Photo by Helena Jankovičová Kováčová.
TIFF is happening this week. A large chunk of downtown Toronto has gone full Hollywood North, complete with red carpets and galas and canapés. The city is awash in guides on how to celeb-spot during the festival. Where to see and be seen. Which parties and clubs have the most star power. And which local coffee shops are the most beloved. Famous or not, everyone needs coffee.
For every fan camped out across the street from the Shangri-La trying to grab a selfie, there are at least as many people who try to dodge the circus entirely. Us included. Back when we worked in the Entertainment District, we would time our commutes around movie premiers. We’d re-route our lunch breaks to take-out in the park. Our rule for years was “do not schedule anything at Soho House in the month of September.” But we tend to catch most movies on the back of the headrests in front of us. So maybe we’re not the best people to ask.
You may find the chaos of TIFF joyful or fatiguing, but at least at a film festival, you know what you’re getting yourself into. Less so with management training.
Bring a ball cap
Maybe you didn’t realize that famous people come to management training. Famous as in actors, sure. But also Olympic medalists. Politicians. Artists. And social media influencers. If you’re surprised that extremely busy people would take time to get better at management, please know that we were, too.
The first time we got the question, it was from an actor who wanted to know ahead of time what to expect from management training. This person was used to getting recognized in public. Did we think it would be disruptive to attend? We joked that the most endearing thing about tech people is that we tend to be relatively clueless about popular culture. Our best guess was that people would be respectful. And also that they might not notice at all. Our actor showed up in a hoodie and a ball cap, pulled down low. As promised, our tech-heavy cohort either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
The next time the question came up, we were more confident. Very few people come to management training for celeb-spotting. It’s a pretty interior affair. And so even if you meet other people during a program, it’s up to you whether you share your title, background, or organizational affiliation. So, yes, occasionally famous people can come to management training and not cause a ruckus. Though not everyone in a low ball cap is an actor on the DL.
Our single largest group of incognito management trainees are hiding for very different reasons. Not because they get hounded for autographs at the supermarket. And not because every bad hair day ends up in the tabloids. But because it’s hard to acknowledge you don’t know something. Particularly if you feel like you ought to. And extra much if you’re very seasoned and very senior in your career.
The phrase we hear time and again is: I don’t know what I don’t know. Not only is it uncomfortable to be a leader and not know how to manage. It’s difficult to get better when you can’t even articulate what’s missing. But you’re certain that something is missing.
This is why a full 10% of people attending programs with us are Founders and CEOs. Hoodies up. Ball caps down. Taking notes. Separate from their teams. Often in time-zone askew sessions so they don’t run into anyone they know. Understandable. What could be more embarrassing than carving out time to show up better for your team?
The Leadership Industrial Complex
This discomfort. This fear of being found out. Of being seen to be learning how to manage instead of just naturally being intuitively brilliant at it. The leaders in our programs are sitting with it, pushing through it, but that’s not everyone. This fear is so great that an entire industry exists to serve the bosses who want to avoid it entirely. A veritable Mos Eisley of alternatives to hard work, something for every budget and appetite for bullshit.
There are the folks who package up experiences as leadership training. Solve an escape room to learn how to lead. Jump out of a plane to learn how to lead. Drive a race car (or be part of a pit crew) to learn how to lead. Do 3 hours of watered-down Navy SEAL combat training to learn how to lead.
There are the ones who package up horoscopes as leadership reflection. Myers-Briggs will tell you what kind of leader you are. No, Enneagrams will. No, your Leadership Circle results, multiplied by your DiSC assessment, divided by your Big-5 plus your StrengthsFinder™️ 2.0 profile.
And maybe the most popular are the ones who just sell absolution. You don’t need to be a good manager, just use our playbook. Use our Operating System. Four-hour workweek it all to VAs in the Philippines, or an agent in your inbox. Haven’t you heard that management is just about fixed-mindset power-hoarding, administration, and top-down direction? Wouldn’t you rather some content-free aphorisms? If you want to lead, be someone people will follow. This lot does well on the bumper sticker circuit.
And like, look. There’s something in all of this if you’re really desperate to find it. Of course you can extract some lessons from world-class pit crews about communication and breaking down complex, interdependent work. Of course there is value in self-reflection for a leader and any tool, even a scientifically dubious one, can be a way to kick that off. But like. Come on.
Be so for real right now
If you wanted to hire a CFO and it came to light that they had no background in corporate finance, but they were an INTJ and they did a 2-hour boot camp with a retired USMC Lieutenant? You might reply, “hey that sounds pretty neat, but can we come back to your total lack of qualifications for a sec?” An executive doesn’t need to have the deepest skillset in the room, but if your VP Engineering didn’t know how to build things, or your Chief Revenue Officer had no sales experience you would have, like, legitimate cause for concern. We all know this.
Leadership is a job. It’s not a mystic essence, it’s not a genetic trait, it’s a set of skills, attitudes, and behaviours that you can learn. Like finance or sales or engineering or any other job. Some of those are big heady concepts around strategy and elevation and communicating a compelling vision. But a lot of them, the significant majority of them, are skills around how you build and organize teams, how you give feedback, how you establish expectations and accountability, treat people fairly even when they’re struggling, set clear and ambitious and attainable goals, and shape a culture as it grows and changes. That’s management. You can’t lead well if you can’t manage well. No matter how many ropes courses you complete.
Any decent sales training would have intelligent, opinionated things to say about prospecting, pipeline management, and how sick they are of talking about The Challenger Sale. It would be weird for a marketing program not to be able to say anything coherent about Brand. But the Leadership Industrial Complex benefits a great deal from keeping the house lights low, and having you believe that leadership is an inscrutable black box and only they have the key. It’s not true. Don’t let them convince you that it is.
It’s funny because, for all their hoodies and ball caps, the actors in our program know that part of learning a role means new training and new expertise. They don’t feel any shame about learning, that’s part of showing up like a pro. Our Olympians are similar. They have whatever natural gifts they have but they’re also really clear: at the elite level, no one makes it on raw talent. You train and you train and you train. You build a strong core, and then also layer on specific training for each event, and each role. This is normal for them.
It may not be as normal for you. Many of the folks we work with finished school two years, or 20 years, ago and have been learning on the job ever since. You figure it out as you go. You get promoted and then try to piece together what that new gig means. Like there’s some weird stigma to getting training when your role changes. That stigma makes no sense, but that doesn’t mean you won’t feel it.
And still. This is our gentlest shove that if you’re in a role that involves leading a team, those are skills you can learn. And you need to. Feel free to bring a hoodie if you want.
— Melissa & Johnathan
