Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Future of Leadership | Matthew Confer - VP of Strategy at Abilitie

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Lessons - The Future of Leadership | Matthew Confer - VP of Strategy at Abilitie · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, we explore the importance of personalized leadership,
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  discover how to effectively assess and adapt your leadership style to meet individual needs.
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  We delve into the common misconception of a one-size-fits-all approach
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  and explore the benefits of understanding and addressing individual differences.
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  I want to sort of double down on understanding more about what ability does and how you work with companies,
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  but first let's set the stage to highlight the contrast.
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  So what is the type of training that I'm going to pick a random number?
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  90, 95% plus of companies do right now that I've been probably exposed to my career and probably
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  many people listening. So what's the benchmark that you're differentiating yourself from?
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  Yeah, I think a lot of organizations use PowerPoint or other materials to convey
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  a structure around maybe theory about what it means to be a good manager or perspective based
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  on what it means to be a good leader at organizations. They might use behavioral frameworks,
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  they might have you read a book on leadership or listen to an executive at the company talk about
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  what it means to be a good people manager. What we're firm believers is that there needs to be
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  an active role in learning. If anything, we face so many distractions as professionals in
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  just in general as people and if you're learning or your training isn't interactive in nature,
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  people are just going to check out. And so unfortunately, I think a lot of people scratch the surface
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  with what you refer to, meaning role plays and that's kind of the extent of experiential learning
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  that they do. We've tried to create and almost gamify the training approach where you're logged
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  into a simulation, your teammates are talking to you, you're seeing emails come on the screen just
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  like you do in your real world. You're making decisions about pricing or strategy or making an
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  acquisition in one of the games to go against your competitors and then you're actually getting
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  out of the simulation and talking and reflecting back on your decisions. So a huge part of experiential
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  learning is actually the reflection on what you did. So it's one thing to just let you lose in a
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  game. It's a whole other thing in a much more powerful to actually put you in real world situations,
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  watch you perform and then ask you to reflect on that performance. And I think that's the key piece.
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  And is this like, so this is very interesting. So is this like an AR environment or is this,
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  you say game, what does that mean? Yeah, so it's basically a browser-based simulation. So virtual
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  reality, no AR, I'll take one of our simulations is called management challenge. Surprisingly,
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  it's about the challenge of people management. And so when you log into the game, you and your
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  teammate are actually presented with six virtual characters. And these virtual characters send you
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  emails, they send you little slack messages, you watch videos of these characters, and then you're
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  actually presented with different challenges. You know what characters should work together on what
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  projects. You have limited time as a manager in the simulation. How do you want to spend your time?
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  You can coach characters. You can provide them feedback. You can roll up your sleeves as a manager
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  and actually do the project. And I think one of the reasons we've been very successful is these
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  are all team-based competitive simulations. So if you and I were partners, there's other teams
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  partners in the game and they have those same six characters and they're presented with the same
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  challenges. But we all go about it in different ways. So we're learning from our peers watching
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  what they're doing. And then as a group or as a class, basically reflecting on that event. And I
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  think that's allowed us to scale with a lot of our organizations that we work with.
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  It's very, very, very interesting. I guess I was I was probably like shooting like to the next
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  iteration of where the chip gamification is with AR. I was too far. I keep thinking like, oh, that
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  would be so much fun to like participate in. But I think that already like this is a huge step
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  like compared to again, what everybody experiences in their career. And like you have these you have
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  these logos like those are not small names. What what does the feedback? What are the results
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  of this type of gamified leadership training? I think the hardest thing in our industry to be
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  totally frank and honest is ROI. Sometimes it's really hard to get a return on investment reading
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  on training. What we do find is that survey scores for experiential learning are off the chart
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  compared to a passive approach to learning. I think that makes a lot of sense to people. If
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  you're asking people to just sit in a room or in a zoom classroom and listen to somebody,
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  you know, PowerPoint slide them over and over again. They're not going to feel like that was the
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  best use of their time. If instead they're involved in the experience. They're making decisions.
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  They're interacting with teammates. They're probably going to find that to be a much more enjoyable
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  experience. The hardest leap that we have to make is what is the ROI on putting somebody in
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  leadership training? We've worked with some of our clients on surveys of the people that they
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  manage and has their managerial effectiveness gone up after going through leadership development
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  training that involves simulations. We're very positive on the ROI if you measure it that way.
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  But I would say to your point that is probably the hardest part in our industry. It's a lot different
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  than if you bring in a new financial analyst and you're able to potentially more easily quantify
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  the approach that they're having or the impact that they're having.
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  Yes, so I agree with you there. I think it is hard to quantify, but it's still is when you're
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  teaching leadership, I would say that I guess it depends on the business that you'd be teaching
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  it into because there's still some, like you said, surveys, employee surveys, satisfaction,
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  just I think anecdotal feedback from people feeling more comfortable in actioning the things
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  that they've learned and just feeling more like confidence. You're probably not going to get an ROI
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  reading on that, but I would say that if a leader who participates in these types of programs
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  is a repeat customer or return customer, it's silly to say, but that's there's your feedback
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  right there. They felt good about it. They learned something. They felt like it actually
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  changed in a positive way, something that they were struggling with in their day-to-day
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  job or their career and then they're going back to you because that's really like for all types of
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  training, I've hired on sales trainers, I've hired on leadership trainers, I've gone to sales
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  training, leadership training, sort of like my area. And when do you go back or when do you have a
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  repeat, you know, you want, when you feel like you're actually taking something from that,
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  implementing it and then it's working out with the positive result. And if you have people that
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  are coming back to you like that, that's your that's your metric right there because a ton of
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  people see training, they used to like, you said it, you nailed it, they sit in this training,
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  they never want to go back, they never actually anything, they don't learn anything, they zone out
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  and then it's like they're back to what they were doing the next week, right? So I think the people
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  going back to you and doing it again and again and again is probably just a that's one sign,
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  but it is, it's a tough business to be in, right? To be selling something like this because it's
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  also very blue ocean, it's something that I, yeah. It is and we find that clients that do come back
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  to us, what I think they say and it hints at what you're saying, our environment is somewhat of a
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  sandbox for you to bring out what you want and what we find that most clients want is they want to
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  throw their leaders into something that's a little bit different. They want to test them,
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  they want to get them out of their comfortable limits, but then they want to make the tie back to
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  what's going on in their world. So for Coca-Cola or for a client that we're working with, our simulations
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  don't necessarily look like the world that these Coca-Cola managers or executives operate in day-to-day,
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  but during the reflective pieces, what starts to come out is, hey, we struggled with A, B and C in
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  this simulation. That's pretty indicative of what our team in Latin America is struggling with
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  right now. Let's use this as an opportunity to talk collectively as a leadership team and figure
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  out the real problem in our real world. So the simulation becomes this really nice sandbox to
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  practice and stretch yourself and then in the reflection piece, you're actually tying it back
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  to your real world. And then my follow up to this would be for people that aren't at that
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  enterprise level, but see value and this type of learning resonates with them. How do they get
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  access to something like this, an entrepreneur, first time CEO founder? One of the most interesting
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  things you asked about what my role is and one of the fascinating things about our organization is
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  about two or three years ago, almost the entirety of our business was taking one of our simulations
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  and slotting it in at a very large organization usually. We'll say Fortune 500.
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  What changed was we started to have more and more companies small to mid-size ask us to design
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  leadership programs for them, taking what we've learned from working with some of the largest
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  corporations in the world. What then the iteration of our business was was actually rolling out a
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  mini MBA program that's fully open enrollment. So our CEO, it's called the invited MBA, so it's
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  the invited MBA by ability our company. Our CEO's belief is that in a 12 week mini MBA program, you
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  can give leaders a small taste, but a very impactful taste about what you learn in a full-time MBA
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  program. So instead of asking people to either leave their full-time jobs or get their companies
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  to support them doing that, we actually offer a night and weekend program. This will be our fourth
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  cohort going through it. This year originally it was based just in Austin and then actually as a
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  result of COVID, almost 30% of our work pre-COVID was fully virtual, so we just decided to go fully
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  virtual with everything. So our mini MBA open enrollment, all of our corporate programs, we just
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  transition to our virtual classroom and it's been very successful for our organization.
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  Yeah, I would say that that was a smart move because that means that you have all these data points
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  from live leadership simulations and training that you are truly just bringing into education and
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  you can, you know, I think that the traditional MBA, that's actually the one thing that it's missing.
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  It's missing the insights for people that are actually doing the things and it's mostly theoretical
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  unfortunately and not tangible or practical. So I think you're actually selling a huge gap,
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  I think it's actually probably a very strong business case or a business idea in and of itself
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  because I find that's what education lacks 100%. The thing that surprised us the most,
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  which we were not really prepared for is a lot of corporations, small, mid and large,
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  wanted to then send people through the invited MBA. So almost sponsor them to go through
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  the program in lieu of sending them back to a full-time program. So that's been one of the fastest
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  growing parts of our business, which I'd have to say caught us a little bit flatfooted to be honest.
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  Well, congratulations on and I think that actually just shows you the need for
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  for education that is useful versus again just theoretical. I'm curious because you're in this
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  space and I know like you have a podcast and you know we can plug that at the end where people
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  will check it out. But some of the things you talk about on your podcast are the disbeliefs
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  or or or common beliefs that are held in leadership that aren't true and I actually really would
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  appreciate if you could tell me some of the lessons that you see or you learn from both your
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  interviews on your podcast as well as some of the lessons leadership lessons pick a few or one
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  or two main ones that you see after individuals go through this program. What are the things that
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  leaders think they have down that they have a total misconception or or the common belief in
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  leadership that just isn't true? The one that sticks out to me is I think there's a perception
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  and I fell into it too that there's a golden rule approach where you as a manager or you as a leader
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  want to do on to others as you would want done on to you and that kind of sounds great. I mean it
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  sounds like oh my god that's a wonderful way to approach leadership. The problem is it misses the
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  fact that other people aren't like you and other people potentially want to be led in a very
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  different way or have different things that motivate them and what I struggled with is a manager
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  earlier in my career where a lot of people struggle with in our simulations and what a lot of the
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  guests on the learn to lead podcast that I host have told me is that you need to do your best to
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  get in the head of the people that you're managing and adjust your managerial or leadership style
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  based on them not based on how you would want to be led or how you would want to be managed and
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  people who are really successful people managers are the people who go into every conversation
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  rejiggering their approach based on the person that they're talking to not being a static leader
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  to everybody just trying to be the leader that they would want to be led by. I think that's a huge
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  shift that it's very tough to make early in your career but once you make it it reframes everything
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  that you do as a leader and you have now I'm just thinking it's almost a it's a huge paradigm
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  shift from what from what I think a lot of us do unfortunately how do you do that effectively
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  because that is incredibly difficult to have a strong enough read on an individual who everybody
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  has different personality types not everybody is so open with with how they would like to be led
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  not everyone's going to tell you that right so how do you actually go into a conversation and
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  understand how somebody would want to be led. One thing that what of our simulations does is you
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  log in and you see your team and the team has all of your characters all of your resources it says
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  you know what their skill sets are it lays it out for you then it tells you what their engagement is
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  it's kind of a yellow red green bar how engaged they are and then it says how much capacity they have
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  and if you overwork your employees in the game actually their capacity tokens start to go away like
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  I like I like to tell leaders that and I've actually noticed some leaders at the end of the simulation
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  do this have you ever thought down thought at the end of the week I manage these six individuals
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  what is their engagement level if I had to mark it on a on a red yellow green bar like how far
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  to a hundred percent green would they be and how much capacity do they have left and what motivates
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  them in the game that gives you like a little profile it says you know so and so is this they came
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  to your organization now they're hoping to get this out of their career have you ever structurally
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  thought I have six people on my team and I'm going to write down what motivates these six individuals
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  and I'm going to actually try to chart out how engaged they are and the people who showed up on
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  your lowest levels of engagement why aren't you setting up a meeting with them on Tuesday when you
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  get back into the office like why aren't they your first call Monday morning or your last call
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  on Friday afternoon I think that's a really powerful shift sometimes it is as simple as like
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  writing out yeah if you if you're if your people were game characters how would they show up right
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  now thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so
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  you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the
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  links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one