How managers can succeed in their first leadership roles

Eric: The best thing you can do is be an excellent coach, and so if you're if you're not a natural coach, if you're not great at asking questions rather than providing advice and telling, I would I would spend some time reading deeply on how to become a coach, maybe take a coaching course.
Jimmy: Hello and welcome back to this week's episode of The Ways of Working Podcast, your weekly dose of practical tips for leaders who are trying to gain that high-performance edge without burning themselves or their teams out. Now, before you put down your phone or click away from this window, make sure you hit follow or subscribe on your preferred platform of choice to make sure you don't miss any future episodes of The Ways of Working Podcast with our incredible experts and guests.
Welcome back and this week we are talking to the incredible Eric Girard. He is a former curriculum manager for worldwide Apple care training. Now CEO of Girard Training Solutions. Eric has been in learning and development for over 30 years, brings a wealth of experience, and spent 20 years working in Silicon Valley, which we're going to hear a lot more about. Eric, welcome to the show.
Eric: Thank you very much. I am thrilled to be here.
Jimmy: Fantastic. So, we've got a whole raft of topics to get through today, but I know that you are a well-recognised specialist in helping individual contributors transform themselves into high-performing people leaders. And our audience are a group of senior leaders who are potentially going to be supporting those individual contributors as they step up and move through their career. So, what I want to start with is how do When an individual contributor moves through that transitionary process, what are some of the kind of common challenges that they might face?
Eric: You know, what happens a lot, what I've seen a lot and what I experienced in my own instance was somebody is an excellent individual contributor. They're great at producing widgets. They're a great engineer. They're a great curriculum manager. And so their manager taps them and says, "Okay, you're going to lead your team now. We're going to promote you above your team, and you're going to lead them." And poof, you're a manager and there's no preparation, and maybe you get signed up for a management development class later, you know, the next quarter, the next the next semester or something. So, you're left kind of on your own to figure it out um for some time, and some people never get that formal education, and so they're making it up as they go, and it's not that they're incompetent or bad people, it's just that they don't they don't know what they should do, and so they flail um and they wind up inadvertently micromanaging, they don't set clear goals, uh they don't know how to coach, they don't provide constructive feedback in a way that it works and is helpful, and so team morale takes a dip, and maybe people start to leave, or they start to grumble, and there's back-channelling in Slack like, "Can you believe this guy?" So, you know, you just want to avoid that by front loading the new manager. "Hey, we're going to tap you. We're going to bring you uh and promote you to lead your team. So, um here's a course, here's a program, here's a set of books." You can see behind me, I've got a a whole bunch of books here that I I just absolutely love.
Jimmy: Yeah, that's a library.
Eric: Yeah, and you know, like my favourite these days is Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, which is all about asking coach-like questions as a manager to help your employees solve problems for themselves, rather than coming to you and asking for advice all the time. So, um I I read deeply and and spend a lot of time thinking about how can I help managers be better? And and I'm convinced that the the single best thing that a senior manager can do for a new manager is front load them, get them into some education first before they get promoted, so that they hit the ground running on the right foot.
Jimmy: I'm so in alignment and I love that phrase you use "flail or fail". We want to uh avoid that. And the metaphor that I think we've we've talked about previously is if you want a plane to fly effectively, it's got to go down the runway and pick up some speed first before it takes off. Otherwise, that pilot is trying to fly the plane without having any training to fly the plane. They need a bit of coaching and preparation time, right? So, when you talk about getting them ready, and it might be that they're already in a very busy individual contributor role, and you say you tap them on the shoulder and you say, "Hey miss or misses uh or mister, you are potentially on the cards for a leadership position." How do you What sort of things would you be providing them with? And what sort of skills would they need to start learning?
Eric: What I tend to do is I get brought in after somebody's been in role for some time. So, somebody may have been in role for a couple of months or maybe a a year, or maybe they've been in role for 10 years and they've never received any training. So, I'll come into a company and be asked, "Hey, could you please offer Management 101, basic management training, uh to our employees?" And what I include in that is first and foremost um a section on empathy, and how important it is for folks to build empathy. Then we talk about the mind set shift that you have to make from individual contributor to manager, because they're two completely different jobs, even though as a first-line manager, you still often have individual contributor tasks to do. You know, the doer manager paradigm um you still have to make that mind set shift to leading people rather than, you know, working alongside people. And then I talk an awful lot about coaching, feedback, goal-setting, problem-solving, conflict management, performance management, so all these things that you need to know. So, I get brought in after someone's promoted to do these things, and what I would rather see is, you know, I would much rather spend a half day, um say four hours with with a potential new manager and say, "This is what you're in for. If you actually sign up for this job, these are the sorts of things that you'll need to get ready for. Here are some tools, here are some techniques, here are some worksheets, here's a book or two that you can read before you get promoted, so that when you do get promoted, you're ready to go and you're not like, 'Oh, my gosh. What do I do? Like, I I have no idea. Now, I have all this massive responsibility.'"
Jimmy: And worst-case scenario, that person doesn't get promoted, but has had some incredible development, which is probably going to help them be a better supervisor or maybe a you know, an assistant team leader, is well invested time and effort, right? And actually, if they're going through that as a group or a cohort or with a bunch of their peers, then even better. They're going to get some positive development.
Eric: Yeah. I mean, and and this actually can empower the potential new manager to be better at managing up, which is a superpower that not a lot of people have, is effectively managing their manager. And so, you know, if you provide them that, then they're just going to be more proactive in saying, "Hey, this is what I need. This is what I want from you, my manager." And I don't I don't see any way you can lose by providing this to your your high potentials.
Jimmy: I love that. And as a senior leader in an organisation who is maybe overseeing uh the development of people, the growth of people through their business, uh maybe supporting and mentoring, what sort of role can can our listeners take?
Eric: I would say the best thing you can do is be an excellent coach, and so if you're if you're not a natural coach, if you're not great at asking questions rather than providing advice and telling, I would I would spend some time reading deeply on how to become a coach, maybe take a coaching course. Um we offer a coach uh a course on high-performance coaching that is all about taming the advice monster, as Michael Michael Bungay would say. So, taming the advice manager and not telling the person what to do, but asking questions to get them to decide. And there's a great HBR article, a Harvard Business Review article that I love called, Who's Got the Monkey? And it was written in 1974, and then republished in the '90s, which shows you what kind of staying power it's got. Um but it's all about delegation, and learning how to not accept tasks from your employees, but instead getting the employee to solve that problem for themselves, and there's six different levels of decision-making and delegation authority that the article lays out. And so I would I would spend some time learning that as well so that you're, you know, whether or not somebody's in line to become a manager, you're still giving them the capability to do some critical thinking and problem-solving on their own, so they're not coming to you all the time, "Hey, what do I do about X?"
Jimmy: I'm I'm so aligned with you on that. And often, one of the things that we discover with leaders who are going through burnout is because they're they're holding the monkey, aren't they? They're the ones that are the expert of everything, the answer of everything, the fount of information for everything, for all of their team, and there's a sense of identity loss as they you know, if they give up some of those really taxing, challenging problems that maybe they've been the ones that have solved consistently through their entire career, now to say, "Well, actually, let's just sit down and see if you can solve this, and I'll support you through that," and getting the satisfaction from their team doing well. Um absolutely fascinating, so incredible. I want to go back a little bit, because you mentioned there were two things uh that the the individual contributor goes through. Number one is a change of mind set. Number two was all about empathy. Tell us more about that.
Eric: So, the mind set is is actually the easier of the two in my mind, and that is you you need to go through a series of steps to move from, "I get recognised for completing a task. I get recognised for being excellent at being an engineer, at being a curriculum manager," you know, fill in the blank. You need to move from from getting satisfaction and recognition from that to, "I get recognition and satisfaction for getting results through my team." And so, it's all about setting the team up for success so that they shine, and they're out front, and you're supporting them to make sure that happens. So, for example, um I was recently on the board for a professional association, and my team was working on a very high-profile project, and I said, "Okay, you're doing the work, I'm going to set this up so that you make the presentation to the board. I'll line it up, I'll be there, but you're making the presentation. You're the ones who shine for this." And I think that that's that's the mark of a good leader is, "Hey, you're taking the credit. I'm not taking the credit," sort of a thing. So, that mind set is the the first thing, and it just it it takes a little thinking to, "Hey, it's not about me. It's about them. It's about my team."
The second thing, and the one that might be more challenging for some folks, is developing an empathy mind set. In 2023, which is when we're recording this, there's so much going on in the world. There's so much going on uh in people's personal lives, and professionally, and globally, that a lot of us are just cooked. We're experiencing VUCA, you know, we're experiencing um all of this this massive uh uncertainty and change and ambiguity that we've got to cope with. And so, as a manager, if you can build your empathy muscles, and say, you know, and learn how to put yourself in the other person's shoes, not just walk alongside them, but actually walk in their shoes and say, "I feel what you're feeling. I understand, because I've been there," sort of a thing, then you're going to be better able to help your employees through their challenges faster. Um Brené Brown is my hero when it comes to empathy and and the empathy research. Um of course, Goleman's work on uh emotional intelligence is fantastic. It's seminal. Uh so, doing a little reading, and then uh just spending some time thinking about, how can I put myself in the other person's shoes um rather than, "Oh, yeah, yeah. I understand," you know, that surface level sort of, "Gee, I'm sorry. That must be so hard." And instead of really getting into the other person's point of view so that, not so that you wallow in it with them, but so that you can help them move through and get through that change, and then get back to productivity.
Jimmy: I'm so aligned. Um yeah, Daniel Goleman's work around emotional intelligence, and I think it's that you're right. Going beyond the, "Yeah, that must be super tough," and maybe even just with the care conversation just saying, "So, tell me about how you're feeling, and tell me what you're experiencing, and tell me what you're actually um worried about. Let's let's talk about that first, and then we'll see, well, what sort of help would be useful for you, and how can how can I support you best?" Because we as leaders, we again we want to solve the problem, right? So, we're like, "Oh, I've got a solution for your problem. I can fix that." And actually, some people just need to like there's the is it the emotional um intelligence relationship coach who says, "Um do you want sympathy or solution? Because my response will be very different, depending on which one you need from me right now." And I think it's the same when you have a a member of your team who is struggling. You go, "Well, you know, what sort of support do you need from me and how can I offer that uh versus let me just solve your problems and I can empathise at a super- superficial level." So, so interesting, Eric. And your work has gone quite deep in this space, right?
Eric: Yeah. So, the book that I'm writing, which has yet to be titled, because there's so many good titles for this, but um the book that I'm writing is the first and longest chapter is about empathy. And I quote a a very dear friend of mine, Nora Zukics, uh who is from Amsterdam. Uh she's an old colleague of mine from Nutanix. She uh spent a lot of time studying empathy. She's an industrial organisational psychologist, and spent a lot of time uh studying this. And one of her favourite questions, you know, when she opens a one-on-one with her team is, "How are you? No, really, how are you?" And just letting the other person know that it's psychologically safe to talk. Now, what I'm not saying is that the manager becomes a therapist. I'm not I'm not trying to put a manager in that box, because that's that's a whole different profession. But being aware of the um the programs that your company has in place to get people into an employee assistance program or something similar, it's like, "Okay. Sounds like you need to talk to a professional. I can connect you with that professional," you know, "or I can connect you with the EAP to get you set up um because I care about you, and I want you to be okay, and I also need you to perform, so let's do both things, all right? Let's take care of you first, and then let's get you back on the path to to producing."
Jimmy: I love that. And for those of us who aren't aware of EAP, can you just tell us a little bit more about that?
Eric: Yeah, I'm not an expert, but um essentially, the employee assistance program that I've experienced in in different companies in Silicon Valley is something that's offered by an employer um where uh through a third-party usually, they will connect you with therapists. Um some of them will even offer legal advice, financial advice, things like that, so that uh you've got a resource that's been vetted by your company, if you need a hand with something that's a little outside of what a manager would normally be able to help with.
Jimmy: That's great. Thanks for sharing. And clearly, you've got a depth and wealth of experience in this space. Walk us through how the the journey, how did you get to to where you are now running Girard Training Solutions and being the CEO of your own business? But what what was the journey to get here?
Eric: Yeah, so it actually goes back to the Boy Scouts. So, it goes all the way back to 1985 when I was teaching kids how to swim and paddle a canoe in a summer camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and I just I loved it. When when a kid would get it, when they would get a swim stroke, or when they'd be able to make that canoe do whatever they wanted, and the light bulb would go off over their heads, that was so gratifying to both of us. I'm like, "Aha! I really like doing this." So, I went to college. I went to California State University, Sacramento and majored in organisational communication, and then I discovered training and development almost by accident, and actually joined a student chapter of what was then the American Society for Training and Development. So in 1992, I became a member of ASTD, which is now ATD, the Association for Talent Development, and I've been a a member ever since. Um so, I got I was like, "I found my people," you know, it's like, training is what I want to do, teaching is when I want to what I do, and I want to do it for adults.
So, right after I graduated college, I uh went to work teaching people how to use their computers. And so, this is back when DOS was still a thing, and so a lot of people were transitioning from WordPerfect for DOS into Word for Mac or Word for Windows, and I was teaching people how to use a mouse. And the first the first uh lesson was, "This is a mouse, and here's how you hold it. The tail comes out of the head." Because the first time I saw a mouse, I'm like, "Oh, this is upside down. Its tail should come out of its butt." And so, I turned it around the wrong way, and then the mouse didn't work. So, it was always a joke, you know. The first lesson is that the the tail comes out of the mouse's head. So, that's where I started helping people understand like, "Okay, like I know DOS, and I know all these keyboard shortcuts for DOS, now I need to transition to a graphic user interface and learn that." But guess what? All your beloved keyboard shortcuts still exist, so that was really relieving to a lot of folks. So, uh I did that for a couple of years and decided I didn't like being on that treadmill, because Microsoft and Apple and all this and Adobe, and all these companies were refreshing their programs multiple times a year, and so I felt like I was on a hamster wheel just refreshing my knowledge all the time, and I got tired of it, and I didn't really like teaching hard skills like computer skills. So, I went to Arizona State University and got a master's in intercultural communication training and wound up going to Australia, working for Xerox in Australia, uh again, doing human resources development, um with a little bit of technical stuff. I was a network administrator for a little bit. Um came back and landed at a cross-cultural consulting firm in San Francisco, and then I was on the board of ASTD at the time, and uh one of my board members said, "Hey, we need somebody at my company who has skills like yours. You've got this kind of mix of soft skills, hard skills. We need someone who can do both of that."
Well, part of what I had been learning to do at the the cross-cultural consulting firm, Meridian Resources Associates, they're now called Aperian Global, um I had taught myself HTML 4 and Dreamweaver 2. That's That's how old this is. And I had taught myself how to do this, and so I hardcoded my resumé to be my the index page of my website, and so I just wrote my website on a napkin and handed it to Michelle and said, "Here you go. If your boss is serious and wants to talk, she can just look up this website." So, it was a really offhand thing. It was really, you know, like I didn't take it seriously at all. Two days later, her boss called and said, "I saw the napkin. I want to talk." And that's how I wound up in Silicon Valley teaching new hire orientation, and then employee skills, and then management development, and then I I just went down the management development path, worked at Veritas, Symantec, had my own gig for a while uh during the downturn, during the housing uh bubble burst, and actually came out of that really well, and then wound up at Applied Materials, and Apple, and then Nutanix. And then, we moved to Seattle and just decided, you know what, let's just clean slate. So in the summer of 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, we moved to Seattle, bought a house, started two companies, my wife got a new job, and I became a scuba instructor, all during the pandemic. It was a very productive pandemic. And so, that's how I became CEO of my own company.
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It sounds It sounds like you had such an adventure on on that little journey. And while you while you were going through listing off programs and coding languages and stuff, I was like, there's a great back catalogue of skills. One thing keep keep kept coming up for me though as you were talking, and that was the don't make assumptions that the person on the other end of your training knows what on earth a mouse does or how it works, uh and that sometimes it could be completely upside down from what you naturally think as the instructor. "Oh, it's completely obvious and everybody knows how to use a mouse nowadays." But sometimes when people are stepping into leadership roles from having been an individual contributor, they don't know the things that are completely obvious to you as a senior leader, because you've been doing it for a while, right? So, there's some really key examples of things that you I think you mentioned so, you know, we have to teach lesson number one is that that the tail comes out of the mouse's head. As a senior leader, you're going to be teaching some things to your individual contributors who maybe super competent people, but they just don't they don't even know the basics. Can you give us an example of of where you've had to where you've encountered that with some new leaders, where assumptions were made by senior leaders?
Eric: Well, I can I you know, I'll I'll use my own experience. That's probably the the simplest thing. So, when I was at Applied Materials, I had expressed to my manager, who was a director, um I had expressed to him that I would like to take on a leadership role, and he was like, "Okay." And he didn't really make a big fuss of it. He just sort of, you know, said, "Okay, well, that's fine." And then a month or two later, he came back and said, "Okay, so I've thought about this and I want you to lead your team. I'm going to promote you to lead your team, and you'll do great, because you've taught management." And I thought, "Yeah, I'll do great, because I've taught management. I've taught management. I haven't actually done management." So, he promoted me, and then said, "Okay, off you go. Oh, and by the way, Michael's a troublemaker, and I want him gone." So, the first thing I had to do was do performance management um with with a troublesome employee, so that was really difficult. And it was assumed that I would do fine with that, because I had been an instructor of of these things. Well, I did my best, but I wound up in kind of a command-and-control situation where I just I just started barking orders, because I I defaulted um because I hadn't been through the training as a participant who was leading or about to lead people. And so, I wound up not setting goals, I wound up telling instead of coaching. Um and then there was this little side issue of having to put this this this one employee on a on a PIP, on a performance improvement plan, so that took all my energy. And so, my other employee got no attention from me. Um so, it was just a mess. And so, um I think all the assumptions that my boss made about, "Oh, well, you're an instructor, you'll be fine. Um and then, oh, by the way, you need to manage this person out. And then, oh, by the way, this other person has been off on her own in Israel doing her own thing for years, and um probably won't be receptive to any suggestions you have." It It was It was, actually, quite a mess. So, um it was a result of that that was like, "Okay, I'm going to make this my life's work and make sure nobody goes through this again."
Jimmy: Great empathy from you as well in that situation that you had to um you made that conscious choice having gone through that painful experience yourself not to not to do that. And I'm sure many of our listeners have also been in that position. They've been promoted into a job and not necessarily supported in the way that worked for them. And then we sort of We tend to pay that forward, right? Because we're busy, we promote somebody, and then we kind of expect them to find their feet whilst they're doing it. One of the other things that you said that was super interesting was, and to me personally, uh was the scuba diving instructor. Um I see a lot of parallels between scuba diving and leadership. I don't know if you do, but I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit in terms of your views.
Eric: Oh, how long do you have?
Jimmy: Well, we've got as long as we need, I guess.
Eric: Yeah. So, uh the reason why I'm a scuba instructor is during my last trip to Hawaii, uh a friend of mine and I were diving on the Molokini Crater on on Maui, and it was just such an amazing experience. The water is warm and clear, and you can see everything, and there's corals, and there's fish everywhere, and there's sharks, and uh it was just so much fun. And I thought, "I want to I want to make this I want to do something with this." And so, I made the call. While I was in Hawaii, I called my local dive shop back here and said, "You know, can I become a dive master and start that progression?" And I hatched a plan that by 2030, I wanted to be teaching scuba in Hawaii. So, that's what I wanted to be doing, you know, retired or semi-retired by 2030 teaching scuba in Hawaii. Since then it's changed a little bit, you know, that the date is a little flexible and the place is a little flexible, because Hawaii is super expensive. But the the idea still stands is to retire a little early and teach scuba and do that.
So, one of the things that I learned teaching scuba is that folks can be excellent academically, and be really uncomfortable in the water. So, the way that uh we teach scuba So, I I belong to PADI, which is the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. And the way that PADI teaches scuba is that first you go through a really good e-learning program. So, you go through some academics and understand the academic side of scuba. Then you come to a classroom and review that, get your questions answered, demonstrate mastery from the academic piece. And then, we take you out to the pool, and we start in the shallow end of the pool getting oriented to gear, getting used to putting our face in the water and breathing underwater for the first time. And it's a it's definitely a progression. But what I noticed was that there were some folks who were actually academically excellent, who had the the technical knowledge in their heads, but then when we asked them to do the swim the swim check, you have to be able to swim 200 yards, they couldn't swim. We I have literally taught people to swim um and to float uh before that they could put on the the the scuba gear. And so, it's like, okay, so don't make assumptions that because somebody is is academically or technically excellent in something, that they'll be able to actually perform the thing on the job. And so, just because I've got a pile of books behind me, you know, that that say that I'm well read in management development and coaching, that doesn't mean I'm great at it. Um I still have lots to learn, and I've been doing this a long time. And so, I think that that what's important is that hands-on, physical doing it sort of a thing, and that's why I think management development is so important. So, in the classes that I teach, that we do we do some academics, we do some theory, but it's mostly talking with other people, small group interaction, lots of labs where you practice coaching, you practice giving feedback, you practice setting goals, you do a SWOT analysis. You practice it in a lab environment. And one of the ground rules I set is, you know, I ask everybody, "Do you remember what the Las Vegas rule is?" And most people say, "Yeah, yeah. What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas." And so, I say, "Okay, welcome to Las Vegas. This room is Las Vegas, and you can say anything in here, you can ask anything in here. It's a safe place. There's no dumb questions in here, because I want you to walk out of here confident being a great manager. So, don't worry, ask your questions." And then we spend a lot of time doing the thing, coaching, feedback, goals, SWOT analysis, performance planning, but they they do it in my laboratory, so they've had some practice before they go off and do it to an employee.
Jimmy: I'm so aligned. And and the the piece for me sits around kind of I use the analogy of fitness versus scuba diving, but it's kind of the same thing. It's that, you know, you can have you can be subscribed to all the fitness magazines and you can have a Google Map of where all the gyms are in your town, but unless you get in there and start working out, uh you're not going to get any fitter and you're not going to get the skills that you need to to be an effective gymnast or effective aerobics person or cross-fitter or whatever it might be. And scuba diving is kind of the same, right? You can do all the academics, but unless you get in the water and start practicing, you are not going to not going to have the skills that you need underwater to do to do to do the effective dive. The other piece that really comes up for me as a similarity with scuba diving and leadership is that it's really easy to scuba dive. You know, you've got to pick up a few basic skills and you can get in the water and you can start blowing bubbles. To be a good scuba diver takes years of practice, commitment, routine, and sticking with a very defined set of guidelines of best practice to keep you and those around you safe. And I think something very similar applies in the leadership context.
Eric: Yeah, absolutely. And I think to add to that, to to build on your analogy, I would say that you need the right tools. So, uh if you've got old scuba equipment, or if you've got the wrong scuba equipment, it's going to make that harder to do um and to harder to do well. So for example, right now, um the buoyancy vest that I use, the thing called a BCD, the the buoyancy control vest, the bladder where all the air is is in the back. There's no buoyancy around the front. So, when I inflate that to float on the top of the pool, to float on the top of the surface, unless I'm kicking, it puts my face in the water. So, I get a lot of exercise every time I teach a class, because I'm constantly kicking to stay upright so I can talk to my students. So, that's the wrong equipment, and so that's the next thing I'm going to upgrade is to a different style vest that has buoyancy up front. So, it's little tweaks you can make to your your your gear, as well. And so as a manager, thinking about, well, what tools do I have to manage? Um picking up a book like like the the one I showed earlier, the The Coaching Habit, or um this other one that's that's right on top here, uh Coach Yourself Up, learning how to do self-coaching uh and coaching yourself to excellence, these are things that you can do. These are tools that you can do to improve your skills so that you're not just winging it with your employees.
Jimmy: Wonderful. Two two good books. Um I know Michael's book extremely well, and I'm going to go and dig out that other book. Let's add one more book to the mix, which is your book, uh available now on your website, girardtrainingsolutions.com, Advice for a New Manager: 6 Steps on Thriving in Your New Role. This sounds like a perfect runway tool to give to uh to new maybe newly promoted or potentially newly promoted leaders in your business, right? Can you tell us more about it? What are those six steps?
Eric: Yeah, so that is a uh it's an e-book. It's only about 20 pages long. Um it's It's kind of a preview to the proper book that I'm writing now, which will be an ex- expansion of it. But the whole idea is to give new managers or potential new managers a taste into, you know, what it takes to be a manager. And so, I talk a little bit about empathy, a little bit about making the transition, a little bit about coaching and feedback, uh and give you just a taste of those things. So, the nice thing is it's free. It's very helpful. It's full of of actional in- actionable insights. Um there's room for you to take notes in it as well, if you like. Um so yeah, if you're if you're manager-curious, as I say, this is a first place This is a great place to start. Um and if you're an existing manager, let's say you were promoted within the last year, and you just want to make sure that you've got the skills, um and maybe fill in some gaps, this is a perfect way to do it.
Jimmy: Lovely. And we'll pop a link to the book, the e-book, in the show notes so people can go to Eric's website and download that, and maybe hand it out to the the high- in- high-talent individual contributors in their team, or those people in the talent team who might be looking at management development programs. Eric, um final piece of information that I think we must share is is your incredible podcast. Um tell us a little bit more about that, and um I know we had the opportunity, the luxury of going through uh an episode together.
Eric: Yeah, and you were a fantastic guest. You were the best guest.
Jimmy: Oh, I'm I'm I'm deeply privileged. I would I'll say the same for you.
Eric: Thank you very much. Um so, Management Development Unlocked is for your audience. So, it's for folks who guide new managers, who are bringing up new managers, and it's full of actionable insights to help them do that. And it's also for the new manager, the person who is considering being uh considering stepping up, or who has been in role for a little while. So, it's It's all about basic management skills, and I bring in a bunch of great presenters and great guests, yourself included, to talk about these skills. A lot of which we talked about on this podcast, you know, the the whole idea of, you know, what's it take to become a manager? What's it take to be a great manager? Um we talk a lot about resources. I've had folks come on and talk about um for example, conflict, and how new managers need to handle conflict in a way that is constructive and empathetic. Uh so there's just a I I kind of range all over the place as long as it's within the bounds of what a new manager would find useful and be able to use, that's what we talk about.
Jimmy: Fantastic. And we'll pop a link to our episode and uh the podcast um as a whole on on the show notes. So, if you're interested in checking out another amazing podcast, uh please do head over there and listen to Eric's podcast, Management Development Unlocked. Eric, we've obviously given a couple of plugs for um how people can find your amazing information. Is there Are you Where else can people, if they want to ask more questions, if they want to reach out to you, where else can they get in touch?
Eric: Yeah, so I would I would say the first place is my website, girardtrainingsolutions.com. And uh folks can also send me an email directly, [email protected].
Jimmy: Incredible. And who are the types of people that you want to hear from, that you want to work with most?
Eric: You know, it's I'd I'd love to talk to folks who have new managers that or potential new managers that need development. So, this would be senior leaders in organisations, uh might also be HR folks who are aware of some some learning needs in their organisation. And I'd also love to talk to the new managers themselves, the folks who are manager-curious, who are thinking about it, um or folks who have been promoted recently and want to build their skills. So, um it's a pretty broad swath of people that I'd love to chat with.
Jimmy: Brilliant, thank you for that. Final question for me. What's something you always wish you'd done, but never got round to doing?
Eric: Mm. You know, I haven't skydived yet. And I'm I you know, I just I'm I'm in my 50s. I haven't done it. I'm thinking one of my daughters might actually be down with doing it with me. Um so, that's that's one of the things that I haven't done yet. So, I I I have pretty much I'm really goal-oriented and action-oriented, so I usually get stuff done. Um so, I'm going to I'm going to answer that with skydiving.
Jimmy: Love it. It's interesting. That comes up for me as well, but I had to make the choice of which type of diving was I going to do, because they're both quite expensive hobbies, so you've you've got to invest in one or the other, I think.
Eric: Yeah, I would I think I would only do it once.
Jimmy: Yeah, exact Just like a try a try, and then like, "Thank you very much." But the But then you'd probably be hooked and and then you're into two expensive hobbies with that require expensive expensive gear.
Eric: Yeah, exactly.
Jimmy: Eric, thank you so, so much for joining us on The Ways of Working Podcast. It's been fantastic to have you along and um I've really enjoyed our conversation. Um really, a really a privilege to have you on the show.
Eric: Oh, Jimmy, this has been this has been my pleasure. El gusto es mío. I really enjoyed this, so thank you very much.
Jimmy: That's it for this week's episode of The Ways of Working Podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation here, why not head over to jimmy-burroughes.com/book and grab chapter one of our amazing upcoming book, Beat Burnout Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture. So, if you're looking for practical tips and to understand why people in your team or yourself are burning out and what to do about it so you can all keep working and perform better, this is the place for you. Go to jimmy-burroughes.com/book and grab that first chapter. We'll also keep you posted when the full book is released very soon. Also, if you enjoyed this episode of The Ways of Working Podcast, don't forget to follow or subscribe on your preferred podcast platform of choice and we'll make sure that you get all of the upcoming episodes as they come out every single week. Take care. Speak soon.