Category: Leadership

You Trained Your Team on AI. Their Output Didn’t Change.

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Everyone in your company can now write a decent AI prompt. Almost nothing about how work actually gets done has changed.

That’s not a training failure. It’s a design failure.

Companies spent the last two years teaching people to use AI tools — how to prompt, how to summarize, how to draft. Attendance was good. Enthusiasm was real. Six months later, the same reports take the same amount of time, the same approvals move at the same speed, and the same bottlenecks are still there.

AI training without workflow redesign creates tool awareness, not productivity.

Why “everyone knows how to use it” isn’t the win you think it is

Knowing how to use a tool and having a workflow that actually uses it well are two different things. A manager can be genuinely skilled with AI and still spend the same three hours a week writing status reports — because nobody redesigned the report, the approval chain, or the meeting that made the report necessary in the first place.

The tool got faster. The work around the tool stayed exactly the same.

This shows up in a familiar pattern:

  • A manager drafts a report in AI-assisted minutes instead of hours — then still waits two days for the same three sign-offs before anyone reads it.
  • A team automates a summary that used to take an hour — then keeps holding the same hour-long meeting to discuss it anyway.
  • Employees learn to prompt well, but the decision that used to require careful thinking still requires that same thinking — the tool just moved the busywork around it.

What actually changes productivity

Real productivity gain comes from redesigning one workflow at a time — not issuing a company-wide AI training and hoping habits catch up on their own.

That means answering three questions before training anyone:

  • Which specific workflow, done today, is slow, repetitive, or error-prone enough to be worth redesigning?
  • What does the workflow look like once AI removes the slow, repetitive part — and who approves the new version?
  • Who owns making sure people actually work the new way, not the old way with an AI shortcut bolted onto it?

Skip these questions, and AI training becomes an expensive way to teach a skill people will rarely get to fully use.

A smaller, sharper way to run this

Instead of training the whole company on AI at once, pick one workflow that genuinely matters — a reporting cycle, a customer response process, a recurring analysis — and redesign it end to end. Train only the people who touch that one workflow. Measure whether the time, quality, or turnaround actually improved. Only then decide whether to repeat it somewhere else.

This is slower than a company-wide rollout. It’s also the only version that produces a result you can actually point to.

The uncomfortable question for your next AI initiative

If everyone on your team finished AI training tomorrow, which specific piece of work would actually get done differently by Friday?

If the honest answer is “not sure,” that’s worth a real conversation, not another training session. Message Jordan if you’d like to think through which one workflow is worth redesigning first — no pitch, just a practical look at where the time is actually going.

FURTHER READING ON JORDANIMUTAN.COM

• AI Was Supposed to Save Your Managers Time. It Didn’t.

• How to Improve Manager Performance in 90 Days

#AITraining #WorkforceProductivity #AIAdoption #LeadershipDevelopment #FutureOfWork

The Real Reason Most AI Projects Stall Before They Start

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Every company says they want to use AI. Most still can’t point to one hour it’s saved them.

That’s not a technology problem. It’s a sequencing problem. Most teams pick the tool before they know the task.

Here’s how it usually goes. Someone in leadership reads an article, watches a demo, or hears that a competitor is “doing AI.” A meeting gets scheduled. A tool gets chosen. Only afterward does someone ask the harder question: what exactly are we supposed to use this for?

By the time that question comes up, the decision is already made. The tool is bought. The team is told to “find a use case.” A few months later, the license goes unused, and someone quietly stops bringing it up in the team meeting.

This isn’t a failure of the tool. Most AI tools on the market today are good enough for what most companies actually need. The failure happens earlier — before the tool is chosen, before anyone has looked closely at the workflow it’s supposed to fit into.

We sat down recently with an operations team convinced they needed a new AI writing tool for their weekly report. When we talked to the person who actually built that report each week, the real issue wasn’t writing at all. Three different people were each pulling the same numbers from three different places, and no one had ever agreed on which numbers were correct. A better writing tool was never going to fix that. Fixing it took one honest conversation, not a new subscription.

That’s the pattern behind most stalled AI projects. The task was never named. The person who actually does the work was never asked. The tool was chosen to look good in a meeting, not to fix a specific place where time gets lost every week.

The fix isn’t more research or a bigger tool budget. It’s picking one real task — one that someone on the team already complains about — and starting there. Not “how do we become an AI company.” Just one task, one team, one fix, proven before anything else gets rolled out.

Useful advice. Zero behavior change — until someone names the actual task.

Which task on your team gets redone by hand every week, and nobody’s questioned why?

If that sounds familiar, send a message. Happy to walk through how the AI Quick-Win Audit works and whether it’s worth a look for your team.

Additional Reading

• AI Was Supposed to Save Your Managers Time. It Didn’t. — https://jordanimutan.com/2026/09/03/ai-was-supposed-to-save-your-managers-time-it-didnt/

• 92% of CHROs Expect Greater AI Integration. The Research Says the Human Variable Is What Determines Whether It Works. — https://jordanimutan.com/2026/08/07/92-of-chros-expect-greater-ai-integration-the-research-says-the-human-variable-is-what-determines-whether-it-works/

• Your Company Isn’t Slow — Your Decisions Are Trapped in Manual Processes — https://jordanimutan.com/2025/12/19/your-company-isnt-slow/

• Build AI-Ready Managers — https://jordanimutan.com/build-ai-ready-managers/

• The Work Is Getting Done. The Outcome Isn’t. — https://jordanimutan.com/2026/03/21/the-work-is-getting-done-the-outcome-isnt/

About Save Time With AI

Save Time With AI is the AI Workflow Improvement path from POC Applied Performance Solutions. It starts with one question: what task wastes the most hours every week? Not a seminar. Not a demo. One workflow, one fix, real time back.

Curious how it works for a team like yours? Send a message — let’s discuss how the AI Quick-Win Audit works.

Before You Roll Out That Leadership Program Company-Wide, Run This 90-Day Test First

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Most leadership rollouts fail for a boring reason: nobody tested them first.

A program gets approved. The slides look great. The executive sponsor is excited. Six months later, it’s rolled out to every manager in the company — and the results are patchy at best, invisible at worst. Now leadership owns a company-wide program that isn’t working, and unwinding it is far more painful than pausing it would have been.

Here’s the pattern that keeps repeating: companies confuse a good workshop with a proven program. Those are not the same thing.

“It felt like it worked” is not evidence

Ask any HR or L&D leader what happened after their last big leadership rollout, and you’ll usually get a feeling, not a number. Managers said they liked it. The facilitator was engaging. Feedback scores were high.

None of that tells you whether anything changed in how those managers actually run their teams.

A pilot without a baseline is a demonstration, not evidence. If nobody measured the starting point, there’s no way to prove the program moved anything — no matter how good it felt in the room.

Run the 90-day test before you scale

Before committing budget, time, and executive credibility to a company-wide rollout, test it first — on one business priority, with one group of managers, for 90 days. In plain terms, that’s six steps:

  • Align — pick one business result worth moving, name the executive who owns that result, and agree on what “success” looks like before anyone starts.
  • Baseline — measure where that result stands today, before a single training session happens.
  • Equip — teach managers only the practices that connect to that one priority. Skip the general leadership curriculum.
  • Apply — managers use the new practice on real work, not hypothetical case studies. Their own supervisors review the evidence, not just the reflections.
  • Reinforce — short nudges and follow-ups keep the practice alive after the workshop ends, without becoming another wall of notifications nobody reads.
  • Review — at the end, the sponsor gets an honest answer: did the result move, what got in the way, and should this be scaled, adjusted, or stopped?

That last step is the one most companies skip. They scale because the pilot period is over, not because the pilot proved anything.

What good pilot evidence actually looks like

A strong pilot gives leadership three things a slide deck never can:

  • A real before-and-after number on the business result that was picked.
  • Evidence that managers actually used the new practice — not just that they attended a session.
  • An honest account of what else might have influenced the result, so nobody claims credit that hasn’t been earned.

If a pilot can’t produce those three things, it wasn’t really a pilot. It was a longer workshop with better branding.

Why this saves money, not just credibility

A 90-day test on 20 to 50 managers costs a fraction of a company-wide rollout — and it produces real evidence about whether the bigger investment is worth making. Scaling a program that never proved itself is the expensive mistake. Testing it first is the cheap insurance.

Enterprise scale should be earned through proof, not assumed in the proposal. That’s true whether you’re planning to expand a program to one more site or roll it out across every branch in the country.

A word for growing, owner-led companies too

This isn’t only an enterprise problem. A growing, owner-led company that finally invests in manager development faces the exact same trap — rolling a program out to every supervisor at once because it “felt right” in the pilot group, without ever checking whether daily decisions on the floor actually changed. The size of the company changes who’s in the room. It doesn’t change the need for evidence.

One question worth sitting with

If your organization rolled out its last leadership program to everyone tomorrow, could you point to a single number that would tell you, in 90 days, whether it worked?

If the honest answer is “not really,” that’s a good place to start a conversation. Message Jordan if you want to think through what a real 90-day test would look like for your team — no pitch, just a practical look at your next move.

FURTHER READING ON JORDANIMUTAN.COM

• Half Your New Hires Won’t Last. Here’s the Real Reason Why.

• AI Was Supposed to Save Your Managers Time. It Didn’t.
#LeadershipPilot #ManagerDevelopment #HRStrategy #WorkplaceExecution #LearningAndDevelopment

Every Company Tracks Time-to-Hire. Almost None Tracks Time-to-Productive.

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Ask any HR leader how long it takes to fill a role, and they’ll give you the number without blinking.

Ask how long it takes that same hire to actually become productive, and the room goes quiet.

Nobody tracks it. But everybody pays for it.

The Cost Nobody Puts on a P&L

New hires typically take three to eight months to reach full productivity, and for mid-level professionals, the median stretches even further — Gallup’s 2024 workforce data puts it at 8.2 months. During that stretch, the new hire isn’t the only one paying the price. Their manager is spending 10 to 20 percent of their own time coaching them through it, on top of everything else on their plate.

Add the rework from early mistakes and the slower project delivery while someone learns the job in public, and SHRM estimates the true cost of a ramp-up period at over $40,000 per hire.

That number never shows up in a hiring report. It shows up as a manager who’s quietly behind on their own priorities, a project that ships two weeks late, and a team that’s absorbed the gap without anyone naming it.

It’s Not a Slow-Learner Problem. It’s an Unclear-Target Problem.

Most new hires aren’t struggling because they’re incapable. They’re struggling because nobody told them exactly what “good” looks like in month one, month three, and month six.

Without that, a manager ends up re-explaining the same thing four different ways, hoping one of them sticks. That’s not coaching. That’s guessing out loud, on the clock.

Useful advice sounds like “be patient, they’ll get there.” Zero behavior change. Patience doesn’t shorten a ramp-up period. Clarity does.

What Actually Shortens the Ramp

The fix isn’t more onboarding content. It’s fewer, sharper targets — the exact three to five behaviors that separate a new hire who’s ready by month three from one who’s still guessing by month six — practiced on real work, with the manager checking in on purpose instead of by accident.

This is the structure behind Hired to Delivering. Instead of asking a manager to “mentor” a new hire with no framework, it gives them one short, specific thing to watch for each month, and a fast way to flag it when a new hire needs help before the gap becomes a missed deadline.

A manager who knows exactly what to look for spends less time coaching, not more — because they stop re-explaining the basics and start correcting the one thing that actually matters that month.

The Real Question

You already know roughly how many new hires you’ll bring on this year. You already know the ramp-up period isn’t free, even if it’s invisible on the budget.

How many hours did your best manager spend re-explaining something to a new hire last month — and what could they have built instead, if the new hire had been ready sooner?

If you want to see what a shorter, clearer ramp-up actually looks like, DM me.

RECOMMENDED READING

• Your Managers Are Busy All Day

• How to Improve Manager Performance in 90 Days

• Middle Managers Are Not the Problem. They Are the Missing Link Between Strategy and Results.

• The 60-Day Onboarding Gap: Why New Hires Forget What You Just Taught Them

• Stop Sending Managers to Training They Will Forget by Friday

#TimeToProductivity  #OnboardingROI  #HRLeadership  #ManagerBurnout  #WorkforceDevelopment

Your Managers Finished the Training. Nothing Changed at Work.

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Your dashboard says 100% completion. Your operations report says nothing changed.

That gap is not a training problem. It’s a measurement problem.

Most companies track the wrong number. They count who showed up, who finished the modules, who passed the quiz. Then leadership wonders why the results they actually cared about — faster cycle times, fewer complaints, stronger coaching conversations — never moved.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: completion is not behavior change. Satisfaction is not business impact. A manager can attend every session, enjoy every session, rate it five stars, and go right back to the exact habits that were the actual problem.

Why completion rates lie to you

A learning event only creates value when a manager uses a better behavior in real work. That single sentence should reshape how every leadership investment gets measured.

Whether a manager actually uses what they learned depends on five things, and none of them show up on a completion report:

  • Relevance — does the content connect to a real problem they face this week, or is it generic advice?
  • Supervisor expectations — does their boss ask about it afterward, or has everyone quietly moved on?
  • Workflow fit — does the new behavior fit how work actually gets done, or does it fight the existing process?
  • Reinforcement — is anyone following up after the workshop ends, or was it a one-time event?
  • Measurement — is anyone actually watching to see if the behavior happened?

A quick example. Picture a mid-size company that just ran a coaching-skills program for 60 managers. Attendance: 98%. Feedback scores: 4.6 out of 5. Six months later, engagement scores haven’t moved, and turnover on the highest-pressure teams is unchanged. Nobody can say whether a single manager actually changed how they run a one-on-one — because nobody was watching for that. The program looked successful on paper, because paper was the only thing being measured.

What to measure instead

If you want an honest picture, track four different layers, not one:

  • Business movement — did the result you actually care about (cycle time, rework, complaints, conversion, on-time delivery) move in the expected direction?
  • Manager practice — are managers doing the small number of practices that should drive that result: better coaching, faster escalation, clearer weekly priorities, better decision quality?
  • Adoption — is the new way of working actually being used consistently, or did it fade out after week two?
  • Context — what else might explain the result? A staffing change, a new system, a seasonal swing, a shift in incentives. Rule these out before anyone takes credit.

This is harder than pulling a completion report from your learning platform. It’s also the only version of “measurement” that tells you the truth about what your investment actually bought.

A quick gut check for your next program

Before your next leadership investment gets approved, ask three questions:

  • What business result are we actually trying to move — and can we point to the number today?
  • Which few manager behaviors would realistically move that number?
  • Who is going to check, four weeks from now, whether those behaviors are actually happening?

If you can’t answer all three clearly, you’re about to fund another well-reviewed program that changes nothing at work.

The real fix isn’t more training. It’s better follow-through.

Training is an input. Better execution is the outcome. Somewhere between the workshop and the workday, most companies lose that thread — not because the content was weak, but because nobody built a bridge between “we learned it” and “we do it.”

That bridge isn’t exciting. It’s an immediate supervisor asking the right question in a weekly check-in. It’s a simple way to track adoption, not attendance. It’s a decision, made before the program launches, about what evidence would justify scaling it — and what evidence would mean stopping it.

Before your next program launches, ask this

If your last leadership program had a 95% completion rate, what number would actually tell you whether it worked?

If that question is hard to answer, it’s worth a real conversation — not a sales pitch. Message Jordan if you’d like to think it through together: what your organization is measuring today, and what it should be measuring instead.

FURTHER READING ON JORDANIMUTAN.COM

• Why Your Leadership Training Isn’t Working (And What To Do Instead)

• How to Improve Manager Performance in 90 Days#LeadershipDevelopment #ManagerExecution #TrainingROI #HRLeadership #PeopleDevelopment

You Promoted Your Best Performer. Every Decision Still Lands On Your Desk.

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

The manager you promoted last year was your best technician, your best salesperson, or your most reliable engineer. None of that prepared them for the job they have now.

They earned the promotion by being excellent at their own work. The new role asks them to make decisions for other people’s work, under pressure, without you in the room.

The Promotion Trap

This is not a hiring mistake. It is a common and predictable gap.

A company promotes its strongest individual performer into management because that person is trusted, capable, and available. The skills that earned the promotion were necessary. They were not sufficient.

Nobody taught this person how to decide what deserves their attention and what does not. Nobody taught them when to escalate a problem and when to solve it themselves. Nobody taught them how to push back on an unreasonable deadline without appearing uncooperative.

So they default to what they know. They solve problems the way they always solved problems: personally, immediately, and without a system for judgment. When something falls outside that comfort zone, it goes back to the owner. Not because the manager is weak. Because nobody built the routine that would let them decide with confidence.

This is common in retail and distribution businesses, where a top-performing branch salesperson becomes branch manager, and a year later still routes every pricing exception and staffing decision to head office, exactly as they did as a salesperson.

Why Competence Does Not Transfer

A growing company depends on managers who can absorb decisions that used to require the owner. If every manager still routes uncertainty upward, growth simply multiplies the traffic jam at the top.

This is the quiet cost of “we’ll figure it out as we grow.” The org chart says the company has managers. The decision pattern says the company still runs on one person.

A manager who only reports problems has not yet become a manager who solves them.

The Cost You Are Absorbing

The direct cost is your calendar. The indirect cost is larger. Every decision that waits for you is a decision the manager did not practice making. The gap does not close on its own. It compounds, because the manager keeps proving to themselves and to the team that decisions belong upstairs.

Meanwhile, the business keeps growing in complexity, faster than the management system underneath it is improving.

What Actually Builds Decision-Making

Confidence in decision-making is not installed in a seminar. It is built through repetition, on real problems, with a simple structure the manager can use under pressure.

  • A short, practical framework for sorting decisions: which ones the manager owns outright, which ones need a quick check-in, and which ones genuinely belong with the owner.
  • Real assignments, not theoretical case studies. The manager delegates a real task with a clear owner and deadline, runs a real coaching conversation, and decides on a real recurring problem.
  • A defined decision boundary from the owner. Managers cannot practice authority the owner has never actually handed over.
  • A short review at 30, 60, and 90 days that looks at what the manager is deciding independently now, compared with where they started.

A Better Development Question

Most companies ask, “what leadership topics does this manager still need?” A more useful question is, “which decisions currently return to me that this manager could own, and what is stopping that handover?”

That question usually surfaces the real issue faster than any competency framework. Sometimes it is a skills gap. More often, it is an unclear boundary that nobody has ever defined out loud.

Growth becomes expensive when every decision still needs the owner. The goal is not to remove yourself from the business. It is to stop spending yourself on decisions someone else is ready to make.

Where in your business is your best-performing manager still waiting for your answer, on a decision they are actually capable of making alone?

If you are working through that question, send me a message. Happy to brainstorm it with you.

Additional reading (jordanimutan.com):

• Middle Managers Are Not the Problem. They Are the Missing Link Between Strategy and Results.

• From Owner-Driven to Manager-Led (service overview)

#ManagementExecution #DecisionMaking #OwnerLedBusiness #ManagerDevelopment #ExecutionExcellence

AI Was Supposed to Save Your Managers Time. It Didn’t.

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

AI was supposed to give managers their time back. Instead, it gave them a longer list of things they’re expected to know.

This isn’t an AI adoption problem. It’s a readiness problem.

Companies bought AI tools for their teams and assumed managers would figure out the rest. Use it for meeting notes. Use it for reports. Use it for coaching prep. No one taught them what not to upload, where human judgment still matters, or how to review AI output without becoming dependent on it.

The result: managers are spending more time now, not less. They check AI’s work. They explain AI’s decisions to their teams. They carry a brand-new expectation — “AI-capable leadership” — with none of the training to match it.

This gap is showing up across almost every 2026 HR trend report. AI raises expectations around output and responsiveness. It does not automatically raise capability. That mismatch lands squarely on the manager’s desk, every single day.

The fix isn’t another AI tool. It’s a fourth pillar added to how managers are developed.

In the IMPACT Framework we use across LeadDaily — Identify, Measure, Prepare, Apply, Coach, Track — AI fluency now sits inside Prepare and Apply. Managers practice using AI for real meetings, real emails, and real coaching prep, on their own real work, with real feedback on what to trust and what to double-check.

That’s the difference between three kinds of managers: one who avoids AI out of fear, one who trusts it blindly, and one who uses it well. Only one of those three actually gets their time back.

AI can absolutely make your managers faster. But only after they’ve been trained to use it — not just given access to it.

Which of your managers is spending more time managing AI output than managing their people?

If your team is stuck in that gap, DM me — or see what a 90-day fix looks like at jordanimutan.com/services.

RECOMMENDED READING FROM JORDANIMUTAN.COM

• The Universities That Teach Students How to Work Will Win the Next Enrollment Race — Why readiness — not just knowledge — is becoming the real competitive edge.

• Managing Yourself Before You Can Manage Anyone Else — The foundational discipline AI tools can’t replace.

• How to Improve Manager Performance in 90 Days: Stop Training for Attendance and Start Training for Behavior — The full model this article’s Prepare-and-Apply steps come from.

• Speed Dies When Authority Is Unclear — What happens when new tools meet unclear decision rights.

• Alignment Is Often a Delay Mechanism — Why “let’s align first” often masks a readiness gap, not a caution.

#AIatWork  #ManagerDevelopment  #FutureOfWork  #HRTrends2026  #LeadershipTraining

Half Your New Hires Won’t Last. Here’s the Real Reason Why.

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Half Your New Hires Won’t Last. Here’s the Real Reason Why.

Fifty-five percent of managers fired a recent college graduate last year.

Not because the hire was lazy. Not because they lacked talent. Because nobody taught them how work actually works.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Most companies blame the graduate. “Kids these days.” “No work ethic.” “They expect too much, too fast.”

But almost 90 percent of employers also admit they hesitate to hire recent grads at all — even while 98 percent of them say they can’t find enough talent. That’s not a talent problem. That’s a contradiction. You need people. You don’t trust the people available. So instead of fixing the gap, you wait. Or worse, you turn to AI instead. Thirty-seven percent of employers already say they’d rather use AI than hire a young graduate.

Let that sit for a second.

It’s Not a Skills Gap. It’s a Behavior Gap.

Your new hire probably has the technical skills. They passed the interview. They have the degree. What they don’t have is the unwritten stuff — the stuff nobody puts in a syllabus.

They don’t know they’re supposed to speak up in a meeting instead of waiting to be asked. They don’t know silence reads as disinterest, not respect. They don’t know “I’ll get to it” sounds like “I don’t care” to a manager watching the clock.

Useful advice would tell them to “communicate better” and “take initiative.” Zero behavior change. Nobody becomes a professional by reading a slide about professionalism.

Behavior Changes Through Practice, Not a Slide Deck

A new hire doesn’t need one more orientation day. They need to practice the exact behaviors that get someone kept, trusted, and promoted — using real work, repeated until it feels normal.

That’s the whole idea behind a program I built called Hired to Delivering. It doesn’t start with “here are our values.” It starts with the real reason new hires fail, and works backward from there. Three phases. Twelve months. The company’s own managers are part of the system too — because a new hire’s performance was never their job alone.

Months 1 to 3 are about getting hired to ready: fitting in, communicating with clarity, using AI responsibly. Months 4 to 9 are about ownership and getting noticed for the right reasons. Months 9 to 12 get them ready for the review that decides if they stay.

No lecture does that. Only repetition does.

The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong

Replacing an entry-level hire costs roughly half their annual salary. A new hire spends three to eight months working at only 25 to 50 percent of full productivity before they even get up to speed. Structured onboarding improves 12-month retention by 82 percent.

The math isn’t complicated. Training the behavior costs less than replacing the person.

The Real Question

You already know your new-hire failure rate. You already know it’s expensive. The question isn’t whether you have a problem.

Which new hire on your team right now is quietly failing — not because they can’t do the job, but because nobody ever taught them how?

If you want to talk through what this could look like for your team, DM me.

RECOMMENDED READING

• The 60-Day Onboarding Gap: Why New Hires Forget What You Just Taught Them

• The Universities That Teach Students How to Work Will Win the Next Enrollment Race

• You Don’t Have a Performance Problem. You Have an Ownership Gap.

• Stop Sending Managers to Training They Will Forget by Friday

• Middle Managers Are Not the Problem. They Are the Missing Link Between Strategy and Results.

#EmployeeOnboarding  #NewHireSuccess  #LeadershipDevelopment  #TalentRetention  #FutureOfWork

Group Coaching Beats One-on-One Advice: Why Managers Learn Faster Together

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Most executive coaching happens one person at a time, behind closed doors, and it is one of the most expensive ways to develop a group of managers I know of.

It is also, in most cases, not the fastest way to build better leaders. Group coaching usually is.

This is not the popular opinion in a market that loves the word “personalized.” But I have run enough coaching sessions with six to ten managers in a room, working through real problems together, to say this plainly: managers learn leadership faster from watching each other struggle with real problems than from a private conversation where they never see how anyone else handles the same situation.

Here is why. A manager who is quietly struggling with a poor-performing employee often assumes they are the only one facing it badly. Put them in a room with nine other managers, and within twenty minutes they discover that half the group is wrestling with a version of the same problem. That alone changes the conversation from “what is wrong with me” to “what is the actual pattern here, and how do we fix it.”

Group coaching also does something one-on-one advice cannot: it lets a manager practice explaining their own problem out loud, clearly, in front of peers who will ask direct questions. That is a leadership skill in itself. A manager who can articulate a messy real-world problem in two sentences, to a room that will push back if the explanation is vague, is building the exact communication muscle they need with their own team.

The structure matters more than the personalities in the room. I use a simple sequence: situation, problem, cause, options, action. Each manager brings one real issue — a difficult employee, a missed deadline, a delegation that went wrong, a conflicting priority. The group works through it using that structure, out loud, together. Nobody leaves with generic advice. Everybody leaves having watched a real problem get solved in front of them, which they can now apply to their own version of it.

Run this every two weeks, forty-five to sixty minutes, six to ten managers per group, and something compounds over a few months that individual coaching almost never produces: a group of managers who trust each other enough to ask for help before a small problem becomes a large one. That trust does not come from a private coaching relationship. It comes from watching your peers be honest about their struggles in a room where nobody got punished for it.

Companies often assume private coaching is more valuable because it is more expensive and feels more exclusive. In practice, for developing an entire layer of management at once, it is usually the slower, costlier option. Group coaching, structured well, builds both the individual skill and the peer network a manager will actually lean on after the program ends.

If this sounds like your team, send me a message. I’d like to hear about it.

If your managers are each quietly solving the same three or four problems alone, what would change if they finally solved them together?

Suggested next reading

Managing Yourself Before You Can Manage Anyone Else

~ jordan ~ Leave a comment

Every company wants to fix how its managers lead people. Almost none of them start by fixing how those managers lead themselves.

This is the mistake behind most failed leadership programs, and it happens quietly. A manager cannot run a clear team meeting if they cannot run a clear calendar. A manager cannot hold someone accountable to a deadline if they cannot consistently meet their own. A manager cannot model composure under pressure if they have never learned to manage their own priorities under pressure.

We ask managers to lead others before we ever ask whether they can lead themselves. Then we act surprised when the leadership does not hold.

Build the muscle in the right order.

I put this at the very start of every leadership development sequence I design, before communication, before delegation, before anything about the team. Personal ownership first. Time management first. Knowing what actually deserves attention today, first. This is not a soft warm-up exercise. It is the foundation everything else stands on.

Here is what this looks like in practice. Before we ask a manager to delegate better, we ask them to audit their own week — honestly — and identify where their time actually went versus where it should have gone. Before we ask them to give clearer feedback to their team, we ask them to practice being accountable for their own commitments, out loud, to someone watching. The behaviors are almost identical. We are just asking them to apply the behavior to themselves first, where the stakes are lower and the habit is easier to build.

Managers who skip this step tend to lead in a very specific, very tiring way. They react to whatever is loudest. They say yes to everything, because they have never practiced protecting their own priorities, so protecting their team’s priorities feels impossible too. They burn out quietly, then wonder why their team seems disengaged — without realizing the team is simply mirroring a manager who never learned to manage themselves first.

This is not about becoming rigid or turning every manager into a productivity obsessive. It is about a manager being able to answer a simple question honestly: what deserves my attention today, and what can wait? A manager who cannot answer that for themselves will never be able to help their team answer it either.

Inside LeadDaily™, this is always week one, before anything about managing others even comes up. One behavior. Practiced on the manager’s own work first. Because a manager who cannot manage their own priorities has nothing stable to lead from when their team needs direction.

If your leadership program jumps straight into “how to manage your people” without first building this foundation, you are asking managers to give something they have never practiced having themselves.

If this sounds like your team, send me a message. I’d like to hear about it.

Before you ask your managers to lead their teams better, have you ever asked whether they can lead their own week?

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