
1st Lead U - Leadership Development
This podcast, now in Season 3, is dedicated to self-development, self-awareness, and learning to lead oneself so listeners can lead others well. If someone cannot lead themselves well, it will be difficult for them to be an effective leader of others. This podcast will help listeners understand what it means to 1st Lead U and build confidence in themselves and their leadership ability. Personal Growth Coach John Ballinger has spent 35 years developing the knowledge and material he shares with individuals, business owners, and leaders from a variety of areas.
1st Lead U - Leadership Development
Training - Everyone Needs It to Succeed - CHART Ep 329
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Part of the leadership gap facing society today is as much a teaching gap as it is a lack of communication gap. In this episode we discuss how training, grounded in assessments and tailored to learning styles, turns strategy into outcomes. We share hard lessons on selection vs hiring, why implementation often fails, and how leaders must train themselves in order to train others.
Highlights from the discussion include:
• Framing the leadership crisis as a teaching problem
• Training as a core leadership duty, not an add-on
• Using assessments to know strengths, frustrations, and learning styles of your team
• Selection vs hiring and the sports model of vetting new team members
• Why implementations fail and how to fix the gap
• Training the C‑suite to model learning and follow-through
• Tailoring content for hearing, seeing, and doing learners
• Outcomes fro propert training and valuing your team members: organizational agility, innovation, engagement, and retention
• A crawl‑walk‑run plan and leader homework
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To do that, there has to be continual development of that leader personally and professionally, because the only way to elevate your ability to carry more weight and burden in the organization is to develop.
Announcer:Welcome to First Lead You, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence, and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.
John Ballinger:Hello, America, and welcome to First Lead You, where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders.
Announcer:Now, here is personal growth coach John Ballinger.
John Ballinger:Hello, leaders. My name is John Ballinger. I am the co-host of First Lead You, and I'm here with my trusted co-host, Mr. Douglas Ford.
Douglas Ford:Good afternoon, John.
John Ballinger:How are you today? I am well. And yourself? I'm good. It's been a nice day. It has been a unique day. Um, so we are starting on the final letter of the acrostic. So we made it to T. We made it to T. And the first T in the Acrostic is training. So I'm gonna read the definition of training, which is pretty unique based on first lead you. It's the teaching or developing in oneself or others any skills and knowledge or fitness that relate to specific useful competencies. So training has a you part of it inside of it. Like as a leader, you need to learn to develop and train so that you can develop and train others, right? And so that made me kind of pause when I sat back and thought about that because it's the first word was teaching or developing. So in in my mind, what that's saying, if in our acrostic chart and being training, today a leader needs to have a teaching component to it, a developing component to it. That's why it's important for the leader to know his or her teammates. So how do you teach to a person without knowing how that person needs to be taught and what they need to be taught?
Douglas Ford:Yeah, well, and that kind of circles back to our EC, which is is coaching. It's similar. Uh obviously has a takes on a different connotation, but uh yeah, it's important to know your know your teammates, your team members, and what they need to motivate them because uh all of our educational friends who are out there they know that there's different types of learning. Uh, and I'm not gonna try to say those because I'm not gonna remember them, but uh hearing, seeing, doing. Yeah. Uh but there's all there's different types of learning, and as a teacher in the classroom, they encourage you to include multiple styles of learning so that you potentially reach all the kids that are in the room.
John Ballinger:Right. Yeah. So I I was just thinking through that, you know, the teaching component, the developing of the leader themselves, the first learning to lead you. And I've made this statement on previous podcasts, but I've been in a lot of companies over the years that someone had come in and done a business assessment and the manual was on the shelf and there was dust on it. Which made me start thinking why are companies paying for assessments? Assessments are being done, but the results of the assessment and what needs to be executed in order for the organization to move forward wasn't implemented. Well, the obvious reason is the person that's responsible for buying in and developing what the consultant, advisor, whomever did the assessment did, they either didn't have the ability to implement it, the team to implement it, they may have gone in and said, All right, here's what they, the consultant, advisor, said we need to do. And there was no plan of action in order to implement it. The person that's sitting at the head of the table telling the team, here's what we need to do, has got to be a teacher. Because let's say there's six people on the team, and each two learn differently. The leader has to be able to communicate to each team member, here's here's what I need you to do in your department in order to enact what we need to do to move forward. Here's how I need you to do it based on this assessment, and communicate. It could be going to that department and spending some time with that person one-on-one because of the hearing, seeing, or doing.
Douglas Ford:Could a leader hand that responsibility off to somebody else that is, you know. I mean, if I'm not a natural teacher, right? Like I maybe I'm a good visionary, but I'm not really a good teacher. Can I pull somebody in so like related to this area? They're gonna they're gonna lead.
John Ballinger:They're gonna be the teacher or they're gonna lead the training the if the CEO is the person that's ahead of the table, most likely they're gonna look at the director of human resources or could be the COO. But the person has to have a teaching mindset to them. And the challenge with most chief operating officers and chief executive officers that I've met in in my career is that they're more action-oriented than they are teaching oriented. They're matter of fact, they they would say the the the C-suite would say a lot of times I'll just try and do it myself because I don't have time to teach somebody how to do that. Because that's gonna take time, and I know if I do it, it's gonna get done right. If I'm teaching someone and develop them, developing them, and I have to make the corrections myself, it's gonna take two to three times longer, so I'll just go do it myself. You're actually failing yourself and the team by doing that.
Douglas Ford:No, you're certainly not setting up for any secession planning or at all. You know, those who are gonna come behind you for sure.
John Ballinger:Right. So as we talk through, if the key component is knowing your team, I thought it would be important to remind our listeners to know your team, you've got to use the assessments. The assessments give you a snapshot of all the people in your organization that are in leadership positions, and it talks about their strengths and weaknesses, it talks about their their you know geniuses and frustrations. And then the other component is what's their emotional intelligence level to be able to withstand the resistance of what they're getting when they're teaching people that haven't been taught in the past. Because you know yourself how much friction that happens inside a company if you go in to do something that's not what the the team members are used to.
Douglas Ford:Absolutely. Yeah, it uh and if the person who is at the head of the table, figuratively or literally, is not supporting that and backing that up with their own messaging, uh, it can be extremely difficult for to get buy-in from the rest of the team.
John Ballinger:Yeah.
Douglas Ford:Because if that person is not on board, it's you know, nobody's gonna be on board.
John Ballinger:We've talked in the past, and there's a there's a book that we recommend that uh our listeners read. Uh leaders, especially, speed of trust, how much money is spent annually on training programs and taking uh team members off site to bring people in to speak about all right, here's what we're gonna do next year, and here's how we're gonna do it. And and because it's not implemented properly when they get back to the office, to the work site, wherever, that book says there was seven trillion dollars in lost revenue because of lack of implementation. So you're spending billions of dollars in an attempt to do something, and you're losing trillions of dollars because of the ineffectiveness of implementing it. Well, to me, there's a teaching problem somewhere.
Douglas Ford:Yeah. Yes, because uh because there's a comprehension problem somewhere, so which means it's not being taught properly to for the team to comprehend it, to understand what's important, and to be able to implement it correctly. So yes, yeah.
John Ballinger:I I saw after COVID especially, I saw this new C-suite position start cropping up. Chief People Officer. Yes. Chief Culture Officer. You know, you saw these just all of a sudden pop up, and you know, they're getting, you know, clinical psychologists, organizational psychologists to come in. I mean, there's a lot of work that companies are trying to do. I still submit, and I'm, you know, my next point in this was is this past week or maybe week before last, there's an organization we were selecting an individual for, and we did the assessment. We sent the assessments to them. Now, this person works for a higher education institution and had never had assessments. Interesting. So it was interesting to her, like I've never had these done before. Wonder why, if I'm in higher education, somebody's not given me these assessments to find out like what's my strengths and weaknesses, what's my genius, what's my frustration competencies. And so she took it home to her husband, who's a general manager for an organization. He said, Hey, I need to do that with my team because we're, you know, we're out of balance, we're not clear on who's who's good at what. We just throw people in a position and then give them a job description, and then we expect them to execute on it. When they start failing, we really don't do a good job of doing employee reviews to say, all right, here's where I see your strengths are at. This is, I've I've seen these strengths in you. Here's where you're struggling at. There's got to be a reason you're struggling. How do I help you through that struggle? What do you need? That's training. You identify what they need, you give it to them, and you allow them to move forward and then monitor to make sure that they're implementing the training that they're going through. But to hear somebody from the higher education side of it say, I've never taken these assessments, and it's a great idea, it's again a trigger for us to know that we in society, big business, even government, we've not we've not really started touching the process of selection versus hiring. The big corporations use headhunters to go out and try to match a job description and a resume, and then they ask for 30 to 40 percent of the first year salary to match, and they're falling flat. So now let's do it again. Let's do it again. So this this process of finding out as a as a leader who your people are so that you can train them properly is, in my opinion, is a great profit center that's gone and tapped.
Douglas Ford:Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think we take we try to take the speed dating approach to uh hiring people versus the you know the eHarmony or some of the other, you know, that really spend time. You you take different assessments, you answer questions, and they really spend time um looking at kind of what the match is. That same type of diligence needs to uh be in the selection process for companies so that you like said, I mean, there's we've talked multiple times about how much money it costs to onboard a the wrong person, right? You you spend the time looking for them, you make a selection, you hire them, bring them in, train them a year down the road, they realize this is not for me, I'm not the right person, or you realize that as part of the company. It's like how much time, money, and effort have you lost that now you've got to start all over when it maybe it would have taken an extra month to find the right person if you had gone through a more rigorous process to get to know them, let them get to know you. This is actually what the job's all about, and make sure everybody's a good fit.
John Ballinger:Yeah. And we've been a part of made the wrong decision, cost the company money, and been part of the selection process where we are getting a little bit of heat. I remember one specific uh leader in a company kept saying, John, if you call me one more time and say no, that's not the person, I'm gonna get mad. So putting pressure on me because you want me to say yes to somebody I'm not comfortable with. And I said, No, I can't. Because then if it's the wrong person, you're gonna come back to me and say, You said yes. So it took me five no's to get to one yes. But I was getting pressure the entire time because they needed that person, like we, you know, snap, snap, snap, let's get it, let's make it happen. We've talked about this on previous podcasts, but I'm gonna reiterate again. Professional athlete organizations have a very thorough process of selecting teammates that they want to join an already existing team. It's pretty arduous. They have scouts, they have you go through psychology, you go through physical. I mean, there's a lot of things that you go through before they say the San Francisco 49ers select. Why as a company would we select someone and hand over the responsibility of departments, portions of the company, or the company without thoroughly vetting someone using assessments, not just what the resume looks like. I mean, I'm still, Douglas, I you're gonna have to help me understand. I don't understand that.
Douglas Ford:Right. Well, because we can all be on our best behavior for some period of time, right? Like you can you can get through an interview process uh with most companies and be on your best behavior, and then you know, it's not till the real pressure starts to come that the real person starts to come out and they're like, Well, we didn't see any of this in an interview process, or you know, there was nothing that indicated this. It's like, well, maybe there wasn't until you put them in a position that they weren't prepared for, they weren't uh suited for from a personality, or uh, you know, we talk about working genius, maybe it wasn't part of their working genius. Can't do all those things in an interview. That's why the assessments exist, is to try to get a better idea of those situations that might not organically occur for several months. It's like, well, at least you have some framework of what they are most likely to react to and how they're gonna react in those situations if you use the assessments and understand what they say.
John Ballinger:Yeah, we even go a step further. We we actually create a chart of leadership for the for the leader, the ultimate leader in that company or the C-suite that gives them a snapshot of their team with the three assessments. So as they're getting to know their people, they can see that chart. Not our acrostic chart, it's the people chart. And they're gonna say, oh, well, this person learns this way, hears this way, has these strengths, has these weaknesses. Uh, this it this is their companies or their genius or their frustration. So we we I'm I'm I'm asking the leaders, first learn who you are with these assessments so that you can then use these assessments in your organization. We come back. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about uh what organizations are doing to select people, and then we'll go into more of the why training is important in your organization. We'll be back.
Douglas Ford:Hello, first lead you listeners, Douglas Ford here. I want to take just a few seconds during this break to say thank you for spending a few moments with us as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of being a leader. We hope that in every episode you find some bit of information that will help you on your own personal leadership journey. In order to reach more people and to improve our positioning on all the podcasting and social media platforms, it's important that you subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcasting platform like Apple, Spotify, or any other platform where you listen to First League U. We would really appreciate you clicking on the subscribe button to help us reach more people and expand the message of First Lead U. And please take time to visit the FirstLead U website. That's the number one, ST, the word lead, and the letter U.com. Firstlead.com. Number one, S T, the word lead, and the letter U.com. I hope you have a great day as you continue to learn to first lead. And that T is training. So we've been talking about the importance of training, uh, the idea that uh really to be a trainer, you need to be a teacher, you need to understand your team, you need to uh be willing to be flexible in how you teach your team and communicate to your team. And the more you know about your team through different assessments and things of that nature, the more you're gonna be able to communicate effectively to them. You're gonna be able to show them the importance of the training, why it's important for it to be implemented and help them to actually uh carry that out as you go forward. And we've even talked about like it doesn't always necessarily have to be the person at the head of the table, but it can be someone else that gets designated who has the skills to properly train people and help them understand uh what you're trying to do. So uh as we get into that, John, you've got some other information you want to share. We've talked a lot about uh sports, but you've got some additional information you want to share about the new landscape of sports and how it's continuing to evolve or devolve, depending on your point of view.
John Ballinger:Yeah, so before we do that, we've said this on a previous podcast, but I'm gonna read this again because it's important to this training tee. The CFO asks the CEO what happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us, and the CEO responds, what happens if we don't and they stay? Now, that goes for the C-suite too. You you can look out and say, hey, we need to do this, we need to train. But what about the development of the C-suite? The CEO's responsibility is to ensure their development. To do that, the CEO has to develop. But I think that's critical for our our listeners to remember hey, just because they may go somewhere, that doesn't mean you don't invest in your people. That's that's part of the issue.
Douglas Ford:Well, and that was one of the biggest issues in the great resignation that we saw coming out of COVID. It's like people didn't feel valued. The reason they didn't feel valued was because they didn't feel like their organization was helping them to improve their skills, their professional skills, or even personally, they were not helping them to develop. And so that was one of the places or one of the things that they wanted to do is find a place that valued them enough to help them grow professionally and to learn some personal skills that would help them advance as well.
John Ballinger:Right. So we all know, if we've been around for a little bit, that athletes go through drafts and are selected. Well, now we've seen that go down into the college level through NIL. Name, image, and likeness. The college athletes said, raising their hand, hey, universities are making a ton of money on us. Jersey sells all that. We want a piece of that. And we saw that start creeping in. Well, I started doing some research. That's creeping down into high school athletics. Yep, absolutely. There are, I can't, I can't remember where the stadium is. It's a high school stadium that was just recently built. I think somewhere in Texas.
Douglas Ford:Texas has used high school stadiums.
John Ballinger:It it looked like a university stadium. This is high school. And they are recruiting team members to this high school. I'm thinking, so we will spend a significant amount of time and money on athletics, but we won't spend a third of that developing and training our teams that are actually the ones executing every day to create the revenue in the organization. And I want to implore the leaders to really embrace a training process with them included, because as business leaders, pastors, citizens, when selecting someone to represent your business, your government, your place of faith, we should be more intentional about how we select the people based on their leadership's ability, uh leadership ability and what we're requiring from them. We have to, when we're going to pull that lever or write in that name for a government official, we shouldn't, we should feel comfortable in their leadership ability. I have been in my position as a C-suite or leader in an organization, I've actually been interviewed by a prospective team member. They came in with questions. A lot of their questions surrounded what's the leadership like. So think about that. You you may think you're doing the interview or somebody in your organization is doing it, but today you're being interviewed too. Um and to do that, there has to be continual development of that leader personally and professionally, because the only way to elevate your ability to carry more weight and burden in the organization is to develop. Now, here's the byproduct. If you learn your people and you develop yourself so you can develop them, and you actually are implementing a training program, here's what several articles I'm gonna I've condensed several articles like we do into here's the byproduct of that. Training leaders is vitally important in today's dynamic business climate because it enhances organizational agility, which I love that word, drives innovation, and boosts financial performance by fostering employee engagement and retention.
Douglas Ford:That's what you want. I mean, that's what everybody's looking for.
John Ballinger:I know. Like you want to hang that on the wall and say, here's our mission in our organization is to train our people because the byproduct is organizational agility, driving innovation, and boosting financial performance by fostering employee engagement and retention.
Douglas Ford:I mean, those are people that uh throw the covers back on Monday morning and they jump out of bed to get work, right? I mean that that's the company you want to work for.
John Ballinger:Yeah. So, so so well-trained leaders better navigate rapid market changes, align teams with strategic goals, and cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and problem solving, ultimately strengthening the company's competitive edge and ensuring long-term stability. I I condensed that out of maybe five or six articles. And I'm thinking, why is that not like front and center in every company and saying that's the mission we have here? Because the reality, Mr. Ford, when we talk about our one percent are leaders, four percent are taught to lead, ninety-five percent are just natural-born followers, but because of the failure to teach, train the people that would be mid-level management, and I'm going back up to the one percent, the leaders in the organization, and they're not developing mid-level management, your people, which are the majority of Americans, are being they're failed by the leader, which creates that fourth category where those those people are just disenfranchised, disgusted with the company. Like, why would we keep doing that? You know, the definition of insanity?
Douglas Ford:Keep doing the same thing, expect a different result. We're doing it.
John Ballinger:Right. And and there's some unction that's going on, is we don't know how to do it, so let's develop robots and artificial intelligence because we can't figure out how to go. And I'm telling you, it's a it's a shame on us moment as leaders that we would let a robot and a computer think for us because we can't teach or train our people well.
Douglas Ford:Well, and you we were talking yesterday about uh this aspect of of people and the organization and risk management, and you mentioned uh a company that's a transportation company that has a uh specific slogan that they love, and everybody in the industry knows about it.
John Ballinger:Yeah, our driving force is people.
Douglas Ford:Which is literally true. It is true, right? And then, but it also applies to their approach to how they take care of their people.
John Ballinger:Yeah, and I told you, I said, this company is so well known in the transportation industry that everybody knows what color their trucks are, what color their trailers are, what color the pants are on the drivers, what color the shirts are on the driver. I mean, that is a put-together company, and you do not see an unprofessional driver get out of one of those trucks. They are buttoned up. And that's difficult in a transportation world, but they have this standard and they hold to that standard, and that slogan is what they abide by. Companies have got to do that, especially in this post-COVID environment. It's important to tailor the training program in your organization to the team member and their needs. Don't buy something cookie cutter and just try to shove it into your company. Now, I'm not saying you can't buy something that's an outline, but you have to tailor it to your company and to your team because just trying to cram something off of the shelf doesn't work. The leader, remember, we talked about this in the beginning. As you tailor that training, remember that your teams they learn differently. And you have to ensure that that training program is taught so when somebody needs to hear it, see it, or do it. Now, the reality is there's a whole lot of doing that needs to be done because you can even hear and see it, but the practical application is where you really start getting results at. So that's very important to bake that time into your training program is actually hands-on. If you don't tailor and you don't recognize how someone learns, I've seen this, you're going to basically take two-thirds of your team and you're going to just discount their ability to implement what your desire to do. Which means maybe one-third of the training, and I think that's where the seven trillion dollars from. Spend all this money, put all these programs in place, lose seven trillion dollars in productivity. Right? So it's vitally important. I use the word vitally important, it's vitally important. If you know your team due to the selection process, and you tailor your program specific to the teammate teammates' needs, you're going to execute and get that organizational agility. That's what's going to happen.
Douglas Ford:Well, like I said, that's that's where everybody wants to be. That's what uh everybody should be striving for because when you create that type of cohesiveness amongst your team, they understand where you're going, they all feel like they're valued, respected. And they're all getting the training they need to properly do their jobs and to grow in their position for potential future leadership. Um you know, everybody's rowing in the same direction.
John Ballinger:Right. I made this statement on the previous podcast, but I want if you're out there and you're sitting at a desk and you your leader, write this down because I think it's so important to have this on your desk around your desk. It's not if someone's smart, it's how they're smart. And leaders must teach to how their teams are smart. You it's your response. I mean, you have a you have an obligation, you or someone in your organization has an obligation to unlock the power of the brains of the people that you've selected to come into your organization. So the homework for the leader on the training is to assess what's what's my training program for me as a person. I want you to assess that, sit down and write down, you know, what do I do to develop myself to make me a better leader for my team? And then assess the training program that you have in your company. If you don't have one, I would encourage you to start planning for 2026 and just crawl, walk, run into a training program for your organization. That's the homework for the uh for the leaders. And remember, in order to lead your team well, you must first lead.