Video Transcript

Hi there, Dr Mike Ashby, co-founder of The Breakthrough Co and creator of the Active Manager Program.

I want to reflect a little with you on the nature and importance of breakthroughs.

First, a slightly embarrassing story: you’ll know what I mean when I refer to some things being hidden in plain sight. We were talking with our adviser who was really pushing us on getting greater definition on the value we offer. You know how this goes, we were all about features and benefits and testimonials and visions, and he was asking us what does the client get on your program.  In the end he said, surely what they’re getting is breakthroughs. Our VP Customer Experience got it first – her face just lit up. I got it a few seconds later – of course!

Some context: when we started back in 2003 we were helping companies become breakthrough companies, working with them on strategy and leadership. Over time we realised that the biggest obstacle for most businesses was the calibre of their middle managers – they were the layers of clay in the business. So we evolved to focus exclusively on them and we’ve seen managers just bloom when they’ve been on this program. It didn’t occur to me that what we were doing now was creating breakthroughs for managers.

So what’s a breakthrough? Technically you might call it a transformative moment when limitations are shattered, and new possibilities emerge. Or you might simply call it an aha moment. It’s when you realise you’ve shifted up a level, and you’re never going back to the way you were. Oliver Wendell Holmes said ‘'a mind stretched by a new experience can’t resume its old dimensions’'. Once you’ve played at a higher level, it’s hard to downgrade.

Breakthroughs are obviously really important to the people who experience them, but when a whole group of managers are experiencing them, the effect is literally transformational. That’s why we call breakthroughs the currency of change. Breakthroughs buy you organisational transformation. If you’ve been through a transformation, and I’ve led a few and seen a lot, you’ll know that not only can money not buy you love, it also can’t buy change. Transformation is a whole lot of individuals leaving their past and their past performance and playing at a higher level. And they do that because they’ve learned to do that for themselves, not because they were told to.

What are some of the breakthroughs that learners (and their managers) report?

A lot of them start with much greater self-awareness. We build our whole program on something we call the Active Mindset, which is really mindfulness but a lot of people equate that with meditation so we don’t call it that. What we mean by Active Mindset is a learner stopping and thinking about, for example, whether they need to be doing this particular task or can someone else do it. That really changes how much they delegate. As has the idea of “only do what I can do”. Other breakthroughs occur when, as someone said, “I listen with my eyes and stop myself thinking of an answer while they’re talking”.

These are the things that happen inside learners’ heads. What their managers and their team see is the breakthroughs that come from practicing management skills using an Active Mindset:

• They’re a lot more confident in themselves rather than delegating everything upwards

• They’re really tuned into their staff instead of hiding behind busyness

• They’re more resilient, they cope with pressure a lot better

• Meetings are actually enjoyable as well as effective

• They get more done, they seem to have time to have great conversations with staff

• They’re solving problems better

Managers who go through our program become more efficient with their time, more effective with their people and more proactive in their role.

While many people will experience between 4 and 12 breakthroughs on our Active Manager program, the real potential is infinite because they’ve learned self-awareness, and that’s the masterkey to ongoing growth. They’ve got a deeper understanding of themselves, how they interact with others, and how others interact with them. It’s self-awareness that unlocks lifelong learning, because with self-awareness you can honestly and kindly confront where you need to improve, and have the courage to change, the courage to grow.

In that sense we had our own breakthrough in the conversation with our adviser. Now we think all the time about how we can best engineer breakthroughs for our learners and their leaders. It’s a higher standard for us, and a challenge that we’re excited to embrace. It feeds our purpose and our vision, which is to change the way managers are trained. Now that will be a breakthrough.

I hope your managers get the opportunity for breakthroughs, and I’d love to be part of it. If you’d like to learn how we can make that happen together, click on the  button. Let’s get to work.