Wanda T. Wallace is a highly sought-after expert in leadership development. With a unique background as a reformed academic, Wanda focuses on the practical application of her knowledge, ensuring her clients experience tangible results. Her approachable and candid style makes her a favorite among those she coaches, pushing them to think differently and grow in their roles. As a skilled facilitator and speaker, Wanda shares her insights on the importance of building relationships and understanding the value of team members. Her dedication to helping individuals move beyond their expertise has earned her a reputation as a true leader in her field.
In this episode, Jason and Wanda discuss:
- Discover the significance of blending in-depth knowledge with a wide-ranging outlook in leadership roles
- Uncover the hidden benefits of utilizing sponsors, mentors, and advisors for holistic growth in life and career
- Grasp the impact of honest feedback and the advantage of being prepared to receive it
- Learn the art of overcoming delegation challenges to unleash the true potential of your team
- Recognize the essence of forging strong connections and appreciating the worth of each team member
Key Takeaways:
- Discern the pivotal balance of profound proficiency and far-reaching perspectives in spearheading success.
- Delve into the persuasive influence of sponsors, mentors, and advisors in your ongoing growth journey
- Adopt the transformative potential of open feedback and the significance of being primed for it
- Surpass the hurdles of work delegation and reveal the innate capabilities of your team
- Acknowledge the imperative need for nurturing bonds and fathom the importance of your team members
“No one wants to give up their expertise, their ability to solve the problem, to be the hero, their credibility, because that's where they see their value.”” – Wanda T. Wallace.
Connect with Wanda T. Wallace:
Connect with Steve and Jason:
- LinkedIn: Jason or Steve
- Website Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
- Email: grow@rewireinc.com
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Listen to the podcast here
Wanda T. Wallace - You Can’t Know It All
I've got a special guest with us. We have all kinds of guests that run past my desk, and this one caught my attention. Wanda Wallace, I'll tell you, not only is she an author of this cool book that I'm sure we're going to get into, but she's the Managing Partner of Leadership Forum. She coaches, she facilitates, she speaks, she does all kinds of things. I can tell you from reading her book that we are going to have a wide-ranging and amazing conversation. Wanda, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Jason.
We're going to start at a place that, I don't know if you're expecting this or not. You're doing the book tour thing right now and you're doing a lot of these types of interviews. I get that they run together. I'd like to take a beat with you and ask you something that's not in the book. We didn't even talk about prerecorded. As you and I engage each other, Wanda, what is something that you're grateful for?
Friends. Isn't that what everybody says? Friends and help, but truly, and occasionally I see, Jason, I'm grateful for my clients. If I'm making a joke for the day, I say, “I'm grateful for really poor managers who can because I can’t be employed.”
We've asked that question over 150 times now. We get the answers that we get. They're not all the same. That's what I love about it. Friends, health, clients, poor managers. I like that one. That's an especially good one. Wanda, you've got some experience behind you that is unique. One of the things that I like to do, I can read your bio out loud. We even used to do that sometimes in the beginning when we started our show.
Now, what we found is our guests can tell something about themselves that might not be in your written bio. I know when I'm tuning into a show and I read about a guest, I'm like, “What does this person have for me? Why am I even reading this person?” I'd love to just for our audience to hear who the heck is Wanda, and why are we reading about you.
I describe myself as a reformed academic, meaning I started my career as an academic, a professor, associate dean at some point. Quite honestly, I got frustrated with the academic world because it wasn't addressing the problems my clients in corporations were facing. I say reformed because I care about the science, I care about that we have accurate data, but I care more about the application. If we can't turn it into a practical, what's the point?
Leadership: "I care more about the application. If we can't turn it into something practical, what's the point?"
The second thing is what my clients all say about me. I have a fairly candid style, and when I'm working with people, I'm going to push them. I feel like that's my job. If I'm not pushing you to think about stuff you won't naturally think about or that might be a little bit uncomfortable to think about, then I'm not doing the best job for you. People always say, “Don't work with Wanda if you don't want to hear the truth.”
I like that. That's provocative already. When you talk about a reformed academic, I automatically think back to some of my schools in college and MBA. Some of my best professors were the adjunct ones, the ones who were doing the thing during the day and teaching it at night. It sounds like that's what you are interested in as well. It is not just what the book says, but what's the application of it. The candid piece, without busting any confidentiality piece or anything like that, any type of story that you could tell us about this whole candid piece where maybe you were like, “I'm going to take a chance here, but dang it,” does anything come to mind?
I do that about every day with somebody, one place or another. The one that comes to mind is a guy that I was coaching and he's in a nice position, senior-level position, but he's not getting that next opportunity he wants. He's not being seen as a credible leader at the next level of scale. I said to him, “You can listen to what I'm telling you or skip what I'm telling you.” When we were doing a deep dive on personality and his strengths and weaknesses, his personality and how that left people thinking about him.
I said, “You can ignore me. It's perfectly fine.” He, in particular, wanted to know, “Am I at the peak of my career? Can I go any further?” I said, “If you want to take that next step, you've got to address these issues.” I had to keep pushing and pushing because his notion was to deflect it. “That's how I am. So what? Who cares? What's the big deal here? A bunch of people are like me.” I have to keep coming back to say, “No, there are plenty of people like you, but they're not getting that opportunity.”
I find the same thing, pushing people past that initial deflection, those types of things. That's where the meat is. That's where the good stuff is. Tell me about the book. When I got it in the mail, the color and everything, you did a really good job on that. That's amazing. I dug in and I was like, “There's some neat things in here.” Tell me about the history of it and how it even came to be.
I've been teaching this framework for decades and finally decided maybe I needed to write it, but here's what I was seeing. Way too many people and lots of women, by the way, are functional technical experts. Now, that could be in a function, or it could also be in a business like I'm a market expert or in your industry. I know this real estate segment, or I know this area, this market segment well.
There is deep knowledge and some teams love working for them because there's nothing you would take the manager that the manager can't help you with, teach you about, or know about. There's this nice acceptance that this person knows more than I know, and therefore, they're a fantastic manager as a result.
We develop and learn to lead, usually because of our expertise, because we are in a knowledge economy. Expertise and depth of expertise counts. That is fantastic, until you decide that you're ready for that step beyond your expertise, you're ready for the boss's job. You're at the peak of where you can go and your expertise and then people struggle.
We develop and learn to lead usually because of our expertise because we are in a knowledge economy.
Women don't take those next big risks. Lots of people struggle. IT professionals struggle, engineers, marketing people, legal, everybody struggles with that next step. They shouldn't have to struggle. They just need to understand what the next step is about. What it requires to succeed, how you go about learning it, how you practice it, and make it transparent. We have just assumed people would figure it out.
You said something that I observe often. I'm going to say it a little bit differently than you did, Wanda. I want to make sure I'm on the right track, but I want to get to a specific question. Part of what I heard you say was the high-productivity individual contributor does a good job. He or she gets noticed and then promoted and maybe even promoted into a leadership capacity. Guess what? Leadership skills aren't the same as when I was really good as an individual contributor. They're out of their element and sometimes way out of their element. Let's speak to that first. First of all, did I hear you right?
That's true, but I want to go beyond that. I'm talking to the people who've already made the move from individual contributors to leaders and are doing a very good job of it. They figured out how to lead. The basis of their leadership is that they have credibility with the team because of their depth of knowledge. When the team brings them a problem, they drill deeply right to the bottom of it to solve it, often solving it for the team. They're great coaches on the technical side frequently, and everybody loves them. They're wonderful. They control the quality and the risk. It's great.
They're already leading and in some cases, Jason, leading at a massive scale. If you think about somebody I'm working with at the moment who's the head of audit for a big internal audit for a big global company, they're leading as an expert, though. It's that next phase when you want to not lose the expertise, but you want to take the next step.
I'm going to give you a response that I hear often from our clients and I'm sure you do too. This is probably where the book came from. This is the cliché saying, “Wanda, if I want it done right, I'll just do it myself because nobody knows what I know, nobody can do it like me, or they can't do it as fast as I can. That's the value that I bring to the table because I have the know-how.” What do you say to that? Walk me through some of that.
I hear that all the time. It is probably true from everybody who says it to me that nobody's going to do it now as fast as you can do it. My first retort is if you want to sit in this seat and this position for the rest of your career, fine. Stay that way. The question is, are you then going to be happy ten years from now when somebody, junior and perhaps less experienced is promoted over you? It's a choice. I have no problem with people saying, “I love this area of expertise and I'm not giving it up and I want to be the world's best in this.” Fantastic, but know the bargain you're trading. That's what I say.
You can always tell if it's time for you to begin to move beyond your expertise because you will hear managers and superiors saying, “We want you to create more leverage.” Meaning we want you to get more out of the team than you can do yourself. That's the clue, that's the hint. It's time for you to begin to think about moving, not giving up, and adding to, so you're getting more leverage from your team.
You're hitting on some good stuff. You've got a term in your book called Spanning Leadership. I think this is a good segue of what you just said into defining that and then talking about that a little bit. We've gone from the leader you said is doing a good job, but it's mostly because of their depth of knowledge and technical aspect of what they want to do, and it can put a ceiling on them. You ask that tough question. Talk to me now about spanning leadership and how that comes into play with what you're talking about right now.
Everybody here is spanning leadership and they think general management, and I'm on a personal mission to kill the word general management. I don't think it's applicable anymore. General management implies that if I have leadership skills, I can drop into any industry, place, anywhere without knowledge about that industry and lead effectively. Your audience would say, “No way can somebody drop into our world without some content knowledge about our business.” It’s not going to happen.
I want to get rid of general and I want to say the point is now, how do I balance my depth of expertise and my ability to span across domains for which I am not an expert? I step up to running, let's say, an office, for example. I may never have led IT, but suddenly, IT is coming to me for budget decisions, for program decisions, and I got to make those decisions. That's my job. How do I lead in that space where I can't drill deeply?” That's spanning leadership style.
I've got 37 questions based on what you said. I'm not going to ask you all 37, by the way. We don't have time for that, but I'm going to ask you a few. If somebody gets this spanning leadership, the way that you described it, not general, I got that you could drop them in a leadership role in mortgage and real estate, forestry industry or a soccer team and they would be successful. First of all, do I have that part?
I don't think you can because I think it's a combination of the expertise and the spanning capabilities that the ideal leader has some knowledge in some places and this ability to go across domains. You would not put somebody in soccer unless they had some experience in sports, some understanding about even that functional role in a sports area.
An ideal leader possesses both expertise in specific areas and the ability to navigate different domains.
Is there one aspect, the technical piece or the experiential piece versus the spanning piece, that's more important than the other?
I don't think so. I think it depends upon where you're sitting in your company. What I would want people to say is to have conversations with your managers and your superiors about how much time should I, at this point, given who's on my team, given where we are as a company, given my experience, should I be dedicating to the drill deeply, the expertise, and how much time should I be dedicating to the spanning capability?
Let me give you an example. Financial services story. A senior woman in financial services has just been given a global team for the first time. She's led teams, but 3s and 4s. Now, she has a counterpart in London and a counterpart in Hong Kong who are going to report to her and each of those people has a team. She's going to lead the entire group. I said to her boss's boss, “How much time does she spend in the classic leading management and how much time should she spend doing her day job, which is a deep technical job?”
He said, “Wanda, if she gives up her day job and spends all our time on leading, we and our clients will not thank her because we still need that deep technical expertise. I want her to spend 30% of her time leading, motivating, inspiring, coordinating, and spanning those groups but 70% of her time drilling deeply into her content knowledge because that's where she's going to make money for us.” 70/30, that's what you got to get to. Where do I need to be? Where's the opportunity, given who I have on the team?
That 70/30 might be a different percentage depending on what the group is, what the industry is, and what the situation at hand is. That's the spanning piece. I'm assuming your defined spanning leader can accordion based on the project at hand and the team at hand.
Most people think that I should become span 100% and give up my expertise. No one's going to thank you for that. That's not a good move now. People got worried while I was moving into this spanning space and now I've been dragged back into deep expertise that accordion nature is the nature of most jobs. After you've established yourself, I lost part of the team, or there's a crisis, I got to drill back down.
You talked about when that leader gets to a certain level, really leveraging your people. I want you to talk about that a little bit. Either a specific example or we hear leverage a lot also like “I can't motivate my team. I can't have them get to the next level.” This idea of leverage. I want you to talk around that a little bit or even give a specific story that may ring true to our audience.
I swear the number one thing is no one wants to give up their expertise, their ability to solve the problem, to be the hero, their credibility because that's where they see their value. That's where they feel unique and can't be sustainable. Before you're ever going to get comfortable going to the spanning space, you've got to figure out the value you add in a spanning role. It's easy to see the value in my expertise role. How do I see the value I bring to the organization and the team in my spanning role? Until you've defined that, no one, and we’ll be talking all day long, but they're not going to give up and create leverage. If I create leverage, I'm just making myself expendable. I created another expert.
It's okay to say no to this. Do you have an example that comes to mind, of what you just said that number one thing about not being the hero myself and giving that up? I resonate with that, by the way, not to mention a lot of our clients.
I have about 1,000 stories. This is in the financial services area. Two companies have merged. That means that the leadership now has to elevate their performance because the team is twice the size it was before the merger, a classic thing. One guy in particular is going to step up to what was his boss's job as the boss steps up to the next level. He has been a deep expert in his market, in the sales area. A deep expert understands it, knows it, and loves solving problems. It makes him feel good to solve problems.
He's struggling stopping solving those problems, letting his team step up their own game and solve those problems. Even though they may be slower at it than he would and even though they regularly come and say, “Boss, what do we do?” He wants to jump in and solve. For example, there's a need to make a hire. I'm going through with him and he's like, “I don't have time for this and I don't have time for that.” It's like, “Hold on. Why are you doing all these details? Get out of them. Somebody else does the details. Your value add is being able to see where this person can add value to the team, integrating within the team, and selling that to your peers, your boss, and your boss’ peers.”
That's real life, that's right now. People can resonate with that. Not easy to do, by the way. Very scary. How's this person doing?
He’s going to struggle with it. He is making steps.
You mentioned adding value and that was your story was one example of adding value to your team. I know there's a big part in your book about how you leverage and how you add value to your team. Team building is a cliché-ish thing, but it adds value. The leaders that are out there, if I were to ask the question, I know this is on the spot, but Wanda, what's the number one thing that I can do to add value to my team?
The number one thing, give good feedback. That means you take the time to prepare it, you think about it, that is a fabulous way of adding enormous value. If you can't give good feedback, then you're not going to be able to coach, to develop, or to have accountability. That is a fundamental skill. Nobody loves giving difficult feedback, but you have to learn to do it. It's a skill.
If you can't give good feedback, then you're not going to be able to coach. You're not going to be able to develop. You're not going to be able to have accountability.
Second number thing, everybody who works for you wants to know how to move their career forward. You're not supposed to have the answer for it, but you have a broad network that you can introduce people to help them raise their visibility, help them make connections, and be the broker for expanding your team's network.
Now that I asked a question about the person that I, as the leader, am leading, I'm going to go the other way and have the leader look up. Chapter eight of your book was my favorite chapter because you mentioned something called the board of directors. That's something that I know that I've been the beneficiary of the team of people that I have around me.
I've been extremely fortunate my entire life. Whether I'm thinking about a particular transition, I've got my board of directors that I go to and ask different questions of. Talk me through that because you’ve got a very specific way and you've got different names for the people on the board. Walk me through what you mean by that.
One of the problems when we say the board of directors is we tend to think about those directors as having loose affiliations or a particular content knowledge. That's a great thing. There are moments in your career when you need somebody who's going to go to bat for you. They're going to burn their political capital to go to bat for you, to find a position to advocate for you for an opportunity.
I call those sponsors. The’'re people that have invested in you and you have invested in them. I’'s not a one-way relationship. Most people think the sponsor just gives, but i’'s not. ’'m going to invest my time and truly back you, then you better be there for me, too. I’'s a quid pro quo relationship and i’'s unique. It does’'t come because somebody asked. It comes because w’'ve worked together and we understand.
Tha’'s a sponsor. That means I have to invest in the relationship pretty deeply and I have to take risks with that relationship. I have to be honest in that relationship. Moving down from sponsor is a thing I call advocate. The one that most people miss, I need a lot of people who will say, “Wand’'s great when asked.”
Somebody says, “Can you see Wanda in this role?” “Absolutely, she's great. Wanda's been fabulous with my team.” Those are not people going to burn their political capital. When asked, they have wonderful things to say about me. I need those advocates if I'm going to step up my game. I also need to go to those advocates and say, “What's working about what my team is doing? What do you wish would change about what my team is doing?” You've invested in their success but not as much in the sponsor’s success.
Moving down from advocate is a thing called a mentor. People get this one mixed up. I believe a mentor can't be assigned. A mentor is a place where there is a natural chemistry in the relationship. I will be honest with a mentor. If I don't ask a mentor for help with something I'm struggling with, then that mentor can't help me very much. We can talk about the strategy and options, but if you're not being honest with a mentor, you're not getting much out of it. Your current boss cannot be an effective mentor. Your current boss gives you good advice is being a good boss.
They have a vested interest in it. It's their job. Now, you may leave that boss and they may become a mentor, but they have a vested interest in what you do and don't do, so they can't be neutral. You need somebody out of the chain of command that you can say, “I'm struggling with this. Help me understand what I can do about it.” That's what a mentor does.
The lowest level is an advisor. When people say the board of directors, they too often feel like advisors. You need advisors too, but advisors are people you'd go to once, twice, maybe three times, and ask for their opinion. You're not going to have a huge investment in them. They may come, they may go. They're people you admire. That's great.
They're good for one area, perhaps, but they're not the people that are going to tell you, “Wanda, you got this wrong.” You got to see it differently, like a mentor or a sponsor would do. They're not going to go to bat for you. They're just going to tell you their opinion. Most of the time, when you sign up for a mentoring program, what you're doing is getting assigned an advisor. We hope that can develop to a company.
Somebody can move up the ladder. The definition of that is so good because yours is a board of directors, but I think of the board of advisors, if you have that advisory role, it's better than nothing, for sure. Those other roles, the way that you describe mentor, advocate, sponsor, that is something. I took a bunch of notes on it. I wrote all over your book, by the way. Just saying that's what I'm doing. Those four categories, if you're tuning in right now and you think, “I got a bunch of advisors, I have a bunch of people that I go to, but that sponsor thing sounds cool. I don't have anybody like that.”
It doesn't just you ask somebody and it happens. No, there's some time investment in these people and there's some with sponsors. There's different things that happen with those different levels. Thanks for going through that. That's so good. Wanda, we're going to third round of our time together and I wish that wasn't the case, but it is. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you want to make sure that the message conveys who you are to our audience and what a message, a project, or anything like that that we haven't talked about yet?
There's a zillion of those. There's always something going on. Most intrigued at the moment, everybody is focused on how we build strong teams. I know there's a ton of research out there, but I don't think we've understood the steps well enough to take a team from a group of people who exchange information to a group of people who do something extraordinary. Darren Overfield and I are chasing this one. We got some interesting ideas.
Leadership: Everybody is focused on how to build strong teams. We have not understood the steps needed to transform a team from a group of people exchanging information to a group that really does something extraordinary.
I can tell by your body language and your smile that that is something that you're truly excited about. There's a lot of people that probably want to talk about that. What I want to talk about is if you haven't read this book, You Can't Know It All by Wanda Wallace, I'm suggesting it. There are even some cards that come along with it that you've got. I love that. That can sit on the corner of your desk and be like little reminders for people. This conversation has been super helpful. Wanda, thank you for your time. I hope that we come into contact again and that our paths cross. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jason. Great talking to you. Good conversation.
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This interview with Wanda Wallace was good. She talked about being incredibly candid with people and how that's helpful. That was another reminder. No beating around the bush, no sugarcoating things, just being candid with people. Giving good feedback as a leader. She said that's one of the main things to great leadership and spanning leadership is to give good feedback to your people, not easy. Part of her definition of good feedback was the idea of preparing ahead of time for the feedback.
I see leaders who are guilty of maybe not preparing ahead of time for good feedback. That's how we help our team. I can't get away from the insight of the board of directors, including four distinct people, sponsors, advocates, mentors, and advisors. She defined all of those. It was an insight for me to think I have a bunch of advisors and I have a few mentors. I have some advocates and sponsors, but I need to think about that some more. If you're tuning in, as we always say at the end of every episode, it's not so much what caught me and what struck me or what my insights were from Wanda Wallace's interview, but what were your insights?
Important Links
- Wanda Wallace
- Leadership Forum
- You Can't Know It All
- https://www.Instagram.com/wandatwallace/
- https://www.Facebook.com/WallaceOutoftheComfortZone/?ref=bookmarks
- Wanda.Wallace@Leadership-Forum.com
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/RewireJason
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/Steve-Scanlon-Lizard
- Grow@RewireInc.com
