Lessons - The Future of Leadership | Matthew Confer - VP of Strategy at Abilitie

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