Practical steps to improve your leadership skills

Practical steps to improve your leadership skills

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You are listening to episode number 44 of the Effective Statistician podcast, Ways to Improve Your Leadership Skills, the last part of the interview with Gary Sullivan.

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Welcome to the Effective Statistician with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Pisgill, the weekly podcast for statisticians in the health sector designed to improve your leadership skills, widen your business acumen and enhance your efficiency.

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We are coming up with a great free webinar on leadership. It’s about the four biggest mistakes you can make as a statistician in order to fade on leadership and what you can do to get about these problems. Sign up at thee slash webinar where you get everything you need to access the webinar. In this episode, we talk about resources

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that help you to improve your leadership skills. And we will specifically talk about the course that is coming up in terms of helping you accelerate your leadership development and what this is all about.

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This podcast is created in association with PSI, a global member organization dedicated to leading and promoting best practice and industry initiatives. Join PSI today to further develop your statistical capabilities with access to special interest groups, the video-on-demand content library, free registration to all PSI webinars and much much more. Visit the PSI website at psiweb.org to learn more about PSI activities and become a PSI member today.

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Hello again to another episode of the Effective Statistician. And this is the last episode in the series of leaderships episodes that we have with Gary Sullivan. Hi, Gary. How are you doing today? Hi, Alexander. I’m doing really well. Thanks for having me. OK. And today, actually, we talk about ways to improve your leadership skills. And let’s go first in a couple of different resources that are out there.

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available for different costs and that basically more or less everybody can use to improve their leadership skills. One of the big resources for me personally in terms of improving my leadership skills are actually books. I read books quite frequently.

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Nowadays, I’m listening to most of them as audio books. But this is always a great deal because you get for little money, you get lots of insight. And that helps me a lot to progress in my career in that regard. What about you? Yeah, I would agree. And I don’t read typically, I don’t read specifically books just generally about leadership.

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different aspects or different competencies of leadership. And I find that’s a way to really dig into a topic and a specific topic and learn more rather than just about general leadership.

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Do you have any kind of specific books in mind that you really like very much about leadership skills? Yeah, there’s a few that I think are pretty easy to read and helpful to, I think, just about anyone. One of them is called The Power of Communication by Fred Garcia. It’s a book about communication, but it’s also a book about

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how to influence with communication, the importance of communication. I’ve seen Fred talk and he’s actually, I’ve attended some sort of courses from him as well. And his material and his concepts and his knowledge about leadership and the way he structures it are really helpful. Another book, and actually there’s a series of books written by Patrick Lencioni.

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and he writes his books in a parable form. So he’ll hone in on a specific concept or a general topic, but he’ll sort of tell a story and he’ll introduce the concepts around the story. And his books are really short and easy to read. One of my favorite ones is the five dysfunctions of a team. And it really talks about teamwork and the different aspects of teamwork.

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It’s a really short story. You can read it in a couple days just sitting down. Those are two of my favorites. One of my favorite books is also a parable. It’s called Our Iceberg is Melting by John Cotter. It’s really a nice book about change management. You can read it on a very, very short flight, maybe just an hour flight. It tells a very, very nice story about…

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penguins that recognize that their iceberg is melting and what they now need to change about that. Another nice book that is actually more about self-management is Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is really nice for building habits on a regular basis or for breaking bad habits as well.

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And in terms of specifically about leadership, a book that I recently read is by Brene Brown about Dare to Lead. And that is also very, very nice. It speaks about vulnerability and lots of these aspects around it. So yeah, I’d mention one more.

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I’ve read quite a few biographies of accomplished leaders. And I think that’s another great way to just understand leadership styles and see different leadership type of actions and characteristics in action. They’ll give examples. So one of my favorite books is, it’s a book written by Robert Gates, who was the former Secretary of Defense here in the United States.

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under presidents Bush and Obama. And he wrote a book called duty. And it talks about his time as secretary of defense, but really gives you some great insights into how he leads. And I mean, I really like his leadership style. So that’s another reason I enjoyed the book. Yeah, yeah. I also read some books by about football managers like Pep Guardiola.

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And these are also very, very interesting from a leadership perspective because it’s really for them very, very important to get their communication across and build a strong team, you know, have this team spirit and get everybody to agree to a common tactic, these kind of things. Really, really interesting. Yeah. So, books are one.

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very, very good thing. Another thing that helped me a lot was mentoring. To actually have mentors mostly within the company, not necessarily from statistics, but also from other areas that helped me with different leadership aspects.

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more formal and maybe less formal mentors. I found that there were people that I would meet with regularly specifically for purposes of mentoring, but then there were also people that I would just have lunch with or meet with less frequently and just leaders that I would, you know, tap their brains and ask questions and again, you can just learn a lot from people that have been in leadership roles and positions.

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Yeah, I think very often this is on a rather informal basis at the beginning. As you said, you meet for lunch or you have a coffee after your project meeting or things like that. And through these kind of circumstances, you can learn a lot about leadership. Also you can directly observe how they lead. And then afterwards, you know…

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ask questions about that. So that’s really, really helpful. But you also have been a mentor for quite some time, haven’t you? Yes, and I’m still mentoring people even after as I’m semi retired. And I find that I’m getting actually better and better at it. Just because of all the knowledge I guess I’ve acquired over the years. But actually in the mentoring role, I learned

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a lot as well from the people I mentor. So I try to, as I’m going through from week to week, if I think about things or have experiences, I’ll jot them down and remind myself to sort of share them with people that I’m mentoring or meeting with. And I think really good mentors do that. They’ll come to you and they’ll always want to share something they’ve experienced. But as a mentee,

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Sometimes you really have to sort of tap into them. And I would encourage people to get mentors and to also be very specific about what type of things you’d like to learn from them. And don’t be afraid to really make them sort of dive in and share their experiences. Yep.

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Actually, my supervisors played a very important role in identifying these mentors for me because they had sometimes better relationships to people and asked them to be my mentors. That was sometimes also very, very helpful. As well as sometimes it’s really nice to bounce off ideas.

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with supervisors in your regular one-to-ones with them and speak about difficult situations, how you can approach things and, yeah. So it’s really, really helpful to work with supervisors in terms of that. And I think the role of a supervisor is really important in your leadership development, even if they’re not specifically mentoring you or even when they’re not giving you guidance or you’re learning from them.

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They need to support what you’re doing and as you said, sort of bounce ideas off them in terms of how you develop as a leader, identify mentors, provide you with potentially experiences or point you in directions or just provide you feedback in terms of ways that you can improve as a leader. But I think the support of the supervisor and engaging them in whatever you’re doing to improve your leadership skills is very important.

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Another area where I learned a lot is just from peer-to-peer interactions. So discussions with other people that had exactly the same challenges, maybe worked with similar people or maybe even the same people and helped me understand what worked for them in terms of getting buy-in from other people, convincing other people.

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setting up projects in such a way that worked successfully. So this kind of informal peer groups, so to say, really helped a lot as well. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. Lots of learning amongst people. When I was on our leadership team, connected really well with a couple of folks and we would sort of even share.

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different ideas or perspectives on things that were issues that we were discussing within the team, and then we can sort of take them into the team, one or both of us, in terms of sharing an idea or perspectives or things like that. I think when you’re in a team situation, sort of connecting with people, individuals in the team is important in terms of sort of building alignments. So just sort of…

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like you said, bouncing ideas off of people and getting a perspective on things before you sort of broach it with the whole team. Okay, so now we discussed books, mentoring, supervisor, and peer-to-peer groups. Finally, a nice resource that for me is helpful is podcasts. So, unfortunately, I never found really a nice podcast for kind of the…

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the leaderships that we are talking about, kind of the leadership where you don’t have a title and you’re not the supervisor in terms of leadership. There’s lots of very, very good podcasts about there in terms of, so to say, manager type of leaders. One podcast that I listen to quite frequently is one by Michael Hyatt.

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And there’s another one by what’s called Manager Tools. Very, very good podcast as well as some German ones. And do you ever listen to such podcasts? I don’t, I don’t listen to the leadership specific type podcast. Again, it kind of gets back to what I said about books. One of the podcasts on our national pub, there’s two podcasts on our national public radio.

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programs here in the States. One is called the TED Radio Hour. And it just, it picks topics, and then it’ll reference a couple different TED Talks on that topic. And not all the time, but I would say a lot of the time, there are topics that are relevant to leadership. And again, it’s a great way to learn about just specific little

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ideas or characteristics or different leadership competencies or concepts or approaches to different things. There’s been some on like the power of change or influence or teamwork and stuff like that. And another one that I’ve listened to is called, and again, it’s on national public radio is called How I Built This. And it talks to entrepreneurs.

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So people that are very accomplished in sort of building their own business and coming up with ideas so you can learn a lot about not just leading people but innovation, perseverance, how to deal with setbacks, those types of things. So those are those are two good ones that I’ve listened to over the years. Yeah. Unfortunately, all of these things are very, very generic. And lots of them, you know, are

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spread across lots of lots of different things. If you want to get kind of leadership training in a very, very, you know, down to the most specific things that you need as a statistician, there’s actually very little out there. Of course, there is the professions like the

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events in terms of leadership trainings, but there’s nothing outside that is really kind of where you don’t need to travel all the time, some things where you have support over a longer period of time because I think leadership is really something that you learn by in kind of cycles. You know, you learn it in terms of you get information.

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you try it out, you fail, you need to speak about why did you fail, then you know, get feedback on that, try again, and so to say, improve over time more and more. Yeah, as I teach leadership courses, most of them are just one or two days. And I’ll make that comment, usually upfront is that I’m not going to teach you how to be a leader in a day.

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and that they do need to invest in their leadership. And interestingly, at the end of the course, we usually talk about things like we just talked about, like here are some books that you can read, using, leveraging others, forming small groups, those types of things. So I agree that it would talk about the idea of investing in your leadership. And so it really is a long-term commitment. I think those courses are good because a lot of people just don’t even know where to get started.

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And so the one or two day courses can help you get grounded in what leadership is all about and at least give you some sense of direction as to how to get started. But I would agree with you. Yeah. In terms of these courses, so to overcome these kind of limitations that the overall

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actually put together a program, the Effective Leadership, Statistician Leadership program. And this is really about helping you to progress in your career in terms of leadership. It’s specifically for statisticians, from statisticians like Gary and myself. And what you will get from this program is basically…

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three different things. The first thing is you will get an understanding of the foundations who will deeply understand leadership, you get some tools for building the foundation as an effective leader, and you will be able to explain role of trust and communication in terms of statistical leadership. You will be able to apply communication concepts and techniques.

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for various situations where you need that as a statistician. And also you will be able to learn how to build trust with your business partners being at statisticians or non-statisticians. A second thing will be you will learn how to influence and create change because lots of what leadership is about is creating change. You know, you want to…

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make sure that a new statistical approach is used, or you want to convince your business partner that it’s a traditional way of doing things is not optimal. So there’s lots of change involved in influencing. So after you complete the course, you’ll be able to understand why developing things like business acumen is important.

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and you will know how to work better with your collaborators based on these better understanding of business and the science. You will also be having different approaches to influence thinking and decisions, and that will help you in your day-to-day work and these kind of things.

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And also, you will be able to generate and formulate ideas to improve business processes via statistical means. So, third thing is you will also be able to develop and implement a specific for you designed action plan, because as Gary just said, you know, this is not a once thing effort,

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What we want to make sure is that you create a habit of improving your leadership skills. And so after finalization of the program, you will have already started and implemented specific actions to improve your communication skills and build trust with your collaborators, improve your understanding of the business and…

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make sure that you continue to study and learn about leadership concepts. So these are kind of the three big things that you will get away from the course that we are about to start, understanding the foundations of leadership, influencing and creating change, and develop and implement a personal election plan. Gary, do you want to add to these kind of…

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three things? I won’t add. I think that’s the we’re going to be able to cover plenty of information. I think the thing I would say is that the way that we’ve laid out the course, I think, is the most sensible way to approach leadership. Just in terms of as you try to learn any skill, the first part is, again, sort of understanding the fundamentals. So I think starting with the foundation of communication and trust, and that allows you to be more effective.

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in team situations and working with people. And I think once you understand and lay that foundation, then we begin to build on it with the idea of being able to influence and create change and those types of things. The notion of developing an action plan, as you said, I think it’s so important over a period of time to form a habit of studying leadership and investing in your own leadership. So.

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And again, based on my experiences teaching, this is, I think, the most effective way to teach a course over a period of time to start to formulate those habits and again, start with the foundation and then build from there. Yeah. And of course, it takes time to build these habits. This is not something that you develop over a weekend. We all know that if we want to.

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implement a new habit that takes weeks and months. And that’s why we designed the course to run actually over six months. Actually over six four-week cycles because each cycle will contain of four weeks. We’ll start every cycle first with a webinar through which we introduce the topic of the month so to say.

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and all the participants will be able to ask questions and will have a Q&A after the webinar. The following week, we will have small group discussions. So, as you know, this peer-to-peer interaction and accountability is really, really important to move forward and make it very, very specific to the individual.

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participants, we will put the different participants into smaller groups in which they can actually discuss about challenges and reflect about what they learned, how they implemented in their day-to-day life, and to overcome actually any barriers that they have there.

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In the third week, we will then have some audio material. You will be able to listen to this podcast player, basically, and then that will give you additional information, more in-depth material on the topic of the month. And then the fourth week, we’ll again have a small group discussions to follow up on the topics.

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And so that concludes basically a four week cycle. Each of these cycle is then basically on one topic. So we will have six different topics over these six different months. So small groups, I think is really, really important because they make sure that all the people stay engaged.