The Culture Nerds - A Leadership Podcast

Nurturing Internal Leadership: What Leading Organisations Get Right

• Simon Thiessen & Kirralea Walkerden

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Leadership doesn't magically appear when you need it - it must be deliberately cultivated within your organization. This revealing episode explores the critical strategies top organizations use to develop their internal leadership pipeline rather than constantly recruiting externally.

When companies recruit leaders from outside, those individuals face a triple challenge: learning leadership skills, absorbing organizational culture, and understanding industry specifics simultaneously. By developing your existing talent pool, you eliminate these barriers and create a more seamless leadership transition. This approach doesn't just make practical sense - it's essential for retention. With research showing that 63% of employees leave jobs due to lack of career progression opportunities, organizations can't afford to overlook the leadership potential already present in their teams.

The podcast delves into specific strategies for nurturing emerging leaders, emphasizing the 70-20-10 principle that acknowledges most learning happens through on-the-job experience. We explore how providing incremental leadership opportunities creates safety for practice and growth, and why current managers must see developing future leaders as a core responsibility rather than a threat. The discussion challenges organizations to examine whether their culture truly fosters leadership development or subtly suppresses it through blame-focused feedback, excessive control mechanisms, and policies that smother initiative.

Most importantly, this episode asks a provocative question: if you can't see emerging leaders in your organization, is it because they don't exist, or because your culture doesn't encourage them to step up? The answer could transform your approach to talent development and organizational growth. Check out our comprehensive Emerging Leaders Program to build a systematic approach to developing your internal leadership pipeline.

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Thanks to our producer, Josh at JCALdigital.org

Speaker 1:

Before we get into today's episode, we want to acknowledge the privilege of living and working on Aboriginal land and we pay our respects to the Elders, past, present and emerging. Welcome to another edition of the Culture Nerds a leadership podcast. My name's Simon Tyson and I'll be your host for this episode. Welcome to another edition of the Culture Nerds a leadership podcast. My name's Simon Tyson and I'll be your host for this episode. As with every month, we have a theme for the month. We produce a lot of resources for our listeners, for our network, and we've decided that we're going to make those themed so that they deal each month with a specific focus, a specific issue, a problem that leaders out there tell us they're dealing with and they're grappling with. And this month it's all about emerging leaders and about what organizations can do to help their next round of leaders emerge instead of die on the vine. So the topic of the podcast is what great organizations do to develop internal leaders, and we'll come to that. Before I do, let me tell you about the other resources almost all of them free that are available for you. This month there is a case study that one of the team are putting together around a very specific emerging leaders program. We did a highly successful emerging leaders program that we did A little heads up on that one. Within six months three people had moved into leadership roles or management roles that had opened up and for the first time the organisation found that they could look at their existing staff group and find leaders ready-made to fill those roles. So great little case study that will be put together. There will be a Plenty in 20, our on-demand fast-paced webinars. You can watch them completely on demand and they're full of punchy tips and ideas, and that one is all about emerging leaders and developing the future. We also have our newsletter. As always, the newsletter will come out towards the end of the month and summarize the resources that are available for you. There'll be a subscription link for that in the show notes. Of course, we have a product page and our product page is our Emerging Leaders Program. So if you would like more assistance with helping your current leaders emerge, then talk to us. Check out that page again in the show notes. Talk to us about the process. We can follow the program we have. That will help those leaders fulfill their potential.

Speaker 1:

So let's get into the podcast Now. This is going to be a fairly short one. I say that every time, so let's see how I go. Now. This is going to be a fairly short one. I say that every time, so let's see how I go. And the reason for that is it's almost a bonus one because, as part of this month's theme, we're re-releasing our most popular ever episode, which is a case study again on emerging leaders, and it takes you through a program we ran and you hear the perspective, not ours. You hear the perspective of a participant in the program, a participant who actually did end up emerging and taking on a more senior leadership role their manager and the role they played to help their participant emerge, and the training manager of the organization that one is. That's an episode that was recorded by Kiralee with those three people.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about this month's topic of the podcast what great organizations do to develop internal leaders. Before we get to that, I want to talk to you about the why leaders. Before we get to that, I want to talk to you about the why and the why. I think some of it's really obvious, but some of it's not, so I've really got sort of three main things that I would like to cover off. One of them is that anytime someone goes into their first leadership position so let's say you've got an entry-level leadership position, a team leader position, and you advertise for it externally You've potentially got applicants who've got three barriers to overcome.

Speaker 1:

It's an entry-level position, so they may not have any existing management or leadership experience. That's number one. They're coming from outside your company, so they don't know your organizational culture and what you're trying to achieve with that. That's number two. And potentially they're coming from outside the industry, and obviously they're definitely coming from outside the company, so they have a gap there in terms of understanding the industry and or the specific product that you offer. That's number three. So we have those three barriers, those three things that a new leader has to pick up. That's a really big load.

Speaker 1:

So I want them to come in, I want them to hit the ground running, I want that team to be well managed, to be motivated, to be clear on expectations, et cetera. But at the same time they're trying to learn all three things. They're trying to learn to be a leader, assuming that they haven't moved sideways from another entry level position. They're trying to learn my industry and or product and they're also trying to learn the organizational culture and its people A very steep learning curve. So if I help existing people within my organization emerge as leaders, I actually deal with all three of those things. So I'm taking people who are in the current pool in the frontline positions. They're not currently managing people, they're not currently in a leadership, have a leadership responsibility but I'm exposing them to development as a leader and we'll come to how that what that looks like. I've actually got people who are already on the path with all three of those things. So I've got people who know the culture and I can see whether they fit our culture or not. I can see whether they're aligned with what we're trying to create here. So I can already make a much more informed choice. But I also don't need them to go into that position and then all of a sudden learn that they know our company and our product. So again, I don't need to have them learning that once they come into the position. And if I'm deliberately developing them as a leader and, as I say, we'll talk about the strategies I'm ticking all three of those things.

Speaker 1:

Now a little warning Sometimes, when internal people apply for a role, we underrate them because we see their flaws and we compare them to someone external who we don't know their flaws. They've seen it as a lovely application. They come to the interview on best behaviour. We don't see them day by day. Now, you know the old saying better the devil you know than the devil you don't. I'm not all that big a fan of cliches, as you know from the previous episode, but what we have to do is accept that both the external candidate and the internal one have faults. It's just that we know what the internal person's faults are and the question we're going to ask is are they faults that we're prepared to work with? Are they faults that we think we can help them move past? If it's a fault around lack of cultural fit, forget it, don't even think about them. They're the wrong person. You're better off with the devil you don't know. If their faults are around inexperience, around knowledge, but they've got great cultural fit and are willing to learn those things, then I think you're better off with them because, as I say, they've got a head start in all three of those things. So that's the first reason.

Speaker 1:

One other point on this one if you've got a good to great culture, you're better to recruit leaders internally. Mostly. Now, you always want a few new people coming in. If you're a larger organisation, you've got lots of new leaders coming in, new managers coming in. It's better to have a few external because you want to shake things up, you don't want to get complacent. But if you've already got a good to great culture, recruiting leaders internally continues that culture, which is great. It's much easier to recruit frontline workers. The pool is much bigger. There's a lot more people out there who can do the work rather than do the work and lead the work simultaneously. So we're better off to recruit the frontline, develop them internally as leaders by moving to that position, and when that happens we create another vacancy at the front line and we fill that.

Speaker 1:

However, if you've got a poor to medium culture, you definitely need to recruit some leaders externally. You just need it to shake things up, and a conversation I had with a couple of people last week sort of relates to this. Sometimes you've got to recruit people and this goes against conventional wisdom. You've got to recruit people who are a poor cultural fit, and what I mean by that is, if you've got a poor culture or just a moderate culture, why would you want to recruit people who fit that culture perfectly and therefore perpetuate and reinforce it. You're better off to find people with good values but who are a poor cultural fit when compared with the current culture. They're a great cultural fit compared with your aspirational culture and by recruiting them and then empowering them and this is probably a whole episode on its own then you move closer to that culture. So I've got banged on a lot about those, the three things a new leader needs to learn.

Speaker 1:

But another really good reason to develop leaders internally is all about retention. You want, if you're going to create a great culture, you want to retain your best people and lose the people that don't want to fit with that culture. One of the main reasons that people leave their employer is a lack of opportunity to progress or to grow, and I just did a really quick bit of research and found a couple of really interesting statistics. So the Australian Human Resources Institute credible body they know their staff 63% of respondents to a survey they conducted identified a lack of career progression opportunities as the main reason for leaving their jobs. 63%, that's two in three. So if people are leaving, we're always going to lose people, but we want to be losing the right people for the right reasons, and this is not a good reason. If there were ways you could have grown those people, then potentially you retain quite a number of them. So that's about career progression.

Speaker 1:

Two other studies I've found here. Two other studies I've found here. One says 30%, one says 29%. Talk about limited growth prospects. Now, growth and progression are obviously linked, but they're not the same thing. So you can grow someone without progressing them. The beauty about emerging leaders and having a really specific focus on emerging leaders is you are growing people with the potential for future progression. So it deals with both of those things. And look, the third reason is purely mercenary. I think it was Edward de Bono who said something like you pay for their bodies, you might as well use their brains. If you've got people turning up for work, get the most value you can out of them and you know what it's good for them as well. Your best. People will want to be stretched. They'll want to feel like they're giving everything they can.

Speaker 1:

Smart organizations don't pigeonhole people in the role that they've been employed for. They recognize that people have skills and knowledge and information and attitudes that go way beyond the boundaries of the role they're currently in. So they find ways to leverage those things and, of course, one of the most obvious ones is around their leadership potential, around seeing someone being prepared to be an informal leader and therefore saying, well, what if we develop them as a formal leader? Therefore saying, well, what if we develop them as a formal leader? So let's talk about the how. The first thing is we have to give opportunities to people to step up informally before we ask them to step up formally. So I can't tell you how many times organizations find a vacancy comes up, they pluck someone out of the team, they bang them into the role the whole deep end discussion that we had in a previous episode I think it might have been the last one and then they look bewildered when the person struggles oh, they're a good person. I can't work out what's gone wrong here. Maybe they're not as good as that as I thought they were. We need to get a better person. What we need to do to do is give people the opportunities to step up before they have to step up fully. So if they're stepping up for an hour, if they're stepping up for a task, if they're stepping up for a week, if they're stepping up in this particular moment in this one particular way. That's all practice for stepping up when they need to.

Speaker 1:

I worked with an organization where one of the branch managers complained to me. I was doing some coaching with him. He complained to me about his 2IC and said you know, when I'm out of the branch he just doesn't step up. He just doesn't do what I need him to do. And I said my question was so what opportunities do you give him when you are in the branch, or do you just do everything then and expect this magical switch to flick when you step out? So if you want that person to step up as a leader, as your 2IC, give them lots of chances to do that, because while you're there, the safest time to do it is while their manager's there, because there's someone to catch them. So look for really specific opportunities. A leader's role and if you can embed this in your thinking but also the thinking of the managers within your organization a leader's role is to grow more leaders. So if you've got leaders or managers who are threatened by people growing within their team, they're deliberately going to suppress them, and I think that's actually a lot more common than we recognize.

Speaker 1:

Go back to and I can't remember if we've done a podcast on this or not, but it's a really good principle, the 70-20-10 rule of growth. What happens is we say we want people to grow, let's enroll them in that magic silver bullet training course, because that's going to fix them, that's going to make them better. And I'm not saying that, look, we run a training company. I'm not going to tell you that's not a good strategy. It is a good strategy, but in isolation it's a poor strategy. The 70-20-10 principle says that people learn 70% of what they know their knowledges, their skills, their attitudes on the job. Now, the problem with that is there's no quality guarantee there, so they could be learning bad attitudes, poor skills, inaccurate knowledge, et cetera. So we want to be really proactive in that 70% and that's just simply that growth opportunity.

Speaker 1:

It's hey, look, I'm really busy, could you take on this for me? Or hey, I know that you're really comfortable in this area. Would you mind taking so-and-so under your wing for me for a day, for an hour, here or there? Would you mind checking in with them once a week just to help them progress a bit, just to help them get their confidence up? Their growth opportunities you're providing to people, one for the person that's being coached and one for the person doing it. That's a step up into that space between their role and leadership. You've also got to do some deliberate coaching and mentoring. So give them these opportunities, but then talk with them.

Speaker 1:

How did that go? What did you learn? What worked, what didn't? What do you think we could do differently? If you're in my role, how would you tackle this situation? Have those conversations yeah, I know you're busy and you've got a great long task list, but this is if you're a leader and if you manage a single other person, then by definition you need to be a leader. Then this is critical to your role. This is absolutely critical. Formal training absolutely. If you decide that you want help with that, check out that product page and we've got a wonderful progressive program to help you emerge your new leaders, to help you emerge your new leaders. But you've got to train the managers in the organisation as well to help their emerging leaders emerge.

Speaker 1:

So if you've got a manager who, as I said before, feels threatened or doesn't recognise the importance of emerging leaders, who just wants people to do their job, do what they're told, stay in their lane all that crap that people go on with, then they're going to suppress people and people will eventually go. What's the point? Remember that you don't have that many remarkably good or remarkably bad team members. You've just got people who are responding to the workplace culture and the leadership they're exposed to. By far, by far, the person that has the most influence on the growth and development of any person is their immediate manager, their immediate supervisor. So if their immediate supervisor is not providing a climate that people respond to in a positive way, they're going to think they've got a bunch of poor people. If you've got someone who provides a great climate, they're going to magically have all these wonderful people. They're probably the same human beings, just responding to a different climate, different culture, different leadership style.

Speaker 1:

My question for you is if you look around your organization and you can't see the emerging leaders, if the next level is not obvious, why is that? Is that because they don't exist, that you just by chance don't have any of them in your team? Is it a recruitment issue? Or perhaps is it because they're not responding to the culture and the leadership? Is it because it doesn't encourage them to step up, to emerge, to take that risk of taking on new things, of trying new things, of showing what they're capable of. So a couple of final little tips. You've heard me use this phrase before. If you're a regular listener, if you want people to step up, get off the steps or back up the steps, you don't have to get off them completely, but maybe there's got to be one or two between you, the space that they can step into. So you've got to get up those steps a little bit and then encourage them, make it safe, allow people to make mistakes.

Speaker 1:

So is your organization when it comes to your emerging leaders. Is it one of fault and blame when things don't go well, or is it one of fault and blame when things don't go well? Or is it one of learning? That great phrase there's only winning and learning. So I've got an emerging leader who's really having a crack. They're trying things. They won't get everything right. Do we celebrate the winning and coach the moments that don't go so well? If we're doing that, we're making it safe, we're making it something that people will say yeah, this is worth doing, it's a process. It's okay if I don't get it right all the time. Are you one of the organizations that runs an ad? And this always makes me laugh. We want creative people, we want innovation, we want all that sort of stuff. And then they come in and then we spend the next three months indoctrinating them in the way we do things around here. So, in other words, we're suppressing all that creativity and initiative and innovation.

Speaker 1:

Emerging leaders are, by definition, people who will show some initiative. So does our culture foster that or does it suppress it? Do we have policies and procedures, habits I like to call them that smother and the reason I use the word habits. Some policies and procedures are essential. We have compliance. We have things that have to be done a certain way for a very good reason. Then we've got a whole bunch of other policies and procedures that are really around a comfort zone, probably the comfort zone of an individual manager originally and then they get layered and they get added to and before we know it, we've got a whole bunch of policies and procedures that serve no value, that serve no purpose other than to smother people. So really, look at that. Emerging leaders just keep coming up against boundaries that make no sense to them, and if they do, how long do they go? It's just not worth it. It just doesn't work here. I'll just work here for a while and I'll grow and I'll give my best and then, when the time comes, I'll look for an opportunity somewhere else.

Speaker 1:

Do you have leaders or managers in your organization at the moment? So managers, by definition, are people who want to be in charge, who want to be in control. That's okay, because we need that. Leaders are people who want to grow others, who want to develop others, including themselves. They're not mutually exclusive, so you can have people in a role who are both managers and leaders. If you've got, you've got people who are looking at the people around them and looking for ways they can grow them. If you've simply got managers, then they're going to be so focused on control that emerging leaders will have nowhere to grow into. Basically, it comes down are your current managers threatened by ambitious people or are they inspired by them?

Speaker 1:

I promise this will be short. I've pretty much hit that. We're just a bit over 20 minutes. Please check out the other resources. If you want help growing your emerging leaders, check out our Emerging Leaders Program. All of these links are in the show notes. We would love to work with your organisation. I'll see you for the next episode, but in the meantime, stay authentic.