808: Finding the Person to Replace You, with Christoff Poppe

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Every leader in almost every role ultimately grapples with this question: Who is going to replace me? In this episode, 3 questions that will help you begin answering that sooner rather than later. This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 808.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:18]:
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:25]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born; they’re made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. One huge inflection point that almost all of us run into at some point in our leadership career is finding out who’s going to replace us, or finding the person that is going to replace us, or not, as the case may be. It’s one of those challenges that we often have to navigate around, both when we’re perhaps thinking about the next opportunity for us, or we’re thinking about the long-term planning and strategy for the organization. And it’s a problem that does not always have a clear answer. Today, how to actually begin the process of finding that person to replace you, how to think about it, where leaders go wrong.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:19]:
And I’m so glad to welcome an expert guest who talks with me all the time about this and many other topics. I’m so pleased to welcome Christoff Poppe to the show. Christoph is an executive coach, Vistage chair, and former airline executive. He believes the most successful outcomes happen when both leaders and their teams feel they matter and when people are the drivers, not just the resources. He is one of our Coaching for Leaders fellows and recently published an article titled Succession Planning: A Key to Outperforming Your Competition. Christoff, what a joy to have you on the podcast finally after all these years. I’m so glad to have you here!

Christoff Poppe [00:01:57]:
Thank you, Dave. Thank you for the invitation. And after all these years of listening to your podcast, I was trying to think how far back, and I think it’s 2012 on the Metra train in my commute to the city, to Chicago downtown, listening to your podcast.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:11]:
Wow. Well, you and I talk all the time, and in recent years, especially since you’ve become a fellow, we have had— oh gosh, I’ve lost track— dozens and dozens and dozens of conversations about leadership. So I am so excited to be able to share this conversation with so many others for the first time. And this topic of thinking about, okay, how do we handle the situation when we need to find out who’s going to be next in the role is one that comes up for almost all of us. And I know it’s come up for you in your career too. And as you think back to the times this question’s been top of mind for you, what caused you stress and frustration in some of those past transitions? Does one come to mind?

Christoff Poppe [00:02:56]:
Yeah. So what led me to write the article was the frustration actually, of a client who’s a VP of sales in a tech company. And he learns that the CRO role, the Chief Revenue Officer role, has been posted. And when he has a conversation with his leadership, it is, he’s not explicitly told the role’s not for you, but he’s not encouraged to apply.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:20]:
Hmm.

Christoff Poppe [00:03:20]:
He was very frustrated with the conversation that had happened. We started unpacking it, and he was doing all the right things, leading the team, coaching the team. His results were up, up the charts. He was showing behaviors, engaging with the best customers. And what became apparent when I asked him, who is going to replace you? His answer was, well, I’ll be the person’s boss, and I’ll work on driving that, and we’ll job share a while, and they’ll develop the skills, and I’ll transition the clients. And to me it became apparent that he did not have a successor, and that was becoming a limitation. He actually called it his Achilles heel. It’s the limitation that is preventing someone from seeing an opportunity because they’re seeing risk.

Christoff Poppe [00:04:07]:
And that, to me, was pretty telling of how we need to work on developing folks so that we can move forward, so we have opportunities to move forward.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:18]:
It’s really ironic, in a way, that so often we’re so tuned into the success and daily responsibilities of the role that we have in our own performance that, I think what you described in your case with the VP of sales you worked with, how then, in a way, we lock ourselves into that role because the organization looks at what we’re currently doing and says, ” This person is a star performer. We need to keep them there. There’s no way that we could possibly move them out of this role for a different opportunity because there’s no one that can step into the role that’s going to do it the same way they do”. And you write on this, if job security is getting in the way of your own development and growth, ask yourself whether this is the right lane to be on, because you may be headed to a dead end. I’ve seen this come up again and again. You have too.

Christoff Poppe [00:05:08]:
I have. I have. And the challenge when you’re really doing a really good job is you want to actually become less— the organization become less dependent of you, which is counterintuitive, right? The more I’m doing a really good job, the more the company needs me; it’s rewarding. I’m getting all the right signals. It’s the flywheel of reward. But the reality is, if you’re not developing your team as a result of that, and I do believe that as leaders we have a responsibility to develop our team members as well, and, you’re not opening up possibilities for you. When I talk to CEOs in my Vistage practice, you know, things like sales leadership, things like operations, product development- I mean, areas that are critical to the revenue of the company- are seen with tremendous risk of loss by those leaders of making changes.

Christoff Poppe [00:06:00]:
Either they have to make changes because it’s dramatically important, or they don’t want to make too many changes because they don’t want to trump whatever’s working and whatever secret sauce is working, not disrupt it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:12]:
There’s another mindset that gets in the way too that you highlight in this article, and it’s looking at it a little bit from the other direction of, “Okay, I’m the person who’s in the more senior role, and I’m thinking about who’s going to maybe replace me”. And you call this the mini-me mindset. I’m wondering if you could describe what that is and what is it that’s limiting about that mindset?

Christoff Poppe [00:06:36]:
Yeah, so in one of my last roles in the corporate world, I was working on developing my successor. And when I try to look at things objectively, at the very— yeah, with my perspective, but try to be objective around what was it that I brought into the job, there was no match in the team? Not because I was this rock star it was just I had different walks in the organization. I had different experiences. I was bringing different perspectives into that no one in the team had at that point. And it was through having this conversation with a group of peers- I was a member of a peer group at the time of leaders- as I was having the conversation with other peers in other industries, someone said something very helpful for me, which was, why are you looking at this as replacing yourself, and why aren’t you looking at this as the whole part of the team? Describe the skills that the team as a whole brings forward.

Christoff Poppe [00:07:29]:
With your absence of the team, how does the team interact and what’s the leadership that that new team needs to move forward? Just that change of point of view allowed me to think of people that I would have not thought that could have been potential replacements on a skill basis. But thinking about leading a team of a different set of skills opened that opportunity. And actually, 2 of the people that my successor today leads that team in a very different than I did, extremely successful. And the other person that I had in mind and was developing took on another role at promotion in the company, leading in a very different way. We tend to think of these roles as replacing the person individually, rather than how the team is gonna operate differently. And that’s what I call the mini-me, right? We’re trying to develop someone to your style, to your ways, to your approach, to your way of working, kind of the mentorship model rather than the coaching model.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:28]:
It’s something our mutual friend Tom Henshaw would call a thinking error, right? Of, we think about replacing someone in the role that we’ve been really successful at. And a lot of times when we’re thinking about succession planning, it’s because we’ve been really successful in the role. And we think, “I need to find someone who’s as close to me as possible as far as skillset, personality, background, experience, all those things”. And recognizing that, like, “okay, I may not find that exact person, but I’m gonna try to start there. And by just coming from that mini-me mindset is, you totally close off the options for someone who’s actually really, really different than you, that could, as you say, like, thinking about it from a team standpoint of how do you balance those skills across an entire team? And oh, by the way, the thing we haven’t even said is things are going to be different in the 5 years ahead than they were in the 5 years in the past, like everything’s changing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:21]:
The skill set that was in the role that made you successful up to this point may not even be the skill set that’s going to be successful for the next 2 to 3 years anyway, right?

Christoff Poppe [00:09:31]:
That’s right. That’s right. And, and it’s also how we see people, right? So we’re their leader. We see them perform every day. We should be really ju— good judges of what they do and what they can do, but we tend to oversimplify that into the current function. You know, early in my career in this airline that I was, that, that I was referencing, you know, I started in my early 20s as check-in agent, taking care of passengers and customers and, their bags. And after a year being there, I was promoted together with a buddy to be the frontline leader, to be frontline leaders of the team. And Pablo is his name.

Christoff Poppe [00:10:11]:
He approached, he was very different than me, very different personality, approached leadership in a very, we were both learning how to lead people as we were going along, which usually is the case for everyone. So we would assign daily roles; we would handle customer issues, focus on bottlenecks, you know, making sure tha you know, we operated safely, bags got on the airplane, people were happy, airplanes left out on time. And when we overlapped, I noticed that the way he scheduled people in roles was very different to mine. I was very focused on training. I was very focused on fairness. I was very focused on ensuring that everyone had opportunities in different places around what we needed as an organization to— for the process to work. When I challenged Pablo as to why did you assign this person this role or this other, usually his answers would be, this person loves to do that work, or we’ve talked together and I believe this person can do this and we’re gonna work together to get there. It was very at a personal individual level, and I was thinking at a much more a macro level.

Christoff Poppe [00:11:19]:
A little bit fast forward, a little bit into that tenure, 6 months into that tenure, when flights get canceled, flights get delayed, et cetera, there’s overtime. You need people to stay on overnight, miss their family dinner, you know, maybe not sleep that night because they gotta take care of customers and flights. And it was notorious that I will always get the same folks sticking around, the people who I believed care about the company or needed the money. When I would look at people who stayed overtime with Pablo, it was those usual characters and then some, and many others who would not stay with me. And that was an insight for me that made me realize there’s something here on how he leads and how he sees people and how he challenges people that because I’m looking at the bigger picture or the broader sense, I’m missing all these cues. And that shifted the way I looked at individual contribution and how to help people deliver above the average, above their normal.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:15]:
And making that shift makes a big difference in numbers too. One of the organizations you cite is DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast, and they say organizations with a strong bench are almost 3 times more likely to outperform their competition financially and almost 3 times more likely to fill leadership roles internally. So there’s a huge business case for this as well, too. And I think that leads to one of the concepts that you talk about a lot, which is the invitation and the— I don’t know if invitation’s even the right word, but just the strategy of untrapping potential. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Christoff Poppe [00:12:55]:
Yeah. So I’ve been in the search to define this for a little while as I’ve been working with my practice and leaders. And what’s driving this approach is that experience that I went through as a kid watching my dad go through his career. My dad worked at a multinational, at a bank. You know, he wrote, he grew from the frontline without a college degree to very senior regional roles. We moved around, and I saw him being very successful and very happy. And at the time I was too young to understand, but at some point I noticed he was not happy. Something had changed.

Christoff Poppe [00:13:30]:
As time progressed, I started to realize it, it, it all had to do with a new leader he had, and how they not see, they didn’t see eye to eye, how frustrated he was. He wasn’t heard; he wasn’t understood. He was put to tackle things and fix things that weren’t his passion, that weren’t the things that he was, he excelled at. My dad was very frustrated and got very stressed and wasn’t happy, but he also was hostage, because he didn’t have a degree. He was 43 years old. He didn’t see that he could get a job at another bank. His career was here.

Christoff Poppe [00:14:05]:
He didn’t see an opportunity externally, and he felt a hostage of the role. And that, at the time, I didn’t realize all this. Later on, as I got into leadership myself and talked about our paths, he mentioned this experience and how sad it made him feel and how strong. And he attached it to his heart attack at the time. The level of stress that he had had led to a health issue. That led me to think about, you know, if I go through my journey in my career, I’m gonna look for roles and people and leaders who see in me things that I don’t see in myself for the better, who help me find paths of learning, find paths of growth, find paths of opportunity. If I don’t find those, I need to create the environment to move. And I’ve done that in my career.

Christoff Poppe [00:14:53]:
And as a leader, following that, I tried to replicate that behavior. Now in my practice, I’m working to define that untrapping potential, what I call it, which is helping leaders find the untapped opportunities with their teams, and their team members specifically. You can think about this either, you know, Zach Mercurio talking about mattering or Pat Lencioni type talking about 6 Types of Working Genius. There’s a little bit of both. There’s a little bit of people feeling seen, heard, purpose, and then shifting, similar to the story that I shared about Pablo, shifting people’s talents to the things that bring them joy and actually drive better outcomes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:35]:
And you say on this that there’s a key distinction that talent development is abstract and succession planning is personal. Tell me about that distinction.

Christoff Poppe [00:15:45]:
So as we talk about succession planning, many people, many times people think about, “Okay, I gotta develop a bench. So what processes, what training, what initiatives do I have to create?” And usually this is an HR function, and it’s great. It lifts the organization. You know, a 9-box exercise or things like that will help you identify structural gaps that you have around training the team or developing the team forward. That’s what I call talent development. In my definition of succession planning, I’m talking about my team, and it’s personal. It’s me as a leader and my team members’ abilities, work, goals, and aspirations. And as a leader, navigating through that and pulling that to drive work towards that.

Christoff Poppe [00:16:33]:
Many times we say, well, HR doesn’t help me, or it’s not within my purview. I would challenge that perspective to say there’s many things, even in very large organizations, that we can do to give people opportunities to work in cross-functional teams or to have exposure to our, our own leader, to try something new, to approach things different. I mean, in the current environment of constant change, if we think a little bit out of the box, I’m sure we will find things that will provide people the opportunity to test new talents or find new skills without necessarily relying on corporate-wide talent development, training, etc. And in that path, I feel like we will find our successor. And if not, at least we will find their success, and they will find their success. It might not be within our team, but we’ve unlocked that. We’ve created that opportunity for them to be successful elsewhere.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:26]:
Yeah, indeed. And I think that this speaks to something you said earlier about untrapping, like untrapping potential that— and you write on this: Succession planning is a leader’s tool for untrapping one person, one role, one timeline at a time. And that it really does strike me the personal nature of this. It’s not just talent development more broadly, which to your point, very important and strategy, but it is, it really does come down to the personal side of it?

Christoff Poppe [00:17:59]:
It doesn’t, doesn’t every leadership aspect ultimately come to the personal side of things? I think at the best level of performance, the team coalesces on a level of trust and a level of commitment that is driven by their own individual desires and their own individual aspirations. And when you package that as a leader and the team together towards that, that’s where you’re, you’re moving forward as a team. So I see this as very personal.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:24]:
And you make the point that succession planning is both selfish and selfless. And I think that that’s a really realistic way to look at this, right? Like, oftentimes, we get in a situation as a leader, we’re like, “Okay, I need to find, I mean, going back to your example, the VP of sales, like if I’m gonna get out of this role and move my career forward, I’m gonna need to find my replacement and develop that person and also demonstrate to others that they’re ready”. There’s a selfishness aspect of that, of course, but there’s also a selfless part of this too. How do they fit together?

Christoff Poppe [00:18:58]:
Yeah, so usually when I challenge some leaders, around how are you developing your successor, and what commitments can you make to yourself about developing your succession, usually there’s a rub. They’re committed to developing their successor, but I’m not telling them. There’s a commitment to developing their successor, but I’m not telling my boss. There’s a commitment to developing a successor, but I’m not talking to others about it. And I challenge that to say: what level of commitment is this? And when you go through their thinking, it’s really about, I don’t have certainty about my own role. Well, that’s probably part of why things are holding you back. If you feel like you’re maybe not hostage, using the term that I used before, but if you feel like you don’t have a growth path in your role, you need to develop your own succession planning, if your leader is not developing it for yourself.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:47]:
Hmm.

Christoff Poppe [00:19:48]:
So this is thinking about succession planning in both levels, your own and others. ‘Cause if you don’t get outta the way, people are not gonna grow. But if you don’t get outta the way, you are not gonna grow. So there’s a little bit of selfishness of getting out of the way for you to be able to grow. When I talk about selfless, this has to do more around we have to give people opportunities to lead because a lot of folks don’t wanna get into leadership, folks. The generation that I was part of, I wanted to grow, I wanted to learn, I wanted to have greater impact, I wanted to earn more money and have more opportunity. And my career growth was the path towards that. Today there’s so many other paths available, and then there are other priorities for younger generations, and that’s awesome.

Christoff Poppe [00:20:31]:
We need to give people exposure to these leadership opportunities so they can appreciate the value of it and at the same time develop the skills for it. And that’s where I think the selfless part comes in: the coaching, the mentoring, the challenging, the creating, helping them get out of their own frame of reference of what they’re good at and what they’re not good at by exposing them to other opportunities.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:55]:
I think this is something I’ve learned a ton. I shouldn’t say I think, I know this is something I’ve learned a ton from you in the recent past because, of course, you’re almost always working with people at the very top of their organization. And it’s interesting how often CEOs are telling you that we have a lot of employees who are not necessarily looking for moving up, not looking for getting into my role, or not looking to become an executive. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, as you articulated beautifully. And one of those reasons is there’s sometimes just— they don’t see the opportunity, and they don’t see the perspective of what’s there and the selflessness of being able to provide that, to offer that, to be able to untrap potential for people. Some of them may go on to then see the opportunity and move into those roles. But even those who don’t, it gives them a perspective they didn’t have. It helps them to take on whatever’s next for them in their own careers.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:55]:
And by the way, they tend to stick around more. I mean, one of the things that I thought was really interesting from the DDI research is when, especially when you think about high-performing employees, if they’re not getting challenged and not getting developed and not getting attention, they’re gone. I mean, so often they jump ship really quickly.

Christoff Poppe [00:22:15]:
That’s exactly right. And the mindset is developing them for something that will come. And people kind of want leaders and CEOs, in general, think about what’s happening in the next 2 to 3 years. I don’t know that I’m gonna have this growth path to be able to promise. The challenge is they don’t invest in it to drive towards it. You’ve gotta unlock that catch-22 somehow: either create the opportunities if you can invest in it, and if not, just hope it’ll happen. Build it, and they’ll come. And with all the changes happening, clearly there’s going to be opportunities for growth and development and change of roles.

Christoff Poppe [00:22:52]:
And what we believe, the org structure being today is probably going to be different 10 years from now. So let it roll is a little bit of the mindset. Things will unpack. And if that process, someone perceives that they’re going to be promoted to a role that you later don’t necessarily have available to them, they have 2 choices at that point. Go somewhere else to pursue that role. Yes, that’s the risk. But sometimes those people stick around because they have so much loyalty around the investment you’ve made, how you’ve made them identify and feel themselves. And the reality is you can create opportunities without a title.

Christoff Poppe [00:23:28]:
You can create opportunities with other mechanisms that may not just be the org chart. And actually, that is very much in line with how the younger generations think. Don’t give me the title, give me the opportunity, give me the experiences, give me the learnings and the lessons.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:43]:
Yeah, I think a lot of us traditionally, have thought about setting someone up for a specific role and even talking to them about it in advance, or taking on a specific title or position or promotion. And what I’m hearing you say, I think, is the distinction here is that rather than thinking about it as an exact role, exact title, exact position, what are the skills, the opportunities, the development that you can do to challenge someone to grow and to be learning and to be experiencing new things? And yeah, some of those people are going to leave, and they’re going to move on to other things. But also some of those people are going to stay and see the investment you’re making and the relationship you’re building and the time you’re putting into that. And then we’ll be ready and have built a relationship with you, your organization, for whatever role that we need in the future based on all the change in the world, emerges. It’s a subtle shift in a way, but I think it’s a significant one.

Christoff Poppe [00:24:42]:
Yes. And interestingly enough, there’s more opportunities of those, right? Because there’s one boss, quote unquote, boss role. But if we look at it from a different perspective, especially today, where teams are so interrelated and need to cross-collaborate. There’s so many opportunities to show leadership without title, to develop leadership skills without title around managing projects, managing tests, trials, activities, research, interns, you name it. The list can be extremely long if you start thinking about this as a development of skills rather than developing to a job.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:19]:
All right, you have 3 critical questions for leaders to ask of themselves when they’re in this zone of thinking about, “Okay, how do I find the person who’s going to replace me?” And I think I’d love to look at all 3 of these and also look at, like, where do we tend to skip as leaders a lot of the time? The first question you say is to ask of oneself, thinking about this is, what are the future needs of the business, the organization, the industry, and your team? What’s important about starting there?

Christoff Poppe [00:25:53]:
There are 2 elements I think that are very valuable in that question. It forces us to get out of today, now, me, and it puts us in a hypothetical, theoretical environment of the future. We don’t know what the future will be, but we do have a pretty good feel as to how we feel about what the future will be. And there’s a lot of uncertainties around it, but certainly we can describe what that future looks like, what our team is gonna perform, or what we believe it will. Now, it may not be within all of our control to make that determination, but if we’re leading a team that has some degree of responsibility and have been doing this for a while and are successful at that role, we probably understand the winds in the industry, the trends of where they’re going, to have some hypothesis around where things are going. The second benefit, in addition to taking a step back, away from the today and the current box and my skills, the other ability of asking this question this way is it shifts our brain to think about opportunities, not challenges. It makes us think about a hypothetical that, all of a sudden possibilities open up that allow us to construct around that. So shifting the current crisis, the current problem, the current reality to those of the future, I think is very effective to start mapping out options that we didn’t think of before.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:07]:
Before I read question 2 and 3, I’m going to repeat question 1 again, because one of the other things you notice a ton is that people miss this question. They skip it entirely. And so I’ll say it again. What are the future needs of the business, the organization, the industry, and your team? What is it that causes people to miss that question?

Christoff Poppe [00:27:27]:
They go straight to the last question, which is the who. I need to fill this role, who’s going to replace me? Who is the person? Oh, this is the natural person. Well, but then this person doesn’t have this, and this person doesn’t have that, and this person— And now we’ve just pigeonholed ourselves to one path that doesn’t look possible, or one path that looks possible, and we’re doubling investing in that one and missing out on creating opportunities for other. I feel like the who answers these first 2 questions rather than the who is the first answer to, I need to develop a successor.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:02]:
You’ve heard me say before, role first, person second, and oftentimes it’s so tempting, especially when you’re in the midst of a transition yourself or for the organization, or planning to think like, okay, “Who can I get into this role? And what does that development path look like?” And we don’t stop first to think of, well, wait a second, what does the organization actually need? And sometimes there is a person that’s a clear answer to that. But if you start with what does the organization need, what’s the role first? Then you begin from a really healthier standpoint, of thinking about not falling into that mini-me trap like we were talking about earlier. Which leads to the second question, which is, what knowledge do you have that’s critical and needs to live beyond you? What’s significant about that?

Christoff Poppe [00:28:51]:
I purposely phrased this question this way to help pull what, what do I bring in of tangible aspects that drive results here that needs to continue? There are many things that I’m bringing forward that may not need to continue. My style, my way of thinking, the way I run meetings, the way I engage with customers, or the customers I like to hang out with, talking about the VP sales. Those things can stay in the past, but there are certain things that you, as the leader of this group, have developed as skills or knowledge that, in this new future state that we described in question 1, are necessary to carry forward. That gives you a roadmap of what are the things that you need to start working on, on developing your team. It starts laying the foundation of your absence. What’s the void that needs to be filled? Rather than the mini-me concept that we discussed before?

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:45]:
Yeah. And then of course, that leads to the 3rd question, which is the obvious one, the who, that is where a lot of people start. By thinking through responding to spending time just examining the first 2 questions, how does that make the who question different and the answer to that question different, versus just beginning with who?

Christoff Poppe [00:30:07]:
Yeah, it’s very interesting. And you put the finger right in it. If those 2 questions lead, the who is a multiple-member item. People start giving you multiple names.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:20]:
Hmm.

Christoff Poppe [00:30:21]:
And when I, when I go back and ask who you would’ve given me, if we started with who, they probably would’ve given me one or none. There’s something about asking the who following this structure that allows people to see things beyond the constraints they see themselves in the, in the succession conversation. Then when we start laying this out into more future, and more critical needs, all of a sudden new paths open up as not people who are ready, and we can touch on that as well, not people who are ready to take the role, but people who can develop towards it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:58]:
And then that’s where you do the untrapping potential, right? And spend the time and resources there, and it becomes the personal connection with where they go next.

Christoff Poppe [00:31:07]:
Exactly.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:08]:
3 critical questions. I’ll say them again. First one: What are the future needs of the business, the organization, the industry, and your team? Secondly, what knowledge do you have that’s critical and needs to live beyond you? And then, of course, the third one: the who. And like you said, if you do a good job of really thinking through those first 2 questions, then the who becomes a much richer, a much more diverse… Opportunities for lots of different paths versus just thinking about one individual.

Christoff Poppe [00:31:36]:
That’s right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:37]:
Christoff, I so appreciate you sharing this. Okay, so I’ve got a couple of invitations for folks. Christoff’s website’s at halfofeight.com, and we’ve got a fun invitation for you. One is to go there if this would be helpful on getting more resources from Christoff. Christoff’s very much in our inner circle here in the Coaching for Leaders world as one of our fellows, and we thought it’d be fun that if you’ve heard something from this conversation that you put into practice and tried out, we’d love to know what it is. So I’d love to invite you to connect with Christoff on LinkedIn and connect with me, by the way, if you’re not already, and send us a note of which thing you put into practice from this conversation. Maybe it was running through the 3 questions, maybe it was thinking about avoiding that mini-me trap.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:23]:
We’d love to know and send us a message, and we’ll respond because we’d love to hear what it is that is working for you coming out of this conversation. And Christoff, I’ll additionally make the invitation that Christoff’s done some incredible work of helping coach folks within our community and also does an amazing job of helping leaders who are carrying too much in driving change and realizing there’s a need to do better in the way of their people. And if you find yourself at this place of trying to figure out who’s that best person to replace you, I think it’s a great opportunity to— engage in a conversation with him. So please reach out directly if that is you right now. Christoff, all that’s going to be in the notes. I have one last question for you. You know, I’m going to ask you what you changed your mind on. So as you’ve been doing this work and moving from being an executive leader to now being very much a mentor, a coach, a guide for so many other leaders, in the last year or two, what have you changed your mind on?

Christoff Poppe [00:33:21]:
So what came to mind as I was thinking about this question, expecting the question, and valuing the opportunity to answer it. It actually stems from a conversation that happened within the Coaching for Leaders community. We were at an expert chat with Margaret Abrams, and I raised the question, this question we were having about how can we create, as leaders, opportunities for people that don’t see leadership as part of their path as an opportunity to develop more leaders in the future, right? 6% of people see themselves in a leadership role in the future. That’s that’s not enough for the leadership responsibilities we have ahead. And, in the conversation, where I landed and where I was thinking around is exposing people to the opportunity and realizing the rewards and the benefits and the sense of responsibility and value of helping others, right? Kind of tying into that emotional bond that gets created between a leader and their team, driving jointly towards outcomes. And Jess Britt, another fellow in the room, brought another point of view that I think we— is not part of the conversation, and it has to be. And I’m challenging the people I work with around it, especially when they talk about their talent pipeline. I’m not gonna do justice to Jess’s point, but what came to me was there’s something that comes out in the research around why people don’t want leadership roles, and it has to do with the baggage that is associated with it.

Christoff Poppe [00:34:46]:
The time, the hours, the work-life balance, the politics, the tough decisions that need to be made without significant explanation. So it led me down this path of thinking: how can we make leadership roles less burdensome in these aspects? How can we remove some of these frictions? Maybe distribute those responsibilities across the team. We don’t have to be 24/7 as leaders. Maybe the team takes responsibility of covering weekends if they’re needed for the business, or things like that, managing the politics in a way that creates more transparency. All of these things create friction for people to move into the new roles. And if we start looking at it from the lens of how do we make the roles more attractive, not on pay, not on rewards, but actually removing some of the friction that is creating the resistance, could we open up this path for more folks to wanna be in leadership roles? And get the benefit of their knowledge, their experience for others.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:45]:
It’s a big shift, and it’s a reality of leadership that we’re all facing, especially thinking about finding the person who’s going to take the organization into the next season. So thank you so much for sharing your perspective with us. I so appreciate it.

Christoff Poppe [00:35:59]:
And thank you to Jess, who triggered that thought.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:01]:
Christoff Poppe is the author of Succession Planning: A Key to Outperforming Your Competition. The article is on his website at halfofeight.com. We’re going to link to it. A ton more in the article we didn’t talk about in this conversation. Christoff, thanks as always for your work, and thanks for serving as one of our fellows. I so appreciate it.

Christoff Poppe [00:36:16]:
What a privilege, Dave. Thank you so much.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:24]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 other episodes I’d recommend. One of them is episode 610: How to Help Team Members Find the Right Work. Patrick Lencioni was my guest on that episode. Pat and I talked about his Working Genius model in that conversation, a very helpful model that many folks in our community have used to answer the question: how do you get the person sitting in the right seat in your organization? That famous quote from Good to Great years ago from Jim Collins invited us all to get the right people on the bus. And Pat follows that up with saying, ” That’s the first step. But secondly, how do you make sure they’re sitting in the right seat?” The Working Genius model is a wonderful tool to help you do that. Episode 610: Pat and I talk in detail about the model and how you can get started with it. Also recommended: episode 733, The Way to Notice People Better.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:10]:
Zach Mercurio was my guest on that episode. We talked about the importance of mattering. Yes, of course, it’s important what salary people get. Yes, of course, the benefits package is important. Yes, of course, it is critical that their interests line up with their work. But ultimately, do they feel like they matter? Do they actually matter in your organization? You heard elements of that in what Christoff encouraged us to be thinking about and asking about in this conversation. Zach’s work, a wonderful complement to that episode 733 for that. And then finally, I’d recommend an episode that’s part of Coaching for Leaders Plus, Dave’s Journal: A Simple Start for Succession Planning.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:44]:
Every single week, I’m writing a journal entry. I’m now also airing those entries on a members-only podcast feed, Dave’s Journal. It is one of the many resources inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. And if you’d like to get access to that, plus many other episodes and entries, coachingforleaders.plus is where to go. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Next Monday, I’m welcoming back Matt Abrahams to the show. He’s the host of the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:14]:
Matt and I are going to be having a conversation about how to get people behind your ideas, an important conversation. Join me for that with Matt. Have a great week, and see you back Monday.