Nobody Believes You: Building Your Capability as a Leader S5 EP2

In the second episode of Season 5, Jenni discusses the practice of capability as a crucial component of credible leadership. She explores the definition of capability, the chaos that ensues from its absence, and draws from her professional experiences to illustrate its impact on organisational credibility.

Jenni outlines three key areas to build capability in leadership: industry knowledge, action-taking, and respect. She also touches on the challenges of demonstrating leadership capability without prior experience and emphasises the importance of continuous learning and mutual respect in effective leadership.

Episode Timestamps:

When I talk about being capable, I define it as a leader who demonstrates their ability to take action, to move forwards and to have the confidence in their decisions and their abilities to do this. A credible leader is someone who is capable of making a good decision and they’re willing to commit to a path. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

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Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about the practice of credible leadership that is capability. Now, this is one of eight practices of credibility and in this season we’ll be covering each one in each episode. 

In this episode I’ll share with you the definition of capability, the chaos that happens when you don’t have it and I’ll also share a story with you from my own work based on conversations I’ve had with people where capability has come up, has been a reason for people not being seen as credible and the impact that’s had on the organisation.

I’ll also share with you three things that you can do to build capability as a practice in your role as a leader. 

What is capability? 

Well, when I talk about being capable, I define it as a leader who demonstrates their ability to take action, to move

Forwards and to have the confidence in their decisions and their abilities to do this. A credible leader is someone who is capable of making a good decision and they’re willing to commit to a path. Now, capability is about experience in the industry or the role that’s being carried out, and it’s also about respecting those that follow you. 

How do we know if someone is capable, and what does it mean to be capable at your work or indeed capable as a leader? 

Now, this was really interesting for me when I started reading around credibility because capability comes up again and again as something that you need to be able to demonstrate credibility.

But I found it increasingly uncomfortable because I couldn’t understand how someone could be capable as a leader and therefore be seen as credible if they hadn’t been one before. How can you demonstrate that? How can you show that you have any? How can you prove that if you’ve not done it before?

And I didn’t really like that from an inclusion perspective or a diversity perspective. I felt that it was narrowing that pool because I don’t know how you would show capability of something that you that you hadn’t done. Which is why when I talk about capability I’m looking at it in sort of three different ways. It’s that knowledge of the industry that you operate in or the organisation that you work in or the role because I think you can show capability across those three different areas.

Now, it’s also about the respect for those you lead and being respected as a result of that and taking action. So, those are the three things we’ll draw on quite a lot. As we talk about capability as a practice. 

What’s the chaos that happens if you’re not capable?

Well if people don’t believe you’re capable they will disrespect you and that comes with its own set of symptoms around things like avoidance, conflict, challenging relationships and it often means that advice or counsel that you’re giving is ignored. 

Now, I’ve got a really good example of this when I was interviewing Steve who was a director in a professional services organisation and Steve and I were chatting about the challenges of the decentralised structure of communication in their organisation. there were sort of pockets of communication teams dotted around and it was proving to cause some issues. So, I was asking him why it wasn’t working well and almost sort of why it had started in the first place. How have we sort of ended up here?

And as we chatted it came really down to one thing. It was the credibility of the central communication function, and that was based on the capability of the team. Steve said to me, “They just aren’t credible because I don’t believe they’re capable of doing what we need them to do.” 

So, for this organisation, the chaos that this lack of capability was bringing was having quite a huge impact on the entire global team. They’d created structures to offset that lack of capability. So, Steve and I discussed the need to change that structure, bringing it together into sort of one complete function, and Steve was a firm no. So, I asked him why not and he said not with that person leading the team. I just don’t believe they can do the job. 

And that was really difficult because it becomes quite a challenging conversation around capability. You have to try and understand if the team is capable, if the leader of that team is capable and looking at whether there needs to be development for them or just changes in the role and bringing someone else in. 

Now, in this case like I said we’re seeing this sort of sticking plaster over the problem. The structure was created because of the lack of capability and no one was going to change that structure until capability was dealt with. But all of that for Steve was wrapped up in: I just don’t find them credible. I don’t believe that they can do the job, and it’s that belief that we really need in order for people to follow you.

With another client, I was doing some one-to-one consultancy with Linda, and she was struggling with her new boss, really, because they weren’t an expert in her specialist area. She was saying to me, “How are they supposed to be my boss if they don’t understand what I do? They’ve got no expertise in this area at all.” And that’s really interesting because Linda had huge admiration for this person. They’d worked together in the organisation for a number of years, and this sort of change in management structure meant that they were now her boss. But she just couldn’t understand how they could be capable of leading them without that subject matter expertise.

And this comes up again and again, which is why it’s important when we talk about capability that we make the distinction that to lead isn’t to be a subject matter expert. It can’t possibly be because a CEO is not a subject matter expert in every area of an organisation. That’s why we hire directors and leadership teams and individuals. 

But leadership can often be sort of tarnished with this subject matter expert piece, but it’s not about knowledge of a subject. And the problem that we have in a lot of organisations is that we promote people who are subject matter experts into leadership roles without the right support and development. 

And in turn this creates employees who expect and want, or maybe don’t want, but expect their bosses to know all the answers and be experts in what they’re doing. And that contributes to cultures that become quite challenging because everybody’s looking up. So we talk about that sort of being learned helplessness sometimes in organisations.

We’ve learnt to be helpless because we’re looking up at our leader and our boss to help us make those decisions. But actually leadership is quite a different skill, and that’s really important for us to separate out. 

How do we build capability? 

Well, we’ve talked about the three things that capability is about, and that’s the knowledge of the industry or the role. It’s taking action and it’s being respectful. So we have to build skills in these three areas. 

When it comes to experience or knowledge of the industry or role, you can demonstrate that and you can build it in different ways. You might not have experience in that leadership position, but your knowledge of the industry is what makes you the right person for the role. So, if that’s the case, you need to make sure that you’re sharing that experience, the stories, your past, your history, all of those things with those that you lead. 

Now, if you’re taking action you’re getting the job done. You are demonstrating that ability in action. You can’t do it any other way. You have to just do the work. So, as you’re communicating with your teams you should be sharing examples, sharing the things that are happening, the action being taken so that capability is really coming through. 

Now, interestingly when it comes to respect, some leaders really struggle with this because they believe that in a leadership position that respect should just be given. But actually what we want to do is think about leadership as serving those around us. There is a power dynamic there which I delve into in more detail in the book, but this is the thing to be mindful of is you’re there to serve the people that are following you because you’ve got to lead them in a direction. 

So, if you want them to respect you, you have to respect them. You can’t just demand that based on your authority or based on your capability alone just because, well, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, my way is the right way, this is how we do it. Expect people to respect that, it just won’t work. So, we have to extend that respect and spend a bit of time listening to people and making sure that we are focusing on them rather than ourselves.

Now, if your capability is linked to previous experience and not linked to the role, it is going to have to be some investment of time of sharing your experience. We can’t just assume people know what we’ve done, and we also don’t know what people have done just from a CV, so telling the stories is incredibly important. 

So, these are the three things I would be looking at if you want to build capability. 

1. Doing the work

That’s around the taking the action, you know it sounds very easy but you have to have that momentum and to do that with your team, be clear about time frames and expectations. They’ll want to feel that movement, they’ll want to see that things are happening and what the impact is of the things that are being done. So, that’s what they’re looking at from capability, they’re looking to see that actually things are being done. It’s very easy to talk about things, you’ve got to actually do it and they need to see that. 

2. Investing in your skills. 

So, regardless of where your capability might be coming from taking the time to do continuous learning is important for any leader because it helps us grow in lots of different ways. So, and also we can talk about that development, we can talk about the fact we’re investing in our capability, we’re upskilling continuously and we’re doing that with focus and intention based on the role that we’re doing. It’s something I always do every year. And I’ll be quite intentional about where I’m spending my time and investing in my capability either for clients or for just my own development. 

3. Respect

So, making sure that you are giving respect in order to receive it. Like I said, we can automatically assume that we’re going to get it because we’re in a leadership position, but it’s just not the case. It might have been the case.

Sort of 50 years ago that title or that position was enough, but it’s certainly not in the modern workplace. So, we have to earn that respect, it has to go both ways and you have to find ways of being able to show that with people through sort of trust and different things like that. 

Thank you for listening!

Now, if you want to find out more about the research that we developed to create the eight practices, or if you want to take our online credibility gap assessment or find out more about the book, you can access all of that information in the link in the show notes.

In the next episode we will look at the practice of empathy, what it means to be empathetic, why it’s an important part of credibility and how to build it. Thank you for listening and if you haven’t already, please do join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. All of those details are in the show notes.