Get Your People Out of Their Caves

Your people are living in a cave and it's your job to get them out of it.

Oftentimes leaders don't even realize that their people are showing up every day and they’re just doing their thing.

They don't have the time, the bandwidth, the interest to learn new things, like the innovations, the creativity, the change, that's happening in the world around them.

They're totally clueless.

They have no sense, no idea whatsoever.

You, as leader, need to be providing consistent information, ideas, skills, tools and techniques, to help them grow and to go beyond the cave in which they live.

Let me tell you a story.

When I was a head of school years ago, we implemented a new student behavioral program.

It was really cutting edge. It was really a best practice and had a lot of neat features.

It was values based. It was really something that was going to transform our school. And ultimately it did.

I remember very distinctly sharing some memos and some content with the faculty about where we were in the process.

We'd already had meetings. We had already shared a lot of content in different ways.

There was some terminology that was used and some of the teachers had apparently shared with one of my administrative assistants (that) they had no idea what this was. And I said, "let me guess. It was from the cave."

I was referring to some of our teachers in our lower school, who were on the lower level, which I kind of in my own mind, referred to as “the cave.”

They lived a in their own bubble. They kind of did their own thing. They had the routines. They never really changed it up all that much. And so I figured if anybody was going to be clued out of what we were trying to do, it was our cave dwellers.

And my assistant asked, "how'd you know?" I said, "I just had an intuition."

Ultimately, that was on me because as leader, my job was to make sure that everybody was well informed.

And that’s your job as well.

When I visit clients, I oftentimes have to share best practices.

I do this because even leaders sometimes don't know what's going on in other businesses, other organizations, in the community at large, and how they can be doing their work smarter, better and more cutting edge, more relevant.

And that's certainly true for the rank and file.

So, with your team, with your colleagues, with your coworkers, and certainly with your direct reports, you want to be the person who is getting the information, curating it, sharing it, using it in meetings, in conversations.

Help your people grow. Help them learn what's out there. Send them to conferences and networking events.

And let them kind of get the broader sense of what's happening out there so that they can remain current, remain, of course, committed, motivated, engaged, because they feel like they're really progressing.

Create a culture that says that the teaching and learning and developing new skills are all valued, all important, and all things that we should aspire for.

So, get your people out of the cave.

Get them learning, get them doing because it's with that information, when you empower them, it motivates them, it excites them and encourages them to do whatever they're doing well already, even better.

Add new tools and new information to their toolkits all the time so that they can perform at their very best.