Podcast Ep 123 | Seven Valuable Ways to Help Develop Middle Managers

How do you devel­op mid­dle man­agers? As com­pa­nies grow, the gap tends to be in mid­dle man­age­ment. As peo­ple are so busy work­ing, they rarely get the devel­op­ment time, resources and atten­tion need­ed for the growth that is required to devel­op tal­ent from with­in. As a result, com­pa­nies end up hav­ing to hire exter­nal team mem­bers to strength­en the team — many more than they would like.

And the exist­ing team stagnates.

In this episode, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence talk about sev­en impor­tant steps you can take to devel­op valu­able inter­nal tal­ent, and grow the next impor­tant lev­el of mid­dle man­age­ment leaders.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast where we talk every week about build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies. Endur­ing is not just about endurance, it’s about great­ness over time and build­ing upon suc­cess after suc­cess. And les­son after les­son. I’m Kevin Lawrence in Van­cou­ver, BC, Cana­da, joined here by my co host, Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia, Brad, how’s it going today?

Brad Giles 00:39

It’s pret­ty good. Thank you. I hope you’re doing well.

Kevin Lawrence 00:41

I am, so word of the day. What’s the word that’s res­onat­ing most with you today?

Brad Giles 00:50

Look, it’s not what you think it’s going to be it’s job score­cards. I’ve writ­ten this book about onboard­ing. It’s going to come out one day soon. No, seri­ous­ly, it’s all com­plete, and it’s hope­ful­ly only a month or two away. But a key part of that is the job score­cards and build­ing the job score­cards cor­rect­ly. And because I’ve done a lot of this work with the teams that I work with, all of the job, score­cards have been refined and changed and are much bet­ter qual­i­ty. So job score­cards is on my mind.

Kevin Lawrence 01:29

Awe­some. Mine is resilience also, from my book, Your Oxy­gen Mask First, and just how impor­tant it is. And as I’m com­ing into vaca­tion time, your resilience is rebuild­ing your ener­gy. And I look at resilience to the win­dows of body, mind and spir­it. And when we’re going real hard, it can affect and wear all of those down. And as we’re plan­ning vaca­tion and think­ing about the cool places we’ll go and expe­ri­ence and what we’ll do. Even the plan­ning and think­ing about the vaca­tion is build­ing my resilience and kind of fuel­ing my spir­it. So resilient job score­cards Are you want job score­cards to add resilient peo­ple to your team, how­ev­er, you want to spin those two togeth­er? We don’t care. But they do go togeth­er. Resilience is crit­i­cal to suc­cess. So speak­ing of suc­cess, the top­ic today, we’re talk­ing about actu­al­ly help­ing peo­ple to become more suc­cess­ful. Yeah, we’re talk­ing about what does it take to devel­op your mid­dle man­agers that next lev­el lead­ers in your orga­ni­za­tion who gen­er­al­ly get neglect­ed, and it’s not because we don’t care about them, it’s that they’re very much in man­ag­ing a lot of the pro­duc­tion of the busi­ness. They’re lead­ing all the peo­ple who are on the front lines and get­ting stuff done, so that we’re suc­cess­ful, deliv­er­ing stuff to our cus­tomers, improv­ing our sys­tems, work­ing real­ly, real­ly hard. And for what­ev­er rea­son, in most com­pa­nies, there becomes a gap of the mid­dle man­agers capa­bil­i­ties to pop up to the next lev­el. And whether you call that a direc­tive, or a VP, or an exec­u­tive, what­ev­er the heck you call it, to grow enough of them to get to the next lev­el. So the dis­tinc­tion we think about is build­ing a team of mid­dle man­agers, which implies inter­nal growth and devel­op­ment and hir­ing exter­nal­ly, ver­sus grow­ing inter­nal­ly, those mid­dle man­agers home grown tal­ent, as peo­ple like to talk about it. And gen­er­al­ly, in the com­pa­nies that we work with, that are grow­ing so quick­ly. It’s hard to get enough home­grown tal­ent won because of the speed of growth and sheer num­bers, but too, because we just don’t put enough ener­gy into devel­op­ing them.

Brad Giles 03:46

So this is such an impor­tant top­ic that teams that I work with any­one who’s lis­ten­ing would be kind of nod­ding their head, because so many times I’ve said in lead­er­ship teams, what you know, what you can’t see, what you don’t know is, as we con­tin­ue to grow, were like stretch­ing a rub­ber band between us and the mid man­agers in the orga­ni­za­tion. And the job that you don’t know that you can’t see is that we have to grow those peo­ple. We have to get them capa­ble. You may recall Kev, the phrase, the genius with 1000 helpers, yep. That’s often how entre­pre­neurs start. And we can actu­al­ly end up with a group of genius­es in the lead­er­ship team with 1000 helpers. So the dif­fer­ence in capa­bil­i­ty unless we work right between the lead­ers, and the mid man­agers can be mas­sive. And it can actu­al­ly be a huge imped­i­ment to growth.

Kevin Lawrence 04:45

It can and nor­mal­ly nat­u­ral­ly, it will con­tin­ue to grow because the CEOs are often out there learn­ing like crazy. There’ll be mem­bers of, you know, YPO or Vistage or TAC, or anoth­er CEO forum group, there’ll be all They’re learn­ing incred­i­bly, and a lot of that spills and trick­les on to the exec­u­tives. The exec­u­tives also get to work with the high lev­el con­sul­tants and experts that the CEO brings in to help them as they move for­ward. So the CEOs, and the exec­u­tives are often sur­round­ed with lots of amaz­ing experts and advi­sors and peo­ple like us that are in there help­ing, but that often does­n’t involve the next lev­el. And they kind of just, they’re just, they’re left to get the work done. So we’re going to dig into that. And, and there was basi­cal­ly because of this, peo­ple need to end up hir­ing many peo­ple into those mid­dle man­ag­er roles to fill gaps, and some­times you need to, but gen­er­al­ly, peo­ple end up need­ing to hire more than would be ide­al in their mind. Sec­ond­ly, there’s many peo­ple in that group that have a lot of poten­tial, but they don’t ever find it, they get stag­nant. They don’t find ways to get to that next lev­el, because they’re not those doors aren’t being opened for them, or the devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties aren’t there from them. And in the end, you know, the real­i­ty is, most busi­ness­es aren’t of the size, where they have the full blown Lead­er­ship Devel­op­ment Pro­gram. At some point, you know, every­one ends up build­ing their own inter­nal uni­ver­si­ties, and builds the com­pe­ten­cy to grow lead­ers to grow those mid­dle man­agers, or even front­line peo­ple to mid­dle man­agers, mid­dle man­agers, to, you know, direc­tors and direc­tors to exec­u­tives. Peo­ple get ready, you got­ta be well over 1000 employ­ees to get there. So what we’re talk­ing about is what do you do now, when you’re busy just get­ting the work done? Those mid­dle man­agers aren’t get­ting devel­oped, you don’t have the sys­tems, you don’t have the com­pe­tence of the exper­tise. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Brad Giles 06:44

The prob­lem with that is that as you con­tin­ue to grow, and as this, this prob­lem becomes more preva­lent, peo­ple then begin to think I need to hire some­one who has the expe­ri­ence, who’s done this before, to step in, to kind of bridge that gap. And that’s, you know, that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the ide­al, you know, our job is to cul­ti­vate our peo­ple to be able to enable the growth that we’re experiencing.

Kevin Lawrence 07:16

And a slight­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, Brad, I think there is an ide­al some­where in there. Like, we need out­side peo­ple, for sure. The key is, if all of your new hires in the mid­dle of man­age­ment, if 90% of them are from the out­side, that’s prob­a­bly not the right amount, right? It should be a rea­son whether it’s 50% inter­nal grown tal­ent, or 60%, or 40%. I don’t know the num­ber. But we want some we always want some out­side peo­ple with Been there done that expe­ri­ence that come and help us. We just don’t want it to be the only answer we have to add to those mid­dle man­agers. That’s that’s the key.

Brad Giles 07:58

There are a few episodes to ref­er­ence for those who are lis­ten­ing that are in a sim­i­lar top­ic, Episode 55 of the growth whis­pers pod­cast, build­ing a peo­ple mag­net machine, Episode 67. Why should peo­ple want to work for your com­pa­ny? Episode 46, sev­en peo­ple ques­tions. So they’re the rel­e­vant episodes to the sub­ject that we’re talk­ing about today.

Kevin Lawrence 08:22

Awe­some. And you can also in Kev­in’s book, your oxy­gen mask first, you can look at the chap­ter called Mak­ing your­self use­less. You can also look at the chap­ter stop being chief prob­lem solver that gets those are pieces that add on to the soul. All right, so the main thing we got, we’ve got, you know, the out­line that was your brain­storm­ing sev­er­al, there’s prob­a­bly like sev­en points to mak­ing this work. And the first thing as almost as it is with every­thing, what’s your goal? Like? What do you want? Now, first of all, do you want 100% or 90% A play­ers in your lead­er­ship roles in your com­pa­ny? I sure hope you do it. Unless you’re a com­peti­tor to one of my clients. And if you’re a com­peti­tor to one of my clients, you should prob­a­bly just stop lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast right now. If you com­pete with one of the great com­pa­nies work­ing because we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need you to know these kinds of things. But for the peo­ple that we work with, Hey, lis­ten in. So do you want 90% A play­ers or 100% A play­ers? Do you what’s the per­cent of inter­nal pro­mo­tions that you want or the inter­nal­ly cul­ti­vat­ed tal­ent? What per­cent­age do you want that to be? You know, that’s that every­one’s is dif­fer­ent. But real­is­ti­cal­ly what does you’d like to see? And so start­ing with that, you know, there are com­pa­nies that only pro­mote from with­in like McDon­ald’s, and I heard this recent few years ago, it may or may not still be true, but at one point, the only way to become a store man­ag­er is to work start in the front and every sin­gle store man­ag­er grew through the sys­tem. That because that is their strat­e­gy. front­line peo­ple move up, move up, move up. So what is your goal?

Brad Giles 10:06

The only point that I’d pick up on with what you said there is, that it’s not just the lead­ers, it’s the lead­er­ship team, the mid man­agers, as you think about the tra­di­tion­al pyra­mid shaped org chart, you want to get a play­ers in all of the key posi­tions as much as pos­si­ble. And so that means that you’ve got to have all of those peo­ple grow­ing. So imag­ine that, that you’re the CEO, look­ing at that pyra­mid of an org chart. And you’ve got a fish­ing rod to every sin­gle indi­vid­ual who is who’s got the title of super­vi­sor or man­ag­er or leader, you want to be grow­ing all of those peo­ple. So you’re just pay­ing a lit­tle bit of atten­tion to make sure that all of those peo­ple are grow­ing all the time.

Kevin Lawrence 10:50

What does the fish­ing rod do?

Brad Giles 10:54

Well, what it means is that you are draw­ing them in you!

Kevin Lawrence 10:59

Oh, you’re like reel­ing them in? Yes, I got it. Okay. Got it total­ly makes sense.

Brad Giles 11:03

You bring them high­er up as the company.

Kevin Lawrence 11:05

So what’s your goal? What do you want out of it? And then you also have, you know, what do you want in terms of pro­grams? Or man­age­ment sys­tems? Do you want to have like, what do you want to achieve here? Sec­ond, who is account­able, and this is a big debate. You know, tru­ly, the devel­op­ment of the mid­dle of your direct reports is you as a man­ag­er or leader, if that’s part of your job. And it’s hrs job to help you or assist you in this and pro­vide the resources tools. And some­times the account­abil­i­ty, it’s not hrs job to grow the peo­ple, it’s HR job to put the resources there and make sure that man­agers step out of their busy work to do a bunch of this. So it’s a lit­tle bit of both when, when it gets to be when you get into pro­grams, like lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­grams, like our team does a lot of them for dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, because they’re not big enough to build their own just yet. But when it gets to hav­ing lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­grams, that’s often dri­ven by HR but has quite a bit of exec­u­tive involve­ment. Because it’s, it’s meant for the ben­e­fit of the busi­ness and the exec­u­tive wants to be, you know, have their fin­ger­prints on it to make sure we’re devel­op­ing peo­ple in a way that they believe in.

Brad Giles 12:31

I think you’ve out­lined that real­ly well, it makes me think about our good friend, Liz Wise­man, and her book mul­ti­pli­ers. The, you know, the great lead­ers that she calls mul­ti­pli­ers, they mul­ti­ply the capa­bil­i­ty of the peo­ple who report to them, yes. And in the absence of that, then if we’re only if HR is account­able for it, then they’ll just get the process­es and sys­tems but there’s absolute­ly a role for the leader to grow the will who report to them?

Kevin Lawrence 13:03

Yep, it’s an account, some com­pa­nies mea­sure it, what per­cent­age of peo­ple have you pro­mot­ed again, being able to pro­mote pro­mot­ing of lead­ers indi­ca­tion that you’re good at devel­op­ing lead­ers. And then so the next three years, you got­ta have a bud­get and a plan? Like, if you don’t have a bud­get and a plan for this? It’s not gonna hap­pen, right? And there’s lots of dif­fer­ent ways to do it. But how are you going to allo­cate and this is, in many ways to devel­op lead­ers, it’s like a farmer, plant­i­ng grapes today, that will be ready for wine pro­duc­tion in a few years. It takes time. It’s not instant, it’s not plant­ed today, get it tomor­row. So you have to be invest­ing in the medi­um term to get ben­e­fits over this, again, just like a farmer have tal­ent, and got­ta have a bud­get. And you got­ta have a plan of, of what you’re going to do.

Brad Giles 14:01

I remem­ber I read a study of some of the most suc­cess­ful CEOs. And one of the things that they had in com­mon is in their mid to late 20s. Some­one, one of their lead­ers bet on them big. So for exam­ple, they were sent to run a remote office, or they were giv­en a high lev­el of respon­si­bil­i­ty. That kind of might seem might have seemed a bit out of pro­por­tion at the time, but some­one paid on them big and then that got them to grow a lot faster than they oth­er­wise should have.

Kevin Lawrence 14:36

Yes. They did what I call throw­ing him in the pool, step­ping on their head to teach them how to swim. That’s not a very nice image.

Brad Giles 14:47

It’s a Cana­di­an thing.

Kevin Lawrence 14:48

It’s a Cana­di­an thing. We don’t do it. No, it’s hor­ri­ble. But the point of it is, is that you put them in a crazy sit­u­a­tion that they have no right being in And then you let them fig­ure it out. Yeah. Because you believe in them, they have your belief and they have your sup­port, but they got­ta fight like hell. And it helps them to be able to thrive, or they don’t make it. But gen­er­al­ly peo­ple get those oppor­tu­ni­ties, some­one real­ly push­es them very, very hard.

Brad Giles 15:18

So you got­ta have a plan, a bud­get. So, the next one is, what’s the program?

Kevin Lawrence 15:23

Yeah. And so I will say, like, our team does a lot of lead­er­ship devel­op­ment pro­grams for com­pa­nies a lot, because they don’t have the time. And we’re talk­ing, there’s the edu­ca­tion, with giv­ing them projects and chal­lenges, com­ing up with ideas to improve things in the busi­ness through to 360s. And some­times even coach­ing if they need it. It takes an incred­i­ble amount of ener­gy to build these pro­grams, gen­er­al­ly, about 10 hours of prep for every sin­gle hour of deliv­ery, which is why most com­pa­nies don’t do it. And it’s hard to do it well, like it’s a seri­ous, seri­ous skill. So you got­ta decide, are we going to make that? Or are we going to? Do we have enough economies of scale that we can make it our­selves and do it? Or the skills? Or? Or do we buy it? And then if you do, do you need dif­fer­ent pro­grams for dif­fer­ent lev­els, like one com­pa­ny we work with, we’ve got three dif­fer­ent pro­grams that we run for dif­fer­ent lev­els of the orga­ni­za­tion based on dif­fer­ent needs, and each of those needs some­one to facil­i­tate it and the skills to do it. The main thing is all your gen­er­al­ly to grow these lead­ers is that you’re giv­ing them some new thoughts. And then you’re putting into my Labor­de Laborie, Atari type set­ting to get them to work with these new thoughts and try new skills and work on new skills. Then they go away, they come back and report how they did. I guess it’s not rock­et sci­ence, it just takes time and ener­gy and some­one to lead it and pri­or­i­tize oth­er thing that we go ahead.

Brad Giles 16:56

I remem­ber I was, I went to Las Vegas to the Zap­pos head­quar­ters, and I went on that tour, they’ve got a library, that each per­son is able to get a whole col­lec­tion of the select­ed books. And peo­ple can go in there, and they can choose the books that are appro­pri­ate that they decide with­in man­ag­er that they’re going to work for.

Kevin Lawrence 17:22

Yeah, so the idea of it is, is com­ing up with a pro­gram that actu­al­ly grows lead­ers, there’s tons of research and exam­ples out there of things that work. Gen­er­al­ly, they need to learn more, and then they need oppor­tu­ni­ties to ingrain it inside them. The root of adult learn­ing is dis­cus­sion and debate in small groups, that’s what gets it. You know, it’s not the con­tent, it’s a dis­cus­sion, the debate and then look­ing for how they can then go apply it in their world. So num­ber five, is the forum look, where do you do it? You know, some peo­ple will have month­ly train­ings for pro­grams or BI month­ly. Some peo­ple do it through projects, some­times it’s coach­ing, some­times it’s new chal­lenges. But what is the form and from what we’ve seen, the ide­al forum is a reg­u­lar, reg­u­lar, what­ev­er reg­u­lar is for you, envi­ron­ment where there’s learn­ing, dis­cus­sion, and then account­abil­i­ty to apply it. And then next time you report back, you know, one of our clients Oshana in India, they did this with their mid­dle man­agers for years, they would bring them in every month now, not when there was a quar­ter­ly. So they would end up I think, eight or nine times a year, the whole mid­dle­man and they were com­ing in from around the coun­try. And they spent a day doing this. So there was for­mal edu­ca­tion, where it was a book they would read or an arti­cle, they would read, dis­cuss debate, talk about how to decide they will be mak­ing pre­sen­ta­tions to get deci­sions made in their orga­ni­za­tion for things that they were doing. There’ll be break­out groups to work on prob­lems, like it was a full day event. And the idea of it is the exec­u­tives were involved and work­ing with them. Part of it was DNA trans­fer up, part of it was sort of down part of was DNA trans­fer up. But they were in there work­ing with the exec­u­tives for a day a quar­ter with very con­scious engi­neered learn­ing expe­ri­ences as part of it. That’s a big way of doing it. Oth­er peo­ple would do a month­ly train­ing and devel­op­ment pro­gram. Some oth­er peo­ple send peo­ple away to oth­er spe­cif­ic indus­try spe­cif­ic devel­op­ment programs.

Brad Giles 19:29

If you’re gonna make your mid lev­el man­agers, if you’re gonna make your mid man­age­ment team more effec­tive and able to take on more projects, and help to scale and com­pound the growth of the busi­ness. Well, how dif­fer­ent will they be in one year from now? com­pared to today? That’s the plan that we spoke about before. And then what is the things that you’ve got to do every week or month or quar­ter to achieve that growth of that those mid man­agers in a year? That’s a dif­fer­ent way to think about it, right.

Kevin Lawrence 20:01

And the key is you just can’t have them attend meet­ings and lis­ten and learn, they’ve got to be par­tic­i­pat­ing and doing and exper­i­ment­ing, that’s, you know, lis­ten­ing to updates from oth­er depart­ments isn’t going to get them there. You know, they’ve got to be involved. Num­ber six, who are the fac­ul­ty that deliv­er the teach­ers and the coach­es, and, you know, the best is a blend between the exec­u­tives and experts. Because the exec­u­tives know a lot of stuff. And they, they’re the best at their roles. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, they should be doing a lot of the teach­ing and train­ing in this, but some­one else nor­mal­ly used to man­age it. So they can just be a guest speak­er and they can be quick­ly involved not tak­ing the 10 hours for every hour of deliv­ery. And the oth­er piece for a lot of our com­pa­nies we work with, and we’re big on bring­ing Lear learn­ing to the com­pa­ny, they use this devel­op­ment as part of this devel­op­ment is cas­cad­ing the major learn­ings that the CEO and exec­u­tive had with the rest of the busi­ness so so we will be read­ing books by Collins and mul­ti­pli­ers by Liz, you talked about maybe it’s blue ocean strat­e­gy. Maybe it’s influ­enced by Celes­tine, maybe it’s, you know, made to thrive your book, Brad or chap­ters from my book, your oxy­gen mask first or skill, what does­n’t, you know, One Minute Man­ag­er is one of the ulti­mate man­age­ment books, that’s out­stand­ing point, if it is, if the exec­u­tive are learn­ing and oper­at­ing the busi­ness based on prin­ci­ples, cas­cad­ing those things down, so future, peo­ple on the lead­er­ship or exec­u­tive team are famil­iar with them. The key is that there needs to be peo­ple that do this, and exec­u­tives should be involved in a way that is respect­ful of the time. So should the CEO, you know, when I was involved in scal­ing up, one of the CEOs I inter­viewed, he taught 10 books a year to the whole com­pa­ny, whole com­pa­ny that was an every year to be like a con­vey­or belt to books with drop off, and he’d bring on to ones repeat eight, for the pre­vi­ous year, and then to fresh ones. But he took it upon his self. To do that teach­ing anoth­er com­pa­ny I inter­viewed Ire­land, there, exec­u­tive team spent time learn­ing every sin­gle week in the board­room, they would spend a cou­ple hours a week learn­ing. And even in our firm, we have at least a 20 minute ses­sion in our week­ly meet­ing that’s ded­i­cat­ed to learn­ing every sin­gle week. So those are extreme exam­ples. But there is a mod­er­ate, there’s a mod­er­ate exam­ple that would suit your organization.

Brad Giles 22:30

If you speak to younger exec­u­tives, or your younger lead­ers, let’s say in their 20s or ear­ly 30s, and they’re think­ing about mov­ing jobs, one of the first things that they talk about is what am I going to learn? Like, it is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty, because I’m going to learn so much. And they’re high­ly tuned into that. So in that envi­ron­ment you just described, if that’s tak­en away, because they leave, they’re not going to be learn­ing as much there­fore, it’s kind of part of that. That sec­ond order engage­ment, I guess.

Kevin Lawrence 23:01

Yeah. And it’s one of the things of reten­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn and grow. And if you can pro­vide it, they don’t need to go some­where else to get it. Yeah. Final­ly, who attends these things? I mean, ide­al­ly, every­one, right? Ide­al­ly, every­one, but when you’re doing dif­fer­ent lead­er­ship devel­op­ment, there will be some peo­ple that are called high poten­tials. Now, don’t go label them in the com­pa­ny. That’s dan­ger­ous, because then they get treat­ed like a spe­cial club, and it often will blow up and piss off every­body else. That’s not in it. But if you’re doing your tal­ent reviews reg­u­lar­ly with a team, you’re going to know the peo­ple that have a lot of poten­tial, you def­i­nite­ly want them in it. Yeah, but maybe there’s the peo­ple that are just keen, or maybe peo­ple who want to be a part of it, invest in them as well, if they’re gonna, as some­one said, Well, what if I invest all this mon­ey in grow­ing my peo­ple and they leave? And the oth­er per­son said, Well, what if they stay? Yeah. Yeah, it’s worse if they stay. I’d rather devel­op them and have them on to do great things and move on to great things, then keep them mediocre in the com­pa­ny the whole time.

Brad Giles 24:07

It’s, it’s just the atti­tude to have like, we need to grow our peo­ple. It’s part of it, because it’s going to be hard to suc­ceed if we don’t grow our people.

Kevin Lawrence 24:19

So let’s review. So num­ber one, what’s your goal? What do you want to achieve with the devel­op­ment of your peo­ple? What per­cent­age of your peo­ple do you want to be a play­ers? And what per­cent­age do you want to be inter­nal­ly grown tal­ent? Who owns it? Well, we know what’s between HR and a man­ag­er. But the HR is ide­al­ly putting in the sys­tems and struc­tures to help the man­agers to exe­cute it. Need a plan and a bud­get. And you got to fig­ure out the pro­gram where we going to make it? Are we going to buy it we’re going to rent it and who we doing it for what does it look like? And then where do we do it? What’s the Forum is a part of a reg­u­lar rhythm? Is that a spe­cial pro­gram? How do we bring it to life? Brad, you want to cov­er the final cou­ple there? Sure.

Brad Giles 25:00

So who were the fac­ul­ty, ide­al­ly a mix of exec­u­tives, peer coach­es or bud­dies? And then exter­nal thought lead­ers, Jim Collins, Liz Wise­man, a cou­ple of that we’ve spo­ken about Roger Ailes is also a great choice. Yeah, well, no, seri­ous­ly, you can use this pod­cast, we’ve got so many top Fish­er’s pod­cast that you can use and get peo­ple to lis­ten to. And then final­ly, who attends? Who were the, I’ll say, high poten­tials. Or who were the peo­ple that we want to grow? Who could grow with­in the busi­ness? Who could con­tin­ue to grow in the busi­ness as we scale and add great value?

Kevin Lawrence 25:39

Who would pro­vide a good return on invest­ment for this growth? Yeah. So that’s been our dis­cus­sion around devel­op­ing inter­nal tal­ent and grow­ing that next lev­el of leader we call mid man­agers. Thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the Growth Whis­per­ers Pod­cast. I’m Kevin Lawrence here with Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia. Don’t for­get to hit that sub­scribe but­ton. If you haven’t yet. For the YouTube ver­sions, search the growth whis­pers at YouTube, you’ll find us and Brad and I both have newslet­ters. We put a lot of time and ener­gy into share with our peo­ple because we believe in edu­ca­tion is the road to a lot of great­ness. Brad is evo­lu­tion. part​ners​.com​.au and Kevin, you can find that Lawrence and co​.com. Have a great week. Keep think­ing about invest­ing in your­self and those crit­i­cal peo­ple around you and through­out your whole organization.