Sabrina Baker  0:10  
The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly supported by Workhuman. We talk a lot on the show about where HR is headed, and one of the most exciting developments I've seen lately is what Workhuman is doing with Future Leaders. Future Leaders is the first talent intelligence tool of its kind, helping companies identify high potential VP plus talent already inside their organization up to four years before they step into the role, and it's not based on gut instinct or visibility. Using real-time recognition data and proprietary AI, it reveals who's already influencing and elevating the people around them. Future leaders from Workhuman is setting a new standard for internal talent development. Learn more at workhuman.com. Thanks for joining us. 

Sabrina Baker  1:04  
Welcome back to the HR Connection on the HR Happy Hour Media Network. My name is Sabrina Baker. I am the CEO of Acacia HR Solutions. We are an embedded fractional HR support firm focused in the one to 500 employee headcount. If you are managing human resources in that space, in a one to 500 then this is the podcast to be. Please go ahead and hit that subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We do exclusive episodes monthly on the HR Happy Hour Network, and then we have weekly HR Connection episodes on our own network. You can find both on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is going to be about a soapbox of mine. I have a few when it comes to small business HR and the nuance. You've probably heard me say if you listened to any episode that small business HR is not smaller HR; it is its own discipline, and there are very distinct things that make it its own discipline. The way you manage human resources in a one to 500 is different. It's a hill I will die on. It is different than the way you manage human resources in a 1000, 5000, 50,000 employee firm. It's just its own discipline, and I have a few soapboxes that I think I get on quite often that I find to be lacking in small businesses. That if they had them, the business would grow so much faster. One of them is onboarding, and I've done episodes on that. We have that on our main HR connection channel. But small businesses are often, in and of themselves, very unstructured. People are figuring things out. You have people wearing many hats, and I think that in order to throw somebody into an unstructured environment, you actually have to do that in a very structured way, which I know sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. And so, one of my soapboxes is absolutely around having really good onboarding programs. The second soapbox is around accountability and the fact that I think in small businesses there is a huge lack of accountability. It's probably true for big businesses as well, but definitely in small businesses we find a massive lack of consistent and effective accountability. The third soapbox is the one that I'm going to spend time on today, and I don't know. It could be actually my largest soapbox, and and definitely where I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about. And if I'm working with clients, this is how I'm working with them, and it is centering around leadership development or the lack thereof in most places. In small businesses, you have mostly what I call homegrown leaders. These are people who joined the organization in an individual contributor type role. They did very well at that. They, for all intents and purposes, were extremely high performers. And so, when it came time to needing a manager for that area, we tapped that person on the shoulder. That, in and of itself, is not wrong. I don't think that that's a bad move. And in fact, I think that in a small business where lateral, where promotional opportunities are few and far between, the ability to, when you have an opening, move somebody into it is a very good news story for the business. It helps morale. It helps engagement. It shows people that while the opportunities may not be as plentiful as they would be in a large organization, they do exist here. And when there is an opening, they do look internally.

Sabrina Baker  4:35  
So I think it can be the absolute right move and a very good engagement booster when you promote from within. In a small environment, people are usually learning how to work in that unique space. No two small businesses are the same. If I've learned anything in 15 years, it's that no two small businesses are the same, and so therefore, promoting somebody who already understands your business, who already understands your customers, who already understands the ethos of what you're trying to build. Brilliant move. Absolutely should be what you do. But promoting them without supporting them in their development is where we go wrong. Individual contributors do not automatically make great leaders. They know how to do the work themselves. They know how to structure the work, how it works for them. They know how to manage through their tasks. But handling the work and motivating, inspiring, coaching, encouraging, leading, developing others to do the work, that is a completely different skill set. So what happens is we promote people and we assume that they know what they're doing. We assume they know how to manage a team, how they they know how to give feedback, they know how to have a one on one, they know how to to performance manage somebody when they're not performing. We just assume that those things are going to come to them naturally. We assume that leadership is this innate trait, and that once you have the title, all of these things just are bestowed upon you, and you suddenly know how to do this. And I'm here to tell you, as somebody who spends a lot of time in leadership development, that that is simply not what happens. They are going to take those individual individual contributor traits, and they are just going to translate them into leadership, or worse, they are going to take what they know from either the best or worst leader they've ever had, and do that. And that is definitely not what we want them to be doing. The thing about leadership development is that whether you are offering a formal program or not, formal, informal or not, leadership developing is happening inside your organization. It's happening. It just may not be happening in the way you want it to be. New leaders, especially, are watching everybody else. They're watching all of the leaders around them. They're watching the founder, the CEO, the executive team, other leaders who they maybe admire or aspire to be like. They are watching them, and they are learning from those people. And if those people are not being the kinds of leaders that the organization wants or needs, then all we're doing is just perpetuating this poor leadership. I am absolutely convinced, and I know people will fight me on this, but I am absolutely convinced that if small businesses focused on leadership development, if they promoted a new individual contributor into a manager role with development and support, and how to be a leader. If they gave ongoing leadership development throughout a person's career, that their business could be entirely different. Now, you may be sitting there going, "I don't need you to convince me anymore. I know. I know that leadership development is important. I have brought this up to my CEO. We have no budget for it. We have no, you know, there's no ability for us to do leadership development. Every time I think I'm going to get some budget to bring somebody in and do this or to have people take courses, then that budget gets taken away from me or it gets redirected somewhere else. I know, I know that it is not a budget that is given freely and and openly, and in fact, when I get do get called in to do leadership development with clients, one of the things that I will say to the people in the room is, "You have no idea how lucky you are to be sitting here today. Not because I'm facilitating; it has nothing to do with me and my presence, but it has everything to do with the fact that so many organizations do not put any kind of priority on this. So many organizations would never put a budget behind bringing somebody in and doing leadership development.

Sabrina Baker  8:49  
So if you get to sit inside of a leadership development course, if you get to have a facilitator come in and do some development, if you get some one-on-one coaching, that's huge. It's very rare, and you should be absolutely thankful for it. So I I know that the budget doesn't happen. I know that it's not something that's prioritized. So here's what I thought I would do today. I want to give you some like sneaky ways. I say sneaky, but you're not necessarily sneaky in the like we have to be quiet about it. It's sneaky in that we can just kind of slide some leadership development in without the person in front of us ever knowing that that's what we're doing. And the beauty about these things is that they work at all levels. So even your CEO can get a little leadership development from you through these opportunities and never know that that's what you're doing. So I'm going to give you a few of my favorites. When we have clients who want us to help with leadership development, but they don't want to put a budget behind more support for us to be able to do it, then these are the things that we will sometimes try to do to see if we can sneak in some leadership development without it actually being a formal program. Before I get into those, let me first talk about leadership behaviors really quick because I think that if you can get your team to agree on defining some leadership behaviors at each level, then you can really use those to start to shift conversations. So what I mean by that is, you have depending on the levels in your organization, you can have a manager, you could have a director, VP, executive, whatever your your levels are. There are different behaviors that define each one of those, and the clients that I do leadership development with, a lot of them either I have helped them define what those behaviors look like, or they already have it when I come in, and it it is something that we use inside of leadership development to really talk and reinforce those behaviors. And so, let me give you a very crude example, just a basic example of somebody being promoted from individual contributor to manager, and the shift of that. An individual contributor is responsible for getting the work done. They have their set of tasks, they have their assignments, their deadlines, their workload, and they are responsible for getting that done. Them themselves. They then get promoted to a manager, and now they are responsible for creating the conditions for others to be able to get their work done. It's very different, right? That's a major shift from I am responsible for getting my work done to now I am, this is a behavior, creating conditions to ensure that my team is getting their work done and can get their work done. That's a massive shift, and I think sometimes when you have those leadership behaviors, if you think about just a sentence like that, it doesn't have to be 16-20 behaviors that you define. It's just a simple of this is what an individual contributor does, this is what a manager does, this is what a director does. When you promote somebody and you explain that to them, that's leadership development already. You you have already done some leadership development with them. You are saying you are no longer a taskmaster. You are no longer somebody who is just getting the work done. Yes, there's going to be work that you're responsible for that you have to get done, but more than anything, now you are creating the conditions for your team to be able to do their work successfully. That's a very different mindset shift. So before we we talk about these sneaky ways that you can kind of build leadership development into the work, I just wanted to say that that even for you as the HR person defining the differences, the elevation level, right? I always say CEOs work at 50,000 feet, VPs, executives, they're kind of at 30,000 feet, and then we go down. Directors are like 20,000 feet, and and managers 10,000 and then so that elevation level of whatever management level they are at, if you can define just a sentence that explains that and the difference between that and the level before it, and you you tell that to somebody when they are promoted, then that's already going to start to shift their mindset on how what they're going to be doing going forward is different than what they were doing before. Okay, so the first way that you can sneak development into your daily life with the leaders in your organization is to stop telling them what to do. It is very common, and we still catch ourselves doing this. 15 years of managing clients, and we still catch ourselves doing this. To have a manager come and say, "So and so is not performing. Sally is not performing, and I need to figure out how to get her to perform. And it's very common for us as HR professionals because we want to help and we want to fix it, and we have a million other things going on. So we just want to move on to stop and say, "Okay, here's what you're going to do. You're going to sit Sally down, and you are going to give her these talking points, and then you're going to ask her what she thinks she needs to do to improve, and what does she need from you. And we give them like this step by step of how to manage the Sally issue, but when we do that, all we're doing is creating a dependency on ourselves that every single time this manager has an employee issue, they're going to come back to us and ask the same question. So you can develop them in that very moment in saying, "Sally has a performance issue. What do you think you should do? What do you think the steps are? Tell me what you have done already. What conversations have you had? What do you feel like Sally needs to be able to improve her performance? How are you going to give that to her? Rather than give them answers, ask them questions. I think this is really one of the most effective things that you can do as an HR leader, trying to kind of sneak in some development, and one that you will see compound pretty quickly. Because the first time you do this with a leader, then they're going to answer your questions. They're going to sit down. Sure, they might get a little frustrated and be like, "Can you just tell me what to do? And and you say, "No, this is a great opportunity for us to talk through this together. You are her manager. You are her leader. You need to own this, not me. The first time you do it, they answer the questions, they think through it. It's new to them, but then the next time they come to you, they've already thought through some of them. Maybe not everything, but they've already thought through some of it. So the next time they come to you, now they're going to say, "Sally has a performance issue. Here are the conversations I've already had with her. Here's what I think we need to do. Here's what I think she needs. And then you can still fill in the rest of whatever they didn't get. But the third time, they're going to get even more. And so what happens is over time you have created this development in them around whatever that situation is that they now know how to manage it themselves. We talk a lot on the HR Connection about building capacity inside of a small business because if you are watching this, listening to this, and you are managing HR in a one to 500 I'm going to guess if you're in a one to 150 you could be doing it alone, and you have a lot to do, and you don't have a lot of time. You can't add more time, so you have to add capacity. And this is one of the best ways to add both capacity to your day and development to theirs. So the biggest thing that you can do, and this is not just with feedback examples or performance plans, it's literally with anything that they, as a leader, should be able to navigate and figure out on their own. Stop giving them the answers.

Sabrina Baker  16:34  
Start asking questions that make them figure out the answers on their own, you can guide, you can pivot when you need to, you can jump in and say, "Hey, I need you to think about this as well. But do not give them final answers. Make them figure it out on their own. All right. Fix number two assumes something. It assumes that you are invited to leadership team meetings, and I I understand that when I'm talking about small business life, that that may not be everybody. And so, if it's not you, I have one more that I think will be good for you. But I do think that if you are somebody who gets to be a part of the leadership team, if your CEO sees you as a part of the leadership layer, and you are invited to the regular leadership team meetings where they're talking about business, they're talking about strategy and infrastructure and all of those things that go into growing a business. If you're in those meetings, here's a way that you can sneak in some development, and I think that this one's really effective too. And it is use real business problems. So a lot of times with leadership development, what we can try to do is give fake scenarios. You know, so I just said Sally has this performance issue, and that's certainly something that comes up. But what is so much more effective is when you can walk into a team meeting and bring up a real scenario that happened. And when I'm talking about a real scenario, I'm saying maybe like a business scenario, something big that happened that you can say, can we talk about the people implications of that? Can we talk about what happened there from a people perspective, and use that again by asking questions, by getting, by guiding the conversation a little bit to get people to realize where there was maybe a leadership gap, and so let me just give you an example because I think sometimes it's easier to understand that way. Let's say that there was a huge miss in the business, a huge deadline missed. Maybe there was a deliverable to a client, and it didn't happen by the date that you the business promised. That deliverable was missed because of maybe two or three departments have to interact together, and one missed theirs, and they're probably in the midst of blaming each other, and it's somebody else's fault. Those scenarios are great examples for the HR leader who can be unbiased, who's not in one of the departments. You're not defending your own people to guide conversations around, okay, let's talk about what happened here. Let's talk about what communication went to employees. Did employees know about the deadline across all departments? Did all three leaders, let's say it's three departments that were involved, did all three leaders communicate the same message? How did we handle the handoff? How did we know when one department was finished with their part and going to go to the next one? You can really use that as a prompt to talk about not just let's not just blame and especially not just blame the employees who maybe missed the deadline, but let's look where our leadership gaps were in that because I almost guarantee you they were there. I can almost bet my paycheck on the fact that there were probably leadership gaps when things are missed in the business. And so, if you are in your leadership team meeting and they bring up problems like that, real life case studies of like something happening inside your business is going to be your best teacher. And so, rather than just like sit and let them talk about it and let them, you know, blame each other and whatever, if you can use it as an opportunity to say, okay, can we talk about the communication plan here and where did we maybe miss something there? Can we talk about the handoff from department to department and where did we maybe miss something there? You can interject questions around leadership characteristics, then they'll start thinking that way. And just like the the other idea that I had for you, you do it once, and then the next time when they go to actually execute on something, they're thinking about that.

Sabrina Baker  20:34  
So it's not coming and saying, "I'm going to do some leadership development today, and we're going to talk about this big miss. It's okay. We had this miss. Now let's talk about if there's anything that we, as a leadership team, could have done differently and can learn from it. Okay, so I said in that last one that if you didn't have access to your leadership team, if you weren't invited to those meetings, you weren't allowed in, then I had another way, and so let me give you that one real quick, and that is in one-on-ones. I absolutely believe that if you are leading HR in a small environment, you should be having one-on-ones with some of the managers. And I know you probably just rolled your eyes a little bit and was like, "Yeah, if I had time, that would be great. It doesn't have to be everyone, depending on your size. If you're under a certain size, I would say it is everyone. But if you're over, if you're in the 80s and 90s and 100 plus employees, I get that you can't have that with every single leader every week or every month. I don't even think it has to be every week. It could just be monthly, biweekly, whatever you have time for. But I do think that the managers who you feel like maybe need the most support, or maybe they they own the biggest departments, or they own the biggest exposure inside the organization. I think it's really important for human resources, their the leader, to have a one-on-one with them on a regular basis, and I think that that does a couple things for you. One, it allows you an opportunity to develop them, which we're going to talk about. But it also gives you an idea of what's going on inside the business? I have mentioned before when I was many many years ago when I was working in a call center environment. I was a director of HR, and I would travel to call centers all over the country. And I would love-I didn't smoke, but I would love to go out into the smoke area because I would find out so much of what was actually happening inside the organization. And I think manager one-on-ones are the same. And depending on your level in the organization, you know, we we work very high level with our clients. We're working with the CEOs, with the executive team, with the VPs, and they, of course, tell us everything we need to know. But then sometimes we'll have a manager meeting and find out something that they didn't even know, or that you know nobody's really talking about that we should be talking about, and so your frontline managers really do have the goods. They have great information, and so I I would highly encourage you if it can't be everyone to be thinking about are there managers you should be having regular meetings with, not just tactical updates, not just what hires do you need, who's you know who's leaving, or not just those kinds of things, but like really, what's happening in the business, and where do you need support? And I think when you have those, that's a great opportunity to sneak in some development with them in the ways that we've already talked about. If you have a manager who you know is not cascading information, meaning that they get communication from the top, and that is not being shared with their team in a way that is helpful. What a great conversation for you to have with them in a one-on-one, because it can be very easy breezy. It can just be a, hey, tell me, you know, that thing that just came down from the CEO. How are you planning on sharing that with your team, or you know, what do you think your team's going to think about that when you share it? I find so often that again we assume leadership behaviors are innate. We assume that everybody knows how to do them, and I find that sometimes the simplest things people do not know what to do. I can't remember if I've shared this before or not, but I'll share it here. I once had a leadership development one-on-one coaching with somebody who would come into the office every day. He would sit down at his his cubicle, and there was open cubes. And his team was literally like one was staring at him, one was to the next of him, and he would slack them good morning, and then the assignments for the day. They were in person, and he would slack them the assignments and say good morning. And I said, "Have you ever thought about saying good morning? Have you ever thought about walking in, looking them in the eye, and saying, 'Hey, good morning. How was your evening? or 'How was your weekend? Giving them like five minutes of chit chat and then sitting down and giving assignments. And he genuinely said no. He hadn't thought about it. He was so focused on. I just need to get in and get the work out because we have so much to do. I don't have time for that five minutes. And when he kind of had that light bulb moment, I realized then that that even the most basic of skills. Most basic, what we would say, maybe common sense leadership skills don't exist for everyone. And so, if you have somebody like in my example who's not cascading information, you saying to them, "Hey, how are you going to share that with your team? I think it's important for your team to know what do you, you know, what are you going to do, and how do you feel like they're going to take it? Could be a light bulb moment for them where they're like, "Oh, I guess I should share this with the team, and they were never doing anything to harm in the first place. They weren't trying to withhold information; they just never thought about sharing it. And so, definitely, having one-on-ones gives you the opportunity to kind of sneak in some conversations and some development that gets people thinking about their leadership differently, without again it being this very formal leadership development process. So, highly, highly encourage you if you're not doing one-on-ones to think about who you might do a one-on-one with in your organization and start to think about what development do you feel like they need, or what are you hearing, maybe in engagement surveys or from employees, and then absolutely kind of sneaking that into your conversations without it being this formal development program. All right, I'm going to give you two-ish more. One is more just like a plug for getting real data, and then another one is like if you have leaders who are excited, maybe they want the development. They understand that there's no budget, but they want it, I'm going to give you an idea for that because it's it's so much easier to do development when they really are open to it and asking for it. But let me just do let me do a plug for data here first. I am a big fan of engagement surveys. I think even if you are less than 15 employees, you can still do engagement surveys, just not in the typical way. I don't think you do a Gallup survey or you do those things because it's too easy to figure out who said what. And if you want the thing to be anonymous, then you know that's it's it's really easy when you're less than 10 people to know exactly who said what. So I think there's ways you can do it. That's a whole other episode. But I I do think that you should be running regular engagement surveys somehow, however you do it in your organization, to get data because the best way to get even the smallest budget or at least get the opening to be able to do some kind of development, even what you can do, is to have that data. We talk a ton about how CEOs love data. As a CEO, I love data, and if you're going to ask me to put money or time behind something in my organization, I want to see the data on why I need to do it or what needs to be fixed.

Sabrina Baker  20:34  
So, if you are not managing or running engagement surveys, I would highly encourage you to do that so that you have some real data to be able to go back and show your CEO or whoever is responsible that we really could use some leadership development data, or we really could use some leadership development based on the data that we're getting in these surveys. Okay, last piece. If you have managers who say, "Man, I'd really love some development. I know we don't have a budget, but what can we do? Then I love to do like a lunch and learn, and one of the things that I have found really successful, I've done this with clients before, and I had a client who we did this for two years, and the the managers absolutely loved it. Was once a month we would come in. They had a meeting once a month anyway to do like a cross functional situation. They had it actually once a week. I'm sorry to do a cross functional talk amongst all of them, and so once a month I would come in and take over that meeting. And they ordered lunch every week anyway, so they ordered lunch for everybody. And I would come in and I would give a real leadership scenario, and then we would just talk through it. It wasn't it wasn't this hour of me lecturing or me facilitating, I would just say, "Here's something that has happened with another client, or here is something that has happened internally here that we we should talk about. And I would give an actual scenario, and then we would talk about best practices. We would talk about what we should do, what we shouldn't do. Sometimes I would give them, you know, role playing and scenarios, but for the most part, it was just an open forum to say, "Hey, leaders, if you've ever dealt with this scenario, what did you do? What worked for you? What didn't work? What did you learn from it? And it was just this conversation, and managers really enjoyed it. And it was easy for me to get approval because they were already having the meeting, and they didn't mind giving up one. They agreed that they could give up one meeting for this, and the managers were telling the CEO, "Hey, we we need this. We would love to do this. And so it was really a lot of fun for me actually to go in and say, "Okay, here's the scenario for this month. Let's talk through it, or taking that engagement survey data and saying, "Hey, I'm hearing that employees want more communication. Why do we think that is? What can we do about that? Where do we think we're lacking in communication? So, if you have leaders who are open to it and they would want to do that, then something very simple that you can facilitate that costs nothing. It's just an hour out of their time once a month or however, often you can give to it can be really effective, and at least getting them thinking about that higher level mindset that they need for leadership. I hope at least one of the ideas today sparked something in you. I have a ton more, actually. I have probably 10 or 11 overall. I just didn't want to make this an hour episode, but you can always connect with me on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile will be linked in the show notes. You can connect with me there and ask if you want other ideas. I love connecting with other HR pros, of course, who are in a one to 500. You can tell me a little bit about what's going on in your environment, and I'm happy to give thoughts or ideas of other ways that you can sneak in some leadership development without it being something that you need to get budget approval for, or time approval, or something that your CEO is going to scoff at. So there's lots of different things that you can do. Happy to have you connect with me, and we can talk through that again. If you haven't already, please subscribe. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.

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