Episode 98, the true cost of
leadership development programs. Welcome to the story in your head. I'm Ron Macklin. Today, we're going to explore the return
on investment your organization could get from leadership training and the huge
cost your business could see without it. Welcome to the story in your head. I'm Ron Macklin. And today we're going to talk about
the cost of leadership training. Whenever I get ready to start to have
a conversation, I always remember working legal contracts and, and kind of
lawyers helped me figure this one out. But it's like, always kind
of get to the terms defined, like how you want to use them. Right? So the first one is costs,
like what is the cost? The cost is anything you
give up to get something. So if I go to the grocery store
to get a gallon of milk, I have to give up dollars and get a milk. So I get, what I gave up was the
cost of the money to buy the milk and I had to drive my car over there. So I wore out my car. And I paid for gas and insurance,
everything else on my car. So the cost of getting milk also includes
some little bit of insurance, some little bit of gas, some wear and tear on my car. And I had to give up some time. Like I just go, Oh, I need to go get milk. So for me to get milk now, it's probably
somewhere around 20 minutes of total time. So 1 3rd of an hour is
what I have to give up. So I have to give up money, I have
to give up time, I have to give up part of my car wear and tear, my
insurance, my gasoline, all that, right. To be able to get a gallon of milk. So the costs are what you give up. Training, training is like when you,
I actually are setting aside a space for somebody to learn something. It's not really teaching, teaching. I'm not sure how I've never figured
out what to do with teaching, but teaching is, let's see, learning is
when, when I, and when the goal of developing new stories in my head,
new knowledge, new tactics, right. But it also, it's about turning
it into where you actually go out in the world and do something. Like you run experiments, you
do something, you learn it with your hands, moving around your
stories, you're speaking, you're listening, you're learning. New stories in your head, new capacities
in your body, and leadership, which is the story about leading, which means someone
must follow you, but it's only a leader. You're only a leader, or you're only
leading if somebody follows you. So what we have here is what you have to
give up, the cost, of leadership training. So leadership is to get
somebody to follow you. Training means there's a
space for you to learn. So it's what you give up to be able
to get other people to follow you and build that skill of getting
other people to follow you. And it can almost sound like there's a
space like it's manipulation, leading can be manipulative, like it has been in life,
like people have been unethical, but most people are looking for a good leader. Like most of the people I've worked
with, if you ask them a simple question, you know, like, well, if you could
find somebody to follow and your life would work out, would you follow them? And the answer is always yes. Like, like we would glad to, right? Like there's no answers. And even like you look back in history
and you go, well, these things work before, but they won't, doesn't
mean they'll work in the future. Life is changing. Things are changing. People are changing new technologies,
new situations, new politics, new demographics, all that stuff is changing. So what has happened in the past
won't always work in the future. So you want to follow a leader that
can help you figure out how to do that. And a leader can tell a
story that you can follow. and live a better life. That's kind of what it's all about. Like, cost of leadership training. So, can leaders be trained? Like, can they learn? Can you develop to become a leader? So, when, when babies are born, and
I've, I've had three of them that I was there in the moment, and when they came
out, uh, none of them went like, oh, The doctor looked at me and went, oh, Ron,
it's a little leader, right, or it's a little doctor, or it's a little, no,
all of that stuff has to be learned. Now, some people can be better at
it than others, the leadership part of it, leading other people, but we
can all learn to be a better leader. Then we are today, right? So it's a skill like throwing a
baseball or learning to ride a bicycle. These are skills we learn, right? And we can learn them. We're capable of doing it. And why do we want it? Why do we need that? Right? Well, a really powerful team is the one
who has a leader, but it's also a powerful team is one that has leaders like multiple
leaders and There's always like one person who says, this is the visionary,
like, this is the vision we have. This is, uh, our vision of, for the,
for the group, but to be different times when different people will actually
be able to be the leader because they have the best skills in that moment. And it's a real dance to know
when to follow somebody and when to be a leader of somebody. So here we go. We're looking at it and say, who
is a good person to go through any kind of leadership training? Pretty much everybody, because
we all have gifts and we never know when those gifts are going
to show up as powerful or useful. And so we're, we're really looking at if
we don't have an understanding of what it means to lead, we may have the best
answer, but not know how to step up and say, I think this is where we want to
go, or this is the space to get there. So we have this space where you
never know who's going to have the right leadership gift, right? If everybody has the skill to be a leader. And a follower, and that's the
beauty about leadership training. When you actually learn how to lead,
you're actually also learning how to follow, you know, when to step in, you
know, when somebody has a better story, you know, when somebody has a space that
you go, that's who I want to follow. And that will get us to the vision. Even if you're the CEO, the visionary,
the owner of the company, when you find somebody who has a better story than
you, you follow, it's just a fundamental. We follow, right? And unless we have a story that we have
to do it our way, but then it really is less of a vision of how are we going
to get to some place, and it's a vision of how we're going to make it ours. Like, like, I choose all this stuff. That's not a team I want to be on. And I think most people don't
want to be on that team either. Just side note, the person who says,
you gotta do it my way, that's the most scared person in the room. And, they don't want anybody
to know that they're scared. It's just a fact. It's just the way it works. When you're scared, you have to
make it where you're right so that you don't hide your fears. So we're not into that. What we are into is who can be a leader. Almost everybody can be a leader. Why do you need a leader? Like, why don't we just all get together
and kind of just go without a leader? Everybody is looking for a leader. Everything looks really scary, right? And you can get kind of chaos. As in, everybody will try to do something
at the same time if there's not a leader. And then pretty soon you'll have
stress amongst the group that says, you know, I'm trying to get this done,
but you're not listening to me, you're not following it, blah, blah, blah. And it's always really powerful
to know, one, who is the leader? Two, is it my turn to be the leader? Three, why would I be a
leader at this moment? Nobody sets out and says, well, I want
to be a leader so I can be a leader. Now, being a leader is hard, stressful. You're carrying the weight
of the organization on you. So, And, uh, the group, like I say,
organization is like a big thing. No, it's like four, four
people, three people, right? You're carrying the weight of the outcome. It's a, it can be a stressful burden to be
the leader, but it also takes courage to stand up when there's that burden coming
at you instead of saying, no, I got this. And it's also something else to be
able to notice when somebody is being a leader because they get the better
capacity and everybody behind them go, yes, we're going to go here. Sometimes it's only
following them for minutes. Ours, right? That's it. And then you fall back into whoever,
somebody else's a leader or somebody else's going into that space. It's a, it's a wonderful dance to
be in, to be able to lead and follow and to dance in that base, keeping
the vision of what you want to do. Are you looking to strengthen your
relationships, whether personally or professionally, you want to learn how
to build authentic connections faster. Or perhaps you're looking to beat employee
burnout through the power of connection. My name is Ron Macklin,
founder of Macklin Connection. And in our workshops, we teach
you the fundamental of how to do exactly that and more. To learn more of the power
of your relationships, visit us at MacklinConnection. com. Why is it important? Leading, which most people do some
version of it from the beginning. I go near our little kids in school
and there we go, so follow me, right? And there's your leader, but leading
to take care of everybody, dignity, to encourage people to contribute,
to be able to pass on the leadership to somebody else, and then also
take it back if you need to. There's a lot of stories in here and
leadership training really brings it to a place where everybody can see
what does it mean to be a leader? What does it mean to be a follower
and how to work together in a way that makes the outcomes the best? And that's why it's important,
because it's really, it's useful, and leading or having a coach, which can
be your leader momentarily, you're still in charge of your own life, it
produce better outcomes, it produce a better situation, you learn more. Not just in leading, but learning more
about all the other aspects of business. So one of the questions that
I commonly get is like, well, how much should it cost? We talked about the cost
of what you give up, right? So we'll first go into one of the things
you give up is money, like currency. And that currency that you
give up for me, my standard is. If I was an individual performer, I would
be looking at how much do I get for it? If I was a manager of a group,
how much did the group get for it? If I was an owner of a business, how
much does the business get for it? Like what is the return on my investment? Well, my fundamental rule is if
every dollar I spend on leadership training, I want to make 5 in profit. So if I had a business that was
producing whatever it was producing and I went and spent a dollar, I wanted
to get 5 in profit in the back end. It's not an immediate return like it, like
you don't spend a dollar and then tomorrow you get there because you're developing
individuals, you're developing people and then they learn the skills to make better
decisions, to get other people to follow them, to follow others in a very powerful
way and the creativity starts to go up and that's what it takes sometimes six months
to two years before you really begin to see the return, but give you an idea. My experience is. Yeah. One of the businesses I was
operating, we would spend about 30, 000 a year on leadership training. And in return for that, we, we made an
extra 20 million in profit each year. That seems a little bit more than like
one to five, like dramatic, but it was also a pretty good size organization,
but all that is very possible. It's kind of a minimum return I would
look for when I'm going to lay this out. Like, how is it going
to get to that place? But also, is it worth investing
in the people to get that kind of return on investment? One of the things that I look at is like,
if I'm an individual, how much should I spend on my own leadership training? Like, is this for me? For my own investment alone,
and normally I look between four to five percent of your income. So if you make 100, 000 a year, four to
5, 000 a year on leadership training. Now, if you're an individual performer,
there's all kinds of training and leadership training, but you're always
going to be working with other people. How to be a good follower, how
to step up and be a leader when it's your turn to be a leader. It's very important to know
because the team needs you to be able to step up and do that. Now, if you are, like your role is
a leader, which means you're going to be leading most of the time and
every now and then you're going to follow, you're going to step behind
other people that's in your group. You have to notice when
that's going to happen. You're going to probably spend more
on that because you need, you need some training and you also need a
network of groups of people around you to help you continue to learn. So it's not just like, You're spending,
you know, 7 percent of your income. Let's say you're making 150, 000 a year. You spend 7 percent of your income
on actually getting training. You're also spending several
hours a week in the learning. Learning and being a leader. It could be reading a book. It could be being in a study group. That could be running experiments
with other groups, coaching and guiding somebody else. All of those things are
part of your learning. And it's the, what you give up, which
is your time to do other things. And you're building that skill. And you're also getting some money
to get some help from others. Like a coach or better yet. I mean, maybe your course. Now, if you're an executive or an
owner, my standard is around 8 percent and it requires more time as well. So it's like 8 percent of your income. So if you're making a quarter
million dollars a year, that's what also 20 grand and also. An hour a day talking to people being
inside of a, let's see, a book group or some other that you're learning
some new skill, you're guiding and coaching other people like that, that
you learn when you guide somebody, you learn more than they do, right? That's just facts of what, how it works. And so being in that space, you
want to spend at least an hour a day building your own knowledge. Building your capacity to be able
to help other people and also know when you can get behind them. So one of the other things like that's
the cost and the time and the energy that you spend to get your leadership training. The next part is what's the
cost of no leadership training. In your organization
or for yourself, right? So one of the biggest costs is
you lose a valuable employee. Like if you're not developing your team
to become leaders and followers, right? They will go find the job someplace
that will like leading is important and following is important, and if they don't
see that you're investing in them, they don't see that your believe in them. You'll lose them and your poor employees
are not the ones like, let's say, like there are no poor employees,
but sometimes there's employees that perform less, the less performers will
not go out and seek other jobs that just hang out, but your good employees,
the ones who have ambition, the ones that are after something or trying to
produce something, they will go find another job and you'll lose them. And you keep the lesser employees,
you also get a bit of a stagnation, even though maybe everybody stays
or you lose one or two good ones, but everybody else stays, right? There's no creativity. There's no place for people to jump in. You don't get new ideas coming at you. Creativity stagnates. Revenue stagnates. Costs, well, maybe go up because now
you've got to find new employees. You've got to find new spaces and you
can do something to trigger the new creativity where if you have leaders. In the group, everybody has a training,
they will begin to trigger each other to be more creative and that will come
up with new answers, new ideas, new offers that will enable you to have
a better situation in your business. Or as an individual performer, you'll be
able to take on more responsibility and the company produces more revenue and
more profit, they can share that with you. And the bottom line is when you don't
invest in leadership training, your profits are going to suffer, right? The creativity, the how long it takes
to get something solved, the customers, you'll lose the best customers. That's all part of the cost of not
investing in leadership training. And I mean, investing in leadership
training for individual performers and investing in leadership
training for everybody that has a supervisor to manager, to director,
to owner, a president role. So the, the key here is always be
investing in your people and leadership training is one of those things that
it's easy to overlook, like let's get tactical training, like how to
write code or how to do engineering or how to do project management
and how to do this kind of stuff. Those are tactical type things, right? But leadership training is strategic. It aligns you with where your future
vision is and help you get to that space. That's why leadership
training is very important. If you have any input on leadership
training, what has worked well for you. What has not worked well for you,
please don't hesitate to reach out. The best way to reach, get ahold
of us is Ron at MacklinConnection. com. Love to hear your stories and
love to hear your experiences. In two weeks, we're going to work on
with Deb, we'll be back from vacation. And we're going to talk about how to
build a strong customer service culture. It's easy to think that customers
are all those people that are outside you, but you really get into it. Everybody's a customer. Everybody is a customer. How to have a culture that says. Taking care of your
customers is important. That's our next topic. Thanks everyone. Hope you have a good day. Thanks for listening to the podcast today. At Adklin Connection, we believe
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