Leading Beyond Any Title

The world of work is dynamic, and how we lead in work has changed. New skills and competencies are needed to lead successfully today. One of those competencies is the ability to think strategically in the workplace.

Strategic intelligence consists of having the mindset, the skills, and the ability to lead yourself and others successfully. Join us for a conversation with Rod Miller to explore the value and importance of strategic intelligence in the workplace.

Jennie, Craig, and Rod will start this important conversation - drawing on the experiences of the audience - as well as concepts and discussion points from SAIT's leadership development program - Leading Beyond Any Title.

Leading Beyond Any Title At Breakfast will bring you weekly, quick lessons and conversations about timely and topical leadership challenges. You'll leave the conversation with 1 BIG IDEA, 2 Applied Strategies, and 3 Questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership that very day.

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Connect directly with Jennie and Craig on LinkedIn:

Jennie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniengilbert/
Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craighess/

Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.

Craig: 0:00

This is the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, your guide to transformative leadership. We're your hosts. Hi, I'm Craig Hess.

Jennie: 0:06

And I'm Jennie Gilbert. Each episode of Breakfast will bring you weekly quick lessons and conversations about topical leadership challenges. You're guaranteed to leave with one big idea, two applied strategies, and three questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership every day.

Craig: 0:22

We'll bring you insights on how to lead beyond any title and unlock your own leadership potential.

Jennie: 0:27

And we both hope you enjoy this episode. All righty. Good morning everybody. Just while we wait for a nice photograph, sunrise from our Heritage Hall campus. A quick reminder to you if you are coming to us for the first time or you haven't been back for a little while, or you just haven't been on Zoom, because for a lot of us, we don't do Zoom as much as we used to. The chat is obviously already highly active. Craig has some links in there for you to head to different things that you can follow up. I have lots of people saying good morning from wherever they are from. You're very welcome to follow suit and as we carry on, feel free to drop your thoughts and conversation into the chat. But if you have a specific question for any. One of us, next to the chat icon on your zoom toolbar is the Q& A button. So if you have a specific question that you would answer, please put your question in there. Craig's job this morning is to follow the conversation, follow the chat and follow the Q& A. So you make his life an awful lot easier if you head to that Q& A and there is the option in there anytime to click on the anonymous piece, if you would like to remain anonymous in that question. We'll come back to the photo that you can see if you're joining us live. If you're listening, it is a picture of downtown Calgary. Sunrise from our Heritage Hall campus, and downtown sits the other side of the river. Makintas, as we are known, the meeting of two rivers. Our land that Heritage Hall is situated on is within the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy that encompasses our indigenous people of the Treaty 7 region, that is the Siksika, the Bukhani, the Ghani, the Sutina, the Stoney Nakoda, and the Northwest Métis homeland. It's a warm welcome to everybody who makes their home here on Treaty 7 and wherever else you are joining us from today. And as we've already seen, we're encompassing an awful lot of Canada and possibly even beyond. We'll see as we go. Thank you for taking that moment with us this morning.

Craig: 2:42

Perfect. Thank you, Jennie. And yeah, so folks, please do carry on the conversation in the chat. It's always very robust and she a pretty good read when we finish these off and try very hard to throw your specific questions into the Q& A. But this morning we have a special guest joining us this morning, Rod Miller. Rod, and I'm going to be. Very transparent here. Rod and I go back, closing in on three decades now, and I know when you take a look at both of us, clearly we must have met on the Draven 4 playground or something like that, because there's no way we're old enough to know each other for 30 years. I have had the great JenniePleasure of having Rod as my leader in a couple of different organizations, mentor, coach, friend. Rod is teacher, professor now. What do we call you at SAIT, Rod? Professor, teacher, facilitator? Oh,

Rod: 3:33

Jenniejust Rod. I'm just, I'm Rod at SAIT. That's what I am.

Craig: 3:36

Just Rod at SAIT. That's his Twitter handle. But yeah, no, Rod's a, Rod is a tremendous individual and has a lot of insight with respect to human resources and especially this morning's conversation around strategy. and strategic intelligence. Rod, welcome. It's great to have you joining us.

Rod: 3:56

JennieCraig, Jennie, thank you so much. Tanshé, Rod Miller, Dishanikaashian. Jennieit's a pleasure to join you fromJennie from the Métis, one of the Métis homelands here in Canada. Jennieas a proud citizen of the Métis NationJennie I represent an Indigenous voice and I love that opportunity, so thanks for having me here today.

Craig: 4:14

And again, wonderful to have you join us. Strategic Intelligence. That's what we're here to talk about today. And Jennieit was very fun in the pre show. We should often record our pre show because I think there'd be some great pieces that come out of that. But in the pre show, I threw the concept of strategic intelligence out to Rod and Jennie, and they took off and ran for quite some time. And I had to bring them back in so we could get started this morning. I'm going to start here, Rod, with the simple question of strategic intelligence. What is it and is it important?

Rod: 4:49

It's such a great question to reflect on because, Jenniewhen you think of a strategy for an organization, that's what kind of drives us, Jennieto go into the future of what we want to be as an organization driven by all these elements that we call things like mission and vision, leverage values, all that stuff. But strategic intelligence, to me, was really born out of where we've come from historically. In a kind of a financial or an infrastructure capital based marketplace where we have these things that we leverage and we leverage financial resources and organization. We leverage the capital infrastructure of our organization to create value. And as we've moved into a more human based and human centered economy, a knowledge based economy, what really is important is being able to leverage the intelligence that individuals bring. To that organization. And so the opportunity here for us from theJennie strategy perspective to build into our future state of where we want to be as an organization is being able to really develop and leverage the human capital intelligence that we have in an organization by building strategic intelligence. Within that organization. So really, to me, strategic intelligence in the simplest form is being able to condense and leverage the human capital infrastructure that you have within your organization and really based off of the concept that we discussed in the program that we do here at SAIT is this concept of social capital and leveraging social capital within your organization. So really, at the end of the day, SAIT. What it is leveraging human potential Jennieto get you to that future state that you want to get to a very strategic intention to leverage intelligence that exists within the organization and outside that organization.

Craig: 6:32

So simple for us to wrap up in about a 40 minute conversation, then, is what we

Rod: 6:36

need. Yeah, that's where we're gonna, we're, so let's just pull a bunch of threads and see what kind of comes out of all of this today, because I think there's certainly a lot there.

Craig: 6:45

Absolutely. Jennie, I saw you nodding along. I'm just curious. What's the first thread you'd like to pull on there? What Rod described.

Jennie: 6:53

Oh, there's many, but I think we have to be fair and let's just tap in onto that term social capital to start with it. We throw it around a fair amount. Those who've hung out with me a bit know I much prefer the word FIKA for it, which is our Swedish version. And simply we're talking connection and we're talking knowing your people and. Within that kind of depth of relationship, the trust that's built, social capital allows us to know the strengths that we're carrying. Rod, I love the way you use the word leverage there. Leverage your people. What strengths are they bringing? We still hire to a list and sometimes we get people who join who have half the list. Sometimes we get people who join who have the whole list of skills and everything we need, but there's always so much more. And if we're not concentrating on building those social connections. And understandings, we can't even possibly begin to involve people within the strategy. So I think that's a really important fabric piece.

Rod: 7:57

And can I build on that? Because I think one of the interesting things that I read, it's probably about a year ago now that, and it was in the Harvard Business Review and I can't remember the title of the article, but what struck me is that today. Only Jennieabout 68 percent of HR leaders, so it's HR leaders, so CHROs, VPs, 68 percent of those leaders have no idea of the skill set sets that exist within their organization. And when you think about that's nearly, that's really between two thirds and a quarter. Of people understand what that organization makeup is. And so really where the value creation resides, cause that's what we're all doing when we're in an organization, whether you're a not for profit organization or you're a for profit or you're a municipality, whatever you are, government agency, at the end of the day, we're there to create some type of value for that organization. We're brought in because of the skills that we have or the knowledge that we have or the experience that we have. But we can't leverage that if we don't know what it is. So if nearly 70 percent of HR leaders don't understand what skill sets exist within the organization, we tend to go back to the traditional route. We need someone who's got this and this. So we're going to throw out a job description or a posting that says we need this and this, not realizing that may in fact exist. Already within the organization in another area, another department that we can leverage and that also speaks to the concept of agility, which we're going to get into today. But I just think that's a fundamental area where we can go. Okay, what is here? What are the skill sets that we have in this organization that we can leverage on this product or the service that we're offering? Whatever it is, we do as an organization. Do we really know what people are bringing to the table in the organization?

Jennie: 9:42

And then I think the hardest question is in the busyness that we have, how do we do that? If we're constantly heads down executing, how do we find that out and how do we tap that information to get to the right places?

Rod: 9:56

How do you build an organization around that?

Craig: 9:58

Yeah, and I was just going to, that's where I was going to go with this is how do you, as a leader, take the time to do this? And I think one thing that comes up often in our conversationsJennie And again, it may be me projecting my own issues, but how do you find the time to figure out what skill you have in your organization? How do you, in essence, what would seem take a team offline or a group offline to do this audit, to figure it out and then start building up from there? I think my gut tells me there's a lot of folks that say, this is all great, Rod. Yeah. We got to figure out what skills we have to start leveraging. We got to know what Jimmy can do and Susie can do, et cetera. But I just, I've got to get this stuff done on a day to day basis. So how do you bring this all

Rod: 10:45

together? So I think it comes, so I think it's, I think there's two, two aspects come to mind. I think certainly culturally, and Jennie, you mentioned this word, it's about connection, right? It's genuinely connecting with your people. So whatever, so if we know the span of control on average is, eight people on average per leader. So can you as a leader genuinely connect with the team that you have, get to know them, get to know their skills, get to know what's important for them, like really genuinely authentically connect with them. And then the possibility exists of all leaders and being able to do that as a priority in the organization, because we do lead through other people. Jennieand that's the challenge of leadership. Is being able to effectively learn how to, with skill development and so on, learn how to lead through others as that guide, that mentor, that coach, that whatever you want to call it. Jenniebut imagine all leaders in organizations effectively leading that way. So you have that as a base. Of yeah, we know our teams, Jenniethe well, and then it speaks to what does our workplace look like? How do we design the workplace to allow for that type of conversation to organically happen? It's pretty hard to go back and say, let's go do an audit. That's pretty big work to do. And it may not serve the outcome you're looking for, but you can even start today. You start today at the foundation of your own team and understanding your own team and what they bring to the organization and then challenging leadership to really dig into their organizations and be and developing the processes to allow that to organically happen within the organization. I think there are structures that you can put in place Jenniethat help that facilitate that. But really, at the end of the day, it comes down to leaders making this a priority. This is the job that I need to do. My job is to develop people. My job is to get to know people. My job is to assign workloads or workflows, whatever, to these people, make them accountable to the outcomes. That's my role as a leader. And so if I can do that with my SPAN, then that's where it begins. And then it's organically created within the organization to build that awareness of what might be there. We also do our project based teams, right? So if you're working on a specific project where you're looking for skill sets, don't take the first step of going outside to find something. Jennieassess what might be available within your organization to work on that particular project, regardless of where they come from. Maybe they've got some experience in the background that could be leveraged for a particular project that you're working on. So part of this is also designing the structure in a way that allows that to be facilitated, but the core of it really is you could have the structure, but if you don't have the leaders leading this way, then it's probably not going to happen. So it really comes down to the leadership and cultural leadership from my perspective.

Jennie: 13:27

I think there's really two really easy things in there that we can take and keep the same. I really liked what you said there, Rod, about that organic piece. And when you hear that, it changes the verb from how do I find the time to how do I make the time? Because when it's a priority, we can't make the time. And somewhat tongue in cheek, somewhat this is real, we know it, especially with our audience that we carry in here. Take a look at the meetings you're attending. There's an hour in there. And the easiest one is find the meeting where you're going with two colleagues from the same team. Don't go to that meeting, you've got two people there. You can hear from them, there's your hour to start on that. And the other part too is to be open. I find still a lot of leaders are almost deaf. scared of asking their employees, what is it that you love to do? What lights your fire? What's your, what do you see as your strength? Because that answer will be different than my answer. And that's scary to some because now, Oh gosh, we might have to go off script, but actually that's the beauty of it. As you say, when that project arrives, there's, Oh, Jennie way over there. And we hear a little bit more now we can second her in or she can come and work on this one. I'll make time for that. And there's the organic piece, but that requires that Agility, I think, as you said, was in

Rod: 14:40

there. You said something, Jennie, that's really important, and it takes us back to where we've come from through the pandemic, even though it's been a number of years since then. What we've come to realize is that Jenniewhere engagement really happens is when employees feel like they truly belong to the organization, like they're part of something bigger than themselves. And there's certainly the pandemic had an impact on that, but also the demographic is part of that as well, too. The demographic that we see in the workforce today is really about what am I doing in the world that makes a difference? And that's the challenge of leadership because we build leadership off of frameworks and models, which are. Critically important from a learning perspective, but they may not fit when it comes to that connection and engagement that we want to have with our team and leader and leadership as a vulnerability is an important one because you want to step into the space of connection. We want to get to know our people. We want them to feel like they can step into that space with us and be whole within these organizations. The contract now between leader and employee is not necessarily leader team of employee, it's leader and employee one on one. It's like building now the great, we'll use a hockey team, because I know you get this one from a perspective, and I'm not going to say it's a particular team, but everybody plays an important position within that team for success. And everyone knows their position and they know what they can bring to the organization. So we need to look at it from that perspective of getting away from the generic. Let's hire this type of person. Let's hire specifically for this type of outcome. What are we looking for? Let's identify internally Jenniewhat skill sets are there for us to get to that outcome that we're looking at. And that's the challenge for today is we need to be more outcome focused versus output focused. So output is time. It's we're going to come and Did in a workplace for eight hours, and then we're going to go home outcomes are different, right? And that's part of the challenge that's emerging. I get my point that I want to make is things have really evolved catalyzed through the pandemic to really change work today. And we're seeing this kind of tension between where we want to go as organizations, but the realization that we're stuck in. These past kind of models, and those models don't necessarily facilitate. That future state that we want to get to an organization. So for me, it's thinking differently about how we even structure work and how we structure the workplace and how do we build the workspace that allows for this type of organic collisions to happen so that Jenniewe can begin to capture that and move that forward into our strategy.

Craig: 17:16

Yeah. And so it's interesting as I'm listening to you both in a fascinating conversation, I think. What we've keyed in on is that for strategic intelligence to be developed within an organization, for a leader to actually draw this out of their team, to draw strategic intelligence from the people, First you need that connection, and you need to get to know them. I think that's the baseline. What can Jimmy do? What can Sally do? How do they love to work? What are the key projects that we could put them on to effectively drive business forward? Because at the end of the day, the reason you're developing strategic intelligence is to create an outcome, right? So where do leaders go wrong when they think about this? So there's a couple of things that are tied up in here is that the whole definition of strategy. In other words, here's how we're going to apply our resources to. Get to an outcome and you can debate internally as to whether this is the right strategy or the wrong strategy. Strategic intelligence is about tapping into that human capital. How do we bring those 2 conversations together? And maybe we start from the perspective of where do leaders go wrong in trying to drive this forward.

Rod: 18:33

So great question. I think where leaders go wrong is they don't quite understand. You looked with, so you made a good point here, Craig. Strategy is strategy. Every organization has strategy and we have frameworks and how we build strategy and there's multiple frameworks that we can look at. I look at this from the perspective of the organic seed of all of this. is as an organization, do we think strategically individually? And then do we as an organization capture that thinking and that knowledge from this organizational strategic intelligence perspective? And then do we capture that intelligence as part of our strategic planning? There's an engagement factor there that exists for the employee because being part of, Hey, I have an idea around this issue. Let's take, for example, that someone is in customer service and they spend their day on the phone and they're starting to realize that customers have this question that keep on coming, that keeps on coming back to them. And they're going slightly important. How do I build the organization in a way that customer service agent is able to transmit that information? Up and into the organization to be part of making meaningful change, whatever that change might be, or does it just stay with that person and then just sit there and nothing happens to it. Jenniethe challenge, I think, for leadership today is really fundamentally based on connection with their team. Jennieif we're not, if we're not training leaders to be great connectors. Then we're going to miss out on being able to really develop that broader based strategic intelligence that's across the entire organization and that becomes cultural. That becomes what the organization is committed to doing. It becomes a commitment into training and investment into training and L& D that we are going to train our people this way, or we're going to hire people that have trained the skill and we all know that learning is lifelong. We now live in a world where if we're not continually learning about all the new things. Out there, things that are important to us in our roles, but things outside of that, then we're going to be left behind. And so this whole concept of continuous learning is really important for a leadership perspective and then put it into practice within the organization. I think those are some of the things that we need to think about as we're thinking about designing the organizations of the future.

Craig: 20:54

Danny.

Jennie: 20:57

You can hear my brain ticking, can't you? A hundred percent. I love that. And I think it's come back to Craig's original question too. One of the. Almost like the nitty gritty fundamental pieces is encouraging leaders, but everybody, and we say this all the time, leadership, you don't have to have a title to step into leadership. Understanding the difference, and it's so nuanced, it's tricky for people, but the difference between that strategy and that tactics. And I think the best way that I heard it described is that. If you can't touch it, if it's general and if it causes you some angst, like we might not get there. This might not work. That's your strategy piece. It's still a how, but that's a strategy. It's a theory. It's a belief that this is how we'll get there. And the tactics is the parts that you can touch. That's the detail. But that tactical, but that's comfortable because it requires a plan and we're really good at planning and we're really good at NIST and we're really good at saying, Hey, you can do this and you can do that. And we're not so good at keeping our eye on that strategy piece. And I think that ties in with the conversations that Rod is advocating in that connection piece. And the person who's working on the frontline, who sees it completely differently than the person who hasn't seen a customer for 10 years. so much. Those are the conversations that have to happen and we still live in an area where those conversations don't happen because that hierarchy just drives us apart. We're not in the same room, we're not in the same vicinity at all.

Rod: 22:31

Yeah. So when you think about the broad, the broadness of strategy, it's vision, it's future state, where we want to be and whatever that time period is that the organization defines and. The mission is okay. Here's how we're going to get there. Here's the things that we're going to do to get there. The bigger buckets of things built on our values as an organization. These are the values that we're going to live by and then rolling it into tactics within the operations of whatever that looks like. And that's where the structural challenges come into place. Because I'll just take a simple example. Marketing may go off and build this marketing plan that they figure the line to what that vision is going to be to the mission. Stales goes off and does something and HR goes off and does something and supply chain goes off and does something it's how do you connect those together so that people understand where do I fit and that's what employees want to understand today is where do I fit in all of this help me understand where I fit and here's the role that you play and that again becomes a challenge of leadership like at all levels within the organization that we need to get this down to the front lines so that frontline individual customer service person for example Knows where they fit within the organization, knows that they're seen, heard, and understood by the company that what I say is of value. And as long as there's a process in place to get that out there, to get it broadly up to the organization, it's helpful. But sometimes it's the structure that confines us from being able to really be effective. And that structure also confines us from being agile. Because we live in structure. And so I think part of this is designing organizations differently today than we have in the past, traditionally to allow that to happen.

Jennie: 24:05

And you can see really quickly there again, how we can get into trouble or make it harder than it needs to be. Often what cascades down are goals, numbers, execution. That's a plan, that's the tactic, and we don't cascade down the meaning. Like strategy gives us, it gives us a coherence. If we all know where we're going to, there's that internal coherence that exists, and then we can build the tactics based on. That, but if it's not cascading down to your point, Rod, that we're all getting it, then we're all off and doing our own thing that Monty Python's sprint for the direction, the challenge springs to mindJennieand we're all up on our own way. Whereas the strategy, if we've got to talk about it Jennieand old ways, 10 people went away for the weekend, created a binder and it was a holy grail, if you like. And then we've moved away from that. And so I think that's really important. It's how do we keep those conversations? How do we design those conversations to happen? And there's the key. We say this almost every week we're here. It's got to be intentional. It doesn't happen by accident.

Rod: 25:15

So true and I'm laughing because I remember those days of being part of organizations designing the big binder that would sit on the shelf and say strategy plan 1999 or whatever, or visions 22, 000, whatever it might be. And. I think today that's the strategy is strategies key for senior leaders to provide where it is that we want to go like we're seeing this is a future, right? It's that forward looking lens. The tactics are stuff that are done at a departmental level. You don't necessarily have to. Bring them up into the strategic planning document. They're part of the process, but they're owned by the business. And if they're owned by the business, the accountability sits within the business to make sure that's being done. That becomes a leadership opportunity as well, too. But what also sits there is the opportunity to be agile, to say this isn't working or that isn't working because strategy is dynamic and it's so dynamic today. It is, it can turn on a dime. Just look at what happened with COVID. COVID was an example of where it hit us all. And we need to strategically turn and do something very different and some organizations, they did it. Jenniethey navigated it. Other organizations were challenged by it. And other organizations fell out of existence because they just couldn't navigate it. It's the ability to navigate that change is also critically important, but that agility needs to go down to the very front lines of an organization. Press to really be able Jennieto make that change happen. And so it becomes in the Jennieleadership beyond any title, right? It becomes throughout the organization. What do we agree on as an organization of where we're going to go in the future, the state you want to be in. What's the role that I play as a leader, employee, whatever that might be. And do I know that clearly? Do I understand that clearly? Do I know what I bring? Do I know what my gaps are? And so I can then identify how I'm going to contribute to that bigger picture. Of the organization and the future state that we want to get to and rooted in that is engagement. All of a sudden, when people know their place in an organization of what their contribution is going to be and mean, that's when engagement really happens because they feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. And that's ultimately where we want to get.

Craig: 27:26

Absolutely. Okay. You've spurred on a couple of questions from folks and I want to pose them now. One, one kind of fits into this whole thing around. Okay. Process for capturing intelligence and capturing the thoughts from your employees. And that is, I'll just pose it from the way it was written is what tips does Rod have for quote, unquote, downloading institutional knowledge and topic knowledge from an employee? Who we know is leaving in a few months. I think, Rod, we can expand that out a little bit further too. How do you mention, put a process in place, or a process in place, depending on how you want to pronounce it, for formally capturing that information, right? Getting to know your employee and understand them is one thing, but Jenniehow can an organization formalize and capture this institutional knowledge, so to speak?

Rod: 28:16

Yeah, so that'sJennie I love that question because that speaks to how often we are so reactive in an organization that all of a sudden someone comes to us and extends their leave, and I'm surprised that it's two months, right? Going, often it's, they're leaving on Friday. Jenniehow do I download all this in four or five days? And again, this comes down to, as a leader, understanding. The role, understanding the account of buildings that exist within that role and ensuring that you as a leader have a backup plan because you're responsible at the end of the day. If that person reports into you, you are responsible for that. So there should be and there's a variety of ways you can capture this information. You can do it on regular reporting or whatever it might be, or just even knowing what the person is doing is important to knowing the person's priorities. And how those priorities fit within the bigger team environment, right? In terms of understanding their plays. If you're in a position where you don't know that when someone comes to you and says that Jennieyou're that they're leaving, it's a bit late, it's a bit late, like it's too late because then all of a sudden the operations tend to, they slow down. I was with a client early this week and we were chatting about a very similar scenario where a manager was off due to illness. And they found out that manager is going to be off for a little while. And my question to them is, what have you got in place to make sure that the operations still continue? And Jenniethey didn't have anything. And so that's the challenge is put something in place that exists within our organization at a leadership frontline leadership level that you can go to and say, okay, what's. The next step for us to move this forward and it becomes leadership accountability. However you do that, it becomes however you do that. Jenniecould there be a consistent process within the organization? Sure. You can Jenniefigure that out, but it becomes, it comes down to leadership accountability that as a leader, you should know exactly what that person is doing. And that's also based on connection, informal connection. And knowing them and knowing the, and the part of the role they play on the team that you have.

Craig: 30:12

Next question, try andJennie paraphrase it here a little bit. How can you ensure that people's skills are not overlooked, especially when staff have skills beyond their roles? Not all organizations or managers are open to allowing staff to challenge themselves, or try new tasks, even if they bring a skill set outside of their role.

Rod: 30:33

Yeah, I, there's a lot in that one. JennieLet me, my first thought is if you are a leader and you're holding on to your people, because you think that's going to serve you best, it actually doesn't in the long run, what serves you better is ensuring that people in the organization know the skill sets of your team and know what they can accomplish. Your job actually is to quote unquote, sell your team into the organization. Sell the value creation abilities of your team into the organization. So if you're holding on to them and you don't want them to be challenged. I'd be careful because you could lose them. They may decide that they're not getting what they need from that organization and they're going to go elsewhere. And that would be a drain and that would be unfortunate if that was the case. So I think it's important as leaders to open up and realize that we're actually better together. We grow the organization through our people. And so as a leader, my job is to make sure that my team, my individuals on my team have the opportunity to contribute and to be challenged to grow within that organization, because if we don't do that today as leaders. Most likely we're going to lose them. And Jenniethat's a loss. We know the training costs or whatever, 1. 6 percent of total compensation value or whatever that number is today. That's a loss. That's a drain on the organization. It goes back to realizing that. Where the capital exists today in organization is up here and that capital is a lot easier to leave than say a building where you're manufacturing something that capital can walk out the door and go somewhere else. And so we want to hold on to that human capital, that knowledge, skills and abilities that we've generated and grown in the organization. If they're producing and helping us, we want to make sure that they stay. So give them an environment where they feel like they belong, where they can be challenged, where they can grow, help them do that. And that again, becomes the challenge of leadership today. Not necessarily as a leadership framework or strategy, but as leaders, that's really our job is to make sure that our people are engaged and they're challenged and they're developing and they're growing within our organization. So that kind of addresses that part. I think there was another part to that question, but I think it's gone. Jay, I don't have it. So maybe you can remind me.

Jennie: 32:46

I don't remember either.

Craig: 32:47

Not all organizations, not all our organizations or managers are opening a lot of the staff to challenge themselves. How can you ensure that people's skills are not overlooked? I think as well. And I think you did a really good job of capturing that as a leader. It is your job to. Capture and promote the individual skills on your team. It is your job to, JennieI've always told Jenniemy teams that my job is to help you achieve your career goals, whether that's here or somewhere else, right? Cause there may be times where you have a career goal that we cannot fulfill for you. JennieYeah. You want my job. I'm not going anywhere at the moment. JennieSo

Rod: 33:26

we didn't see this. And we would see this. And so what's interesting about that comment, Craig, is we even see this culturally as part of Jenniemy teaching, I have the opportunity to teach a variety of different types of international students that come from all over the world. And every one of them has got this view of leadership. And for some of themJennie It is leadership is leader knows all, right? So there's this view that Jennieas leaders, I need to be the one that knows all. I need to be the one that directs all that's what they want to aspire to do. And I say, no, that's not necessarily leadership today. Leadership is about you as a leader, developing yourself first and foremost, because we need to do that. That's the foundation of effective leadership today is developing yourself, a commitment Jennieas developing as a leader, but then leading other people. And lead other people is not telling other people what to do. Lead other people is challenging them to be successful in whatever way they want to be successful, but contributes to the organization. So to your point, Craig, it's helped me. What's that? I don't remember the movie, but it helped you. Yeah. Whatever the choir, whatever that is. I can't remember anyway, but I think that's our job as leaders to really develop our people. And then there's a leverage opportunity that comes with that.

Craig: 34:38

Any thoughts? Nope. I was just going to ask you for your thoughts in the last couple

Jennie: 34:43

of questions, but I think we can take that right back to something that Rod said at the beginning, and I think this is so useful within that leadership piece, the connection. How many times do one on ones get rebooked, cancelled, changed within? So there's the priority again. It doesn't actually have to be one on one, it could actually be a really good team conversation. I'm pretty sure these came from Steve Bull. And that is four questions. And so that everybody knows the answer. What is your role right now? What are the challenges that you face with your role? Jenniewhat are you excited about in your role? And then what do you see as the possibilities of your role? Where would you like your role to go next? And just listening to the answers to those four questions, the amount of, let's call it data, that. a leader can get from their team, from every single person on their team. And I actually like it as a team conversation, if you have the psychological safety, because now we begin to understand the parts that everybody is playing. And the more that those conversations happen, the more we start to weave all those connections that we've talked about all morning.

Rod: 35:52

Yeah. Jennie, great leaders are great facilitators,

Jennie: 35:55

right? They're

Rod: 35:56

great facilitators. They facilitate those types of conversations. And I think that's the leadership. That'sJennie The essential skills of leadership in the future is those things that we don't normally have done as leaders in the past, but that's brilliant. This also brings up to mind this whole concept of performance management and how we manage performance in an organization. And we've seen models where we just throw it all out. And we just say, we're not going to manage performance anymore. We're not going to have a structure in place. And I'm like, okay, you can, you might be able to do that. But if you don't have accountability within the organization, and I'm pretty sure not much is going to get done, think about performance from both the formal and informal aspects of things, because it's a blend of both. It's a blend of, hey, maybe we do have those formal sit down conversations that we hold in our calendar, and we make sure that they stay in our calendar, because if you're an organization that's meeting formally twice a year, and you change those meetings, the message you're sending to your employee is that you don't matter. You're not a priority, so that's an issue, but blend in informal conversations, walking meetings, going for coffee. How are you doing today? How do you feel about this project you're working on? Tell me more about what you're up to. What are you learning? What's challenging you? Take that information away and make that part of the process of performance development. Not just performance management, because then we can leverage that. Hey, listen, this individual, my team has worked on this project and here's the success factors of it. Here's what that individual did. I'm sharing that with other leaders that may want to have something like that in their group. This goes back to us saying, you want to grow and develop with us? I'm going to be your biggest advocate. So long as you're accountable to what we need to do today, because that's the piece of it, too, is that we still need to deliver on what we need to deliver on today, but I'm your biggest fan. So let's make this work. I call it designing an alliance. Can

Craig: 37:47

you repeat

Rod: 37:47

that? I call it designing an alliance. Between you and your employee.

Craig: 37:53

It's good. Oh, thanks. Great. That might be a tattoo

Rod: 37:59

coming from you. That means a lot.

Craig: 38:01

Oh, so I'm going to close with a question before we move into our wrap up and listening to a podcast yesterday, we often hear this phrase. Hire for culture. Hire for culture fit. And I think it ties in this overall conversation of strategic intelligence in terms of understanding your people. The individual was making the argument that hiring for culture is not a great approach. Because if you hire for culture, you are hiring for people who currently look, feel, smell like the others in your company. You're creating a very homogeneous group. If you're trying to bring in diversity of thought and idea, how does hiring for culture fit versus hiring for skill and perhaps the outcome that skill is going to produce? I don't know if that triggers anything for you, Rob, but I think that there's something in here around this. Obviously, you're not going to go hire somebody that you think is actively going to burn down your culture, but

Rod: 39:02

JennieI'm so glad you brought this up because when I hear that from senior leaders, if I sit across from an executive and they say, they're saying we're going to hire for culture, here's a word, my thought is, gosh, you're missing out on so much potential. Because culture, just like strategy is constantly dynamic and it's constantly growing and changing and evolving to the state of the world that we're in today. So when you hire someone new and you're saying you need to fit this, you need to conform to this type of culture, you're not necessarily getting the best of the person it's rather it's, Hey, we need someone like you because here's the skills that you bring. We want to weave you into the culture that we're creating as an organization. And that culture becomes very dynamic. In that is a sense of belonging. In that is, Oh, I feel like I belong here. I'm wanted and valued for what I'm going to offer this organization. And if I feel that sense of belonging that I can be my whole self at work, whatever that is for me. Wow, what a powerful opportunity to leverage for an organization, because we know that engagement number, when people feel like they belong, that engagement number results in higher gains in productivity, but also results in higher levels of retention. And that's part of the challenge is that we want to be the great place to work. And so we do that by ensuring that we make people feel like they belong and that they can contribute. When you have the boundary of culture fit. And you don't bring somebody on because they don't perceive the fit to your culture, you're missing out. I think that a dynamic culture, growing culture is a competitive advantage today. You will attract the right people that you want to your organization.

Craig: 40:45

All right, we, this 40 minutes has just flown past. And so we typically wrap up as we were chatting with Rod in the pre show with one big idea, a couple strategies. And three questions. And we often joke that Jennie often provides me with three, three and a half, four, six questions. Rod'sJennie provided us with one idea and four strategies. I think we're just going to start talking about an idea, some strategies and questions as we close off Jennie. But we're now sharing on the screen Rod's one big idea. So Rod, why don't we just turn it over to you to walk through these final thoughts.

Rod: 41:22

So I think I would, I'm going to take this one big idea, which is really to me, is how can we organically leverage strategic intelligence across all levels of the organization? And that's the design challenge that we have is how do we bring this idea to life? And so there's a couple of strategies outlined on the next couple of pages that we'll walk through. I think first and foremost is to create a learning first organization. That your organization is committed to learning, and I'm not just talking about coming to something like this. I'm talking about learning from the experiences of the individuals that sit within that organization and giving them the opportunity to share that learning across the organization. In order to do that, we may want to invest in formal and informal training and development for your teams, but also. What are the skill gaps that we have in the organization today that we perceive to be in the organization today that we need to have in the organization to be successful in the future, and then identifying how we can fill those gaps to strengthen the organization and doing that in a way. Where we develop agility as a superpower organization, where change in today's world is constant and we find an organization or build an organization that loves change, that loves to drive change into the future. The power behind change can be absolutely incredible and granted. Individuals may be on the change cycle differently, but as an organization, if we invest in learning, become a learning first organization, we automatically will develop agility as part of our superpower of the organization. So that's the number one strategy is create a learning first organization. The next one on the next slide, create a workspace that allows for collisions, organic collisions to happen for learning and development. When we go back to the, I saw this Jenniein a, in an organization where Jenniethe CEO wanted to take the organization back to the workplace. And so they did that, but they were struggling with it. And here's what came up, and I'm sure we've all experienced this is that I'm now going back to the workplace to do the same thing that I could do at home. And I'm standing a half an hour commuting there and a half an hour commuting back, and I'm not being as productive as I was when I was working flexibly at home. So we got to redesign with the workplace that encourages collaboration and ideation. Whatever that looks like for you as an organization, that's open spaces. It's walls where you can write on. It's all the tools you need around that. It's leveraging technology. To ensure that individuals can be part of that. If there are remote or flexible based workers, the foundation of that is the technology that we have available today. And then encouraging learning collisions that allow for individuals who may not be in certain departments or certain areas to bring them together to create potential solutions for across the organization. Jenniehere's an example, let's say that you're working on a project in an organization and you've got a project team. And in your, one of your collision spaces, you put up there. Here's the project we're working on. Let's ideate on that. We want to learn from you. What are the ideas that you have, whether it's sticky notes or felt pens or whatever it might be, give people an opportunity who are outside of your work, your workplace that you're in, your team to contribute to that, whatever that looks like organically. JennieSo you just put it up there. They come together. You work it through, you engage the rest of the organization. The other one I'd say, and JennieJennieI think this is a bit more dramatic than what it means to me, but I think it really speaks to me that we need to take a look at hierarchy and literally try to blow it up for what it is today. Hierarchy is vertical, it's horizontal, it's matrix. But what we want to be able to do is use that hierarchy and leverage that into the learning space so that we can bring people together that may be able to contribute to something today. In the organization that we are working on hierarchy matters in some respects, but a lot of respect. It doesn't matter in the learning of an organization. We can capture those. Jenniefor me, it's what do we need to do to change hierarchy to allow for that? To happen. And I've seen organizations and lived in organizations that are fully matrix. People think that's the be all and end all. It doesn't necessarily work either, but we need to find a way in the organization to capture the learning environment so that we can take that learning into action and deliver on the results that we're trying to achieve, the outcomes that we're trying to gain. Jennieand then the last, the next one is. This, I think, is fundamental because where we lose the push for strategically intelligent organizations is when we have leaders that don't quite understand what it is, nor do they understand the role of what it is or what it can do to create value within the organization. Jennieto me, this becomes leadership intention. It becomes ensuring that we are developing our leaders who understand the value of investing. In the development of their people who treat failure as a successful step forward in the organization who create psychologically safe spaces for their teams to try, learn, fail, try again. That is critically important and that is leadership design to me. We need to rethink how we train and develop our leaders around the space to help them facilitate. And engage and leverage and value creation of strategically intelligent organizations. So we need to do that in an agile way. So that leaders, when they see an opportunity in the organization, they're able to turn quickly, they're able to turn their teams quickly, that allow them to address that challenge or opportunity that's put in front of them that day. Again, taking a binder off the shelf, putting it to action through the tactics that we are designing as an operational leadership team, whatever that might be. And. Capture it all. Capture the data, capture and test the ideas. Develop an environment in a learning organization, test these ideas. They give it a shot. They pilot them. They assess them. They bring them back. They look for MVPs, most viable products. They give that opportunity to learn and design within the organization. And they take it to the market marketplace and they try. And along the way, they establish a process that captures. The results of those ideas, that's a part of learning in the organization and those learnings that are shared to help make those products or services better. Jennieidentifying what works and what doesn't work and capturing that within the organization is a critical part of learning and that could be certain data points that you want to test. It could be certain materials you want to try. It could be certain products you want to take to the marketplace and try them internally and then try them in pilot groups and give your team an opportunity to contribute to those. And then here's three questions. They're pretty straightforward and pretty simple. And the question to me is, if we invest in developing a strategic, intelligent organization, what will we gain from doing? Jennieand conversely, if we don't invest in developing a strategically intelligent organization, what are we going to lose? And thirdly, What do we need to do to build strategically intelligent leaders in an organization? As a leader myself and having led for a number of years, I think this is fundamentally important. If we do this without investing in the leadership development piece, the chances of success are much less. And so this becomes really a leadership development question for me. It's how do we leverage our leaders? in an organization with the knowledge, skills, and ability to help us move into the state of becoming a strategically intelligent organization.

Craig: 48:57

sir. Jennie, thank you again for a great conversation. Rod, this has been a ton of fun. Tough to believe it took us 30 some years to have a conversation like this. Although I'm sure we had many of these back in perhaps a hospitality suite or more, more appropriately over coffee,

Rod: 49:15

but the memories, my friend, the memories.

Craig: 49:18

Yeah. Greatly appreciate you joining us, Jennie. Thank you as always for all that you bring to these conversations. I appreciate you. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic weekend and we will be back not until the middle of May, but we will be back with another fantastic guest, Ila Egger, where we'll be chatting about trust in leadership. So take care. Bye for now.

Rod: 49:40

Thanks Greg. Thanks Jennie. Take care, everybody.

Jennie: 49:42

Thank you both. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Craig: 49:44

Take care. Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow SAIT corporate training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content through the link in the show notes.

Jennie: 49:57

Additionally, don't miss out on the opportunity to experience Leading Beyond Any Title live. Sign up for our webinars and experience the podcast before anyone else. Finally, make sure to rate, review and subscribe wherever it is that you listen to your podcast. Thank you again for listening.

Leading Beyond Any Title – Strategic Intelligence (with Rod Miller)

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