The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

Moving From Individual Contributor to Visionary Leader with Aaron Trahan

• Jay Johnson

Share episode

Ready to unlock the secrets of effective leadership? Join us on this illuminating episode of Talent Forge where we sit down with Aaron Trahan, a former corporate executive turned executive performance coach. Discover Aaron's unique insights into the often-overlooked challenges of transitioning high-performing individual contributors into leadership roles. With startling statistics from Gallup indicating nearly half of promoted employees underperform within 18 months, Aaron provides essential strategies for successful leadership transitions, including critical mapping exercises to identify and bridge skill gaps.

We dive deep into the power of short-term investments in development and training for long-term organizational success. Aaron shares his wisdom on the necessity of mindset shifts when stepping into leadership roles and the indispensable role of high-quality feedback. Learn why it's crucial for leaders to continuously seek feedback and avoid the trap of complacency, allowing them to grow and adapt to new challenges effectively. The discussion highlights the importance of a solid succession plan and the pitfalls of relying solely on past successes.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of talent development. I am joined today by our guest, Aaron Trahan. Welcome, Aaron, hey Jay.

Aaron Trahan:

Glad to be here, really looking forward to the discussion.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, so why don't we start with a little bit about yourself, aaron? You know, how did you get into the talent development space? What do you do, what do you specialize in? Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Trahan:

I like to start off my introductions by saying I'm kind of a semi-recovering corporate executive and what led me into the you know executive performance coaching slash, talent and performance development space was really being on the other side of the table that I now find myself on as a client.

Aaron Trahan:

So I've got firsthand experience of what it was like to have a tremendous amount of business success as a leader, only to find myself looking in the mirror and answering that big question that Marshall Goldsmith famously published out and that is what got me here is most likely not going to get me there.

Aaron Trahan:

So what am I going to do about it? Right, and that was my entrance into this whole space around needing some better professional support around me to help me see the blind spots that I wasn't able to see, to help me look at problems and solutions from a completely different lens, broaden my perspective and get out of my own way. I think we can kind of all relate to that and, to make a long story short, that's what completely pivoted the trajectory of my career to, if you fast forward, eight or nine years. From that point that I just mentioned, the gravitational pull became too strong for me to not launch my own firm, being able to make that type of impact with leaders, with organizations, on a day in, day out basis, and so that's where I find myself now.

Jay Johnson:

So I love that. Aaron, there's a lot to impact there. I actually want to take a quick step, maybe down a little bit of memory lane here. When you were in that corporate executive position, what was your perspective? How did you view talent development for your organization? One of the things that we're seeing right now, especially kind of an industry trend, is that it seems that leadership has a little bit of a lack of faith and a little bit of a lack of trust in their talent development teams, and part of that is, as we know from statistics nine out of 10 trainings don't actually yield business results. Was that your experience, or could you walk us through like, what was your day-to-day thought process in that leadership position?

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, I would say you know, my experience was probably even a little bit worse than the average. I was in an environment where it was very much sink or swim. It was very much, and even you know me being and becoming a leader at a very early age. I'm pretty confident the leaders at the time said let's just throw the kid in there, hopefully so maybe we find a more permanent replacement for the role, and so it was. So it was one of those cultures that I'm sure your audience has seen over and over again, throwing a high performing individual contributor into a leadership role, hoping that the performance is just going to translate to a team or organizational wide standpoint. And so it lacked the building of the bridge to get there.

Aaron Trahan:

Luckily, I was able to learn how to swim versus sink pretty quickly, which benefited my career. But I noticed a lot of those around me and now that I see it from a completely different lens, I see the perspective and sales is an easy one to pick on where high performing salespeople get elevated to run sales organizations and it's almost like it's a completely different person where they were so talented, performed so well in one area. They operate kind of like a fish out of water in a different area, and so I, like many others, had to navigate those uncharted waters of not having robust, you know, talent and professional development mechanisms that I could rely on. That helped me go from high performing individual contributor to being able to translate that into helping other teams and helping others around me elevate their performance and take that next step and that next leap in their own career. So, yeah, I think I share those thoughts, like many others do is I didn't have a good system to rely on. I had to figure out a lot of things myself.

Jay Johnson:

Well, and it's such a great perspective. And Gallup research actually shows that 48% of employees who are promoted are seen as underperforming within 18 months and if you let that sink in, that is half of the people promoted are seen as underperforming in less than two years. And generally you're getting promoted because you were successful, you were contributing as that individual contributor. But I think that that is such great insight, as when we think of somebody as successful in their position, they're getting promoted. They're getting promoted because they're good at some things, but leading and managing and overseeing is a very different thing than that contribution. So how did you navigate that space? What were some of the things that you did? Personally Cause I think that we can relate that to our audience being, you know, trainers and coaches like what was it that got you to here? Now, rather than you know referencing that Marshall Goldsmith book and I love that book you know what got you there, that you had to develop yourself, and what should a talent development person be offering to help people get there?

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, I'm going to tackle that question from the end first, and I think it all centers around a couple of big questions that can really pierce through the noise to find clarity. And when you think about elevating an individual, whether it's a star performer in one place and they're elevating them where you know they may need a different skill set, they may need new capabilities, they may need new perspectives on how to be a top performer in this new job, at this different role. And so what I think was missing and I see it all the time today, but was certainly missing for me was there. Wasn't that what I kind of refer to as the mapping exercise, like here's where the strengths are, here's where these strengths were leveraged for you to be a high performer in this area, here's where the next set of attributes and strengths that are going to be required to perform well at this next level, where are we, where is the current state on that suite of attributes that's going to make this individual successful at the next level? Because if we don't have that I kind of refer to it as it's like taking out your phone and pulling out the app of Google Maps right, for that application to work, you have to know where the current location is and you have to know where your destination is.

Aaron Trahan:

And I try to apply that same concept to talent development and performance management and optimize route to enhance the capabilities that need enhancing, to further strengthen the things that are already strong and to leverage them in this new role. And if there's weakness or development, areas A, where are they? And then B, what are we going to do about them? What does success look like over the next 30, 60, 90 days? What are the tangible action steps that we're going to take to turn that weakness into a strength? And so a lot of that is missing. And so if you don't know your current location and you don't know your destination and Google's probably spent billions of dollars developing that app, but if you don't have those two data points, you're not going to get an optimized route where you want to go.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, gaps and maps right. What are the gaps in our current places and what are the maps to get us to where we need to be? I love that.

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, yeah, and I think even having the awareness, like the respect I guess you could even call it from the organization or the leaders within an organization, to be able to do this mapping exercise with this individual. They're moving to a new role. Are the expectations clear? Do we know what success looks like? Do we understand what is going to be a new strength attribute feature to themselves as a leader that we're going to need for them to be successful in this new role? And, if there's some work that needs to be done to strengthen that, what is going to be the game plan there?

Aaron Trahan:

Because I like to remind leaders of this all the time a weakness you are unaware of can never be strengthened, and so this I would call it this hope and a wish strategy that a high performer here we're going to elevate them to a new role that's going to require a lot of things to be done differently than that has may have generated their success before. But what does that look like? Do they lack some of the skills or capabilities today that will make them great in this new role? And how are we proactively addressing that versus the status quo which is then waiting for a high performer moving into a new role starting to underperform and we take a completely reactive approach to it.

Jay Johnson:

After they're demotivated, after they're feeling dejected after the fire is gone After the damage has been done.

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, after the damage has been done, and then we're trying to claw our way back and get back to where they were, when there's no guarantee you may be able to to get back there. There there's been damage done. I just hate to see that.

Jay Johnson:

Now, aaron, let me, let me ask a question here, because I think here here's an interesting thing, and I'm loving this insight because I I really think you know if you're a trainer, if you're a coach, if you're somebody that's helping that person, helping them identify what are their gaps. I got to believe that the people that are making these promotions, like the leadership that's hey, aaron, I'm going to promote you from sales associate to sales manager, we're going to put you into this position. Now that person doesn't go home, twist their mustache and think about how can I really ruin Aaron's career or his life? Like they're, they're doing this with the best intentions. What do you think it is?

Jay Johnson:

Do you think is it possible that maybe that person that is giving the promotion not the person getting it, not Aaron getting the promotion, but the person giving the promotion do they maybe not understand the difference between doing and now leading? Do you think that it's a knowledge gap from their perspective? Maybe they haven't been through those positions themselves, maybe they're in HR and they're giving this. What is it that creates the conditions for this transition and this shift in employment that doesn't come with the onboarding or the appropriate training mechanism to get that person up to speed. What was your experience on that?

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, that's a really insightful question and there could be a lot of derivatives to this answer, but I think, once all the smoke clears, it ultimately comes down to the fundamental truth of priority mismanagement. If, for an organization and their leaders, the top priority was to develop their people, was to make sure, above all else, that they were going to be successful, even if they take on a new, increased role, I think a lot of these missteps and lack of or you know, performance gaps, a lot of those would go away. But I think you could almost compare this to delegation. Right, and I know for a lot of other high performers, delegation is is a tough thing, right, because you've got to take the time, you've got to make the investment. It's going to feel like you're actually going slow. You have to slow down a little bit to properly train, properly communicate, make sure all the context and clarity is there, and only after that's done and you're going to be doing a lot of that and spending a lot of time there without immediate gratification and look, we're wired for instant. Dopamine hits, right, that's right. Social media and Zuckerberg right, but that is how we're wired. If we put in an input, we want to see that immediate output, and in this game it just doesn't work that way.

Aaron Trahan:

And so where I see a key bug in the system is that there's not enough or it's not being prioritized to where people openly make the short-term investments to do the development, do the training, do the mapping that then allows them to see the long-term benefits. I think for a lot of us, quite frankly, is we're already looking for more hours in a day. We're already stretched too thin, and so I think it's not intentional. But I think there is a lot of hope built into the system of thinking that we elevate a high performer and they're going to elevate the role and the team to be high performers. But that's a big hope, right, we're not slowing down to take the time to make the investment to develop today. That will generate the long-term sustainable benefits.

Aaron Trahan:

And I think it could be tied back to a Navy SEAL quote. And look, sometimes you have to go slow to go smooth, go smooth to go fast. And it's so counterintuitive because no leader wants to slow down and spend time and do the training and do the development. But I think that also comes down to priority mismanagement. If it was their priority to make sure that that's the most important thing. I think you'd have fewer and fewer scenarios of lack of development, lack of training, lack of investment in the people to ensure they're successful over the long term.

Jay Johnson:

I'm going to piggyback off of that too, because I think the important thing here is and what I'm hearing, I'm going to draw this a little insight out is having a good succession plan. That happens before you're in the muck. Right, because let's think about a promotion when somebody gets promoted, it's usually because either somebody else got promoted above them and now there's an open space, or somebody retired, somebody left, et cetera. Now you've got a hole that you need to fill. So now you start looking through your people and saying Jay seems like a great fit, he's doing really well, let's move him into that position. But you've not spent any time cultivating Jay for management.

Jay Johnson:

This was exactly the experience that I had in training with a big company. The training was for their new leaders and I'm like but what about the people like? They're already in the position? What about the people that you're cultivating and they're like what do you mean Like? You know that the ones that are going to follow this set of leaders are like should we include them in this training? Yes, you should have included them well before we're here. So I'm going to go back to something that you had said, and I know that this is part of your area of expertise, that mindset shift when we take on a new leadership position, management position. For me, what I've experienced is a lot of times the harder part is actually letting go of what's made us successful in the previous position, which is why we fail to delegate, which is why we failed to lead and continue to try to do. What is your experience in that sort of shifting mindset that occurs when we're, say, taking on that new position?

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, I you know. One word is jumping to top of mind right now, and it's a. It's a chronic mistake that I see with a lot of leaders, and it all centers around feedback, where I give them a quota of. They must ask this question X amount of times per week or per month, and it's simply looking forward and finding key stakeholders where they can mine the insights around the question of how can I be better, how can I improve? Because the one thing that I've seen happen is that once leaders reach a certain level of success, they develop a tendency to start listening to more of the things that they want to hear, kind of that confirmation bias, relying more on what they've always done. That's kind of got them up to that point and they've lost the willingness to listen to the things they most need to hear. That would actually help them close the gaps, improve and become better as a leader, and so I think that all leaders should be flexing the feedback muscle. Do you have enough high quality feedback loops that can help you see the blind spots, become aware of those weaknesses and development areas that either need to be worked on or need to be closed? That would help you perform better in this role.

Aaron Trahan:

You may have a great resume, you may have had a great track record of success, but that's looking in the rearview mirror.

Aaron Trahan:

That's what happened in the past in a different role, maybe in a different organization, in a different time period. Things change, things evolve, and they're evolving more quickly than they ever have before. So we need to leverage that feedback to be able to look out the front windshield to always find out how much better can I be? What more am I capable of? What weaknesses do I need to work on? And so leaders have to be aware that success will always breed complacency. It's just the way that it works, and so the more successful you become, the harder you have to fight to stave off complacency, to stay in learning mode. Keep understanding what you need to continue doing, continue working on and getting better at to perform better in this new role, moving forward, not relying on what's happened in the past, because some of that, if not a vast majority of that, may not be applicable. Back to the Marshall Goldsmith quote to get you where you want to go next.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. You know it's funny. At the end of all of my one-to-ones with my team, my last question is how can I be a better leader for you?

Jay Johnson:

And and and it's really interesting because the first time and this is going to be my follow-up question to what you said, because I love what you said about feedback Feedback seems to be one of those hardest things for managers or leaders to really execute, and I think that sometimes they think, oh, I'm either going to be too terse or I'm going to be too tough, or, uh, getting their own feedback. That can be a big challenge too is because what ends up happening is hey, how could I be a better leader? For nothing, You're great. How do you get them to kind of get past that resistance, like making it safe for my and that's one thing that I've really worked on is making it safe for my employees to be like hey, Jay, you really suck at this, here's where you can get better, here's how you could show up for me. How do you help your leaders essentially navigate that space to create safety for somebody, to give them the authentic feedback that they need to have for their growth?

Aaron Trahan:

Yeah, yeah. Another great question, and I think it really boils down to what culture are you building? Do you have a culture of continuous improvement? Are you building Do you have a culture of continuous improvement? Because if you do, you need to be the leader that sets that standard of excellence. Don't preach what everybody else should do. Show everybody what continuous improvement looks like, and continuous improvement is all about continuing to find out how you can be better, continuing to understand what more you're capable of, and so I think, when you can first start with the right culture and demonstrate the right actions, that is an example of what that strong culture of continuous improvement looks like. It becomes a feature of the system.

Aaron Trahan:

Versus that question jumping out as kind of an exception and like throwing people off guard, right, I think a great culture that prioritizes continuous improvement and talent development. That should be a question that is welcomed, is frequently asked, is expected and people continue to get better on both ends, asking it and giving insight to it and kind of responding to it. The cultures that don't breed that is when someone asks that question and it almost is like a deer in the headlights, right, I think it's. You know, I think a good culture over time is going to just make sure that the insights that live on the other side of that question always stay near the surface. It's something that we as an organization, as a team, as a group, we're always searching for, and so I kind of like to think about that.

Aaron Trahan:

As you know, being a leader is an unbelievably awesome responsibility. Leading people is a great privilege. So to do that at the best of your ability, you always have to be wondering and curious and being a student of how you and then in turn, can make others better. And so I think it kind of starts with culture. If you can build it, it makes everything easier. If you don't have the culture, it makes everything more difficult, because that information is not going to be readily available. People don't know how to respond to it. A lot of people avoid asking the questions and look, it's easy to leave the unknowns unknown. But the great leaders want to take the unknown, convert them into knowns and truly find out.

Aaron Trahan:

You know, feedback is not supposed to be and not designed to make us feel warm and fuzzy at all but, what sits on the other side of it is a great precise, directional beacon of exactly where we can focus and exactly what we can do to improve our performance, and so if you build a culture that leans into that pretty heavily, I think everybody wins and benefits and I'm going to tie this back.

Jay Johnson:

So audience this is where this really comes in, and the coaching program that I do for trainers and coaches and everything. I talk a lot about feedback and it's so important. If you are a trainer and you are a coach, one of the best things that you ever get is when you look at your reviews and you get five stars all the way down. It was great, it was lovely, it was wonderful, and I challenged that. I hate that kind of feedback. Don't get me wrong. My ego loves it, I appreciate it, I'm glad you enjoyed the experience, but I'm not growing from that feedback and the advice that I give every trainer and coach in the same way, because you are essentially, as a trainer, a coach, an HR person, you are a leader. You are developing people for their best performance. The same role as a leader. Ask for more direct feedback, ask for how you can grow, find out. Don't just settle for. You're doing great, jay. That's not good enough, because if you stop building your skills I loved what you said about complacency, aaron, as we're successful and we get wow, all of these, everybody's saying we're so good, well, fantastic, you're now getting stagnant and every time you get that same feedback.

Jay Johnson:

You're not growing, you're not moving and you're becoming a part of the larger group rather than standing out. So I think there's some incredible insights for our trainers and coaches and HR people out there get good feedback and as we get close to the end of our conversation here, aaron, I want to ask you what are some other tips? Because I think this is brilliant. I think this is really really powerful stuff. What are some other tips that you would want to leave for our trainers, our coaches, our HR people how to really elevate that next step in their talent development cycle, because a lot of them may be walking into a new management position in that talent development space or maybe they're on their own and they're now the sole proprietor of their future and destiny. What else would you advise from your experience in that transition from corporate to what you're doing now? What else do you advise? How, how?

Aaron Trahan:

can they get to get to there, even you know, and take that next step. Yeah, you know it's. It kind of comes back to the big question around why do goals and initiatives and projects fail? And if you look at more than 90% of the failure rate in a goal or any type of initiative, you can always boil it down to two big buckets as the reason why. One, they've lost the connection between the long-term vision and the short-term priorities.

Aaron Trahan:

And so if we're trying, you know, back to that mapping process, if we're trying to get from, you know, our current location to our destination, you can't just focus on the destination and hope that it happens. If we want to be here in 12 months, what must be true over the next six months so that we're on track? Go back even further. What do we need to focus on now for the next quarter? What is our action step for the next three months to be on track and for the six-month target that keeps us on track for our 12-month goal? So I think there's this element of making sure the short-term action steps and priorities match up very directly with where we want to go from a longer term standpoint. And then two, I would argue the more important one is never underestimate the value of tracking and measuring, Whatever it is you're trying to improve, it will rarely happen if the tracking and measuring is not in place and not visible.

Aaron Trahan:

It's kind of interesting.

Aaron Trahan:

I think there was a study done by the High Performance Institute across 19,000 individuals around goal setting across the country, and what they found was very interesting is the cohort that set a goal but didn't have a tracking and measuring system in place performed no better than the group who didn't set a goal at all.

Aaron Trahan:

And so I think it just shows that tracking and measuring is so critical, because then it allows you to have focus and prioritization around what it is that we're trying to improve, and that allows us a really great series of after action analysis to really be able to sit back and say here's what we intended to do, what worked and why, what didn't work as well as we had hoped and why, and you're able to mine those insights to now say, based on what we just learned, what new actions, what do we need to take more action on? What do we need to stop doing? That's getting in our way of making progress, and so I think it just opens up a whole different vision of clarity, because if we don't know our current location, we're not clear on the destination and we're not tracking our progress towards getting there. It's kind of wishful thinking to ever think that we're going to arrive where we want to arrive and get the performance that we're expecting.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. Yeah, very consistent with you. Know, creating that visual scoreboard. That's one of the main principles, of the four principles of execution with Covey. So it's something that we have our goals, we have our metrics and tracking because, you're right, if we want to get there, we got to make sure that we're on the right track, we're hitting the right KPIs, we're hitting the right measurements and you know, seeing the growth.

Aaron Trahan:

Because if we feel like we're stagnant. That can kill our motivation. So I love that. Yeah, it's kind of it's just and it does wonders for the employees, right. If we if we lay out the mapping and saying this is where this is where we want to help you improve. This is what improvement looks like, and here's how we're going to track and measure it and collect feedback along the way.

Jay Johnson:

And celebrate those milestones that we're hitting on the quarters or on the six-month timeframes.

Aaron Trahan:

That's right, and we find out where we're winning, we find out what's getting in the way and we take action on both Double down on what's working and calibrate to work around the issues. That's causing some friction on making the progress that we want If we're not tracking and measuring on where we want to go. It just blows my mind that organizations, big and small, still have this belief that we're just going to somehow end up there, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but high performance doesn't happen by accident. It's made by a series of intentional acts. That's part of a deliberate process. Always has been, always will be.

Jay Johnson:

Love it, aaron. How would our audience get in touch with you, or?

Aaron Trahan:

is there anything that's out that you'd love to give a promotion to here? Yeah, I think two of the areas that I hang out the most in is one would be LinkedIn. I would highly encourage those that are interested. Let's connect, let's exchange info, let's have a great discussion around this topic. I'm constantly sharing things on LinkedIn around this space and for more insight on my particular methodologies, how I help not only individuals, but also how I work with HR executives, people, operations executives, of how I collaborate with them and help make their leaders get better at being better. You can go to my website and that's just performancemindsetcoachingco. And Jay, before we end, just a special bonus that I'd like to extend to your audience For anybody willing to want to have kind of an engaging conversation. There's always a free performance breakthrough assessment that I do, where I can walk those that are interested into the four key areas that most effectively determine your ability to get better. So happy to share that with anybody that wants to take advantage and book a call.

Jay Johnson:

Love that Audience, take advantage of those resources, reach out to Aaron and definitely take that assessment. That sounds amazing. I think I'm gonna be doing that myself this afternoon, Aaron. So I want to say thank you for being here with us and I'd love to have you back at some point in time and talk even deeper on some of that methodology, because we've scratched the surface. But I think some of the things that you said are just so insightful from that transitional journey. So, thanks again for being here, Aaron. We'll make sure those links are in the show notes for you audience. But yeah, this has been great. Thanks, Jay. Great to be here. My pleasure. And thanks for tuning in to the Talent Forge podcast. We look forward to hearing you and seeing you next episode.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

Host