Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Every employee should be accountable for is to give their manager their best advice.

So the idea behind best advice is, from where I sit, here's what I recommend we should do.

If you build a culture of best advice, then what you do is you create an engaged workforce.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Forrest & Leila.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And speaking of leadership, this exciting month of April, we have a special leadership series where every single guest will be a leadership coach, a leader in their own organization, and they will be helping us become better leaders ourselves.

And to top it off, we have three episodes per week instead of the usual two.

We will be publishing three episodes per week, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, instead of the usual two episodes a week in this special leadership series in April.

So stay tuned, become a better leader, and log on to Apple and Spotify to give us a rating and a review.

And let's get communicating.

My guest today that we'll be communicating with is Julian Chapman.

He is an expert on leadership, especially managerial leadership.

He has over three decades of experience engaging teams and organizations.

His bestselling book, The Managerial Leadership Journey, and Unconventional Business Pursuits will be part of our discussion today.

Julian has been added to the impressive roster of My Keys Who's Who, a notable register of leader biographies.

So he's a perfect fit for the show and for the leadership topic.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Julian.

It's great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

My absolute pleasure.

Thanks for accepting the invitation to be here.

Before we talk about all your credentials in the illustrious career, please tell us a little bit about yourself.

I guess first and foremost, I'm a Canadian, so I apologize a lot.

That's the nature of Canadian communications at any rate.

I grew up on a farm and at a certain point in time decided, hey, I'm gonna try this thing in the military.

So I joined the Canadian military and served in the Canadian Army for 34 years.

And eventually, you know, starting off as a private soldier and then eventually retired as a brigadier general.

But at the same time, had a career in the consulting business because leadership training is one of the key things that the military teaches.

So I thought, hey, maybe I can carry that over into the civilian world.

And that's just a very quick overview of my background.

It's interesting whenever any leadership topic is brought up and the military is part of the discussion, us who've never been in the military, we always have this misconstrued idea that the military is all about, the leader tells you what to do when you don't answer, you don't say a word, you just do it and say, yes, sir.

And yet when we see how leadership, the direction it's going right now, it almost seems like a contradiction.

It's interesting, yeah, I suppose the media and particularly film and television have created this sort of imagery for people around what the military is all about.

Most of the constructs in management come from the military.

The notion of empowerment is actually something that came out of the military.

The idea that you empower the lowest levels and you provide them with an insight as to what they need to do as part of the plan, but letting them get on with doing it.

It isn't about just do as I say and not as I do sort of thing, although there are lots of bad apples that can live that sort of lifestyle.

But it's very much about how do you engage your people and engage them in the mission that is at hand.

It isn't just about people being yelled at and being marched around and things like that.

What you want is you want the thinking soldier.

You want the soldier that's gonna think and be able to interact with their environment and understand what needs to be done.

Which means that actually the emphasis is on the leader to actually provide that sort of insight as to what is the context within the work?

What is it that we need to deliver?

And then what are the tools and resources that I have to deliver that with?

So it puts the emphasis back on the leaders rather than the soldiers being just follow the orders and don't say anything.

Back to my point about empowerment, I think one of the big lessons is that when we don't enable people to speak up and say what they see and give their perspective, then we've lost the battle, so to speak.

If it is just mindlessly following along, following orders is so often is the term, that doesn't help anyone in the long run.

And in fact, so many of the bad things that happen in our society today are as a result of that, of not engaging with people and communicating with them and getting them engaged in the nature of the work and speaking up.

And what you're saying makes perfect sense.

And the reason is, if you think of a war zone, you have to empower your soldiers and make them realize that you trust them to make decisions.

Because you're not gonna be there with them as the leader.

For the battle to be won, you have to empower your soldiers to make decisions, to trust that they will use critical thinking, they will act on the spot.

I don't know if you've recently heard of the term VUCA?

Yes.

Yes, and that's actually a military term.

Would you like to share your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so I mean, the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world that we live in today actually requires those that are the closest to, if you'll pardon the phrase, the coal face, in other words, those that are right in the thick of things to actually be empowered, because there is no way for us to be able to respond as quickly as we can.

So it's so important in the age of VUCA for us to be able to empower those people at the lower levels by giving them clarity of what is necessary, what are we trying to achieve, what is our intent and what is our aim that we're trying to achieve here so that then they can use their own judgment and discretion to figure out how to do it.

The whole point of engaging employees is to be able to get them to use their judgment and discretion.

Think of jobs that one's had in one's lifetime where you have limited judgment and discretion, where you can't use your own thinking, you become disengaged when you're not allowed to use it.

Now, some of us will digress and not choose to use it, but that's different from not being allowed to use your judgment and discretion.

Right.

It's all interrelated from that standpoint.

And I understand your perspective on communication.

Communication becomes a critical part here.

The only way to get two or more minds working together is by communication.

So you have to be very good at communicating and getting the message across and particularly under stress and pressure.

Right.

And speaking of communication, especially in the leadership space, the illusion we have about communication is that it has happened.

Meaning, if I say something to you, Julian, I shouldn't immediately assume that you understand it the way I intended to and that the message you've got it is clearly at least the way I intended.

So the communication hasn't happened because you haven't decoded the message in a way that I intended for you to decode it.

Exactly.

You know, what we like to say is that I'm actually accountable for the message that I give you.

You're not accountable as the receiver for the message that I send to you.

It's up to me to make sure that you fully understand what my intentionality is.

Because there's so many other factors that get in the way.

There was a great book by Bill Jensen years ago called Simplicity.

And what Bill argued in that is that there's so much things that are happening in our world that are bombarding us.

We assume that in the conversation that I'm telling you this one thing, and that one message is getting through, but there's so many other things, so many other factors.

What are their stresses?

What are their pressures?

What do I have to do on my way home tonight?

You know, all of these sort of things come into play.

And as a result, our communications get skewed.

So I'm the one who is accountable to make sure that you understand what it is that I'm trying to achieve here.

And that does require sometimes saying it more than once.

The number of times I've had managerial leaders talk to me about, well, I told them once, yeah, that doesn't cut it.

So it's about making sure that they truly understand.

I write a weekly missive, and last week's missive was my observations on the past.

And Communication 101 seems to have been lost out there in our world today.

Just the basics of communication.

And that might have been as a result of COVID over the years and our disengagement and how technology is coming to play.

But we have to get back to the basics about really understanding how to communicate.

And I find in organizations, they've lost that ability to communicate.

You did mention stress, which I think sometimes does play a role in, like you said, we're disengaged, we're not communicating as much, and we need to go back to the basis.

Sometimes when we are stressed, communicating almost is put on the back burner because I have more urgent things to attend to.

Did you hear what I just said?

Let's do it, we have a deadline.

Hence you say, your managers say, I told them once because they had somewhere else to be.

After that.

I would suggest as well, and I heard one of your podcasts recently, the nature of our focus on how the message is sent is important, but we spend too much time worrying about the intonation, the body language, and those things, rather than the clarity of the message itself.

For example, and I say this all the time, whenever there's this discussion about, well, so-and-so isn't getting along with their people, and they're very brusque, and these things, and one of the first questions I ask is English as second language for the individual.

We have this attitude in the English-speaking world that you have to be perfect with your language, and when someone is speaking in another language, they're just trying to get the message across, and they don't have all those nuances that we suddenly expect in our society today of the language, and that it's about getting to really truly understanding the intent of the individual as they send the message.

You mentioned managerial leadership earlier.

What is that, the art of managing managers?

Well, so managerial leadership, so we talk a lot about leadership.

There are lots of books about leadership, and we talk about leadership.

The problem is, is it's an overused word.

It's an overused word because it can mean my greatest sports figure.

It can mean a political figure.

It can mean all these different things.

So managerial leadership is the ability to bring together both management and leadership.

So a managerial leader is someone who is in a role, whose job it is, is to lead others and to manage the tasks.

And it's about bringing those two things together.

And there's often we just focus on the leadership side, which is important, absolutely.

It's about how you connect with the individual, but you also have to do the management side, which is managing the task.

So they're not mutually exclusive.

In fact, the two of them have to be in symbiosis.

You can't have one without the other, or at least that's my argument, that you have to bring management and leadership together.

Because there are some great leaders out there who are horrendous managers, and then everything falls apart.

They're able to connect, and they have wonderful conversations with their people, but where are they going?

But the job has to be done.

And then you have the taskmaster, who is just focused on the task, but not on the people.

And as a result, it's a dark satanic mill is where everyone ends up working.

So it's about those two things have to be in symbiosis.

The point around managers of managers, as I argue in my book, is that it's critical for managers of managers, or leaders of leaders, however you want to say it, but those individuals who actually lead other managers to get into the game.

My argument is that managerial leadership is a profession unto itself.

It is the most common profession in every organization in the world.

It's interesting you make those distinctions because a lot of the time when we speak to executive leadership coaches, they either coaching the C-suite, or those who lead and have managers reporting to them.

And managers are usually portrayed in a, you're just the supervisor who makes sure people do their jobs, the tasks, right?

And it almost seems like managers are kind of neglected from all the training and leadership coaching and all the leadership aspects we talk about, they focus on the higher levels of the company hierarchy.

Is that what's still happening?

Well, I think there is an element to that.

One of the things that happens the further up you go, the more you have to rely on your management skills in order to organize the business.

Because you can't influence that many people directly.

And sometimes CEOs love to influence people directly.

They stand up and they have their town hall meeting and they have all the employees together and they say, this is where we're going.

And all the employees hear it all the way through the organization.

And that's them trying to influence the organization, and the problem is, by doing that, they've cut out all the levels of management who will in turn describe and relate where the organization is going to the individuals.

So I use an example in my book of a CEO who talked about, I wanna make the branches sing in this financial institution, great town hall, everybody's there, I want the branches to sing.

Rather jokingly, the question then became, okay, so here we are in the branch, when are we bringing in the pianos?

Are we having singing lessons?

What does that mean?

What does it mean to say the branches are going to sing?

And if the managers hear that at the same time as the employees, then you're not gonna be able to connect them to the strategy.

So it can't be this cult of personality, it's gotta be about this careful planning and thinking through, how are we really gonna run this?

I mean, the personality is great, don't get me wrong.

And it's critical, I'm not saying one or the other, but I'm saying that two have to be in symbiosis, the two have to be together.

It's the yin and the yang of managerial leadership, the two come together.

Yes, just that example alone shows that there's gotta be a more practical way of trickling down the information, the communication.

Right, so your book, which you've mentioned, The Managerial Leadership Journey, An Unconventional Business Pursuit.

Why did you title it unconventional?

Well, for a Canadian, it's very rare that a Canadian has spent a certain amount of time in the military and then goes and gets into business.

It's either one or it's other.

So my approach is rather unconventional, although what I would say is, is that it's not flavor of the month.

It's about what are the good solid things that leaders have to be able to do and managers have to be able to do.

And part of that is their job is to remove the pain in the organization, to enable the organization to move forward.

It's about being focused on removing the roadblocks that get in people's way.

And far too often that isn't what happens.

We don't spend the time as managerial leaders to clear the path to enable people to get on with it.

And part of that clearing of the path is, in fact, that communication piece.

Being absolutely crystal clear on what the expectations are.

What do we need to deliver here?

What must we deliver?

What do we want to deliver?

Are critical things that managers have to be able to express.

And as I said earlier, it is a profession.

We don't take it as seriously as we take, for example, for an accountant or a marketeer, or an engineer or a doctor or whatever, but the common thread throughout organizations is this managerial leadership function.

We don't see it as that.

We see it as, I'll do that managerial leadership stuff on the side of my desk.

Let me get back to my spreadsheets and everything else when it's the human beings that actually drive the business.

Until we have replaced our human being resources with robots, we have to be able to engage with people and lead people.

That's the priority.

That cascades all the way down to what do you delegate, what do you not delegate, all of these sort of things is a critical part of this.

Delegation always comes up and it's at least been listed as one of the biggest challengers of leaders, especially that they struggle with delegating.

There's always this gray area of, have I delegated too much or sometimes they delegate, but then they keep checking back with you.

It's almost like they don't trust that you did the thing they delegated you to do, so is that delegation?

Why is that quite a challenge for most leaders?

Well, I think part of it is not understanding the framework of delegation.

So I delegate the things that don't require my sort of capability, and I need to free myself up to be a managerial leader, so that I'm actually building the capability of my team in the long run.

If I'm doing all the work, I'm not building anything.

We say at Forrest & Company, we say that the role of the leader is to build a team of increasingly capable direct reports.

That's what their job is.

So that means that you're practicing continuous improvement all the time, and you're developing your people.

If I'm doing all the work and I'm not delegating and coaching and assessing how well they're doing in all of this, then I'm not really building a team of increasingly capable direct reports.

So that has to be what my manager is looking at me to deliver.

Am I actually building the capability of this team?

And far too often, either the case of the manager who micromanages, in other words, who frees down the back of the neck of their direct reports, or the manager who delegates and disappears, is actually the problem not necessarily of that manager, but their boss's problem.

Because they're obviously not being monitored and coached well enough either.

So we think of it in a very binary thing, that it's just this relationship between the manager and the direct report.

It's also the third person in that is their manager.

And what are they doing about ensuring that their managers are being effective?

I had never heard of that other leg of this relationship.

Because when a manager delegates a task, it's part of what the team is supposed to do.

So they think, okay, Roberta, this is your section.

And I would trust you to do this.

Give me back to me in the next two days.

Even if they disappear, how is the leader who they report to, how are they responsible for their actions in that, Julian?

Well, in this particular case, they are holding that manager who delegated and disappeared or delegated and micromanaged.

They're holding them accountable for being a good manager or they should be.

If they're not, then that manager can delegate and disappear, and we don't deliver what is expected, or we deliver it through micromanagement, it gets delivered.

But everybody is annoyed and angry and doesn't want to deal with that manager any longer.

It's actually that manager's problem.

We use the term accountability to define this, and accountability is different from responsibility.

One of the things that if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary and look up accountability, it says, see responsibility, and look up responsibility, it says, see accountability.

Doesn't help you.

But one of the ways that we help our clients to understand the nature of this is to understand the difference between accountability and responsibility.

So responsibility is a personal feeling of obligation.

You know, we'll say things, for example, that's a responsible young woman, meaning that that individual takes that on on their own.

Whereas accountability is actually the component of the relationship between a manager and a direct report.

So in other words, a manager gives their direct report and says, here's what I need you to deliver, here's when it needs to be delivered, why?

Here's what it looks like at the end.

Now, away you go and do it.

And by the way, here's the resources to do that.

That's the nature of accountability.

And they hold that individual to account on the delivery of that.

Because of the interrelationship of their own manager, what they're doing is they're actually assessing how effective the individual is in delivering it.

How well did they work out?

Whereas responsibility being a personal feeling of obligation is what's inside me.

Responsibility is a great thing, but the problem is we don't all have the same sense of responsibility.

And I apologize, this is a sports analogy, but it's like professional soccer or football team, where everybody knows the position that they play, and that we pass the ball back and forth, and when we score, we score as a team.

That's the difference between accountability and responsibility.

And too often we rely solely on people's sense of responsibility.

But human beings are all different.

They all think differently, and they all have different levels of responsibility.

So what we have to have is we have to have accountability first, and then we can employ responsibility after.

That's my commitment to it.

And accountability then becomes, what does it mean to be a manager?

So I'm accountable for the output and the working behavior of my direct reports.

I'm accountable for the goals of my direct reports.

I can't blame them because that means that I haven't been doing my job if they don't hit the numbers.

If they're getting into arguments, I'm the one that has to step in and deal with it.

And I need to build a team of increasingly capable direct reports, and I need to lead that team, and I have to practice continuous improvement.

Those are the key accountabilities of a manager.

And then in your book, you say that a great place to work is not just possible, it's in your hands.

I wrote the book specifically for managerial leaders.

There's an old adage, the fish rots from the head.

The problems in organizations are not the employees, it's management.

There are no bad organizations, only bad managers.

We take our direction from our management.

And far too many times managers will turn around and say, well, I've got these employees, they're not good enough and find me some better ones and these sort of things without realizing that our job is to grow them and develop them.

Nobody comes fully for it.

Even if they have degrees, because even college or university doesn't teach you the actual day-to-day job.

They teach you the skill, but day-to-day workings at a job, that you just learn when you enter the organization.

The employees you want to hire are the ones with street smarts, not book smarts.

They're the ones that can look around corners and can actually conceptualize abstraction, especially in the VUCA world.

Is that part of the soft skills we sometimes talk about?

I think, interestingly enough, I suppose it's more of a harder skill in a sense because it's actually, can I conceptualize?

Can I handle the ambiguity here?

Can I handle the complexity that's here?

That becomes the critical glue that binds because we can't rely on a set of experiences.

COVID taught us that.

Unless you were around for the Spanish flu in 1919, you didn't have experience around this sort of thing.

So you have to be able to think through it.

And our world is changing so rapidly with the advent of artificial intelligence.

So with all of these things, we have to be able to think through these things.

So that's why I say street smarts are better than book smarts because the book smarts come back from an experience that may have no relationship whatsoever.

Some leaders would say the street smarts, I can teach the technical skill the job, but I know that because they're street smart, they'll be able to handle whatever happens here in the organization.

Exactly, exactly.

But we go to the lowest common denominator, which is what's on the resume, what's on the skills and experience, what's on the check marks of the skills that they've had, because that reduces the risk when we're hiring.

But when we're hiring, we need to be hiring for that je ne sais quoi, that thing that is just where someone can make that connection.

And the best way to do that is ask them about how they've dealt with ambiguous situations, circumstances.

Can they think through the problem, or do they have to just rely on their skills and knowledge?

I did talk about the nature of the accountability of every employee.

From a communication standpoint, one of the things that we say that every employee should be accountable for is to give their manager their best advice.

So the idea behind best advice is from where I sit, here's what I recommend we should do.

Now, when you make that an accountability, what that means is the managers have to get good at asking for best advice.

They have to get focused on providing their best advice, and getting that out of the employees.

Now, some of us are being more uncomfortable giving our best advice, but if you build a culture of best advice, which is in essence communication, then what you do is you create an engaged workforce.

That's where the ideal workplace is available to us, is if we create a culture of best advice, because it means my opinion counts, where we're listening to the best advice, and it doesn't mean I have to take it, but if I don't, I'd better be able to tell you why not.

Right.

This is the first time in all the episodes we did on engagement that it's described as best advice.

It's another word, like you said, that gets thrown around a lot, and sometimes I think we're not really sure exactly what it means and what it looks like.

We always think engagement just means, oh, they're involved.

What do you mean involved?

But the best advice one, that's a different perspective, so thank you for sharing that.

What I like to refer to as the holy grail of business is that everyone is looking for open and honest dialogue.

And I say it's the holy grail of business because everybody's looking for it and nobody's found it.

And best advice is the closest thing that we can come to.

And so that means that if I'm a manager and I'm getting best advice but I'm stifling it because I'm not doing anything with it or I'm being quiet, my manager needs to be paying attention to that.

My manager needs to be getting the best advice coming back up.

We can't do this this way and here's why and here's what I think we need to do are the things that come out of best advice, when our managers, the managers of managers, have to be pulling that best advice from the bottom of the organization up.

Back to the story that I told you of the CEO who said, I want to make the branches sing, it requires the best advice at all levels to come back up and say, okay, well, here's how we can do that.

Here's how we can do that.

And that's forcing people to no longer sit on their hands and say, well, this is never going to work.

I actually have to be engaged in solutioning this.

And that's the roots of continuous improvement and innovation.

And in a VUCA world, we have to have best advice because we're not seeing it all.

So obviously, for best advice to come as a leader, be approachable, have an open door policy.

Otherwise, no matter how much people think they'd love to share, if you are not approachable, wouldn't that be a challenge?

Exactly.

One of the things in some of the clients that have implemented this, the performance evaluation at the end of the year includes an element of best advice.

So in other words, I think you didn't give me best advice this year.

Well, why is that?

Probably because of me as the manager, right?

So we make that part of the performance evaluation.

Now, one of the things that a CEO of a major international bank used to say that the best advice moment was when he had to put his tin hat on, because it was probably something that he had screwed up somewhere along the way.

So we have to gird ourselves as leaders that the best advice is going to be about something that we've probably screwed up somewhere along the way, but we have to own that.

And we have to recognize that it's a journey.

Nobody is perfect and that we learn along the way.

Taking those lessons, learn and changing them.

It's okay to make mistakes, but if you keep making the same mistake, that's problematic.

And often that's one of the reasons where best advice can get stifled is because it feels like it's coming as an attack to me, and so I behave in such a way that that then frightens anyone from giving their best advice.

It might feel like an attack if you're one of those leaders who lives under this myth or this idea that you have to have all the answers, because you're not expected to have all the answers.

Exactly.

Perfectionism is the sure route to unhappiness.

Both in business and in life.

Exactly.

And far too many leaders think they have to be perfect.

And then Julian, any last words of wisdom from your book, The Managerial Leadership Journey?

I just come back to the point around the connecting of management and leadership.

And that it is about being able to do both of those things.

So being able to provide clarity of the task, but then leading in such a way.

And I refer to the post-COVID age, if we can say such a thing as a post-COVID age, I don't know, as the age of enlightened leadership, where I have to be authentic, I have to be servant, and I have to be transformational.

That's the key to the leadership side.

The key to the management side is providing context, clarity of work, and clarity of resources.

That's the two sides as they come together.

And the most important, as you're well aware, Roberta, is the nature of communications.

It's the only way to get two brains or more working on the same thing.

Back in the day, in my earlier life in leadership development, I didn't put enough emphasis on communication.

So this is one of my lessons learned, that communication is so critical and that we have to get really good at it.

And that's part of that professional managerial leader, has to get really good at communicating and connecting and making sense and clarifying all the time what are the expectations.

And then listening, truly listening to the best advice.

Words of wisdom from Julian Chapman, the author, leadership expert, and as he said, he's a Canadian, who has had over three decades of leadership experience and was in the Canadian Army.

This has been such a pleasure.

I really had a good time.

Thank you, Julian, for being here today.

Well, thank you very much for providing me with the opportunity, Roberta.

It was terrific.

And some great questions.

So thank you very much.

Well, I appreciate your kind words.

It's my pleasure.

And before you go, where can we find you online or the socials?

Yeah, you can find us at www.ForestAndCo.

Forrest as in the trees and the forest, with two R's, andco.com or the managerialleadershipjourney.com.

forrestandco.com and the managerialleadershipjourney.com.

So the forest that can sing.

That's right.

Exactly.

Excellent stuff.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Roberta.

My pleasure, Julian.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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