Ep. 032 - Why The Wrong Leaders Get Promoted

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Bread to Lead, where we bring radical change to the world of leadership, episode 32, season 3.

Speaker 1 Last week, we talked about the trauma budget, how organizations fund chaos, but star prevention. This week, we're talking about why that keeps happening.
And the answer is uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 We're promoting the wrong people. The best clinicians become the manager.
The best manager becomes the director. The best director becomes the VP.

Speaker 1 We take people who are exceptional at one thing and put them in charge of something completely different. And then we wonder why our leadership pipeline is broken.

Speaker 1 Here's what I've learned in the last decade. Clinical excellence does not equal leadership capacity.
Management skill does not equal strategic vision.

Speaker 1 And being good at your job does not mean you should lead other people doing that job.

Speaker 1 We've had a leadership famine in healthcare, not because there aren't talented people, but because we're selecting, developing, and promoting based on the wrong criteria.

Speaker 1 Today, we're diagnosing why healthcare organizations keep getting leadership wrong because leadership is the software, systems is the hardware.

Speaker 1 And if you promote based on the wrong code, the whole system crashes. Let's go.

Speaker 1 Friends, bridge builders, welcome back again. I am your host, Dr.
J. Taylor Jacobs, and today we're talking about some really, really, really

Speaker 1 important things and in the scope of truly developing the next generation of leaders. And I'm not talking about next generation based on age.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about next generation based on position and ability. I just did a podcast, actually, my Espidy 911 podcast, and we talked about a concept called leeway.

Speaker 1 And leeway is having the autonomy, the freedom, or the authority to create change or influence change within an organization.

Speaker 1 A lot of leaders think that position brings leeway, but leeway, someone has to trust that you not only have the best interest of the organization, but you have the best interest in the person giving you the authority.

Speaker 1 Leeway is that freedom range that you get to be able to levy change and create opportunities, but position itself does not create leeway just because you have the resume, just because you have the title.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of leaders that have access because of position, but don't have leeway access, meaning you can create change, you have access to budget, you can sign off on

Speaker 1 services, you can fire people, you can change policies. That's where the leeway comes in.

Speaker 1 And in this podcast or pod class, as we call it, leeway is something that we want to make sure that you develop no matter where you are, gaining that favor because they know not only are you good at your job, but that you're thinking of everyone everyone else who depends on that job or that opportunity to be able to grow.

Speaker 1 Listen, this season is nothing short of amazing. We're getting amazing feedback.
For those of you that helped us become the number eight business podcast in the country, I would like to say thank you.

Speaker 1 If you're new to the podcast, Bread to Lead, I just want to tell you one thing. Welcome.

Speaker 1 I call everyone a bridge builder because the objective of leadership is learning how to build a bridge between different people, different generations, people of different cultures, people of different religions.

Speaker 1 Your bias or your upbringing should not determine how you lead.

Speaker 1 You want to be a bridge builder that all types of people can bring, that can come to you, that can come over your bridge to communicate, and you can come over that bridge to communicate to them.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the biggest pieces that we want to make sure that as a bridge builder, you understand the concept is collaboration, not isolation. Let's get to it.

Speaker 1 Today, listen, we're talking about something that I think is extremely important we're talking about truly understanding that in healthcare specifically you know we promote the wrong people there is a leadership famine and and oftentimes and and if you're listening from another industry oftentimes the people that get promoted are just promoted because of proximity not really even because of capability.

Speaker 1 It's just you were there longest. You were there when that leader was going through tough times.
You were there

Speaker 1 when they consoled with you or you heard them venting about someone else. And by default, you get the pity promotion.
That's one version. Where it's like, hey, you're my guy.
I tried everyone else.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work. Let me give you a chance.
Then you have the other promotions that are,

Speaker 1 they sound good in theory. They're really good at their job.
So because you are an amazing surgeon, that must mean that you'll be great as a chief surgeon. Because you are an amazing nurse.

Speaker 1 That means that you should be a CNO because you're an amazing technician in sterile processing. That means you should be the director of sterile processing.
That's not necessarily true.

Speaker 1 There are phases of development that every type of leader needs in order to be able to rightfully promote to the next space.

Speaker 1 There are specific skill sets that are needed in someone's tool belt to truly be able to elevate them to a place of true authority and true success that a lot of people don't take into account.

Speaker 1 And I think it's very important for us to recognize that we live in the space of what I call the clinical excellence trap. And here's the pattern.
You have the best nurse on a unit.

Speaker 1 You show up on time.

Speaker 1 Your patients love you. Your charting is flawless.
Your clinical judgment is sharp. So administration says, we want to promote you to charge nurse.
Congratulations, you just became a manager.

Speaker 1 You are now not only getting paid a significant amount of money, now you are leading your peers. And there's, and it's exciting, except no one taught you how to manage.

Speaker 1 Nobody assessed whether you even want to manage. Nobody asked if you have the temperament, the communication skills, or the system thinking required to lead a team.

Speaker 1 They just assume that because you're great at nursing. You'll be great.
So you should be great at leading other nurses. And then when you get into the position, you struggle because managing people is

Speaker 1 a completely different skill set than managing patients. Patients do what you tell them to do.
Well, mostly,

Speaker 1 except if you're my pops,

Speaker 1 he goes see the doctor, the nurse, and he did do his own thing. He's in a room right now.
That's why I'm talking about it right now.

Speaker 1 But your staff.

Speaker 1 Your staff have opinions, they have egos, conflict, and competing priorities.

Speaker 1 Your staff sees you as a friction or as a wall that is stopping them from actually getting to their next level. Maybe you had the only position available.

Speaker 1 You got the only position available to be a charged nurse, and they know that there won't be any other positions coming soon. So you telling them what to do or them making you look good,

Speaker 1 it's not on their priorities list.

Speaker 1 You have your clinical protocols.

Speaker 1 That's the easy part.

Speaker 1 Technically, everyone is supposed to go based on whatever the protocols are. But leadership decisions, now those,

Speaker 1 that's messy. You can master a procedure.
You can't master human behavior. So you burn out or you become a tyrant or you quit and go back to bedside.

Speaker 1 And the organization says leadership is so hard to find. No, leadership is hard to find when you're selecting for the wrong traits.
And this is the clinical excellence trap.

Speaker 1 And it's killing healthcare leadership pipelines across the country. Matter of fact, it's killing organizations across the country, regardless of if you're in healthcare or not.

Speaker 1 We promote technical competence and hope that leadership skills materialize and they come based on osmosis.

Speaker 1 If they just observe or shadow someone doing leadership things, they will pick up. But the thing is, if I don't know what I'm looking at, I also don't know what I should be picking up.

Speaker 1 So you're assuming that they even know what to pick up from a leader that they're shadowing. Because nine times out of 10, they don't.
They don't pick it up.

Speaker 1 A matter of fact, most people pick up the wrong traits of a leader. Being brash, short with words, fight or flight,

Speaker 1 pick it up or lose it. This is the temperament when we talk about really creating an organization historically that has been done.

Speaker 1 But when you look at the top organizations, regardless of industry, most of them treat their own company like a training university. Go look at the top organizations.

Speaker 1 They build their leaders from scratch. There's always a next level of development, training, skill set processing, because

Speaker 1 you can't do one major training and think that that's it. You have to have one training that masters with the next training that develops the next one.

Speaker 1 Then when they graduate from that, there is something else for them to develop and grow in.

Speaker 1 These organizations treat their organization almost as if Oracle University, Amazon University, Chick-fil-A University, there's always levels to the development. And if we get caught in this

Speaker 1 in this clinical excellence trap, if we stay there, we will continue to hire the best people. Matter of fact, there's a saying.
that the best coaches in sports are not always the best players.

Speaker 1 And in most cases, the ones that are the best at what they do are terrible owners and coaches.

Speaker 1 But the ones that are not as good as the greats or the hall of famers, those are the ones that become extraordinary coaches, owners, and GMs. Why? Because there's a different level.

Speaker 1 If I'm somebody who's used to being the star, it's hard to take someone who had an organization built around them. to get them to then understand what building a team looks like.

Speaker 1 But if you take someone that was off the bench, the 12th, 13th man that person had to get up when the when when the top leader came to who needed a seat that person had to go get water for everyone that was coming in that person had to play their role that person understands the concept of team reading energies reading people reading plays coaching people when you really want to be out there now you're telling them what you saw to make them become better see these are the tandems or these are the skill sets that most people don't recognize are being developed so the person that gets the job first or get the promotion or the leadership first is the standout star when your best leader is probably your average ordinary producer, but they help everyone.

Speaker 1 There may be more generic. They may not be a specialist, but they can do everyone's job.
And they can navigate people's emotions. They know how to move around people.

Speaker 1 They know how to push people to their excellence or to their level of potential. And so if we're only giving promotional roles to those that stand out,

Speaker 1 you're going to have an organization where that person is going to want everyone to stand around them, not build with them, not grow with them, not innovate. Let me

Speaker 1 tell you about an organization, a system I consulted several years ago. They were hemorrhaging leaders, high turnover and middle management, poor engagement scores.
project stalls, culture eroding.

Speaker 1 So I asked to see their leadership selection criteria. And here's what they assessed for promotion.
Years of experience.

Speaker 1 Certifications, performance reviews, peer recommendations.

Speaker 1 That's all. Here's what they didn't assess.
Emotional intelligence, systems thinking, conflict resolution, change management capacity. ability to develop others.

Speaker 1 They were hiring based on credentials and hoping for capability. Uh-oh, Hello, somebody.
I am talking to somebody now.

Speaker 1 Hiring based on credentials and hoping for capability.

Speaker 1 And then they wondered why their managers couldn't handle the complexity of actual leadership. Here's the truth.
The skills that make you promotable are not the skills that make you effective.

Speaker 1 Being reliable gets you promoted. Building systems make you effective.
Being liked gets you promoted. Having difficult conversations make you effective.
Being busy gets you promoted.

Speaker 1 Thinking strategically makes you effective. We're selecting for visibility and credibility, not for actual leadership capacity.
And then we throw these new leaders into roles

Speaker 1 with zero training, zero support, zero feedback loops, and we expect them to figure it out. That's not leadership development.

Speaker 1 That's hoping that somebody. It's going to all of a sudden evolve like Doranism.
Doranism. Just they're going to evolve.

Speaker 1 go from a tortoise to an animal, to an animal just out of evolution. It doesn't work that way.
Even if you have a leader that is capable, I like to come back to sports because just maybe, just maybe,

Speaker 1 I get somebody that understands sports enough where it clicks.

Speaker 1 No matter how good the player is,

Speaker 1 the player is still

Speaker 1 subject to the coach's playbook. It doesn't matter how good you are.
Coaches select players based on their playbook, what works within their system.

Speaker 1 So if you were to bring a new leader, even if they were capable of greatness into a world that doesn't even have a playbook,

Speaker 1 how can you imagine that they'll succeed?

Speaker 1 Even in the new year, they have offseason. preseason, where you're learning these plays and systems and processes and structure,

Speaker 1 but just hoping that somebody who went from being a tactician or a clinician that all of a sudden is going to become a manager and know exactly how to rebuild that system of the holes that you have without having any proper training to do it is asinine to believe that that could happen.

Speaker 1 So this is the piece that we have to understand.

Speaker 1 Because in this, we can start to diagnose the true leadership famine.

Speaker 1 We have promotion structures that are based on tenure, not capability. Compensation models that force people into management to make more money.

Speaker 1 No leadership pipeline infrastructure, no assessment, no development, no succession planning, role definitions that blur the lines between management and leadership.

Speaker 1 And then on the softer side, we have leaders who are never taught to lead, just promoted and expected to figure it out. Let me give y'all some context.
I say it all the time.

Speaker 1 I said in the last season. I'm always going to reiterate this.
It takes three months for someone that is even capable to get comfortable in a new environment. 90 days, three months.

Speaker 1 I didn't say pick up new skills, learn plays, process. I'm talking about just get comfortable, knowing who to talk to.

Speaker 1 knowing who they shouldn't talk to, knowing who allies, knowing who are foes, learning the culture, understanding people.

Speaker 1 Matter of fact, as a leader, you shouldn't be expected to make any drastic changes in your first 90 days because you have to get a real feel and assessment of people around you, capabilities, who's willing, who's not, who has time,

Speaker 1 who is there just to be there. There's so many things you have to take into account the first three months.
First three months, just getting comfortable.

Speaker 1 The first year, it takes a year to become efficient in a new process, in a new system, a year, four years to become efficient.

Speaker 1 And efficient by definition definition means your ability to get the job done with little

Speaker 1 problems or distractions.

Speaker 1 Anything that's above a little problem or distraction, you have to get help. You have to have some oversight.

Speaker 1 It takes 18 months to 24 months to become proficient in that new job, that role, if they already are capable.

Speaker 1 They were in the role before. If they were not in the role before, they've never done it before, you can multiply multiply that times two or three.

Speaker 1 How long it takes them to actually get settled into the role, where they're comfortable making hard decisions, they're comfortable creating with strategic plans of growth.

Speaker 1 They're comfortable rebuilding systems, processes, and policies. They're comfortable with implementing or integrating new things into their department.
They're comfortable doing change management.

Speaker 1 These are all the things that make you or break you. Then it takes 36 months and beyond to become a master at running that role.
That's with someone who is capable.

Speaker 1 Again, multiply that times two or three for someone who doesn't have any training or any experience in that role. So we talk about it.
Got to get past the figuring out.

Speaker 1 The next one is there's no common language or framework for what good leadership actually looks like. What standard are you holding your leaders to? Does everyone have their own?

Speaker 1 Typically, when I go into an organization, it looks like a s'mores board of all different types of philosophies and ideologies and standards and processes.

Speaker 1 How can you run an organization? You, as the head of the organization, everyone should be running your plays,

Speaker 1 your language, your lingo.

Speaker 1 So, if there's no common language, if I can go to one leader in one department and go to another leader, matter of fact, if I were to go to in your department and ask all your leaders the same question, would they all say the same thing verbatim or would they tell me something different?

Speaker 1 That'll let me know exactly where your organization stands.

Speaker 1 We have cultures that value heroism over system building, needing that one person so that one person's carrying the weight of their full department and you're wondering why they're burning out and leaving or getting inefficient.

Speaker 1 A soft problem that's causing issues is zero accountability for leadership development. It's treated as optional, not essential.

Speaker 1 Get leadership development on your own, but when you get it on your own, I want you to apply it here, but I'm not going to give you a raise for it or a bonus for it.

Speaker 1 Invest in your own development, but I want the best of that development.

Speaker 1 If somebody feels like they invested in their own development as a leader outside of your organization, nine times out of 10, they're not going to be loyal to you when it comes to how to best use that new skill set that they learned.

Speaker 1 Here's the point I'm making. Everybody typically around the world, it's human nature.
We all operate on the

Speaker 1 feelings of,

Speaker 1 for lack of better words, like an IOU system. If somebody naturally does something for you, whether they say it or not, you kind of keep a tally.

Speaker 1 You're like, I'm going to make sure I look out for them. Maybe not at the same capacity, but you're thinking in your head.
You're trying to navigate that, right?

Speaker 1 What do you think the mindset of your team would be if they knew that you were investing in their development for their future? How much more loyal would they be to the organization?

Speaker 1 They know that you're responsible for getting them better. They know that you invested in their talent.
They know that you invested in their skills.

Speaker 1 You're going to get your staff on average to stay four to five years longer

Speaker 1 than you would if they feel like they have to invest in their own growth on their own.

Speaker 1 Because there's no loyalty to you. Because if all I'm getting from you is a paycheck and nothing else, but you want the best of me.

Speaker 1 But all I'm getting from you is a paycheck, not development, not career pathways, not exposure, not experience, not cross-collaboration. there's not going to be any loyalty.

Speaker 1 And that's exactly why we'll always have a leadership gap in hospital systems.

Speaker 1 And that disconnect is that our hardware promotes based on

Speaker 1 past performance, but leadership is about future capability. Our software rewards people for being good doers,

Speaker 1 but leadership is about making other people

Speaker 1 better.

Speaker 1 And we're running a system designed to elevate individual contributors and then asking them to multiply impact through others. It doesn't work that way.

Speaker 1 A hard question I want you to ask yourself is, do we have the infrastructure to identify, assess, and develop leadership capacity?

Speaker 1 The soft question I want you to ask yourself is, do our current leaders know how to recognize and cultivate leadership in others? Most organizations fail both checks.

Speaker 1 And that's exactly why we have a a famine. So let's get specific.

Speaker 1 Before we get specific, I want to give a shout out to SIPS Healthcare, our healthcare operations company that's constantly building new pipelines of development and talent within hospitals all over the country.

Speaker 1 And also, our technology, Starbuck Design, is being implemented in hospital systems.

Speaker 1 And we're excited about our new software because it's the first software in the periops space that helps mitigate errors before they happen.

Speaker 1 If you want more information on that, you can go to sipshealthcare.com and find out more information about that.

Speaker 1 In this segment, we're going to talk about what leadership actually requires. If you're new to this show, this is a podcast, not a podcast, if you can't tell.

Speaker 1 The objective of the show is for you to get information from us. Take it and go apply it today.

Speaker 1 I'm on your leadership journey. Our goal is to create a million leaders all over the world that are in this space to create change.

Speaker 1 They can be radical change makers to ensure success for a healthcare system that's in dire need of amazing leadership. Now,

Speaker 1 I want to ask you a question:

Speaker 1 What does leadership in healthcare actually require?

Speaker 1 Not management, not administration,

Speaker 1 leadership.

Speaker 1 And if you don't know, I'll give you five things.

Speaker 1 Five things, five skills, five requirements in order to be a great leader. One,

Speaker 1 systems thinking.

Speaker 1 Leaders have to see patterns, not just problems. They have to understand how decisions in one area impacts outcomes in another.
They have to think in systems, not silos.

Speaker 1 Most clinicians are trained to focus narrowly. Master your specialty, your unit, your protocols.
Leadership actually requires the opposite. You need breadth, integration, complexity.

Speaker 1 So if I'm going to promote someone, I need to know how well do they think on a systems level.

Speaker 1 Because someone that's in leadership, especially in our industry of healthcare, You want them to be able to proactively think of cause and effect of every decision that's made in every hole that is created, how that affects the entire ecosystem.

Speaker 1 The second thing you need to look at and observe if someone actually have it is emotional intelligence.

Speaker 1 You have to read people, navigate politics, manage conflict, build trust, give feedback that lands, have conversations that matter. Clinical training doesn't teach this.

Speaker 1 And frankly, clinical environments often punish it. We reward efficiency and competence, not empathy and communication.
In leadership, emotional intelligence is 100% empathy and communication.

Speaker 1 Trying to gather context versus the content that's being displayed. I understand that you see somebody frowned up, but what I see is somebody who's out of their norm today.

Speaker 1 I understand that that person snapped at you. But what I heard was that they were hurting somewhere else.
And I want to dig down deep and figure out what is actually causing them to lash out at work.

Speaker 1 What you see is someone continuously stepping over boundaries. What I'm understanding and I'm recognizing is it's not that they're stepping over boundaries, maybe that they don't understand

Speaker 1 why those boundaries are there.

Speaker 1 See, emotional intelligence causes for you to move your emotions to the side so that you can comfortably and confidently break down the emotions of whatever you're dealing with or the energy of whatever you're dealing with to come up with a logical solution.

Speaker 1 That's emotional intelligence.

Speaker 1 The third thing a leader needs that you should be identifying is change management. Healthcare is in a constant flux.

Speaker 1 Regulations change, technology changes, reimbursement model changes, patient expectation change.

Speaker 1 Leaders don't just manage stability. They lead through transformation.
And that requires vision, adaptability, resilience, the ability to bring people along who don't want to go.

Speaker 1 If you don't know how to bring people along that don't want to go with you, you're going to have a hard time leading.

Speaker 1 Because 100% of the time, you're trying to bring somebody along that doesn't want to change, that doesn't want to comply.

Speaker 1 And change management is looking at problems that have been there 20, 30 years and realizing that your

Speaker 1 newness to leadership, you cannot change something that's been there 20, 30 years that's in the culture, in the fibers, in the fabric, and the history of all the people that you're leading and expect them to get comfortable at changing in one to two months.

Speaker 1 If I want to break a habit out of someone, you don't break it day one,

Speaker 1 you ship pieces of it off a little at a time.

Speaker 1 I like to compare it to

Speaker 1 the sanctification process when you say yes to serving God.

Speaker 1 And then there's this process that happens along the way that over time, eventually you'll become one with him, shedding some of the things that you do wrong, that you know are wrong, off along the way.

Speaker 1 That's what leadership kind of is. I understand the protocol.
I understand

Speaker 1 where they're supposed to be. But if I'm getting into leadership and I'm adopting and I'm inheriting a group of people that I did not choose, that did not come through my system.

Speaker 1 I have to build mechanisms that allow for them to weed out the things that are inefficient or wrong about them and to input the things that will make them better producers within our system.

Speaker 1 The fourth skill set that a leader will need is the development mindset. Leadership isn't about being the best, it's about making your team the best.

Speaker 1 That means you invest in people, you coach, you mentor, you reiterate over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 You create growth paths, you build bench strength.

Speaker 1 Building bench strength means as I have current talent that I trust, I do not get lazy as a leader and say, hey, I developed the leader, now you go develop a leader.

Speaker 1 No, in that process, I always like to say go three layers down, meaning.

Speaker 1 If I'm a director of a hospital system, I want to develop my manager, I want to develop my supervisor, And I want to develop the next team lead. I want to go three generations down.

Speaker 1 So I may be alone in managing and developing my managers, but then I co-partner and take 20 and take 75% of the role. And the manager takes 25% of the role of developing our supervisor.

Speaker 1 Then when it comes to the team lead, You may give the manager 50% of the role and you get 50% of the role or 75% and you get 25% of developing that team lead.

Speaker 1 Now you have three generations that have been bred, trained, and developed through you that all know the ways of your playbook and your system so that when your leader leaves or when the person you depend on leave, you have the next man up.

Speaker 1 There's no better compliment that you can get as a leader to know that someone developed and became a great leader in your system and they went somewhere else and flourished.

Speaker 1 It only scares those that got lazy in their development of their bench talent, bench talent.

Speaker 1 That when someone says that they're leaving, you get mad and upset because they want to grow in their career. I love to see the thriving nature of an organization and where those leaders end up.

Speaker 1 Matter of fact,

Speaker 1 there was a study that was done on Xerox,

Speaker 1 and Xerox had a metric that they... that they measured.

Speaker 1 And the metric was they knew the strength of their sales team based on what their sales team leaders and their top producers did when they left Xerox.

Speaker 1 They said, you don't know

Speaker 1 the true strength of your development or your leadership or leader development or talent development system until they've grown past your organization and you see what they do outside of the system or structure of the world that you curated.

Speaker 1 So they judge the value of their company based on what their top producers went and did after they left Xerox. Because Xerox knew there was only a limited amount of top positions that they had.

Speaker 1 So the only thing that they could do is get the best out of that person and the time that they had and let them spin off to go do something that they enjoyed to do or something similar.

Speaker 1 So they were able to truly judge. the value of their organization based on the impact that it made outside of the organization.

Speaker 1 And there's so many leaders that are scared that their top leaders are going to leave because you spent so much quote unquote time with them. But isn't that what you want?

Speaker 1 Don't you want people spewing out and becoming disciples of your system in other places? It shows the strength of what you curate. And matter of fact,

Speaker 1 it will attract so many more people to your organization.

Speaker 1 If they knew that this place, if you leave this hospital, you can go any hospital in the world and get a leadership position because this hospital is known for producing great leaders or this organization is known for producing great leaders.

Speaker 1 You want top people to come from you, and you judge a tree by the fruit it bears. So what type of fruit are you bearing? And

Speaker 1 what trees are they becoming? That's how you look at the true development cycle within an organization. You won't always have them stay there, but when they're there, why not get the best out of them?

Speaker 1 Most new leaders have spent their careers being the star, but leadership is about being in the business of making stars so even that transition of becoming a star to putting yourself in a position to make stars that's the difference you can't want to be the star and make a star you have to be willing to curate and create stars if you truly want an organization of stars and then the fifth insight is

Speaker 1 That's needed for a leader is your strategic foresight. Leaders don't just solve today's problems.
They prevent tomorrow's crisis. They see around the corners.
They ask what-if questions.

Speaker 1 They build infrastructures before it's urgent. Your best leaders are the ones that challenge you the most because those are the ones that make the system better.
They don't become your yes man.

Speaker 1 And this is exactly why frameworks like our sterile design matter. Because you can't just tell people think strategically and expect it to happen.

Speaker 1 You need structure, methodology, and repeatable processes that teaches them how to think strategically.

Speaker 1 And Steraby Design, our operating system, gives leaders in perioperative environments a proven system to move from reactive management to proactive design.

Speaker 1 It's not just about operations, it's about building the leadership capacity to sustain those operations.

Speaker 1 So we talk about

Speaker 1 the problem. We talked about the skill sets that are needed.
So let's spend the last function of portion of this podcast to talk about how we fix it.

Speaker 1 How do we stop promoting the wrong people and start building real leaders? Well, first, we have to separate the career tracks.

Speaker 1 Not everyone should have to go into leadership to advance. Create parallel paths.
You have clinical excellence track and you have leadership track. And let people choose and compensate both fairly.

Speaker 1 Stop forcing great great clinicians into management roles that they don't want just so they can make more money. Find pathways that they can continue to do what they do and get better.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of the leadership that you have and leaders right now in the hospital system that will bring more value to you back on the floor.

Speaker 1 And the only reason they said yes to the management position was because that was the only position that would pay more.

Speaker 1 So we really have to assess what our actual promotional track looks like and really get creative with how we design this promotional track.

Speaker 1 The second thing that we must do, we must assess for capabilities, not just credentials. Before you promote someone, assess their actual leadership capacity.

Speaker 1 Use real tools, behavior interviews, situational judgment tests, 360 degree feedback. Don't just look at what they've done.
Look at how they think. And one of the best part about our next step.

Speaker 1 talent development system that we've that we implement into hospital systems, we curate and we observe that leader in three dynamic ways. We call it our eco.

Speaker 1 We evaluate their effort and their engagement. Then we evaluate how they comprehend and their competence.
Then we observe them in the actual action to look up the true ecosystem of that leader.

Speaker 1 What is the makeup of that leader? And you cannot judge that or see that just within an assessment or a resume. You have to see it in action.

Speaker 1 And your talent development system has to be able to promote and develop that in that process and observe it objectively. Third, we want to build development on ramps.
On ramps.

Speaker 1 We want to build development on ramps. Stop throwing people into leadership roles code.
Create apprenticeships, mentorships, leadership rotations where people can try it before they commit to it.

Speaker 1 Let them learn in low-stake environments before you hand them a department.

Speaker 1 If you already know in your mind who would be a great leader leader next, go ahead and put them in your minor leagues, like baseball.

Speaker 1 Hey, I see you coming to the big league. So let me start giving you minor leadership things.
Let me start developing certain things and getting some of those natural kinks out.

Speaker 1 Let me hire SIPS Healthcare to actually develop our leaders and put them in an ecosystem or incubator that can help them actually grow and be ready for winter's time.

Speaker 1 The fourth thing you're going to have to do to fix this problem is actually invest in real training, not a two-day seminar, not a webinar, real sustained leadership development, cohort-based programs, executive coaching, 101s, peer learning, action learning projects.

Speaker 1 We want to make leadership development a competitive advantage, not an afterthought. And the fifth and final thing is we want to hold leaders accountable.
for developing leaders.

Speaker 1 Your job as a leader isn't just to deliver outcomes, it's to to build the next generation of leaders. Make succession planning a performance metric.

Speaker 1 Evaluate leaders on how many people they develop, not just how many problems they solve. If you're not building leaders, you're not leading, you're just managing.

Speaker 1 This is the shift from dependency to design. You've been dependent on accidentally finding good leaders.
It's time to design systems that intentionally create them.

Speaker 1 If I'm looking at my leaders and I want to promote them to a director, I want to know how many people did you actually develop that became managers that left your facility, that left us, that became managers.

Speaker 1 How many people did you build in your organization that can operate as a manager right now? Because if we promote you to director, can you actually put somebody in place that can keep running it?

Speaker 1 I want to look at the highest places that I put, that I'm trying to promote my team. I want to see how many leaders have you developed.

Speaker 1 Because honestly, the highest level of leadership is learning how to develop other leaders. That's the the key.
Because the uncomfortable truth is this.

Speaker 1 The leadership famine isn't a talent problem. It's a design problem.

Speaker 1 We have plenty of talented people. We're just selecting, developing, and deploying them wrong.
We promote based on clinical skills and hope leadership emerges, and it doesn't.

Speaker 1 We throw people into rows without training and expect them to succeed and they don't. We reward firefighting and wonder why nobody builds infrastructure because we never taught them how.

Speaker 1 We rewarded them on their basis that they know how to navigate firefighting. But here's what I've seen in over a decade.
The organizations that get leadership selections right,

Speaker 1 they're the ones that assess for capability. They invest in development and build real pipelines.
They don't have leadership famine. They have a leadership surplus.

Speaker 1 They become talent magnets because people want to work there because they know that they'll grow there.

Speaker 1 And those organizations don't just survive change, they lead it because leadership is a software. Systems are the hardware.
And your promotion process is the manufacturing line.

Speaker 1 And if you're building leaders based on faulty criteria, you're going to keep getting a faulty product. So here's the challenge I have for you this week.

Speaker 1 Current leaders, look at your last five promotions. Did you assess for leadership capacity or just reward for past performance? Be honest.

Speaker 1 Aspiring leaders, ask yourself, do I actually want to lead or do I just want the title in the pay? Because if you're not willing to develop others, you're not ready to lead.

Speaker 1 If you're somebody who states, I'm not really a people person,

Speaker 1 You should not be in leadership. HR and executives, audit your leadership pipeline.
How many of your current leaders were actually selected for leadership ability versus clinical competence?

Speaker 1 What does that tell you? The leadership famine ends when we stop accidentally finding leaders and start intentionally building them. And when we process like that, we understand

Speaker 1 that building talent development systems are no longer optional.

Speaker 1 It should be mandatory. And if you're in the healthcare space right now, SIPS Healthcare can help you do it.

Speaker 1 We're doing it for hospitals all over the country, truly helping them build their talent development system by licensing our system to the hospital system.

Speaker 1 Reach out to us if you want to find out more information. I am your host.
This is Bread2Lead, the business of healthcare, episode 32, season three.

Speaker 1 Next week, in episode 33, we're going to be talking about the culture architects, building organizations people do not want to leave. And remember, we've got exclusive masterclass content this season.

Speaker 1 You do not want to miss. So head on over to breadtolead.com to join our community and get access.

Speaker 1 Subscribe, share this with an HR executive, share this with someone in your space that needs to hear it. And most importantly, remember, I love you, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 1 And not only do I love you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 1 You need to start looking yourself in the eye and telling yourself that you love you because everyone has the capacity to be able to lead. The question is,

Speaker 1 how well will you do it? This is Dr. J.
Taylor Jacobs. It's Bread to Lead, and I'm signing out.
Again, thank you for making us number

Speaker 1 eight on the list.