Great Books + Great Minds is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
During these post-pandemic times, those working in managerial roles are experiencing unprecedented challenges. Worker shortages. Massive shifts in strategic direction. Looming recession — All of these are having a profound impact on today’s business culture and one’s ability to manage.
Getting up to speed requires a heavy investment of time and energy, particularly if you are in a new managerial role. But while the demand for highly skilled managers has never been greater, it is estimated that a mere 20% of employees across the world strongly agree that their managers are motivating.
Now, two authors have released a book offering a simple roadmap for helping accelerate the cultivation of great managers faster.
“The Leader Lab” delivers to readers an accelerated leadership intensive, equipping managers and execs with a Swiss Army Knife toolbox of skills to handle even the most challenging of situations. As a result, leaders are quickly able to achieve extraordinary team performance and a culture of fulfillment and belonging.
Through a painstaking deep-dive process of research and training involving over 200,000 managers, Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, Ph.D. identified and captured the most important skills separating great managers from average. Most importantly, they’ve discovered how to support new and emerging managerial talent in rapidly acquiring these core skills—from micro habits like “split-tracking” and “deblurring” to macro skills like feedback and strategic thinking.
The duo believes that all too frequently, talented people are promoted without any training around the myriad responsibilities facing today's modern managers as part coach, part player, and part therapist. Ideal for individuals who in being promoted to a managerial role need a high-impact toolkit, The Leader Lab book serves as the definitive resource for becoming a great manager today and becoming a great leader faster.
Having worked in my past life as a healthcare executive with three leadership teams, I found “ TheLeader Lab” to be an accessible read with prompts for accelerated learning. There are ample practice examples that allow the reader to make the learning even more sticky.
“Great Books, Great Minds” reached out to Tania Luna, cofounder of LifeLabs Learning, co-author of “The Leader Lab,” and cohost of the podcast Talk Psych to Me for a deeper dive into the book and what it promises to those who take it up.
She is a researcher, educator, advisor to alt-protein startups, and partner at Columbia University’s eLab — an accelerator for entrepreneurs who increase equity and access to education. Her company, LifeLabs Learning, has helped over 350,000 people at some of the world’s most influential companies (including TED, Yelp, Tinder, Slack, Reddit, JetBlue, and 2,000+ others) become more confident, competent, and compassionate leaders.
Asked about her own personal background and leadership journey, Tania had this to offer:
“I had the tough but lucky experience of getting asylum from Ukraine in the U.S. when I was a kid. We moved straight into a neighborhood that made it clear they didn’t want “outsiders” coming in. It was scary and disorienting, but it taught me many lessons I still cherish today about the importance of community. I always keep that painful memory of exclusion fresh in my mind because it helps me in my design of workplace culture and systems that prevent people from feeling like they don’t belong. I always strive to make the workplace feel like a community.”
She says that the strength of her collaboration with co-author LeeAnn Renninger Ph.D. comes from their differences.
“I tend to focus on systems while she focuses on skills. I like to delve deep into research while she has little patience for anything that’s not immediately practical. I generally argue for flexibility while she craves structure. We are a bit of an odd couple, but we are both so passionate about helping leaders and teams get better faster than our differences tend to create a balancing force rather than a challenge.”
Our primary audience of the book, she says, are current managers because they’re feeling the pain and pressure of this role most acutely.
“It is a hard, important job and very few people get the support they need to do it well and gracefully. That said, the skills in this book are going to be just as helpful for informal leaders and future leaders. We’ve even heard repeatedly that readers are applying the skills with great success in their romantic relationships, with roommates, and with their kids.”
Asked what makes the two of them uniquely qualified to share the book’s message, she responded:
“Our company and our book always felt to us like things we had the moral obligation to put out into the world. Bad leadership hurts people. It turns work into a painful chore rather than an adventure. Good leadership, on the other hand, can catalyze seemingly impossible growth and discovery. The way I see it, we are so stuck in so many ways in our society right now — if we democratize access to leadership skills, we can get unstuck and start to feel proud of our own species again.”
She says that the two of them directly observed hundreds of leaders and managers in action, surveying over 24,000 of them. Both have a background in research psychology and are skeptical about conventional ways of working. This combination of factors helped them look at leadership empirically and with fresh eyes, she notes.
With respect to their ongoing leadership training and advisory efforts:
“We’ve been teaching what we’ve found through our company, LifeLabs Learning, and seeing people and teams rapidly increase their confidence, competence, connection, and compassion. To date, we’ve trained over 350,000 people at about 2,000 companies and we are not slowing down. Over 98% of people say they are still applying the tools we've taught one-year post-training.”
Asked about what was the major catalyst behind your decision to write The Leader Lab, she offered this:
“We love the impact we get to make through our company, LifeLabs Learning, but we felt that we weren’t reaching enough people quickly enough. This book — along with the many free resources we release every month (including our LeaderLab podcast) was our attempt to reduce barriers to access. Leadership skills are survival skills these days, and they should be accessible to everyone, whether that’s executives, managers, or individuals who lead through informal influence.”
Tania asserts that the primary message of the book is that leaders don’t have to get good at all things.
“Not all skills are created equal. To learn to lead more committed, engaged, and high-performing teams faster, focus on a small number of ‘tipping point skills’ — skills that quickly tip over into a wide range of areas. If you collect these skills, you can apply them in countless situations, kind of like how a small number of primary colors create all the colors in the world.”
She continues:
“Unlike most other leadership books, we break down this small stack of tipping point skills into what we call Behavioral Units (BUs). These are observable micro-behaviors that people can learn and apply that very same day.
We cut all the fluff we find in most leadership books and focus only on the smallest changes that make the biggest impact in the shortest time. Most importantly, we only share what we’ve seen work in practice with thousands of leaders across the world.
Lastly, we take an unconventional stance in the book that managers should never attempt to manage people. They can manage resources, time, plans, and even themselves, but attempting to control people only backfires. Instead, we teach readers tools that catalyze great results in others rather. The result is a team that feels seen, valued, and supported achieves far more than employees who spend their days feeling “managed" ever can.”
Her greatest hope for workplaces is that The Leader Lab book combined with the work at LifeLabs Learning will help redefine the role of the manager.
“Managers should not manage people, but manage conditions. In other words, rather than trying to control people, managers need to spend their time figuring out what workplace conditions will help their teams succeed.”
Her concluding thought?
“My hope for readers is that they will feel a profound sense of relief and exhilaration as they put this book down. Relief that there are simple actions they can take to make the work of leadership easier, and exhilaration at the thought of becoming a catalyst for others. It is one of the greatest joys and privileges of leadership to get to help an individual or team not just do better work, but become better versions of themselves. I also hope that the practicality and playfulness of this book inspire readers to transform their own workplace into a “leader lab” where they can experiment, practice, and play with better ways to lead.”
