How intentional leadership development makes stronger companies

I’d love to start broad, tell me a little bit about who you are and how you came to be where you are now. What inspired you to start Everleader?

I’m Megan Galloway, I live in Kansas City. When I graduated college, most companies weren’t hiring. I had a Spanish degree with a minor in Business and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. My husband and I are both from the midwest and wanted to move back west so we applied for jobs in Denver, Portland and Seattle, deciding that we'd go wherever one of us got an offer first. I got a job in HR in Denver. I started in benefits and workers comp and continued making my way further into the HR functions until I landed in Learning & Development. I started an L&D program from scratch for a construction company in Denver. After our first was born, we moved to Kansas City where I built another L&D program for a construction company and then one for a bank.

After being in corporate America for ten years, I realized I wanted to create real change within organizations. I felt like there was such a large gap between who we are as human beings and who were trying to be in the workplace. The biggest driver of that is leaders inside our organizations building cultures that don’t fit the people inside of them. So I set off to start my own business. I quit my job, got two clients, and started my LLC within a week. One of those clients was a venture backed EdTech startup based out of Salt Lake City called Campfire. I worked with them as a client for a few months and then joined their executive team full-time. I spent almost two years working with them building and managing different functions inside the start-up. I recently relaunched my own business Everleader. Everleader is a boutique leadership agency that works with companies to build custom leadership campaigns and experiences within their organizations.

You talk about helping companies define their leadership brand, what does that mean to you and why is that brand so important?

I work with a lot of different industries, construction, healthcare, retail, biopharma, tech, municipalities, and more. The biggest commonality is that people are people. The other biggest commonality is that a lot of times, particularly because we’ve been through so much collective change over the last five years, we create work cultures in which behaviors are mirrored from executive leaders to senior leaders to the rest of the organization. If that mirroring is not intentional, it turns into “accidental culture”. 

Companies have a leadership brand within their organizations whether they know it or not. While they’re very intentional about how they build their external brands around their products or services, they aren’t always so thoughtful about how they build their internal brand. But if we can be thoughtful about how we build these internal brands, it's not only going to create better experiences within our organizations and more intentional cultures, but it will likely help external brands as well. The folks on your front line who are talking to your customers, they should be representing your culture. If that’s not the case, it will create churn and cost your company money. Most companies aren’t thoughtful about the internal user journey, they’re just thinking about the external one and it costs them. 

What can companies be doing to make their leaders more effective?

A huge part of this is creating real playbooks and operating guides for the behaviors that are expected within your organization. A lot of the time, we don’t hold people accountable for their behavior or the ways we want our cultures to look simply because we haven’t defined that for ourselves. It is crucial that your leadership culture is modeled by your most important leaders, culture can’t change if the executive leadership team isn’t accurately representing the organization’s values. This usually happens either because they don’t know how or because they’re operating in a way that’s fear-based because they’re trying to go through change. I work a lot with companies who are going through big changes and their executive teams are trying to figure out who they want to be inside this next version of their companies and how they can lead their teams to success. To do that, they need to accurately define their leadership brand for themselves and the rest of their organization so everyone can be on board and moving in the same direction.

People often become managers because they're great individual contributors, not because they have leadership experience or expertise. How can companies help people make that transition?

There are two things I think are crucial to setting new leaders up for success. The first is smart organizational design so that you’re hiring people who actually want to be leaders. Second, minimizing the player-coach model so you have leaders with actual capacity to lead. Far too often when people get promoted to a manager job they keep ALL of the deliverables of their previous job while also managing people, their workload, performance management, keeping their team motivated and everything else that comes up. It puts folks in mid-management into immediate burnout. 

I think organization design will readily shift over the next five years. The gig economy is continuing to grow. If people don’t like what they’re doing inside of organizations, they leave, they move somewhere else. That has never been the case inside of corporate America. That means we need to do more skills-based hiring, because leadership is a skill like any other type of technical skill, and provide good training. Without good leadership training, new leaders either adopt the behavior they’ve seen from previous leaders or try to counter the behavior of people they didn’t like. It ends up being just an experimentation. 

Good leadership training is actionable. Too much training is theory based, it’ll say things like “a good one-on-one helps people feel seen.” Which is great, but what does that actually look like in practice? What does that mean? These kinds of skills are so important for an organization’s success. For example, if someone comes to you with a mistake, how you respond to that is so important at establishing the level of psychological safety and trust for your team. Offering new leaders advice on how to respond to the situations that come up is way more helpful than just telling them “you should have a one-on-one twice a month.”

In conversations about the state of work, I’m seeing a lot of the word “disconnected”. On paper, we’ve never been more connected. What do you think is driving this trend and making people feel so isolated and unsettled at work?

I don’t think that connected digitally means the same thing as connected emotionally. We are more connected than ever, but we’re also more scattered than ever. When we’re sitting in a meeting, we have text messages popping up, Slack messages, Teams messages, emails, all of these little things that require attention. Very few people I meet are 100% present in any place that they’re at. When COVID happened and so many people went remote, organizations were terrified that productivity would drop. People were terrified of losing their jobs, because they were in a fear mindset and living through a massive, scary historical event. Productivity skyrocketed, so many people wanted to prove they could work from home and get everything done. But that productivity surge never went away. Today, we’re incredibly fatigued by trying to be productive all of the time versus being present where we are and making genuine connections with people. Our society is hyper connected and I think that sometimes it triggers parts of our brain that makes us think we're connected but that connection isn’t reaching the depths of the community that we actually need. It doesn’t satiate that feeling of being truly connected with other human beings in real communities.

During the pandemic, I was working remotely for a startup. I had only my cat for company during the day and it was really lonely. So I started this thing called coffee chats. I posted on LinkedIn on a Tuesday saying, “anyone can join my zoom room, all we’re going to be doing is networking and connecting with one another. I’ll facilitate the conversation.” Two days later, thirty eight people showed up. By the end of that year, over 1500 people from six different continents had joined this coffee chat community. I would facilitate conversion that would encourage people to talk openly and authentically about the things happening in their lives because they didn’t have that outlet anywhere else. Creating that space for connection was something that I was really proud of. 

What’s the best leadership advice you’ve ever gotten?

The best leadership advice I’ve ever gotten was- “you don’t have to have all the answers.” The biggest mistakes I’ve made in my own leadership journey were during times where I tried to be someone that I wasn’t and tried to be the one who knew everything. I was afraid that if I didn't know all the answers that I would somehow be “caught” as someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the role that I was in. In reality, your job as a leader is not to have all the answers, your job is to elevate the people around you and create environments where they can do their absolute best work. If you’re doing that, everything is going to turn out okay. My proudest moments as a leader are when folks that reported to me years ago reach out even now to connect. 

Who helped you rise to this level and how do you pay it forward?

The person that always comes to mind is the VP of HR at the first construction company that I worked at, Brad Marsh. He is such a phenomenal human being and is still a good friend of mine. He had more belief in me than I had in myself at the time. I also appreciate that he showed me such a great example of what it meant to lead from a human based perspective first. If I didn’t have that so early in my career, there is no way I’d be where I’m at now. 

How I pay it forward- I do a lot of pro bono coaching sessions, even with consultants who are in the exact same space that I’m in. That’s important to me, there is enough of this work to go around. Leadership development is not something that most organizations have figured out, if it was we’d have a completely different workplace. The more I can help others figure out ways to be successful in this space or others, the better off we all are. I take at least five calls a month to help others and offer advice. It’s important to me to make space to support others because we're all just humans trying to make a difference in the world. 

How do you hire? What do you look for in people?

The biggest thing for me personally is a desire to learn. You can be as talented as all get out and if you aren’t willing to learn, you’re going to fall behind. We’re all learning all the time, no one has it all figured out. The world is constantly changing and in this wild environment that we are currently in, the rate of change just gets faster every year. If we think that we have things figured out, we’re going to find ourselves in a place in which we’re no longer relevant. You just need to be willing to keep learning, keep growing, be willing to be wrong, be willing to put yourself out there and make mistakes. You have to let go of the need to know all the answers.