How Loblaw Defined Good Leadership for 220,000 People

Mickey Anderson (0:00)

This month, 521 HR and business leaders said the biggest source of friction for managers is leadership expectations. Manager training came last. And one of Canada's largest employers has written down what effective leadership means across a company of about 220,000 people. So, do your leaders agree on what good leadership looks like? This is Unleashed, a podcast from LoyaltyOps. I'm Mickey Anderson, and every week, I ask what it takes to build a business that lasts in a decade no one is prepared for. Today, we're looking at new research on what gets in the way of managers, and what one of Canada's largest employers did about it. By the end of this episode, you'll know why expectations came out ahead of training, what a version of this looks like in a company of your size, and a 20-minute exercise you can run with your leadership team this week. Let's start with the survey. Betterworks, a performance management software company, surveyed 521 HR and business leaders in the US and the UK this August. Everyone in the survey was at director level or above. They asked, what creates the most friction for managers? Leadership expectations came out first at 48 percent, communications came next at 43 percent, and performance management followed at 40 percent. A lack of manager training came last of the barriers they named at 25 percent. Let's look at that order. When managers struggle, most companies reach for training first, and the people in this survey put training last. Expectations sit upstream of the other two. Managers can't communicate well or manage performance well until they know what good looks like in your company. Training builds skills, and it can't tell a manager what your company expects of the people who lead others, because that's a decision only the leadership team can make. There's a second finding that explains why this problem tends to stay unresolved. 64 percent of HR leaders said manager effectiveness is mainly HR's job. Only 32 percent of the business leaders agreed. The business leaders were more likely to point to executive leadership and strategy. When each group thinks the other side owns it, nobody ever sits down and actually defines it or takes ownership. In a company of 30 to 300 people, there may be no HR team at all. So this lands on the leadership team, whether anyone decided that or not. So here's the question I want you to sit with this week. If I asked each of your leaders today to describe a good manager in your company, would you get the same answer? Tell me in the comments how close you think their answers would be. I'd love to hear where you stand. Here's why all of this matters. Now according to Gallup, managers account for at least 70 of the variance in team engagement. When expectations are unclear at the top, every team underneath it yields it. Now let's look at what one large company did about this. HDR Canada reported in September that Loblaw, with about 220,000 employees across grocery, pharmacy, e-commerce, and corporate services, found that different parts of the business held different views of what effective leadership looked like. Mark Lutze, the Director of Talent Development, put it this way. He said, we saw an opportunity to create greater clarity and consistency around what effective leadership means at Loblaw. Here's what they did. They built a model with four stages of a leader, leading self, emerging leader, experienced leader, and executive. At every stage, the expectations are organized around the same five areas. Shaping strategy, building talent, fostering collaboration, driving performance, and their own culture. What's expected changes by level, so a frontline leader knows what good looks like in their specific role. As HDR Canada reports, their next steps are building these expectations into hiring, performance assessment, succession planning, and development. The big picture here is the order of this lesson. They defined what good leadership looks like first, and every other people decision gets built on that definition. Most companies do it the other way around. They run reviews, promote people, and send managers to training without ever writing down what they're measuring against. If you're finding this useful, please take a second to like this episode and subscribe.

Next week's episode shows up in your feed. Now, you might be thinking, that's a big company exercise. At 30 to 300 people, a single page is probably enough. In most companies of a smaller size, there are two levels. There are people leaders and your leadership team. Three to five behaviors for each level is sufficient, and they should be written as things you can see someone do.

For example, raises problems early, or makes the decision and explains why.