Culture Won’t Change Without Leadership Development

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

If your workplace culture isn’t evolving, your leadership development probably isn’t either. In this Relationships at Work episode, Dr. Rob Lion joins Russel Lolacher to explore how broken systems, poor communication, and lack of psychological safety derail leadership development efforts. They dive into what it takes to manage up, lead across, and build better—without waiting for permission.

🔍 You’ll learn:

• Why leadership development can’t live in silos
• What to do when your culture isn’t ready to support growth
• How communication habits shape trust and culture
• When to stay—and when to walk away

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: Team seems like a logical understanding of bringing in as a leader, bringing in, developing, working with their journey as well. I get it. Totally understand that. But there's also the colleagues, there's also the people above you. You're in a leadership journey, you're learning, but they may be on a different journey or they may be at a different part of their journey, regardless of what their title says.

How do you bring them in on the journey with you or do you not?

Rob Lion: You try, right? I get this question a lot. How do we, is the concept of leading up or managing up? In some instances, sometimes it, which really helpful and has worked really well with a lot of our people are some of the personality and behavioral assessments we use so that they can learn more about themselves.

And then begin to recognize their team members. But then they figure out, oh, the person that's above me, they're, this is their tendency. And if I could start to dance according to that or communicate according to that, I'll have better luck. And they actually do because they start presenting information in different manners in different ways so that they respond better.

And it's a beautiful thing when it works, but then there's other people that are just not interested, right? And so I'm gonna grow me, and I'm gonna grow my team. And this kills me. I've had clients over the years where we would go into the organization and their C-suites not involved.

In fact, it's just one division or something like this. And this is a smaller organization, so there's no reason why everyone shouldn't be involved with it. And they're handling this development in a pocket and that's just the part of that is a mindset. It's part of, it's a value belief, right? And sometimes we just have to build the best team we can. Which is part of building our efficacy as a leader. And then we need to look for a new position because that is not a fit. And unfortunately we can't change their viewpoints, their beliefs. And so, and we see this a lot. We see actually, when you think about the hierarchy, we see certain leaders that are turning over good people consistently.

They chalk it up internally as bad hires, but if you did the exit interview, you'd learn that, there's no psychological safety or there's no equity, or he's absent or she's absent. Things like that. And the different groups like HR and the COO and these other people know that this churn's happening because of this person, but they're not addressing it.

And so I, and I don't know. It's a tough situation, so sometimes what we just have to do is leave. Unfortunately, I love this organization. I don't love how I'm being treated and I need to find another opportunity.

Russel Lolacher: So where do we start, Rob? Like as someone who's looking, maybe they just started their role, maybe they're middle management and they're going, okay, I'm not getting what I need. I can, to your point, I can only control what I can control.

Rob Lion: Yep.

Russel Lolacher: Where am I starting? We've talked about self-assessment, we've talked about self-awareness.

Is that the first step on this journey?

Rob Lion: Wow. That's, I wonder if that's, you have to have some level of self-awareness to realize what's not working out here. I think so. So that's part of it. I, we have to be careful of who we talk to. Because just as I mentioned, be vulnerable and bring your team in. There's certain things you don't talk about, and this is one of those things, right?

Let's not throw our leadership under the bus here to our team so that we look better. I think we have conversations. We find people that can relate to us. Sometimes our friends and family aren't the best connections. Sometimes it's a mentor from a previous job. Someone that what we're looking for is gaining perspective because there's some self work to be done here too, because some of it could be also to what extent is it me that's the problem here? Because you notice our conversation is always about everyone else, right? And that's a real convenient self-preservation approach. So what is it that I'm contributing into this that might be contributing to that problem? And so maybe a 360 degree assessment from your team in certain key areas would help you figure that out.

Having a mentor or a coach that you've had relationships with that knows you well, can walk you through this. Be wary of, you could pull in some friends if you want, but be weary of people saying, you know what, they're just wrong. You're right. Because that's what friends are supposed to do, right?

And I don't recommend really your significant other too much unless you work with them, because they really don't necessarily know what you do and don't do once you leave the home. So that's a really tough question to ask. I think continue reading, continue listening to these things, podcast, stuff like that, gaining perspective.

But what I like to remind people is that so, so our organization has several tenets, and these tenets are core beliefs that we try to ground people in to change their perspective of understanding of life and the world. So that they can move forward in a different direction. So one of them is vulnerability does not equal weakness, and we've already talked about weakness and vulnerability.

So the one, another one as it relates to what we're talking about now is your perception is not reality

Because for how long have we been told our perceptions are reality? And there's some, there's some nuance there. It's our reality but there's a big difference between our reality and everyone else's reality.

And starting to understand what that difference is super important in terms of realizing that I'm just a small piece, small cog in the overall gear of this organization, and it will be fine without me. It has been fine without me. And so there's some self-realization that needs to start to occur in terms of who I am.

Is this working for me? What other options exist? I know it's not a super concrete answer for you because it's a super hard question to answer. But if I had a a couple hours I build you a program to, to work through that. That's kind of what we do. I need a little bit more lead time here, Russel.

Russel Lolacher: Communication's always something that comes up for me 'cause... so my big three big tenets for this show is self-awareness, situational awareness, communication. Know yourself, know who you're around and how to connect. How does communication fits itself in here? Because if we're on a journey, it's, we're not like, as we said earlier, we can't just do it in a silo somewhere.

We have to be engaging. But that comes with communication. So how are we communicating to our teams? How are we commun, how are we showing up? Presenting ourself that we're on this journey, just to give anybody listening an idea of, okay, how do I start engaging those around me to support me or to connect with me as I'm on this?

Rob Lion: You are right. Communication is the foundation of all of this, right in one aspect. Think about it. If you ever go to a conference, there's always communication workshops. You always find communication consultants because it's something we haven't figured out and we don't do very well. So it is key to understand the nuances of communication and how humans behave as it relates to communication and if you can do some self-development work, if you could read about some behavioral profile things, if you could learn more about this... What you begin to learn is that people are not the same as me. That there's some people that have behaviors and tendencies and communication practices similar to mine, but most people don't. And another part of that is, I communicate with others in a manner that I would prefer to be communicated to. So how I package a concept and send it your way is really biased towards my mindset, my beliefs, what words I put value on.

And so now your task is to decode that based on a different filter. And so this is where communication fails, is that we aren't on the same page with many of these things, and this is where tools that help with communication assessments and personnel pieces and things like that are really powerful because now really quickly I learned that Russel is different than I in this manner.

And because of his behavioral profile and communication tendencies and preferences, if I want to connect with him, if I even want to lead him in a certain direction to make a decision that's in a certain weight that benefits me. I can present information in a certain order. I could package it up in a manner that he can take and it would make sense to him.

But how do you do that if you don't have that foundation? Like I think about people that I've worked with over the years and had conversations with, especially salespeople. And they're like, oh, I don't need any assistance in terms of reading people. What I do works.

And what they're really doing is they're really hammering and leveraging the charisma element that's resonating with a portion of the public. It's not resonating with everyone. If they would pause and take some development into consideration, they would learn that there's different profiles that they could connect differently with through different tactics.

So you're right, communication is the foundational piece even to myself, right? I have to be skilled at communication with myself, but I also, that is really reliant on a level of self-awareness and consciousness, right? Because we hear people in the trauma space and the mindset space talk about like things like room rumination and things like that, right?

And if I don't have a level of self-awareness, I don't know how to monitor myself as being a participant of rumination, negative self-talk, things like that. And so what you're talking about here is all really integrated and important, and then it spills into your team. How does this relate to your team and when you have self-aware leaders? Isn't this true? When you're a self-aware leader, you begin to quickly recognize on your team who needs work in that area? And then that's where you use your vulnerability, cultivate that space, integrate it into your one-on-ones, be a part of their journey. There's nothing more beautiful than a leader that's really worked hard, is insightful, is patient, is humble, and then they start to take their followers, their team members under their wing, to start to cultivate some of that in them. So that, not that they want to be so they look like the leader, but so that they can flourish and thrive and be a better version of themself for their family, for the organization, for all these other things.

Russel Lolacher: I'm sure I have a million more questions, but that's a great place to wrap this conversation up with. Thank you so much, Rob. I appreciate your time.

Rob Lion: Hey, thanks Russel.

Russel Lolacher: That's Dr. Rob Lion. He's a Professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University. He's also the principal at Black River Performance Management with specialization in leadership and organizational development as you heard from this conversation. Have a great day, Rob. Thank you so much.

Rob Lion: Thank you.