Leadership Development Is a Shared Journey

This is part 3 of a 4-part conversation on the context we need for improving leadership development.

Great leadership development isn’t done in isolation—it’s done with the team. In this Relationships at Work episode, Dr. Rob Lion explains how leaders can use trust, vulnerability, and shared growth to develop themselves and those around them. Russel Lolacher explores how team engagement and development can be intentional, relational, and central to leadership success.

🔍 You’ll learn:

• How to integrate development into 1:1s and team meetings
• Why vulnerability is key to real engagement
• How to grow trust through shared learning
• Why leadership development should build your team, not just yourself

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And to your point you nice segue, Rob, is that this isn't all about us. I mean, as much as leadership development, we're not islands over here. So as we work to define and we're understanding our self-awareness and we're understanding our own leadership journey, how are we bringing our teams into this? Are they part of the journey?

Are they an other within this org this part of it? Or how do we engage our employees on our own leadership journey?

Rob Lion: Yeah. Have you taken an inventory of all the difficult aspects of the organizations I've worked with because these are all parts of those conversations, right? Like leadership. Is a much as much about your people and yourself as it is in essentially the task of the mission you're looking to accomplish.

Your goal as a leader, in my opinion, is to create the conditions to create that environment for people to be successful. H how do people, how are people successful when they don't have the tools or the information to do the work Well? If they're not competent, how do we bring their competence up?

And so this is, to me, what you're talking about here is a shared journey. And this is where I love leaders, that role model this stuff, right? So monthly meetings, let's say, and as, and also it relates to their one-on-ones. We're carving out a part of our time to talk about self and team development, and whether that's the materials we got from a workshop. Whether that's, what are you reading now. Whether that's, let's listen to a 15 minute podcast on what we're talking about here in discussing... this, to me, is an important part of that value added experience for employees, that it's going to keep them at organizations, but the byproduct of that is that you're creating rapport, relationships, growing trust, as well as you're growing this ground step so that you can more naturally have these feedback and accountability conversations. So I believe in the leader being vulnerable, opening up, not disclosing their whole ,life story, strategic sharing and then bringing people in as a part of that journey, right?

At some level, we need to know what's best for X. When I say X, that can mean this engineering design, that can mean the service line we're providing for our customers or our clients or, and know best for moving the team forward. It's the leader needs to be, and I could appreciate this because I had a client that once said, we're talking about goals and it's like, Rob, I can't even look that far ahead.

Because my head is so down day to day of what's going on now. So this is a real difficult concept talking about goals, right? We wanna create that space to do this so that they are looking over all their people's heads to see what's coming down the way. And part of that is building self-sufficient members of your team.

But it's for most organizations, you can't hire self-sufficient members. You have to cultivate and grow them based on what your organizational priorities are.

Russel Lolacher: And I, I always love the idea of bringing up vulnerability because I think nothing builds relationship better than understanding that as a leader, I don't have all the answers either. I am also on a leadership journey. I didn't come in here fully baked and ready to go and have all the answers for you.

One of the best experiences, I had an executive do a presentation. Super nervous. She was not her. She very introverted, not her realm, but unlike most executives who talked about their leadership journey, she talked about all her failures and all the jobs she didn't get. Up to that point, every executive sounded like they've gotten every job they ever applied for in their entire lives since they worked at McDonald's.

And she was literally like, I really wanted that one. And I didn't get it. I wasn't ready. And the amount of people that crowded her after that going, I see myself in you and now you're giving me a North Star, that is attainable because I also can fail and still be in a position that you're in. So I love the idea of that because it only fosters engagement within the team and the larger organization.

Rob Lion: Yeah, some people respond to hustle and drive talk and... you know what I mean? I don't like it. And I think it's really few and far between. I think most people respond to compassion elements of the human condition. And that's sometimes part of our problems in organizations is that we're so work and busy oriented.

We're not human oriented. And so people that might be having tough times going on in their life don't know how to navigate things because they might not have someone back home to talk about and at work they might not have someone to talk about there. So at least we cultivate. So you mentioned motivation, that's an area I spend a lot of time on. We cultivate the grounds at work, hopefully for people to feel heard so that they can navigate their own paths, right? Just because you're in a relationship doesn't mean you're not lonely at home. So what's to mean that everything's good at home? What can we do for people that are giving the best parts of their day to our organization so that they can feel supported?

So that they can feel like they have enough energy at the end of the day to go home and tackle home things like that. And so I think it's really important that we're cultivating that space. But it's so easy going back to that busyness, right? And we did a really good job of this during COVID that, oh, I'm so busy, and the self-talk and things like that, that we have to prioritize, or at least I believe this, and I know you believe this too, that a part of our job is the development of our people and this organization in this other space. Because if we don't do it in this other space, we're gonna run out of people to do the work we need to do. We might get performance out of them and grind them through it, but we're gonna lose them in the end because they don't feel valued, they feel run down, things like that.

And that, I believe is really the grounds of what you alluded to earlier, where these newer generations are not as interested in leadership roles because they've seen what's happened to their parents. They're starting to get a taste of it as they're starting to come into these new jobs. They go in for these interviews and these organizations talk about their brand and their principles and their values, and they're like, man, I can't wait to work here.

Then they start in the first week and they're so let down because they haven't been socialized with the team that they're not seeing any integrity. They're starting to talk to people and they're like, don't talk to that guy, he'll throw you under the bus. All these other things, and so I, it, people deserve this.

We deserve this. We need this. Because people actually like work. Like I look forward to work. I go on vacation and there's parts of work I miss. And it's not out of a habit, it's out of a part of my meanings tied up and my part of my identities tied up in helping others. And so if that wasn't fun, then I wouldn't want to do it the same as when you go to the office. If that's not fun, you're not gonna want to do it. It's gonna pull more out of you than you're possibly able to give. So, and fun's not a difficult concept. It's different for different people just as that journey of development is. But I really, truly believe that organizations have an obligation to integrate this stuff as a part of their identity, as a part of, you know this organization as an organism, right? Even though it's just an entity.