Lois:

Hi everybody. Welcome to Building My Legacy broadcast today. We’re so excited to have you with us. We have with us today Glain Roberts-McCabe. She is a renowned leadership trainer and developer in Canada and elsewhere. She works with all sizes of companies and has really been recognized in a number of ways.

Lois:

I want to just make sure that I include at least some of the highlights for you so you can see who she is and what she might have to offer you. She has a personal mission to create a movement of intentional leadership. She has developed The Roundtable in 2007 where leaders could cultivate their leadership together.

Lois:

She has been the recipient of innovative and multi-award winning awards for what she’s done with her Roundtable peer-to-peer coaching programs, where leaders teach leaders. She has received the prestigious Gold Award at the Canadian Awards of Training Excellence, she’s been featured by York University’s professor in his textbook, The Context of Business: Understanding the Canadian Business Environment.

Lois:

She has been named the Best External Consulting Provider in Canada. She was the recipient of The Roundtable Silver Award for Women Led Business at the International Stevie Awards. She received the RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards, presented by women of influence in the Microbusiness category. She also produces a monthly newsletter for leaders on The Roundtable.

Lois:

This is just the first half of the page of her accomplishments, so just to give you a sense of who Glain is. But I think what I wanted to have you share with the audience today is first, just a little bit about what you want them to know about you. Then we’ll get into what it is that you’ve done and your remarkable contribution.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

What do I want people to know about me that maybe didn’t covered off in my bio. What I always is I’m a leader at heart. I mean, a lot of people go into the world of leadership coaching because they’re interested in leadership. I got into it because I am a leader and I’ve always been trying to figure out how to get better myself as a leader. So everything that I do in The Roundtable and what I talk about in The Roundtable, a lot of it is based on my own experiences leading. I’ve been leading since I was 24.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I really spent the last … I was fortunate when I was 30 I joined a consulting firm that specialized, I call it, in the soup to nuts delivery of talent management, executive coaching assessment, consulting training, even classroom training, and we also used to bring in all these big speakers like Tom Peters and Marshall Goldsmith, who you and I both know, and Marcus Buckingham and all these people.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

So I’ve had the opportunity to learn directly from a lot of people, but really the kind of premise of our organization at The Roundtable is less about the consultancy model, which is all we’ve got all the ideas and we’re going to teach you our ideas. For us it’s about bringing together the collective because, to me, leadership is about doing. You can read all kinds of books on leadership, but until you have to go and do it, you really don’t know what you’re in store for.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

When I think of particularly challenging times in my own leadership, the most powerful learning I’ve had was when I’ve been able to share what I was going through with somebody else who’d maybe been a little bit further down the path or who had had the experience. And so what we have created with The Roundtable is this idea of leaders coming together to teach other, but also to inform us on what their looking for and what’s important.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I see us as an aggregator of knowledge and also our expertise, obviously, is in this group coaching space and building collective development together. But the real engine behind it is all the leaders that come and share their insights, and learning and growth as part of the community, the greater Roundtable community.

Lois:

You talk a lot about The Roundtable. If you would just talk a little bit about how this collective, how the peer-to-peer coaching works it would be great.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yeah. At The Roundtable, so The Roundtable is our company name, and then we have a number of programs underneath it. I’ll have, just to confuse everybody, that we put the name Roundtable around, so we have The Roundtable for Leaders, which is a group coaching program. We have The Roundtable Catalyst, which is the guided group mentoring program. We have The Roundtable Exchange, which is truly a peer-to-peer coaching approach, and then we have The Roundtable for High Level Performance Team Coaches, which helps team leaders become really great team coaches.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

But all of them across the board all follow a similar framework in that every program that we do always starts with the strategy and priorities of the organization. So our belief is that as leaders we’re there to do a particular job and we’re hired to deliver results. I think as leaders we’re always trying to balance, people and profit and keep them both in balance and check. So it’s really critical that we understand what the business is trying to accomplish before we start getting into what leaders need to work on.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

That’s where we start, no matter what the program is. Our anchor program is this group coaching program called The Roundtable for Leaders. In that program, once we know what the organization is working within, it start to funnel down into the individual needs of the leader involved and what’s the role they’re playing? What’s the circumstance they find themself leading in? What are their own personal ambitions and goals?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

From that, we really focus … You mentioned in our opening about I’m really trying to create an intentional movement in leadership. Leadership is about how are you showing up, so part of how you’re showing up is your behavior, and what sits underneath your behavior is your mindset and belief systems, so that’s what we really focus on in our group coaching program, is helping leaders unpack a lot of that so that they show up as their best self. How do we help them shift a mindset and shift a behavior and, like any coaching program in group coaching, you’re doing that over time.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

This is not the kind of spray and pray approach to leadership development that is so common in terms of one and two to eight leadership workshops. This is about helping leaders really set a strong compass. We help them set what we call the big bang for the buck behavior. What’s a behavior that’s going to be a game changer for you, given the strategy, given the role, given the expectations, what’s the behavior that if you really focus on it it’s going to be a game changer for you?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Then we help them move the needle on that behavior as they go through this group experience with other leaders and as they learn about other aspects leadership, but the common thread is that they’re really working on this behavior together and so they’re building their capability and they’re building their capacity, but they’re doing it in a collective. They’re not on their own, isolated, trying to shift. They’ve got allies and colleagues around them who are there to support them.

Lois:

And then you do this within companies across different companies both?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yes.

Lois:

And what’s the difference?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yeah, so when we started, we started it as we call it open enrollment, eight different leaders. That’s our favorite group size is eight. Eight different leaders from eight different companies and I have been running that for a couple of years in that format. Then I had a client approach who was with a company that was going through a massive amount of transition and what they were finding was they were doing a lot of what I would describe as reactive coaching, so leaders were getting moved into roles with bigger scope and more complexity and they were struggling. So they were getting all these individual coaches involved and everybody had a coach.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

That was costing them a lot of money, number one, but number two, they were not seeing the return on those investments as quickly as they wanted to see. And so she asked me if we could do our group coaching program on-site with a company. I will share with you that I was skeptical because one of the things that happens in the group coach program, certainly that we’ve designed, is that leaders are very vulnerable with each other. They get very, very connected.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I wasn’t sure if people who worked together would be comfortable with that level of vulnerability, but I was willing to give it a try. One of the things that we did to try and ensure that we were going to get as much openness as we could is that we pulled leaders from across the organization, so we had somebody from supply chain, we had somebody from HR, we had somebody from sales, and it was really diverse. These weren’t people who were going to be competing for each other’s jobs or anything like that.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

It was really powerful. The feedback that we got from the participants was that this was like nothing they’d ever experienced before. I had to say, this company is world renowned for their talent management practices. This is not a newbie organization. They’ve probably done just about anything and, in fact, I work with many, many clients and I have to position them as world class in this.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

So we knew we were onto something really significant, the fact that this … And the group that we were working with were a group leaders who are being prepped to move into the executive band in this company, so they’re incredibly smart, incredibly savvy. If it’s not working for them, they are just not going to show up. And so we’ve been now with that company for 10 years. We’re actually going into our 10th cohort with them.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

It is the program that everybody talks about in that company because it really allows leaders to … I want to say leaders. It allows the leaders in organizations to hit so many things at so many levels. As leaders they’re coming together, they’re solving real time issues, they’re getting to support each other around behavior change, they’re building these strategic networks that are so critical, they’re broadening their understanding of the business.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

You can imagine for organizations what this does, it really allows an organization to pull together leaders that can be change makers in the organization. So, if you’re trying to do anything around a culture shift or mindset shift on things, we’ve seen incredible, unexpected things come out of group coaching programs like more empathy, more compassion. So when you’re hitting things around D&I initiatives, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives or mandates, anything where you’re requiring leaders to look at situations differently, a group experience does that.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I find for a lot of organizational development people they really can move a lot of their agenda through a group coaching process, which is powerful.

Lois:

It’s interesting because right now I think we have so much discussion about people becoming more isolated as we’re working virtually more and more, virtually now not always by choice. I think coming out of this the companies that will do well will be the ones who understand how to pull people together in a group because we’re going to have to come back somehow, right, and be a collective. So your thoughts on that?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yeah, I mean, I have been obsessed with this idea of the collective for years and I just think that right now, to your point, we are in this position where we can really look differently at how we build community in our organizations. I’m in the leadership development space, I mean, this is where I’ve been playing for the last 20 some odd years. One of the things that has always been the way we’ve developed leaders is to kind of treat them in an individual way, go out to a course. Or even when you’re in a classroom you’re kind of working on your own and it’s about you and your need, or go and work with an executive coach.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think that what we’ve missed in doing it that way is we’ve missed the opportunity for us to create community within our leadership ranks as an organization where you can really build these learning communities, these ongoing learning communities where leaders can support each other. I think that’s been a big gap and I think that now, as organizations are adjusting to having leaders talk to work virtually need and not be able to eyeball their people in the same way they’re probably used to doing, I think there’s a lot of companies that are struggling with, “How do we go about keeping people engaged and how do we go about developing people in a way that’s meaningful?”

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think this is where group coaching opens up so much opportunity for individuals, especially when we’re going through any kind of disruption or major change. I mean, that’s when our programs tend to have the biggest impact is when we’re getting to work with organizations that have been going through disruption or change, whether it’s a merger or an acquisition and you see [inaudible 00:15:42] coming in. That’s always been, for us, a place where we’ve helped leaders navigate those new times.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think as companies are looking at, “How do we keep building our leadership capability while we’re in a space where people are having to be dispersed and not necessarily able to come together face-to-face?” We’ve got such capability now with Zoom and platforms like that, that group coaching is really going to be an amazing tool for people to bridge this time and allow leaders to also, when you’re going through change …

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think one of the myths about group coaching is that you bring a group of leaders together, there’s a lot of change going on and all they’re going to do is complain. It’s going to be a pity party and everybody’s going to be complaining. My own experience has been that that is the furthest from the truth. When you bring leaders together and you have a framework for them to follow. It’s not a free-for-all in group coaching. Group coaching is quite structured, even though it feels loose, it’s actually quite structured.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

You’re actually allowing people to productively process anxiety, and fears, and concerns and overwhelm and help them separate fact from fiction in terms of what’s really going on and help them move through these really difficult times more strongly and in a more aligned way. I feel like there’s, right now especially with everything that’s going on in the world, there’s just a huge opportunity for us to be equipping leaders with this kind of outlet and platform. I think it also gives them a great window into how to do that kind of work with their own teams.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think as team leaders we’ve got to look at how do we build community with our groups when they’re dispersed? A lot of the methods that we use in the group coaching approach are equally useful for leaders that are leading team. I think there’s great opportunity right now, actually, for us to rethink how we build collective.

Lois:

When you say you have a process for the group to walk through, what does that process look like?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I mean, our program, again, we have multiple programs, but I’m just going to focus on the main anchor one because that keeps it simple. But we have a group coaching method that is very similar to the Mastermind method, so people might be familiar with Mastermind where people get to put out an issue, the group asks questions, and then the group can share experience.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

So what makes it unique in our process is that what we’re doing when we’re having individuals share their challenges, but we’re also teaching managers coaching skills. So one of the fundamental capabilities that every manager needs to have today is the ability to coach. I think for most managers, and I know I was one of these managers, so I speak really from my own experience, was I was always told I was a great coach as manager.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Then I went and did advanced coach training through the Coaches Training Institute and I realized I was a horrendous coach. I didn’t know what coaching was. I thought coaching was giving people good advice, and listening to them, and then telling them what to do in a motivating, “You can do it,” kind of a way. And so I really realized I was probably a good mentor. I was not a great coach.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

What we do in our program, and we’re often working with companies that they’ve done what I would call baseline coach training, everybody’s done some kind of manager as coach training and they know the fundamentals of asking good questions and listening and all of the kind of fundamentals that you go through as learning how to coach. But what we get to do when we’re coaching a group is that we’re giving them this framework, but really what we’re doing is coaching them on their coaching skills in real time.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

And when you are able to do that and you’re able to keep pulling the focus back because the ultimate role of coaching is coach the person, not the problem. And yet managers, what we are rewarded for in our careers, is solving problems and so we become junkies for it. We cannot help ourselves but want to solve all these problems, right?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think when you’re able to see a group together and you’re able to draw their attention to when they’re, “Are we on the person right now or are we on the problem right now?” When you could start to bring that awareness in real time, you immediately up the coaching skills of the group.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

That’s one of the frameworks that we use and then the other thing we do is we have a lot of content that we also bring into programs that is built in a coaching type way. Everything that we do with the group, whether it’s topics like looking at your values, or your strengths, or how to do be a better influencer, or how to build your confidence, got a number of different topics go down different things of leadership. But the way it’s designed is that it’s always related to something that the person’s working on in real time.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Our model, and I think the way group coaching works with us, just when you think about almost like a flipped classroom approach where the individual’s work is their classroom. Then, when they come into a session, they’re there to debrief what happened and discuss what worked and didn’t work and get to share and hear from others, and then build on that knowledge to go and continue to apply.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

It’s a very organic process, but that coaching framework, the peer coaching framework, is the one that we use probably through, I think, 80% of our programs to really allow people to work on what they want to work on. I mean, the speed of change and the speed of organizations is so quick that you want to give people a chance not to talk about academic case studies of theoretical things, but let’s talk about what’s on your plate right now and how do we help you move something off your desk immediately?

Lois:

When you start an engagement like that, how long does that last generally before the engagement is over? Do you contract for three months, six months, a year, 18 months, two years? What happens?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yeah, so I would say most of our engagement are 12-24 months, so the core program is usually a year long. Then there’s usually some kind of alumni momentum piece in year two, so we’ve designed our programs to kind of all work together. So, if I give you the example, so The Roundtable for Leaders program, which is our group coaching program, eight leaders from across the company come together to learn about their own leadership.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

When they’re finished at the end of the year, they can then go on into our Roundtable Catalyst program, where they learn how to be group mentors and pay it forward. Then those leaders will start working with smaller groups of individuals, three to four, four to five groups of individuals and lead coaching conversations with those groups that can run anywhere from six to eight months.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Or they can go into our High Performance Teams program where they learn how to really increase t heir team coaching effectiveness by working within a team, but then going back to their individual teams to help them accelerate. There’s different entry points to come into our programs, but we’ve designed them so that they all work together and that when leaders create a common language and understanding, they can build off of that through every iteration of work we do.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

But ultimately, our goal is to pull away. One of our clients, I think said it really, really great. She said, “You teach us how to fish. That’s what you’re doing. You’re teaching us all the tools so that we know how to do this for ourselves,” and that is ultimately our goal. That kind of circles back to what I said about myself at the start. I am a leader, first and foremost, and so everything that I talk about and that we talk about in The Roundtable programs are things that I’ve been doing, I try and do as ways to build my own leadership. I think, “If I can do this stuff, you guys can do this stuff.”

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Because I think when it comes to, especially in the world of coaching, a lot gets outsourced to HR or we outsource a lot to external coaches. I am a coach. I think coaching is one of the most amazing tools for leaders and everybody should have a coach. However, it’s not the only tool and it’s really important that leaders know how to coach their people effectively.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think also, when you’re inside an organization you see people in context, you have a much broader view that an external coach doesn’t necessarily have sightline to, so you have so many opportunities to coach and share. The more we can up that capability I think in organizations, the stronger we’ll all be for it.

Lois:

Where do you get the biggest pushback?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

It’s interesting because it’s changed. When I started the business 13-14 years ago, it was still pretty novel to have a program run over 11 to 12 months. People couldn’t wrap their around, I mean, short bursts of learning every six weeks. It was very challenging. And the other thing that was very unique about our program and I think, to some degree, still is, but thanks to Brené Brown it’s going a little bit more mainstream.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

But when we started the program we were having leaders look at their values. We were having leaders look at their mindset and belief systems and a lot of learning professionals were like, “Well, what’s the learning outcome from this? Show me your curriculum with learning outcomes.” And see, the way we designed the programs are that it gets fed, as I mentioned, off the strategy of the business and the needs of the group and the individuals, and so it’s extremely agile.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I found back in the day that was what was really hard was convincing people that, “No, leaders do need to understand their self first before they can lead,” and this notion that you didn’t need planned curriculum, that you could drive your content based off of the needs of the group. And so that, I found, has become less so, I think. Now, probably I think about what’s the pushback that we get the most is that it’s usually that people don’t understand how it’s going to work and they’re still wanting some kind of reassurance. They want to see the work.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I mean, we have workbooks and we have material, so it’s not that we don’t have any of that, but it’s sometimes hard to articulate exactly all of the elements of a group coach experience. I think it’s still one of those areas that it’s still pretty new, there’s not a lot of companies that are doing group coaching to the degree that we’ve been doing it. What I see people saying as group coaching, or if they use the word peer coaching because we used to use that phrase, peer coaching, and people would think it was two peers coaching each other as opposed to this idea of a collective group of peers.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think sometimes what I see is I see a coach at the front of the room coaching an individual while a number of people observe. That’s not what we’re talking about, so we’ve actually come in behind other organizations that have had more of that model, where it’s still kind of an expert, which is really the throes of training, right? You’re the expert at the front of the room and you’re imparting your wisdom on the group.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

In group coaching you’re not necessarily the expert at the front of the room. You’re the facilitator and yes, you bring in some expertise around things, but you’re also creating this container for leaders to be able to share and exchange. And when you’re working with very senior leaders, there’s a lot of wisdom in that room and your key role as a coach is to pull it out. There’s a lot of, I think in our field, a lot of practitioners, but aren’t necessarily comfortable not being the expert in the room.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Where we’ve had other pushback is where I would say a more traditional approach has been tried with these peer groups, but it’s still really like a consultant teaching in a small group. People say, “Well, we tried it and it didn’t really work. People didn’t get a lot of value of it.” And when I hear how it worked and what the formula was, I kind of go, “Okay, I get why. This was really like a mini-training session, not a group coaching session,” so I do think it’s educating people on what group coaching is and what it’s not, but it’s probably still a barrier.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

But it’s about to explode. Team coaching, group coaching is going to be the next five to 10 years, it’s … We are just making a massive shift into that space.

Lois:

Well, we don’t have the time or the money to do it and we’re also seeing big corporations spending massive amounts of money and not really being able to reach the company, the employees to the extent that you need to if you’re going to impact change. You need a different process, I think.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yeah. I mean, I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head with that comment because I think that everything goes in waves I can remember in the late ’90s, early 2000s where the executive coaching wave was really starting to take off. I can remember at the firm that I used to for it became this thing that everybody needed a coach, everybody was going to have a coach. That is so expensive, number one. As somebody who has hired coaches for myself off and on since the age of 30, I will tell you sometimes you need a coach and sometimes you just need to go and do the work.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Your coaching relationship can morph very quickly into a big friend relationship if you don’t have clear goals and objectives that you’re trying to move towards. I think what we’re still continuing to see is a little bit of the view that for executives they need to be one-to-one people. When you’re a senior person you need to have a one-to-one relationship. I actually think that that’s a really big missed opportunity and I think that the problem with executive coaching, and again, speaking as somebody who is an executive coach, who does hire coaches for myself.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

But the downside for executive coaching is it is very hard, especially when you’re working with the anchor change, which is what we’re shifting, behavior and mindset. It’s hard to see the person in context. You don’t necessarily get to see them in their natural habitat. One of the great things about group coaching is you do, so the person comes to a group session and you get to see how they’re showing up, which makes your individual coaching …

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

We do have individual coaching as part of our group programs, but it makes that individual coaching all the more impactful. But the other thing that you’re missing out upon, when you take eight leader and send them in eight different directions, you are not tapping into the collective wisdom of that group. And so if there is something happening in the organization where collectively, if you can get this group thinking about it or thinking differently, it is going to have a ripple effect in your organization.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

With the companies where we’ve worked, we tend to work with client over the long-term and we’ve had the privilege of working with some clients for a decade. They’ve been very committed to building a coaching culture, and a coaching mindset, and a learning culture and seeing where they are now compared to when we first started with them, we see the massive change in that. We’re able to track things like retention rates amongst the people who have gone through group coaching programs versus those who haven’t.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

You can actually see hard core business results and I am completely convinced that it’s because you’re allowing people to get together in a productive way and talk about things that are getting in their way. You have to give people space to do that. I mean, personally, I don’t know about you, Lois, and your coaching, but I know for me when I’m coaching executives sometimes you just feel like you’re creating a container for them to do thinking because they have no time to think otherwise. You know?

Lois:

[inaudible 00:34:00].

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

A lot of the time we create this strategic space for them to step out of their day-to-day and think, well, imagine doing that with a group that actually could go then and walk out the door and collectively impact together versus one individual who’s been trying to make a little difference on their own. It’s hugely impactful.

Lois:

Well, think of how hard we work on getting visioning communicated, right? And so it maybe gets a third of the way down or a quarter of the way down, and the rest interpret it. I was speaking with one leader who asked me the question, “What do you do when a organization has more than one culture in its operation?” And I thought about that for a while and I thought, “Why would you have more than one culture?”

Lois:

Well, it’s because the culture vision got down to the director level and then everybody after that interpreted it for themselves and they each had a different interpretation. And so the implementation ended up with very different meanings and people were confused, right?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Right.

Lois:

So it’s very interesting that there’s always a consequence of everything that we do and the choices that we make for how we’re going to structure things.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yeah. I think the thing that you make me think of too, and I think this is what’s so often underestimated when we’re developing leaders, especially around these kinds of change mandates and change initiatives. As soon as you say the word change, you’re immediately implying that there’s going to have to be a behavior change with leaders because what got … With Marshall’s book that I know we both love, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, if you take that at the organizational level and an organization is saying, “We need to move from doing business this way to doing business this way.”

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Whether that’s, “We need to be more innovative. We need to be more collaborative as an organization. We need to increase our agility to be able to respond to things.” Whatever that is, immediately it means that the way your leaders have been operating needs to now shift.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

And so what I think a lot of companies don’t give enough thought to is how are you helping the leaders understand where their shift needs to happen? Are they really clear on the behavior that they have that’s going to support the new direction and the behaviors that may not support that new direction? I say to our clients all the time, “There’s two sides to your balance sheet at a job. There’s what you have to do and then there’s how you have to do it.”

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

We all know that the what gets you hired, so what you had on your resume, your previous experience and all that good stuff, that gets you hired. It’s the how that’s going to get you either promoted or fired, how you show up and how you do it. Because past a certain level, particularly if you’re a director level and above, being able to deliver, that’s just table stakes. You’re there because you deliver results.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Now it’s all about the how. So if your how is working when the organization was going in one direction, it may not work if the organization’s chosen to go in another direction. And how much self-insight do you have, first of all, to know that, and second, do you understand what you need to do to pivot? Do you understand what behaviors you need to start demonstrating more of in order to be successful?

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I think that’s where we just don’t do enough of that kind of work with leaders. I mean, that’s a part of what our goal is, is to take a very vague concept like behavior change, it sounds so consultancy, right? You need to shift you meeting group. How do you make that really concrete and practical for your average line leader who is not navel gazing and thinking about this the way coaches do or HR professionals do, and help them become really pragmatic and really practical and give them the tools to be successful. That, for me, and that’s kind of an underpinning of all of our programs, that for me is so key and that has been so absent because we often focus on surface things, like find in leadership.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

I remember my old consulting firm. We had all these courses that were like, “Dealing With Difficult People.” I used to think, “Well, what if you’re the difficult person?” It’s great to externalize the problems on everybody else, but when you’re the leader you need to understand your own triggers and how you’re showing up, and we need to be spending more time helping leaders …

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Because we’re in the knowledge age of collaboration. That’s where we are now, so it’s all about the mind and connecting. It’s only going to get, with AI and all the other things that are coming in, that’s just going to keep accelerating so we better equip people to understand themselves in order to know they can show up and add value.

Lois:

Before we leave, Glain, I would like you share your book that’s coming out. It’s coming out this spring, I believe.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yes.

Lois:

For those of you who are listening, we will make sure that you are informed of the book when it comes out so you can get it. But tell us a little bit about the book.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Yes. My new book is called The Grassroots Leadership Revolution, and it’s all about how you can create your own peer community to help you guide your leadership and a leadership career. The book kind of breaks down into how to go about assembling a community, why you should think about building a community as a leader because I truly believe community building, it’s going to be another core skillset that you’re going to need to be good at doing, so it breaks down that.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

And then the second part of the book gives you some really concrete activities and exercises around things like values, strengths, personal brand, goal setting, that you can do with your group together so that you can create your own support group and trusted advisors so that you don’t have to rely on your manager to get your career path moving. You can do it yourself, kind of a DIY approach to career management using all the things that we do in The Roundtable program with Fortune 100, 500 companies.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

So if your company also doesn’t have a lot of funds for leadership development, this is a way for you to get a top-notch program and put it into your own hands.

Lois:

Glain, thank you so much. This has been wonderful to have you with us. And those of you who are listening, if you have questions that you would like to ask of Glain, well just email me. I’ll make sure that the information is passed on. We will let you know when her book becomes available.

Lois:

Glain, thank you so much for your time.

Glain Roberts-McCabe:

Lois, thank you. It’s always great talking to you. I appreciate you having me on.

Lois:

Thank you.