Tom Giberson uses his extensive psychology background, with a specialty in industrial and organizational psychology, to develop emerging leaders and their leadership teams through consultations. For over 20 years, he has consulted with individuals and organizations that needed to cultivate strong leaders and teams, and a strong leadership culture.
Throughout his career, Tom Giberson has worked as an external consultant and a director-level staff in various organizations. His responsibilities were on the global scale, focusing primarily on “leadership development and organization improvement and change.”
In terms of academic experience, Tom Giberson has also worked as Associate Professor of Leadership at a state University. In that role, he has conducted a variety of research and published papers on diverse topics, which included “leadership, organizational culture, and the future of higher education.” He also teaches leadership on all levels of tertiary education, from the bachelors to the executive MBA levels.
Tom Giberson has worked with various organizations throughout his long career. These organizations worked in various sectors, such as “healthcare, manufacturing, retail, financial, education and other non-profits.” He has worked with companies on such subjects as building “long-term organizational culture” and coaching “individual executives.”
Over 800 executives have received Tom Giberson’s in-depth assessments, “for the purposes of hiring and leadership development.” Companies that wish to develop their teams or get started on strategic planning also work with Tom, considering his vast experience as a leadership coach, a leadership team coach, and facilitator.
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Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Tom Giberson: A few things, I suppose. As a solo practitioner, my company and I are inseparable. What my clients tell me is that I’m easy to work with, highly competent, and that I get results. A lot of people in consulting at a similar career stage as I am are doing truly little consulting or coaching work. In fact, they haven’t for quite some time. They are partners in large firms or have built a team around themselves in their own firms. Their role is no long consulting but selling junior consultant’s or contractor’s billable hours.
In fact, since 2008 there are more and more ‘consulting firms’ composed of 3–5 people whose core competence is selling projects and deploying contractors. These firms have little or no original intellectual capital and the success of the project you bought depends upon the available sub-contractors’ skills. And if it is a sub-contracted coach or consultant, that means that they can’t fill up their calendar on their own. If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s a consultant/coach with a lot of time on their hands.
So, one thing that makes my practice stand out is the accumulation of experience and expertise over the past 25 years. I continue to add to my skills and ‘wisdom’ of sorts through adding experience helping individuals, teams, and organizations succeed, rather than building my skills at selling projects and so forth. My clients don’t suffer from the consulting ‘bait and switch’ whereby someone like me comes in and makes the sale, then an inexperienced team delivers. If you work with my company — you work with me.
I’m often sought-out for difficult assignments — such as a leader who needs to make significant change or they will be “pushed out” of the organization. I’m told that my approach to helping others to grow more complex is unique and powerful. I have a way of connecting with others and helping them to self-reflect and take ownership for their behavior and results, which are the first steps toward growth and change. That unique approach comes from who I am as a person, professor, psychologist, and my deep and broad experience.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Tom Giberson: Consulting is an extremely stressful career path. Working on billable hours and finding the next project and client is exhausting. For me, I’ve selected my strategy — stay small and focus on what I’m good at and enjoy — and that helps me to manage the urge many consultants have to “be all things to all people,” which is no strategy at all and leads to burn out. What are you good at? What do you enjoy? What is there a market for? Do you have the energy to market yourself in that space? Finding the intersection of the answers can make the energy and stress of this work much more tolerable. Just like “a psychologist” was part of my self-identity for many years, “a consultant/coach” is now also part of my self-identity. Its not just what I do, but who I am, which makes the difficult work and tough times a lot easier.
Jerome Knyszewski: None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Tom Giberson: Absolutely. Two amazing leaders took me under their wing during my time at that first boutique consulting firm. Nancy Finley, who we tragically lost far too soon a few years ago, was one, and Dr. Kraft Bell the other. I think of these two as the ‘mother and father’ of my career. Both mentors took a personal and professional interest in me and exposed me to all kinds of experiences that many people do not have until well into their consulting careers. I was meeting with top executives & CEOs within the first month or so of working with them. I brought knowledge and skills that were valuable because of my academic training, and my own — and what I’m told, original — way of thinking and doing things that they both saw value in.
There are all kinds of stories from those times — mistakes I made, awkward things I said or did and so forth that they would give me direct, candid, and kind feedback for my development. One subtle but powerful piece of feedback came from Kraft after a meeting with a potential client. I was particularly ‘on’ that day and had some good contributions to the meeting. This was important because at the time, I tended to talk too much on topics that I was excited about, leaving little space for others. Still do at times. After the meeting, Kraft said, “Tom all you have to do is say one brilliant thing an hour.” I still use that to manage myself in client situations. That funny, but honest feedback means a lot to me. It means that listening is more important than talking. It means I don’t have to have all the answers. It means that sometimes listening more allows a person to say what really needs to be said at the right time. It means that I don’t have to take up so much conversational space to make the kind of impact on others that I want to have.
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Delegating effectively is a challenge for many leaders. Let’s put first things first. Can you help articulate to our readers a few reasons why delegating is such an important skill for a leader or a business owner to develop?
Tom Giberson: Of course — and indeed, two of the most common areas I end up coaching leaders to are delegating and driving accountability, as these two things are inseparable. In the simplest of terms, if you’re not delegating or delegating enough, then you’re doing someone else’s job.
Another truth is that delegation happens, always. One of the most common patterns I see with leaders is that their team is “delegating up” to them. A leader who does not delegate is often a perfectionist, is conflict avoidant, and their self-identity is intertwined with the content of their team’s work, rather than tied up as “leader of the team that does the work.” This results in the leader doing what others are paid to do.
People subconsciously pick up on this and, for example, might let something slide a bit — say a report or spreadsheet that they don’t want to do or aren’t very skilled at — it’s late or not done well, so the leader figures, “I might as well do it myself — won’t take long.” That becomes a pattern and the leader simply starts taking on that task. Their conflict avoidance prevents them from having the difficult conversation about performance, and they justify it through the satisfaction of doing the work itself. Or, “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you help articulate a few of the reasons why delegating is such a challenge for so many people?
Tom Giberson: It’s an interesting thing to me, since a ten-year old can master delegation. A simple approach can be summarized in five steps: 1. Clarify the expected outcome, 2. draw the “box” to define boundaries (cost, quality, quantity, timeliness), 3. identify to whom to delegate, taking into account whether it is a developmental stretch or simply a “get it done” assignment, 4. empower with the authority and resources to get it done within the “box,” 5. follow-up to drive accountability.
There are very, very few people who make it to a supervisory rank or above who cannot do these things from a skill standpoint — unless they’re in the wrong job. Some of the primary drivers behind a lack of delegation include:
- Being afraid of what others will think of you. This happens at all levels but is quite common for new leaders who have been promoted from an individual contributor to a supervisor of (former) peers. More than a few supervisors have shared with me that they are afraid that their former peers/friends will “think that I think that I’m better than them.”
- Defining yourself in terms of the content of the work you did and now lead because you love it; or you’re afraid you’ll become “irrelevant” if you don’t keep up your technical knowledge and skills to the same level as your team. This is rather common for leaders at all levels — I’ve worked with plenty of supervisors through CEOs with this challenge. It’s also common for leaders with a technical background, such as accounting, finance, IT, engineering, etc. Plenty of leaders struggle with letting go of the “content” of the work and believe that leadership is intertwined with the specialty that they supervise. It rarely is.
- Having a “tough time trusting others.” This is a false flag version of the previous example. Plus, if you think your team is incompetent or not trustworthy, you’re the problem, not them. And your boss and everyone else knows it.
- Defining your success in terms of your hands-on productivity rather than the productivity of your team. This is common for supervisors through middle management, though I see it at times above that. Truth is, the higher up you are in the organization, the fewer decisions and actions you should be taking on a daily basis. The shorter the time horizon of your job, the more decisions and actions you should take on a daily basis. In the best run companies, the CEO and C-suite leaders make few decisions and take few actions because they delegate, empower others, and drive accountability enabling themselves to focus on long-term/strategic and truly critical issues. In fact, one of the first questions I ask CEOs when I begin coaching or consulting with them is, “how many hours a week do you work?” Anything over 50 hours usually means they’re being delegated to and not driving accountability in others. Some top leaders like to work a lot more than that — that’s great, but what on earth are they doing? Usually someone else’s job.
- And finally, working in or creating a culture that rewards leaders for saving the day rather than on anticipating, planning, and executing effectively. Typically, the same leaders who ‘save the day’ are those at fault for the fire that’s burning in the first place because they didn’t delegate and hold others accountable. Plus, these leaders love the action and attention.
Jerome Knyszewski: In your opinion, what pivots need to be made, either in perspective or in work habits, to help alleviate some of the challenges you mentioned?
Tom Giberson: As simple as it is to delegate from a skills standpoint, it is a tough thing because as I described, for some leaders the work is intertwined with their self-identity and often their personality — such as being conflict avoidant. Very much the same as I described earlier about being a psychologist and consultant are intertwined with my own identity. The self-work required to delegate — and truly lead for that matter — is that of growing into a new mindset about who you are, what your role is, and how you measure your success. That takes self-reflection, being quite honest with oneself, and engaging in behaviors that don’t come naturally to you. But that is the nature of change. I encourage leaders to think about “growing more complex” across their careers, rather than developing or changing as a leader. A lack of delegation in this way of thinking is a result of the complexity of the role being greater than the leader occupying it. So, it isn’t skills per se that need to be developed, but a fundamentally new way of perceiving oneself in relationship to others, and in relationship to the content of the work done by the people you lead. It isn’t a simple path, but it’s the only one that I know works.
The good news is that there are all kinds of great things that happen when a leader engages in this self-reflective growth and change — not just delegating and getting things off your plate. But also becoming comfortable having difficult conversations, driving accountability, making the tough decisions, and so forth are all part of that same psychological package. Delegation is just the easiest to put a finger on because it should be so easy!
Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Tom Giberson: So much time and negative energy is spent pointing out our differences and ‘taking sides’ — especially politically. I think it’s awful how many people vilify others who don’t look or think or vote the way that they do. Life is challenging enough as it is — hating and blaming others simply makes life that much more challenging for everyone — including for those who hate and blame. If I could start a movement, it would probably be to build our individual and collective empathy. This might help us to see the humanity in and similarity among each other rather than socially constructed differences that drive the divisiveness that so defines this era.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Tom Giberson: My blog is www.leadershipisapractice.blog and my primary business page is www.leadgrowchange.com
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
Absolutely my pleasure!
