills that leaders have in common in this group and the group of the leaders that get the okay results.

Jolynne Rydz: 2:59

They generally don't have these skills, and I wanted to bring them to people's attention because they're often they're not spoken about. They're not necessarily things that are asked in recruitment about when we're trying to assess whether someone would be a good leader. They're not talked about during performance discussions, about how people are going, what's working and what's not, and what do they want to work on and grow in. And also, I find these particular topics are not necessarily covered in a lot of leadership development programs. And the thing is, these three skills leadership skills that you didn't know you needed they're actually critical in an environment where, more and more, we need to access the untapped capacity of teams. There's a lot of talk about people saying too busy, they're at capacity, they need more resources, but those people saying that often have this untapped capacity and the reason why they're feeling at capacity is for all different reasons around the structure and the leadership and the environment and the tools and the processes, and their own beliefs and mindset as well. So many different reasons. But being able to tap into this discretionary effort in a way that each and every individual employee wants to be here, wants to make a difference and has the ability to adapt and flex at speed without being slowed down by systems of control that might be creating lag in the system, and have that ability and permission to use initiatives and their strengths like that, that is the gold. If you can uncover that, you can uncover amazing productivity and performance in your team. Productivity and performance in your team.

Jolynne Rydz: 4:39

According to the Harvard Business Review, they estimated that $60 billion is spent every year around the globe on leadership development. Yet I found some other research from CEB, so the Corporate Executives Board, that found that 50 to 70% of executives fail within 18 months of starting in a new role, and that's regardless of whether they were promoted internally and had that corporate knowledge and awareness of culture and the way things worked, or whether they came in externally from another organization or industry. 50 to 70%. Now, if you think about the cost I don't have that figure off the top of my head, but if you think about the cost of recruiting someone at an executive level and if that has such a high chance of failure, we need to be focusing on these things. So what these two statistics tell me is that there's room to make the implementation of our leadership development more effective and there's room to better support our new leaders.

Jolynne Rydz: 5:42

And, most importantly, the thing that I want to focus on in today's episode is that there are underrated and critical skills that aren't being talked about and they're missing from leadership development programs and conversations. So the good news is I'm here to share them with you today. So the three leadership skills that you didn't know you needed. I love focusing on these with clients and groups because they are impactful. When I see people get this and they run with it and they put it into practice, things shift for them, they transform, so their results go. Rather than this incremental slow approach, it's like a. Rather than this incremental slow approach, it's like a step. Rather than gradual. I mean, it's like a step transformation in their performance and their impact, and that's why they're so underrated.

Jolynne Rydz: 6:32

So many years ago now, I was sitting in a auditorium about, let's say, 400 people in the audience of a medium-sized organization, and a leader had just come in to basically introduce themselves and give the audience a bit of a pep talk about you know, what they could bring to this role and why now's a great time to be making some changes and why they could make a difference. Now what I noticed was that this leader had absolutely no awareness or ability to feel what was happening in the room. So they delivered a beautiful speech. Everything they said was the right thing to say and they said it in a really great way, but there was a mismatch between how that was being received. So I could see hostility on people's faces, disbelief, upset, and, despite the speech itself being flawless, they didn't earn the respect of that audience that day Now.

Jolynne Rydz: 7:30

Have you ever experienced a team that's stuck in the negative, complaining about what's wrong with the situation, what's missing, what's not working? Maybe they're feeling under-resourced all the time, but you can't do anything about it? What about people that, no matter how many times you've explained what needs to get done, it's just not getting done? See, the problem is we teach leaders to focus on what they say, and people want to learn about you. Know how do I say this? Well, what's the structure, what's the method, what's my delivery method of saying this? Well, structure, what's the method, what's my delivery method of saying this? Well, so they focus on what they say rather than what they see.

Jolynne Rydz: 8:06

Now, a great and impactful leader and the ones I've seen have this incredible ability to see and acknowledge reality. So they see and acknowledge the reality that their employees are facing in any given moment and, as a result, they're, instead of people feeling zoned out like oh, I just don't even want to listen to what this person is saying, they lean in Instead of feeling unheard, like you just don't know what this is like right now. For me, they feel heard and instead of feeling stuck like, oh, I just, I don't know, this is going to go anywhere, this isn't going to make a change, this is not going to make a difference, they buy in. So the benefit of seeing and acknowledging the reality that someone is facing is it shows people that you get it, it gives you that credibility and it builds rapport and it makes the person feel seen and heard. The second thing that it does is it helps them feel okay to not be okay. So this is incredibly powerful when there's a challenging situation going on, so something that people are not wanting, maybe haven't been expecting, it's been a surprise.

Jolynne Rydz: 9:18

It might be things like there's a lot of downsizing going on at the moment and that news can always be often be very difficult for people to accept. So things like that, or maybe a problem in the team with some people that are causing trouble those kinds of situations or a change being forced on someone, people can experience a lot of negative feelings associated to that and if you're told to just move on, get on with it, let's be positive, how can we solve this If we don't see and acknowledge the reality that someone's actually struggling in that moment. They spend time and energy going what's wrong with me, why can't I move forward, or why haven't we done it this way? I don't understand, or why is this happening? So they spend all this time and energy and effort questioning things and are actually unable to hear and see what's going on. So that's why people can get really stuck. And it's not until you see and acknowledge reality that people can process these emotions, start to process them, feel safe to process them and feel like it's okay and part of the process, because it is in human behavior. You need to go through these emotions to get to the other side of a change and see that change is possible and positive. So we need to, as leaders, to create space for this, and part of that is seeing and acknowledging reality. And then the third reason this is really powerful is it clears the slate so people can move forward.

Jolynne Rydz: 10:51

I don't know if you've seen the show. It's a show that is on in Australia and might be on in different countries as well, but it's called the Biggest Loser and it's about a group of people who are significantly overweight and they've tried all sorts of ways to get healthy and lose the weight and they haven't been able to. So they go on this bootcamp program, which is they're away from their loved ones and they're in this intensive exercise and diet kind of regime. And one of the challenges they do every season is they put on the midway through the season the amount of weight that these people have lost. So let's say they've lost 20 kilos over the season. They will carry a backpack holding 20 kilos Sometimes it's 10, sometimes it might be 30 kilos, so that's a really heavy backpack. And they make them trek up a mountain. So they're walking uphill and, as you know, walking uphill on its own is hard. But imagine carrying a sack of rice on your back as you trek up the hill. So it's a grueling experience and it's something I find fascinating because it breaks the participants down physically to the point where, when they release that pack, there's this massive full body realization of what they've achieved, because they can in one moment notice what they've been able to let go of. So this happens in normal life as well. We need to create this clean slate. We need to allow people the space to realize the baggage they've got on and to let it go so that they can move forward with more energy and freedom and headspace to come along on the journey with you. So that's the first leadership skill that you didn't know you needed to see and acknowledge reality.

Jolynne Rydz: 12:33

About 20 years ago, I was in a high school band and I was the section leader of the clarinets and we were coming up to a big performance. So every year our school entered this competition and it was this big thing that so many different groups from all throughout the school went up on buses and we competed at this competition and we'd won first place for about 10 years at this point, and winning that consistently, when there was amazing quality bands that we were competing with, was incredibly hard to do. Back to back, and as we were approaching this competition, one of the teachers spoke to me and said look, the teams, the clarinets, are really not getting this part of the piece of music. They were fumbling over it. It wasn't sounding clear, it just. It really wasn't great, no matter how hard we were practicing and we were doing, you know, twice a week rehearsals as a band. We were doing at lunchtimes we were doing sectionals, so people were skipping their free time with their friends to come and practice and so morale was a little bit low and I was tasked as a leader to, you know, let's up their performance. So I had to think about what I could do and when. I felt really inspired.

Jolynne Rydz: 13:53

And so in my family we often watched the tennis and my mum's a massive Wimbledon fan and I always remember this feeling that I got as I watched the athletes walking through that tunnel towards the court and it's like this buildup of emotion as they walk out onto Wimbledon, which is the leading competition for tennis, really one of the top places that they can compete, and it was just an incredible feeling. So the next day I spoke to the group and I used this analogy. I basically said we are coming up to what is our version of Wimbledon and we have an incredible honour of having won this before and we have an incredible honour of an opportunity to do our best and see how we go in this up and coming competition. And part of that is really nailing this one bit that we all know we've been trying so hard but not really getting, and that's okay. But the important thing is that we come together and we all do our part, because, at the end of the day, when you play in a group, an instrumental group. You want it to sound almost like one person is playing, so it sounds really seamless. And what happened after this was that one of the teachers had heard the band come together in practice and they said you know what happened? How did you do this? Their energies lifted, I could see their commitments changed and people were showing up when they weren't showing up, and so others weren't noticing our results.

Jolynne Rydz: 15:26

Have you ever wondered or experienced when people get stuck and maybe there's a change coming or something they need to do, and they're just resisting? The problem is that we focus on the reasons, sometimes, of what the change is and why people need to do what they do, and that really only engages your head, and your head is only one part of you as a human. So what I found is and this is the second skill here is that storytelling is a critical leadership skill that helps you to engage people's head, heart and mind, their body, their emotion, and really buy into a change. Think of it of a movie or a piece of music that you've listened to and how it makes you feel. Can you think of one? I can think of the first time I realized that music and movies have this emotional effect on me as a human, which was when I watched Saving Private Ryan and I was overcome with these tears as the mother was told that her son wasn't coming home during a war.

Jolynne Rydz: 16:35

So music, movies and arts, they have this incredible ability to move us, our emotions, let us feel things that maybe we don't always feel on a day-to-day basis, or we shut down, or it helps us relive emotions that we've experienced and help us to connect meaning to that. So, thinking of a movie or a piece of music, I'd love for you to think. You know, have you ever felt disgust, or maybe joy or desolation? Has it made you laugh or cry? Be joy or desolation? Has it made you laugh or cry and that could be crying with sadness or happiness or relief. It's so, so powerful. And what storytelling also does is it cuts through our conscious brain. So the thing that is saying we should do this, should do that to what we know and feel deep down. So it cuts through some of the mental barriers that we don't even know often, that we have in place, the way that we view the world, the way we think things should be, because we've been taught they should be that way. It cuts through that to what we are really truly feeling is real for ourselves.

Jolynne Rydz: 17:41

And the third reason why storytelling is so powerful and such a critical leadership skill is that it's memorable. Like people will come up to me and say often I remember that time when you drew the circle on the ground in a workshop. They were in and you were talking about being in and out of the circle. So I won't give that story away, but they will come to me and tell me and they will remember this Now, if I go and chat to some random people, which I've done this before, I'll say hey, you know, you attended some training this is not my training, by the way, but someone else's training on coaching. Let's say Be like, what do you remember from that? And people often go um, um, yeah, oh, I'm really not sure it was a while ago now. So storytelling is a critical way to actually help people to remember your message, whether that message is something you're teaching or something that you need them to understand, about a change that you're implementing or just the reason for moving the way an organization might be moving.

Jolynne Rydz: 18:43

Now, the third skill that you didn't realize you needed as a leader is facilitation. So there's two kinds of leaders that I've seen, and yes, I'm going to generalize here, but I've basically often see leaders fall into one of these two groups. So one is, when there's a team challenge or a goal that a group is working towards, a team challenge or a goal that a group is working towards, there's a certain group of leaders that will shy away from doing any sort of group work themselves. So they'll want to work on it one-on-one or do it through written communication and all different methods, but they will shy away from being front and center and bringing a group together to have a conversation about it. And then there's another group of leaders that I see will jump in and just do it. They will get up, they'll design a group session or they'll seek advice on how to do that, and they will get up and run it themselves rather than bring someone in or rather than avoid that conversation.

Jolynne Rydz: 19:39

Now, there's obviously reasons why you might do either way or might have a preference for either way, but what I found is that the leaders that lean into facilitating with their group and building that skill are ones that have incredible impact. And now what I found is that the skill is not necessarily taught. So when we teach leaders, we're often teaching them how to present so one way to a group rather than actually facilitate. So facilitating being where you open and hold a safe space for discussion and ideas to be shared, where you actively use activities to tap into people's strengths and their ideas and let them flow freely and then you shape the conversation so there's actually some tangible outcomes and actions that come from that. So it is a skill that you can learn, which is fantastic.

Jolynne Rydz: 20:32

And if you've ever felt that there are interpersonal issues in your team like this kind of he said she said jealousy, dynamic, maybe frustration at the way some people are behaving or their performance, or that people in your team are just not on the same page about what's needed or what's expected, or there's people complaining to you rather than taking action themselves, all of these things, I found, benefit from group development and facilitation, because it gets people to see everything out in the open. So instead of this, he said she said secondhand stories people hear it from the other person's mouth, the impacts that it's having on them and what that person wants to achieve, and when everyone shares that in the team, it starts to break down those barriers and silos and is really critical for behavior change. For you as a leader. It also stops you being the umpire. So if you manage imagine again at the tennis if you're the umpire, you're kind of looking left, right, left, right. It can make you really dizzy watching what one person does and then how the other person responds, and then that has a retaliation or effect, and you're just kind of watching this tennis game unfold and neither of them are really seeing what needs to be done because they haven't been able to step back and have that view that you have from that umpire's chair. So instead of you being the umpire and saying, no, this is the rule, this is what you need to change, you empower the group to be accountable, so then they are self-managing that behavior, that challenge or that goal and that project, rather than you having to map out everything and share all the steps for people. And the third benefit of really tapping into an ability to facilitate is you help people to grow together, and it's key for collaboration. You help people to grow together and it's key for collaboration.

Jolynne Rydz: 22:30

So I'd love for you to reflect on these three skills that you didn't know you needed. Do you already do them? Maybe you already knew that you needed them, I don't know. Let me know If you don't already do them, do you want to? Because what I've noticed is for the leaders that don't lean into these three skills, it's a lot harder for them to achieve their goals, for them to overcome challenge. The journey for them, I've noticed, has always been a lot harder. So my invitation today is to lean into these three. Where are you already doing them? Where could you do more of it? Where is it getting you great results if you're already doing them? And I'm so confident that if you lean into these three skills, that you will see impact, positive impact in yourself and your team and what you're trying to achieve.

Jolynne Rydz: 23:16

So if you're curious on how you develop these skills so how do you see and acknowledge reality, how do you actually storytell for impact and how do you facilitate groups where they come together and really are empowered to collaborate Then I'd love for you to connect with me.

Jolynne Rydz: 23:33

You can shoot me an email, so, at Jolne J-O-L-E-N-E at brillianceinspiredcomau. So send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can book in a just a casual chat and we can explore how we could build that for you or your team and as leaders, it's so easy to get caught up in getting the results because that's what we're measured on right, but the true impact of leaders is helping your people to feel seen and heard of. Leaders is helping your people to feel seen and heard, to connect and create meaning through story and feel safe and equipped to collaborate. Aristotle is known to have said the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and ultimately, our role as leaders is to create more value from groups of people coming together than what they can generate on their own as individuals. Thanks for joining me today. I hope that's inspired you to lean into those three skills and here's to you unleashing the power of your team.