Manager Readiness Crisis: Why Leadership Development is Failing Your Business | Expert Insights with JD Walter

We have a manager readiness crisis. Why Leadership development is failing your business. We are joined today by expert JD Walter, and let me tell you thought leaders, you are setting your managers up for failure. It is a fact that employees don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers. Join us for this very special and important episode because traditional leadership models are most definitely broken, and there’s a critical gap that’s costing your business.

We are going to talk about management as a skill set on its own and separate it from technical expertise. It is a whole different way of thinking. You’re gonna get some very practical strategies to develop your managers. And to truly drive some peak performance. We are also going to talk about leadership itself and the human side of business success.

This is a great episode, some amazing insights, and a very special offer at the end of the podcast. So stay tuned for this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. You will be a little bit familiar with my guest today. He appeared on a panel podcast that we aired just a couple of weeks back. Jd, welcome to the program. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Anthony. It’s great to.

See you again and come on your show one more time. So thanks.

Look, it’s an absolute pleasure and I think there’s a big topic that we’re gonna discuss today about manager readiness, and I think it’s been, as you like to say, a topic that’s been neglected a little bit. But before we get into that, why don’t you refresh everyone’s memories and tell everyone a little bit more about yourself.

Sure. So my name is JD Walter. I own a company called Walteric. We’re a small learning workforce, learning and development company. We focus primarily on human skills development and what I. I got into this backwards, I started out really studying and looking at and experiencing organizations from that structural, systematic perspective.

So all of the administrative and management sciences were in my wheelhouse. Over the years I came to realize that you, it’s an incomplete equation if you really wanna understand how to achieve peak performance in an organization. And that got me thinking more about the human aspect. And what I mean by that is humans not as assets or resources in an organization, but.

Humans as human beings and all of the fun stuff that goes into us being these psychological creatures, these emotional creatures and how we bring our lives with us to work every day and we take our work home with us every night and all of the things that swirl around us and how they influence and impact our behavior.

And so it caught my attention years ago when somebody said work life balance. And I was like, man, I really have an issue with this. Because I don’t feel like I, I can segment. And as I thought more about human experience, I realized there’s no way to compartmentalize this. There’s just life, right?

And we live it. And there’s a number of things that we do in it. It really got me focused in on this human piece. And so now. What I focus on, we can do technical training, but what we really like to do is get in the room with small groups and mix it up over a couple of days and really dive deep into some of these competencies that are just absolutely critical for not just success in an organization, but success in life. So things like leadership and emotional intelligence and strategic thinking.

These are all important things that I wanna get into in a moment, but I just want to start off as well with the idea that you alluded to there about both about work life balance and this idea that you can, that it’s all just life.

Because, we have this I don’t know if you’ve seen it, there’s a show on Apple TV at the moment called severance and the whole idea based around this, that you could go to work and completely forget that your. Outside life and vice versa. And. But, and that’s a, it really is based on a principle that many had for so long, wasn’t it, that when you come to work, you should leave all your personal life behind.

It’s just not possible to do that. And particularly post COVID where this whole work from home idea has become so. Prominent and I, in fact, I just read recently a survey which suggested that the whole push to get people to come back into the office is flawed because most people want to spend 60 to 70% of their time still working from home it’s. This work-life balance idea is an outdated idea.

I, yeah, I think as a concept I think we’re starting to recognize its outmoded ness, right? But it’s never been realistic in that we can actually do this, that we could actually achieve it. I think if you go back to the industrial age and you think about work and life where you’re standing in a factory and you’re, you’re hammering steel or you’re, putting fenders on cars, et cetera, those things are easy to leave behind because there is no work to take home.

We live in an age now, knowledge work, predominates and or dominates and. So we all have the ability to take our work home with us because it’s not just, I’m gonna take, I’m gonna go home and write this report that I didn’t have time to write today. I think things are getting so fused together that it’s hard to distinguish the thoughts, right?

So the thoughts about how do I better connect with these people that I’m working with? So that we have a better work experience so that, fill in the blank, right? Reduce stress, less absenteeism, all those things that we’re shooting for. Those principles apply right across the board in terms of our lives.

And so it, I stopped thinking about work skills and, soft skills and hard skills and I just, I think about human skills and what are, there’s, so the way I think about it now is there’s job skills. I’m an accountant. This is how I use Excel. Here’s a p and l. These are the things that you have to do.

And then there’s. Life skills or human skills. It’s all the stuff that makes us wonderful creatures, but it’s also all the things that is incredibly vital for us to be able to. Get along.

Yeah. I think that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s more and more these days that differentiation of your own human experience is going to become more and more prevalent

Otherwise, you may as well just be it, a robot yourself and whilst that was a term that was used in the past without much real meaning to it. Nowadays with the advent of ai, it’s. Realistic that, everyone is just, can just be the same if all you do is utilize the same as everybody else.

So in using your own human experience is absolutely vital.

Yeah. Going back to your show idea, I haven’t watched any of the episodes, but the premise is interesting. It also just scares the crap out of me. That, that, that’s an appealing, now it’s a great, I’m not, this is not a comment on the show, but rather the idea that idea could be appealing.

I would, I would be so scared of missing, I. Those moments, right? All of those things that are required from our past that inform our present. And if you’re bifurcating that and you’re taking a, an entire, a major chunk of your life and you’re saying, okay we’re putting this behind closed doors, and you have no access to these memories until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

I, it feels like there’s gonna be a lot of repeated mistakes. It feels like we’re not gonna learn as fast. We’re not gonna grow and develop to the level that I think we all aspire to. And I don’t so ultimately our contribution, not just at work, but our contribution in life becomes grossly diminished, right?

Because we don’t have the totality of this lived experience to draw from. And I, that scares me because I think I’m constantly going back through these, through the hard drive in my head to find all those nuggets and to remember things and to think through. I go back and do my own like case studies.

I go back to experiences where. I am only now just realizing how poorly I behaved in a particular moment, and this could be 20 years ago. But I go back and I think about it because I was there. I know all the details. I experienced it. I was the one that behaved and I think through. The scenarios, like, how could I have done that differently?

Because these are the same things that we do in workshops. This is exact same conversations that I’m gonna have with participants trying to figure out what our ideal is and how we wanna move forward. Developing ourselves. And yeah, that I. That bums me out that would even be, I would not sign up for that.

I was sitting

here thinking as you were talking, going. The ironic thing about it is this, first of all, it only came on by complete accident last night when I was watching it, I was watching something else on Apple and I was distracted putting some dishes away, whatever I was doing, and automatically another show came on and this came on.

And the ironic thing about it is. That if I hadn’t have let it play, and I hadn’t have remembered it, if we had have been, in exactly as the show says, I had have severed my personal life from my work life, we wouldn’t be able to talk about it this morning anyway yeah. So it’s a it’s an interesting irony with it.

Anyway, but I think what, getting back to the whole idea of what you are focusing on is around around managers and. The whole idea that they’re being undervalued at the moment, and I think this is an important thing for listeners of the podcast to understand because you are either the manager or you are the CEO business owner who has managers underneath them, and whichever you are.

You’re still wanting them to encourage them to be thought leaders. And so if we are not doing that, if we are not valuing them, then that’s at real risk and that pushes everyone down. So tell me a little bit more about how you’ve recognized that this is a, this is an issue in the first place.

Like so many things something pops up and just catches my attention. And as I ruminate on it longer and longer I start to feel something about it. And this is it goes back to every single one of those. Posters and LinkedIn posts and wherever else you find them. That, and this is a distillation of all of them, but it’s managers direct and leaders inspire.

And that just chaffs me because when you get down to it, leadership is a, quality management is a function. There are, we don’t go out and we don’t hire leaders. We want people that have leadership qualities, but we don’t hire a position called leader. We hire an executive, a director, a division manager, maybe a team lead, but they’re still a manager or a supervisor.

So this is the first, and I think the biggest thing, this is what really got me thinking about managers, was. What I think was, I call this the fallacy of leadership, and it’s not that leadership itself is a fallacy. It’s that leadership is at best synonymous with management, and at worst, a replacement for it.

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What I think was, I call this the fallacy of leadership, and it’s not that leadership itself is a fallacy.

It’s that leadership is at best synonymous with management. At worst, a replacement for it. And so when I think about organizations, and I think about the organizations that I’ve been in and what I hear from employees constantly, and we know all the data, right? 85% of employees don’t quit their jobs, they quit their managers, right?

We talk about what do employees, I’ve done tons of focus groups with employees. What do they want? They want to see equity and workload distribution. I. And part of the reason is because they feel like they’re overworked and they observe others not. They see the distribution of special projects and they look at those special projects as I.

An opportunity to develop, to stretch and to be recognized and they don’t get the opportunity. So there’s something about workload distribution, there’s something about time management. Do we create space so that individual contributors can do deep work? Or coming out of COVID, are we jamming everybody with, constant back to back meetings And there’s all kinds of stuff that we can talk about, how detrimental that is.

But, so it was the starting point was this idea of leadership. And management and of, and I was all in on leadership and I started studying it. I do did a lot of guest lectures on leadership and championing the idea, but it started to come up as a competition or this binary that I thought was incredibly disruptive.

So what I’m talking about here is we set managers up as the evil empire. We didn’t like ’em in the first place. Now we hate ’em. So that’s strike number one against managers. But what I’ve also observed is that organizations aren’t developing managers and here’s a typical scenario, right Anthony, you are the top technician in our organization.

So I want you to be a manager. Have fun. Hold on. Management is its own skillset. Yes. The knowledge and expertise that you have as a technician helps you manage that group of work. We have to remember that a manager’s job in every organization, and people won’t like these words, but I use them deliberately.

Is command and control of production, executive sets, visions and strategies managers take that strategy and operationalize it so that the technicians can actually go complete the tasks, right? So this command and control over production is the direct frontline oversight for this thing called production.

We’ve gone through all these different epochs of management where, we started out, maybe it was more systematic looks at organizations. We got into standardization at some point. And you draw the string out. And and these are approaches to improving management. I think leadership is an approach to improving management.

I don’t think it is a competing idea. And to go back to why are managers under fire? So first of all, just like everybody else, they’re under stress. If they don’t have resilience developed through, some aspect of their existence, whether it’s in their personal life or their professional life, they don’t have the self-awareness to behave the way individual contributors or executives are gonna expect them to behave.

When their work, their individual contributors are under stress. They don’t have the awareness, the social awareness to recognize that something’s happening in this group of individuals. And then to be able to employ authentic empathy and to bring them into a conversation to understand what is actually going on in the moment so that the manager could potentially do something about it.

So they’re not developed as, they don’t have a manager skillset. They’re not trained in leadership. The competency of leadership, they are, overlooked as a vital component of the organization. And there’s this sort of, this binary that I talked about. So all of these things come together and have put a premium on, kinda banging on managers.

And so I. I wanna champion them because I’ve seen too many managers just being beaten down in organizations. These are good people that are trying to do good things and they’re struggling on their days. And when that fear takes over, the default is to white knuckle your environment, and that’s what micromanagement is.

And nothing kills the human experience inside of an organization, particularly for individual contributors. When. Somebody’s trying to micromanage every aspect of their work existence.

There’s so many things in what you’ve just been talking about that I think back even on my observations of different organizations, and you’ve got this concept of lead by example, which I think is, I.

Embedded in this concept that someone’s been thrust into being a manager and the only thing that they know about managing is to keep doing what they’re doing, which is not really leading. It might work in a sports environment. It might be that, if you’re in a, if you’re on the football field and you are leading it, and you are the leader of a team, that the best way to lead is by you, up your enthusiasm.

You get in there and you. You make the tackles, you lead the attack, whatever it might be, that can be leading by example, but the sports field isn’t necessarily always relevant to the business field. And getting in there and just doing and getting your hands dirty and doing all that stuff isn’t always the answer.

If you’re a manager, I.

I love that analogy because it makes me think of divisions of labor. There’s a reason that we have specialization of labor within an organization. There’s a reason that there are individual contributors, managers, and executives. Everybody plays a very specific function.

If you go and at all each of those levels, they’re not homogenous, right? Individual contributors don’t do the exact same thing. So take take the football pitch and say, I’m the center. You’re a wing and somebody else is a defender. Okay? We all have three very specific roles to play.

Now. We can be a leader in terms of positive attitude grit, determination, celebrating each other, lifting our teammates up, all of those things. But we can’t do anybody else’s job. So part of being a manager. Is creating that environment where somebody can do their job to be able to be the individual contributors that most employees wanna be.

It requires some level of autonomy, trust, right? And a willingness to accept. Failure at least at a small scale, right? Because those are perfect learning opportunities and failure is the impetus for innovation. So if we if I’m an individual contributor and I don’t have at least the autonomy to control my immediate production environment, my tasks, if I don’t have some control over that.

I it’s hard for me to connect to it. I don’t, there’s no way for me to own it, right? I’m just stamping out widgets, and that’s not what we’re looking for in employees. In a modern world, what we’re looking for is strategic thinkers. We’re looking for problem solvers. We’re looking for innovators, even at the lowest level in an organization, those individuals are critical.

You do this work on a daily basis. You are the one. In the best position to say, listen, there’s 27 extra keystrokes here that we can get rid of. There are four forms that we don’t have to fill out anymore. We don’t have to wet sign this. You know what, this doesn’t need to go through four people. I. In the routing chain, just one approval is all we need, X, Y, and Z.

But those are the ones that are observing that work on a daily basis, and so they’re in the best position to be able to say how it can be innovated. Now, those innovations are smaller in scale from an organizational perspective. But they’re vital because if you don’t hit efficiency at this ground level, you’ll never ev never be able to get to efficiency at the macro level.

So the manager needs to be prepared to grant that autonomy and to some degree, push back when someone above them. Doesn’t want, doesn’t appreciate that. Doesn’t like that. Hey, you’re giving them too much space. Nope. Have to. I use this example a lot. So what I think of is not the perfect manager, but like an ideal manager is somebody that says, you know what, Anthony?

I. I got a special project and I want you to work on it with Susan, right? I want you to show her how to do this. You’ve done it a hundred times, but I don’t wanna keep coming to you. You can’t be the only one that we rely on. And then I need to be able to turn around and say to my boss, potentially an executive, Hey, I know you want that in 24 hours, but I need 48, and here’s why.

It’s because I need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of this opportunity to develop someone, right? And then I need to be able to distribute the workload more equitably going forward. So this is critical. So you’ve gotta gimme 48 hours and that manager has to have the confidence and the trust, right?

They need all of that emotional intelligence to be able to establish that relationship with their their boss, potentially an executive. So that there’s some faith that what the manager is asking for, right? The default is you want 48 hours. What? Why are you being lazy? No, I’m not being lazy.

I’m trying to take advantage of this opportunity. And this opportunity actually benefits the organization as a whole. So that manager really needs to be able to, in the military we call this top cover, protect the people that are under them. At all costs, right? I always say this, and we talk about this in leadership, and I’m, and I know you’ve talked about it as well, Anthony, right?

I always take the blame and I never take the credit. If I’m the manager, I always take the blame. I never take the credit. You do not get to talk smack about my people. If something went wrong, that’s my failure. You wanna talk trash about somebody, you talk about me. If something went well, they did it. I’m not here to be getting gold stars.

I’m here to take the beatings and do the translation and protect these folks so that they can be the peak performers that they ultimately wanna be in an organization. So managers play this sort of vital function of keeping the organization out of the way of production.

Yeah, it’s it’s so important that people understand that differentiation in the role that managers play.

And, also understand, I think equally that there are people that don’t want that responsibility, that they’re really happy being the technician. They’re really happy showing up every day because ultimately, whether you are. A worker, a manager, or the owner CEO, director, whatever you wanna call yourself.

You still need joy in what you do. And that’s at the heart of it. We talk particularly small business owners will have heard a lot about for various various people talking about business owner joy. And it is true that you need that and you need to be aware, even as a manager that the, that you need to have it, that the people working underneath you need to have it as well, because otherwise this whole thing doesn’t function at all.

Yeah. I don’t, I know we’ll all go to work for a paycheck and that’s fine. ’cause that’s what this wage labor exchange is all about. Now I get it. There’s work that we can be more emotionally connected to our levels of engagement or higher and work that we’re inspired by or that we see some greater benefit in.

But at the end of the day. We all wanna take advantage of these experiences to become better, right? To grow in some way. So when we show up at work, it’s not just about grinding out eight hours and stamping out widgets. There’s something needs to occur in that experience. Where I’m growing as an individual because my growth, my development, that’s what allow, that will ultimately be what allows me to continue to contribute.

And you’re absolutely right, just because somebody I. It doesn’t wanna take on a manager role. It doesn’t make ’em a bad employee, doesn’t mean we need to ostracize them. We need to celebrate them. You need senior technicians, right? That’s why you have technical leads, right? Like you take the senior most technician and you say, make sure that all the other technicians.

Have the level of skillset that we need, that they’re apprised of changes right in the way we do the work. If there’s a policy shift, something about the market, materials have changed, et cetera. So everybody is brought into how the work is being done and then the junior folks are being developed.

So you’re taking, and this is that apprentice, journeyman, master schema, right? So we always wanna have those more junior folks that are at the very front end of becoming a technician, a skilled technician. And you need those senior folks to guide them on that process and. I think you don’t wanna lose them.

The milit, the US military, sorry. I was in the US Navy. So the US military did something the US Navy did something while I was on active duty, and that was, we took the master chief, that’s the senior level of an enlisted and they split it and they said, okay, if you wanna be, if you want to continue to be a technician, you will stay in your rating.

I was a Jo. That was a public affairs person, so I could have been a Jo Master Chief, but I never would’ve been put in a command master chief role, right? I wasn’t qualified. I could only take over as the senior enlisted of let’s say a public affairs shop, a broadcasting unit, armed forces network, those sorts of things.

But if I wanted to actually be a command master chief and have insight and, contribution to how the command was run and the decisions of the command staff, then I had to declare that I would leave my rating behind. I would get a new designation as a cm. It was a CMD, so a command master chief. I went to school and then those were the billets I filled.

So I would take on a command master chief. So this is the difference between being a technician and a manager at the most senior levels. It’s funny that I don’t see enough organizations doing this very thing, creating a band for senior technicians and then saying, okay, and then these are the managers, and how do those two then interact with each other?

’cause that’s very important to figure out as well.

Yeah, and it’s interesting too, isn’t it? Because if you start thinking about it and going, management is its own own skillset. We always think of managers as being senior, but if you start thinking about managers as being a role to coordinate and do things, it’s just a different role and it’s not necessarily a question of seniority.

The seniority happens at the owner CEO level. That’s definitely a level of authority because they’re the people charged with the full responsibility and the strategy. But at those levels, if you start thinking about it differently. You understand that the roles are there to support one another?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I was 18 and I was the assistant manager of a franchise pizza chain here in the United States, and I. My job was I made pizzas but I didn’t deliver ’em. I didn’t really, I answered the phones if nobody else was around, but I didn’t usually answer the phones. But what my job was to make sure we were staffed with enough.

I. Folks every night. So I had to know volumes of, throughput over the course of the week. I had to know when our busy hours were, when our lean hours were. I had to know when we had more deliveries versus carryout. I had to have all of, so I had to have the workforce, I had to have the supplies, so I had to get the orders in and the orders incorrectly.

So we always had enough, but not so much that we had excessive waste. I had to make sure the facility was. Always clean, safe, and then up to all of the codes. So the roles that I the work that I did, the things that I spent the most of my time on were all this other stuff, back office stuff every now and then, during the heavy loads, I was out there making pizzas right, and talking to customers but the primary function wasn’t being the greatest pizza maker.

Using our analogy here, it wasn’t about being the best technician. It was about all of the things that allow all the other folks that are working in that shop to be the best that they could be, the best drivers, the best customer service, the best beat to makers. So back to your point, I think were, there was probably a clearer idea of what a manager was in the industrial age.

It was a little easier to. Place people on an assembly line and then have these rovers that were managers who were just like coming by and doing spot checks, making sure quality was there and seeing if anybody was having any issues. That, so it was more of a utility player. But I think in like a, go back to this idea of being, here in the modern age and knowledge work, it’s a little bit different because it’s not about problem solving as part of it.

But we’re actually asking for innovation. So I’m taking one of the most junior people. I had an intern a couple years ago and I said, and I was putting together, I was doing a bunch of learning and development programs for supervisors in this particular organization. So I would do this lunch and learn.

So I took my intern and I said, I want you to watch me do one of these. I am gonna walk you through how I create the content. I’m gonna give you the template, the formula, and I’m gonna show you how I present the content. You’re gonna sit through one of these, and then you are gonna go make one, and then in a couple of months you’re gonna present one.

And so I. Took him and I put him imme almost immediately. I was getting him developed ready. So to your point about managers now, I could have very easily taken that intern and said, okay, now this is how we’re gonna manage a series of contracts where we have p and l requirements for the company where we have service level agreements for our customers.

And where we have individuals that need to do the work. So to your point, I could have very easily taken a college intern and said, I’m gonna put you in a management internship and we’re gonna learn how to manage these projects, these contracts. And I think we would do very well if we recognize that managers.

Management, to your point, is a skillset, a competency, all to its own. And we started treating managers as if that competency was incredibly vital to the organization because it is.

I wanna shift gears a little bit for this last part of the podcast. If I can to talk the other side of things, which is leadership.

So we’ve talked a lot about managers. And that functionality there, and particularly this program focuses on thought leadership. What’s your definition of the idea then of leadership? If we’ve got managers performing a function that isn’t necessarily leadership? It can be what actually is the definition of leadership then?

There’s a thousand of them out there. As Anthony, my definition is leadership is a set of qualities that you bring to bear on the work that you’re performing. And it doesn’t matter if I’m the pizza guy, I can be a leader if I’m the, I’m on the soccer pitch, I can be a leader. So leadership is actually available right to everyone at every level all the time.

What leadership? I think the focus on it as an acumen or a competency that we can develop, and I don’t want to say perfect, but look for that continuous improvement is that leadership’s about creating space for others to be successful. So it’s about seeing how other people are feeling. It’s about recognizing where there are obstacles and challenges.

There’s, figuring out how to navigate difficult situations and have tough conversations and engage in productive conflict. So those are the sort of the things, the skills or the, that we or the traits of leadership. But leadership is really just about. Being, I think being thoughtful, recognizing that I am a part of a collective, however big or small that is, that everybody here is incredibly important.

So these ideas like inclusivity, celebrating diversity, championing diversity because of its absolute value to the decision making process, making sure that people are included. An example, is I’m hosting a meeting and it’s in a remote platform, like we’re doing this podcast and there’s 10 people and two people are dominating the conversation.

Or worse, we’re in a hybrid situation where there’s five people in the room and there’s another five people on a digital call. Part of leadership is recognizing there’s a distinction in that environment. And that it’s not the same experience for everybody. And so there has to be an accommodation.

And so demonstrating leadership is something as simple as Hey, Anthony hasn’t had a chance to chime in. He’s been on the call. This last however long we’ve been together. Anthony, what do you think about this? I’d really like to hear from you. And that’s bringing people in.

So leadership can be as simple as. Always making sure the door stays open till everybody’s through.

And by the way, the Be I wanna break in there and just say one of the best examples of how you can realize if you are doing that successfully or not. ’cause I observed this recently where I attended a particular meeting that’s happens on a regular basis with a regular group of people.

It’s a, and on this one particular occasion, one person who is usually quite a dominant voice. Was not able to attend and. I observed how different the dynamic was. Now that’s not a criticism of that individual. It was just more that other people were able to have a say and then the nature of the meeting was quite different without that dynamic in the room.

And I think that’s such an important thing to be aware of, is that some people by nature are a bit more dominant in a conversation and other people like to sit back and listen and you have to actively prompt them in order to get their. Opinion out. And that, as you say, I think is what leadership is about, is recognizing that you have those differentiations in a particular setting.

Yeah, and that’s such a great point because we can’t default to, Hey Anthony, what do you think? Anthony might need more time. And that’s really what we have to recognize is that, you know what, Anthony’s gonna take about 20 minutes to really get into this, and then he’ll be ready to talk. So I need to make sure that I’m mindful of how I’m navigating this conversation so that I’m not putting people off, but I’m not letting them feel excluded either.

I think at the end of the day. Leadership, if I distilled it down to just a small set of words, is leadership is helping others to see that they belong. And that my way of saying that for years has been to create space for other people to be successful. But that’s really what it comes down to, and that has to happen at every single level of an organization.

That behavior has to be modeled from the top down and the bottom up. It has to be. That is the culture that we’re trying to build in organizations. It is a leadership culture. We can talk about all the other things in inclusive culture, a diverse culture et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, what we’re really trying to build is a leadership culture where everybody is taking on the responsibility and owning the opportunity to be a contributor to making sure that everybody else feels valued.

Such an important idea. I. And what I was sitting here thinking about as well was that the extension of leadership is what we talk about here, which is thought leadership, which is exactly what you’ve demonstrated, in, in the way that we’ve talked about it. Because it is about using your experiences, thinking about I.

How those, that interpretation of all of that can have an influence on others. And that’s exactly what thought leadership is. And I, I appreciate that’s what you’ve been demonstrating here in this particular podcast. And in talking about management I. We are just about out of time, but I do want to a allow you to talk a little bit about an offer that I know you have coming up for for people who are listening into the program. ’cause I think it’s an important one for people. Again, I, I’ve kept using the word important in this episode, but I really do believe that. This is an an area that business has forgotten. Business is moving so quickly, so at the moment, the rate of change is, almost daily and leaving all of this behind is at your own peril. So talk to me about what the offer is that you’ve got.

For everything that we talked about today, Anthony I was trying to figure out a way simply to get engaged with organizations and have a very meaningful and productive conversation.

The last thing I wanna do is go in and browbeat anybody. Because just like you said, change is occurring every day. Everybody that owns a business, everybody that’s an executive, everybody that’s a director or even a manager, they know the fire that they’re under. The rate of change is accelerating in an exponential pace, and none of us can keep up.

And what I did is I created a, I just call it a manager readiness assessment. It takes maybe 15, 20 minutes to complete. It’s got a bunch of questions. But it’s designed to see, to get an organization thinking about their managers and have they done enough and are they doing enough to make sure that they can be successful because they are a critical function in the organization and it’s not designed to be the, light shining from the heavens. It’s just designed to be a trigger to be a little bit more deliberate in the thinking about, are our managers ready? And if they’re not, what impact are they having on the organization? So for all of your listeners go to my website, wal trick.com, click let’s chat. Send me a note.

Just mention that you heard this on this show. And what I’ll do is I’ll send you a link to the assessment. You complete that assessment. We’ll schedule a two hour complimentary scoping session with you and your stakeholders, and then I’ll take all of that information. I’ll wrap it up and I’ll send you back a complimentary report that’ll just give you about five things that you can do as an organization immediately without any external assistance.

You don’t have to spend a bunch of money to improve the manager experience and ultimately help you move your organization closer to the ideal of peak performance. And it does a couple of things. I’m happy to have, I love having the conversations, but I’m also, I’m interested in how we’re perceiving our organizations.

I know how I look into an organization and see it, and I’m really excited to hear how others are seeing them and experiencing. I. The organizations from inside and so yeah, reach out to me via the website. Let’s chat mention this episode. I will send you the link, complete the survey or the assessment.

We’ll schedule a session and then I will provide you a report for things that you can do to improve manager readiness in your organization without spending another dime.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. And of course, we will include all the details in the show notes. Just to wrap things up, a question that I love to ask my guests, what’s the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have in advance?

I think at the end of the day, it’s that. The, we’ve put such a premium on systems, processes, technologies. That we’ve forgotten about humans and the absolute magic that humans can create if we just give them some space, some freedom and some safety to do that. I think we’re so focused on, oh my God, it’s gotta be right, and catastrophic failure, rapid pace of change and tolerance for risk and all of these things, it’s gone over the edge.

And I think what we can find is that investing broadly in workforce development will pay bigger dividends than any other investment in your organization faster, specifically if you don’t do anything else with your workforce, but you just focus on that management band and ensuring they’re ready again without spending a ton of cash, you’ll see monumental changes.

Very quickly. And it’s that moment where they realize oh, if I just give people freedom to bring their A game, by golly, we’ll do it. ’cause we’re inclined to do it. We’re not lazy as a species. We’re not, we don’t stand back on our heels. We’re not looking for the easy way out. We are predisposed as human beings to roll up our sleeves and get in there and get greasy.

And get the work done. And what stops us most of the time is some obstacle that has become. Muted or it’s invisible to us in the organization. And so we constantly look I need a new ERP, I need a new CMS, I need a piece of ai. I, and we go out and we spend so much money in organizations on things that don’t fundamentally move the needle.

They make a bit of an improvement. But they don’t make the kind of improvement that we could make in our organizations if we actually put a premium on developing those folks that have come to this opportunity, called our organization, and are willing to give their very best effort on behalf of us. And so I think that’s the moment, and I love it when I see it, and I love to celebrate it because it’s.

The, because it changes people’s lives. This is the, let me be soft and squishy for a moment, because what it does at the end of the day is those employees, they have a better experience. Their lives are improved because this work experience has been improved. It’s such a big part of our lives and we so undersell the negative impact that work can have on our mental wellness.

What a. Wonderful way to end what’s been a fascinating discussion. And I really appreciate all of the insights, jd. It’s been a absolute pleasure talking to you and I know we’re gonna have more conversations into the future, but thank you so much for being part of Biz Bites for thought leaders.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Anthony, for having me, and I appreciate everybody listening.

And a reminder to everyone listening in all the details in the show notes about how to get in touch with jd. And of course, don’t forget to hit subscribe, so you never miss an episode of Biz Buys for thought leaders.

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