#HRTechChat: Mastering Leadership through Setting Direction and Controlling Traffic

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Welcome to the fourth podcast in The Five Talents that Really Matter series.  In this podcast we begin to introduce the five talents, beginning with Setting Direction and Controlling Traffic.  

There is a familiar phrase: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”  While setting direction is where all great strategies begin, in our conversation with Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, the authors of The Five Talents, we learn that it might be one of the rarest talents.

Successfully setting direction requires:

  1. The destination has to be a place worth going to—a destination where people want to come along.
  2. Getting people to come along is not just a matter of telling people your direction, you have to engage them—it requires listening, connection, and the ability to articulate a compelling picture around why you are going there.
  3. It is important to connect each person to the destination and the work they are doing;  people have to know how they create value and how their contribution to work matters.

Many times, however, leaders can propose a direction, and it is met with skepticism because the direction was formulated in a vacuum, or it was the result of consultants formulating a direction that is not authentic to where the organization needs to go to be a success in the marketplace.  What we know is that it is difficult to inspire people and build a shared commitment to the future state.  

What we learn from Barry and Sarah is that you need to pay attention to the terrain.  Having a map is the beginning, but understanding the terrain is essential, and that is where controlling traffic is important.  It requires agility, adjusting to market conditions, recognizing opportunities that lie ahead, making sure that the organization is positioned for success.  

What I love about this conversation is that Barry and Sarah give us notable examples of how the best leaders can control traffic.  Execution capability is essential—the ability to effectively execute and orchestrate action.

Join the conversation on Setting Direction and Controlling Traffic to learn more.

 

The Five Talent that Really Matter is available on August 27th.

The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance: Conchie, Barry, Dalton, Sarah: 9780306833403: Amazon.com: Books

 

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

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Transcript:

Pamela Stroko 00:00
Hi everyone, and welcome to what is our fourth podcast on the five talents that really matter. In the previous three podcasts, we learned about the five talents. We learned about the authors, Sarah Dalton and Barry Conchie and how they were inspired to write the book, and how they arrived on five talents. And so this podcast and the next one, we’re going to be doing a deep dive, and what are the five talents and and what’s relevant as you think about those talents for you and your organization. But one of the things you know, just to kind of catch everyone up, is, you know, we’ve talked about whether or not organizations have the right strategy for talent acquisition. We’ve talked about leadership, and what are some of the misconceptions about leadership, and how we define leadership, and what a good leader does. And so these two discussions on the five talents really extend that discussion and help us take a deep dive into what really matters. So today we’re going to be talking about two of the talents. We’re going to be talking about setting direction, and we’re going to be talking about controlling traffic. Now, when I read the book, one of the first things I liked about setting direction, and this is so simple, was you have to create a direction, and you have to create a journey that people want to go on. It’s not just a matter of going anywhere. It has to be purposeful. It has to be engaging, and you have to be bring people along with you. So let’s start out, and I’ll open this up. Barry Sarah, let’s start out with setting direction, and how you arrived at that, and how you connect setting direction with controlling traffic?

Barry Conchie 02:05
Well, Pamela with the with the idea of setting direction. You know you mentioned that the destination has to be worthwhile and the journey has to be interesting. And when we wrote the chapter, I remember a story about a friend of mine who was going to go on a bus trip, and he went to the local bus station to buy his ticket, and he went up to the counter and he said, I’d like a I’d like a roundabout ticket. I’d like a return ticket and the ticket sales person said, Well, where do you want to go? And he said, well, back here and, and it was a funny thing, because it was true. The whole idea of a of a roundabout ticket, is that you go somewhere and then come back from a from a company perspective, the destinations are staging point to somewhere else, and very few leaders are capable of articulating the multiple staging points that take you 10 years into the future. They might get, I don’t know, a couple of years. They might get three years, but they can’t get 10 years. So one of the things that we discovered when we studied really, really effective leaders is that the thing that guides them more towards that longer term future is how they define value in you know, where they where the initial destination is, and where that value can lead us as an organization. And you know, the the creating of value is saying that this destination is better than that destination, or as we define that destination, this journey is much more interesting than that journey. And that’s actually a really important thing for every leader to think about, because I’m not sure we see that many good examples of it. As we look in the business world, people are much more interested in short term goals. They’re not much more interested in the short term activities that take them towards their goals. But one of the questions to reflect on, and maybe we start with this. And you know, Sarah and I asked this question quite a lot in in organizations, but what would be lost to the world if your company didn’t exist? Let’s start that question. So you know you exist now, but let’s say you don’t exist in the future. I mean, the first thing is, would anybody notice now? If the answer is no, then you probably don’t have a clear vision or value set already. You’re probably already commoditizing your business and your service. Services, but on the assumption that something would be missing to the world, can you clearly define what it is? Because if you can, then you’re closer to understanding how to articulate your value and what that value means, not only to your customers, but to the world more broadly. Now the other question, Sarah and I ask, and it’s a very provocative question, but it’s a question that might upset a few listeners, but, you know, at risk of me being traumatized at upsetting people, I’m going to put the question anyway. And that is, you know, Could you, could you work for a company who kills people? Oh, a startling question that is.

Pamela Stroko 05:43
It’s shocking

Barry Conchie 05:47
does that include tobacco companies? Does it include fast food enterprises? So you can see how this gets quite a contentious issue, because the nature of an industry, you know, you gotta try to find the way in which you articulate your value to a world. But you know, I’m not sure about organizations that might stand up and say, Hey, look at our abiding value is that we actually kill quite a lot of people. Are you with us? And and not many people would would feel good about that. And yet, those companies exist in the world, and they’ve got to try to find a way of articulating a meaning that tries to add some value. Now the reason why I’m struggling is because that doesn’t work for me. Clearly, there are certain types of organizations that I could never work for, but people do, and they work for them in their 1000s, and the challenge for those organizations is still the same. How do you give people a sense of value, meaning and purpose in what you do that inspires people to elect and commit and to want to go there on that journey?

Pamela Stroko 07:00
So Sarah, as I was reading the book and looking at setting direction, you spend a quite a bit of time talking about engaging people with meaning and purpose. And when we look at the marketplace today, in US people, what’s valuable to you? What do you want in an organization, particularly post pandemic, meaning and purpose have a very central place in the conversation. I want to be at a place that the purpose that I have as an individual aligns with the purpose the company has, or that what I value somehow is reflected in the work I do, and so I’m wondering if you could, could take us in the direction and the research that you did, and how you connected meaning and purpose with setting direction.

Sarah Dalton 07:53
I think one of the ways that you instill that sense of meaning in people is by showing them that their work matters, and that their thinking and contribution matters to the direction that the company is taking. And one way that you do that is that you involve them in decision making. So in that chapter around setting direction, there are different ways that leaders can go about it, right? So part of how you set direction is through idea generation and asking questions about what’s possible. Some leaders set direction through a really strong goal orientation, but other people establish a vision for the future by bringing people into the fold right by testing ideas against people and seeing what’s possible, or how we create a framework for how this thing becomes a reality. And I think one of the best ways of giving people a sense of purpose and showing them that they’re important is by saying, I don’t have this all figured out yet. Could you lend me some of your time? So we look at one of the things we look at in that chapter on setting direction is what a good decision making process looks like, because way too often you get leaders behind closed doors making all the decisions for the company and where it’s going to go, and then they’re charged with going out and selling that idea right. And people can immediately pick holes in it. People are immediately wondering why nobody talked to them, and then you get all the frustration in the commentary about lack of transparency, and people don’t listen to what we know, right? So one of the things that we talk about is, what is a good decision making process look like? How do you bring people in early as a way of generating ideas, getting feedback, and establishing a clear connection between the strategy that we think is right and how things actually happen. And I think that’s a phenomenal way of giving people a sense of of pride and purpose about where the company’s going, knowing that they contributed to it.

Pamela Stroko 09:59
So. So when you were doing your research and and highlighting the five talents, and obviously, I mean, you had 58,000 assessments where you had all this data that you were looking at, the people that did that just what you recommended. You bring people along with you. You have the conversation. You involve them in the thinking. How did you find that that impacted the results down the road?

Sarah Dalton 10:29
For one, it is an incredibly rare characteristic, and Barry, you’ll chime in on how this impacts performance, but I’ll just say it. It’s one of the rarest elements in our database. Typically, we see that leaders either do all of their own thinking on on their own, so they collect all the evidence that they need, they sleep on it, and the answer comes to them, or they just talk to way too few people, and they’re trying to get the decision right, but they’ve missed the fact that they’ve got an entire organization following them right? And they’ve got to prepare those people for the changes that are coming, and they need to do it early. So Barry, I’ll let you, I’ll let you finish what you had just started to say. I just wanted to, I wanted to add that it’s incredibly rare that we find people who are more consultative, more driven to reach down into the depths of their organization to figure out what people know that could help them.

Barry Conchie 11:26
Yeah, I think we need to change the conversation about leadership and the five talents and the way that we describe them. A part of that change, I think for too long we’ve pretended that great leaders do everything and that the best leaders do it all and do it all to a really high degree. And the answer is they don’t, and the truth is they never have. So when you look at compendiums of leadership capabilities, dispositions, talents and traits, this never ending list of wished for things that tell everybody what a great leader is. It’s completely not a nonsense. That’s the conversation we want to change. See the truth of the matter is this, Pamela, you might not be very good at setting direction at all, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be a fantastic leader. You just better make sure that somebody’s setting direction around you, and that’s what we mean by the five talents that really matter. We don’t expect every leader to be brilliant at each of these five things, and the truth is that they’re not. And as Sarah just indicated, setting directions, the rarest of the five. Well, if it’s the rarest of the five, that means some people don’t have very much of it, right,

Pamela Stroko 12:48
right? But they’re still pretty,

Barry Conchie 12:52
pretty good leaders. And maybe they’re pretty good leaders, because first they realize that, and they recognize that in themselves. And that’s where we get to, you know, looking at these five talents as as a collective. And that is, you might not have them all yourself, and you probably won’t, but you better make sure that they’re covered, and that places a huge emphasis on the people you surround yourself with. So if I’m a leader that struggles directionally, and it isn’t as easy for me to explain value or purpose or some of the other elements that go into setting direction. Please, please, please have that influence the kinds of decisions you take about who to surround yourself with, because the entire team is deficient in that area, you’re going to go off a cliff edge pretty quickly not know about it and sing all the way down to the bottom, where you disintegrate on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. And that’s really not a virtuous ending for anybody or any organization. Yeah. So think about think about it in that way, and we’ll say exactly the same for all the other talents too. So you know, we’re just talking about setting direction now, I mean, that doesn’t just uniquely apply to setting direction, but we’re going to be going on to talking about controlling traffic, and maybe we get a talk about harnessing energy. The same applies to those two. There might not be natural capabilities for you, but they are absolutely essential components of leadership that have to be taken care of at the top of the house, and you better make sure you got people around you who contribute in each of those areas. So the five talents provides this. We call it a holistic framework. And it’s a holistic framework because as a collective whole, it gives you a very clear description of what high performing executive leaders do, but they don’t do it all the. Themselves, and that’s hopefully people see that as liberating and not threatening. But that’s why we want this book to change the conversation, because in too many too many treaties on leadership, too many essays, too many books, too many writings, you can almost see the Superman t shirt beneath, beneath the dress shirt. And we’ve just got to stop this nonsense of thinking that everybody’s just waiting to rip this damn thing off and Superman shows up. It doesn’t really work that way.

Sarah Dalton 15:36
You know what’s funny when I was just going to add one thing to this, because it made me laugh thinking about what Barry just said when we take candidates through our leadership assessment as part of the interview process for the companies they want to join, one of the things that I preface that conversation with is saying that we’re going to find out that you’re not perfect, and I hope you’re not bothered by that, and everyone kind of laughs, but What I’m trying to do is put people at ease and tell them we’re going to find out some phenomenal strengths about you that you might not even realize are as good as they are, because, by the way, we’re comparing you to a bigger data set, right? But we’re also going to find out that you’re not perfect. There will be some things that you will be useless at in this assessment, and I hope you’re not threatened by it, because it’s it’s an annoying fact of human nature that we can’t be perfect and good at everything. And I want everyone to know going through that assessment, that that’s exactly what we’re going to find. It doesn’t speak negatively about you as a leader going through this process, that you can’t be perfect. But I always leave the window open for them to be the first one, but we haven’t found it yet. But

Pamela Stroko 16:44
you know, what’s interesting is you may say that, Oh, we’re going to find out you’re not perfect. How many people have actually received that and kind of laughed and said, Oh, you’re right, I’m not perfect. But in the back of their mind, they’re thinking, but I am perfect. I have all these talents, and I may be the one person that you talk to that has everything but one question. I wanted to ask both of you, because I think this is so important. You talk about setting direction, and often times I see in organizations that we couple that with inspirational leaders. You know, people that are able to set a direction and motivate people, and everyone’s excited. And you know, I’ve seen it. I spent 12 years in the tech space. I’ve seen it in the tech space that people want to follow inspirational leaders. So where is your where’s your place in the talent for setting direction and controlling traffic for inspirational leaders, because you talk about the values and align mining purpose in in meaning. But I can tell you, when I’ve seen inspirational leaders, it’s phenomenal what they’re able to do with their company and how they’re able to organize and inspire people to move in a particular direction.

Barry Conchie 18:07
Well, let’s not confuse inspiration for charisma. Ah,

Pamela Stroko 18:16
that’s a great point, because a great point there

Barry Conchie 18:19
are different ways of inspiring people, and people themselves are inspired by different things. Now, some people are inspired by dangling big pieces of juicy meat in front of them and asking them to take big bites out of it. And it’s a it’s a relatively Neanderthal form of inspiration, but taking big chunks of meat out of a bowl is, really does get some people fired up. So that’s the kind of short term goal. Stack it up. Let me knock it down. As much of it as I can devour today. This is the most fun I’ve had in my lifetime. So that’s, that’s one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is, I’m not doing this because you told me to I’m not doing it because you think it’s important. I need to think it’s important. Now inspiring that person is a whole different order to dangling meaty bones in front of some people, and they are going to need to understand not only the value of their contribution, but the value to society. You can’t answer both of those people with the same response now, well, the other element is some people are inspired by the people they work with, the teams that they belong to, and the kinds of tasks those teams are given to solve so they get meaning through that sense of reflective value. The organization thinks I’m important. They put me on this team. Other people said that, see their contribution is important. We’re doing important work together. This is This is fun. Some other. People are inspired by plain old rara right where we get a we get a phenomenal cheerleader on a stage in front of a group of eager beavers waiting to show up and put their best foot forward, and they just sing a tune, and everybody joins it, and it’s a phenomenal thing to see. So what we do in our assessment is try not to make an assumption that everybody’s inspired in the same way, but to try to identify the very different elements and very different ways in which people can be inspired. Then you flip it the other way and say, No one leader can do all those things. And not only are there many various ways in which a receiver can be inspired, but certain leaders are better at inspiring people one way rather than another. And the folks who really figure it out are the ones who get both sides of that equation right, so they’re able to connect their capabilities and their best ways of inspiring people such that the recipients can pick up their message, get excited about it, and feel like they can go and conquer the world now at the local team level, it gets really interesting, because, you know, one of the things that we look at is, you know, well, we asked this question, Are you the kind of leader where your team would take a bullet for you, or would they go over the parapet, or whatever, whatever equivalent you want to use, but, but they would put themselves ahead of you in order to, you know, either protect you or further your aims, but they themselves take the lead on your behalf. And there’s not just one way in which people do that, you know. I mean, if somebody, if somebody, poked me with a sharp stick, I’d probably do it. It’s better than I choose to do it myself, but I might choose to do it for different reasons than you. And you need leaders who are smart enough to understand that. So within setting direction, we talk about this kind of variability first, so that leaders feel encouraged. Oh, I can see my way here, but then they don’t get despondent by saying, I got no chance of doing it that way, and hopefully by finding their own path to doing that. You know, we can. We can help more employees feel inspired by their leaders at work.

Pamela Stroko 22:41
Now, one thing I want to move on to, because we’re we’re running a little short on time, is we wanted to talk about setting direction and pair it with controlling traffic. So Sarah, talk about controlling traffic and and how leaders do that, and how organizations need to pay attention to that.

Sarah Dalton 23:02
So in the book, when we talk about controlling traffic, this is really setting the parameters for how things play out in the company. So if setting direction is thinking about what we could do and establishing a course that brings us into the future, controlling traffic is about how we put the guardrails and the systems and processes in place for, again, how things happen, and we measure a couple of different characteristics in there. And one is about structure and process. So if you think about your organization as a as a messy map of all this different activity and things going on creating structure around that allows work to scale and things to happen in in in more predictable ways, right? But just as you need predictability and process and organization around things, you also need to be able to flex as circumstances change. So one of the other characteristics that we talk about is, is a kind of flexibility in how you manage people and resources, so how you how you manage pace and complexity, and then how you flex to changing circumstances. Because sometimes you’re going to get surprised, everything is going to go to plan, right? And you need to have a way of managing that. So that’s the that’s the whole game. When we talk about controlling traffic, is how do you make progress, and all of the different things that you expect to and manage people and resources in in the most efficient way. So we create a really strong linkage in the book between establishing a sense of direction and then thinking through exactly how things happen.

Barry Conchie 24:44
One of the frustrations in most organizations Pamela is a tension between direction and and controlling traffic, so the operational aspects of leadership, if you will. And that tension is. Caused often by organizations who think strategy or direction setting is a higher order thing that smart people do senior leaders do, but then the execution is the kind of messy bit that the rest of the organization does, and this tension is most evident when execution fails. And it’s interesting to look at what happens in organizations if execution doesn’t work out the way that the senior leaders who set direction expect it to. So if execution fails, it’s a failure of execution is the typical way they describe so they tend to pile on their operational people and try and figure out what went wrong. Here’s our view, if execution failed, it was the direction that was wrong, because direction needs to take account of our capabilities. It needs to take account of the reality of our organizational structure, of our systems and our processes, and if we set a direction in such a way that the execution subsequently fails to direction, that was wrong. Now that is a very, very different take on an inherent tension in the way that leadership works in most organizations. And you know, we we’re looking forward to discussions and argument about this, believe you me. But if you don’t get that balance and that tension right between setting direction which takes account of an organization’s capacity to execute, yeah, will forever be in this trap of we’re up. One minute, we’re down. The next we do well, one month, we don’t the next, you know, it’s because we have we ride this sawtooth. Either the direction doesn’t take execution into account, or the folks who set direction blame the reasons for execution failing on execution failing

Pamela Stroko 27:02
so in kind of reviewing, because we’re coming to the end of our time here. Through this session, we’ve been talking about setting direction and controlling traffic and the five talents. We’re not really talking about them just as individual components. This, I think goes on into our next two discussions, because they all come together to create a particular kind of leader, a particular kind of experience. So summing up setting directions, summing up controlling traffic, I’m going to ask both of you for just a piece of advice. So if an organization isn’t good at setting direction, and I’ll give this to you, Barry, because you, because you talked a lot about setting direction, how do they mitigate that to your point, you end up in the wrong place. You know that you had the wrong plan. How do you how do you work with organizations that maybe aren’t good at setting direction and they need to be better at it?

Barry Conchie 28:08
What if the entire leadership team is not very good at setting direction?

Pamela Stroko 28:11
That’s scary.

Barry Conchie 28:15
That’s what we find sometimes. Well, it’s a rare element, and we sometimes find that, and the evidence is in their sawtooth performance. You know, one year they’re really successful, they knock it out the park. They don’t really know why, and then they’re in the doldrums the following year because they’re just not that good at setting direction. But might have other good capabilities. One of the things that we recommend you do is, and this is why the assessment is so important, yeah, is, Are you clear about who plays that game stronger than other people, and do you put more weight on their opinion, or is it a free for all where people who pretend they’re good at setting direction throw their opinions in and expect to be listened to? Because one of the things I’ll tell you is that some people aren’t worth listening to one direction. They’re really not. Yeah. Now that doesn’t sound like the most inclusive comment I could make, and yet it’s the truth. If you want to be listened to in setting direction, then be worth listening to, and that means you got to do a lot of hard work, yeah, don’t have the team around you. Then I would, I would, I would argue that you don’t just talk to the people you normally talk to, but you dig deep and go wide in your organization and really solicit opinions, write down a frontline employees, talk to them about the most important issues facing your organization, and say, we have this issue. What do you think? And it’s remarkable the kind of information, insight and advice that you get, and that could be a very, very good, uh. Compensation, but that kind of deficient thinking at the top of the

Pamela Stroko 30:04
house, it’s really it’s very powerful to involve people in that discussion. Sarah, your advice, if an organization is not great at controlling traffic, and we all need to control traffic, you know, you can’t do everything all at once. So what’s it? What’s the advice for them? How do you get better at that?

Sarah Dalton 30:26
Just thinking through some of the leaders I’ve given feedback to recently, and it’s it. A lot of the people that we assess are very disciplined, very meticulous planners. They are highly organized. They’re very good at the kind of process approach that I described earlier, but I think what they are less effective at is anticipating where they’re likely to get surprised, and forcing their team to do the kind of thinking that plans for those surprises and what contingencies they might need to put into place. So you might be a really effective planner, but there’s only a single plan, and it often fails to take into account what might go wrong and what you do in light of those things. So some of the best advice I give is just thinking about, you know, what changes are likely to come. How do you need to plan for that, and how are you going to maneuver around the the inevitable changes, right? So that’s, that’s one of the better pieces of advice I can think about, is how you build more flexibility into those rigid plans that you make. Because as soon as I throw a wrench in that, you’re going to lose momentum as you if you haven’t planned for it in advance.

Pamela Stroko 31:40
No, that’s great advice. So we’ve been talking with Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton about the five talents that really matter. Specifically today we did a little bit of a deep dive on setting direction and controlling traffic. And in our next two podcasts, we’ll be talking about harnessing energy, exerting pressure and increasing connectivity. Thanks so much for joining us in this podcast. It’s podcast four of the five talents that really matter.

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