Shore University: How We Customize Talent Development

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Bigger. Stronger. Faster. the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion-dollar resources to the lower middle market space. In the first episode of this series, I talked with Michael Burcham, Chief of Strategy, Research, and Talent Development at Shore Capital. About the deep roots and commitment to learning that are at the heart of Shore’s work and how these roots go directly back to our founders.

In episode two, I talk with Michael, as well as Jackson Sprayberry, Director of Talent Development and Ben Gilbert, Associate of Talent Development about the emergence and evolution of Shore University as Shore Capital’s learning and talent development platform.

In this third episode of the series, Jackson, Ben and I discuss what partnering with the talent development team looks like for our portfolio companies and how we collaborate in designing and executing talent development programming for their company, their team, and their particular needs. We provide some examples of the breadth of our work and how it continues to grow and evolve as we work with and learn from leaders across our portfolio.

Welcome back, Jackson and Ben.

Ben Gilbert: Good to be here, Anderson.

Anderson Williams: So Ben, why don’t you start us off and just describe when we get a call from a portfolio company, what are some of the typical things that they’re calling, asking for resources for, or help with?

Ben Gilbert: Usually people will start off saying something like, well, can you help me with some management of conflict on my team? I’m having a lot of issues. With putting these new team members together and what usually takes a quick 30 minute call with them comes to find out it’s actually something more on like communication or just understanding your value as a team member within this larger team. And pretty quickly we can help them diagnose what it is that’s actually the issue.

But it’s interesting to see how the presenting problems kind of come out. And then how we do a little bit of creative problem solving on the front end of those calls.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. Any other patterns, sort of inbound things that you’ve already recognized, Jackson, in terms of your experience and inbound requests from portfolio companies?

Jackson Sprayberry: I think it’s similar to what Ben just highlighted. You know, sometimes folks will come to us and say, “Hey, I need some support, helping my team have difficult conversations.” And as you start to mine through conversation a bit.

You start to understand it’s actually they need a framework for more effective communication, and what they’re actually saying is, my team needs to know how to give feedback. And then you start talking about feedback, and then you realize actually they need to know how to hold people accountable.

Anderson Williams: They need to hold people accountable, which means that people have goals and people have goals that they understand, and so you just sort of start pulling the string, right? You could just keep that riff going of, this is what it’s presenting at and I need help with it. And we try our best to get down to a root cause. That is actually easier to control most of the time than the thing they’re presenting us with.

Jackson Sprayberry: It is. I tend to think of it as helping them really distinguish between leading and lagging indicators on their teams. Often they’re coming to us with the thing that’s lagging.

It’s how it’s showing up in their team dynamic or in their, uh, relationships among their team. It’s through really strategic questioning that we do on some of these initial calls with our portfolio companies to really start to work backwards and better understand where the breakdown happens. And that’s really where we start to target our content specific to them.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Ben Gilbert: What about you, Anderson? What are some patterns that you’re seeing with our portfolio companies?

Anderson Williams: Yeah, I think that a lot of this comes back to something we’ve talked about in previous episodes, and you mentioned in previous episode, is this idea of the accidental manager and we, our companies are full of smart and talented people, and none of this is a reflection on smart or talented.

It has to do with understanding your role, your contribution, how you create value for the team. So when you’re growing as a individual contributor, or as a manager or as a leader, you’re not just changing your role in the company, you’re reframing what you do as work. You’re reframing how you add value to the team. You’re reframing how you reflect on whether today was a good day or a bad day when you’re driving home in traffic.

Those transitions aren’t just skill-based. And one of the patterns that we see is those transitions are critical and frequent in growing companies. And if we can get upstream and get to the mental model, and I know Jackson, you’ve done a lot of work on this, but get to the stories and the narratives that are blocking people from understanding what their new role is, then we can open things up almost more systematically.

And I’ll use an example you guys already shared. Then Jackson, I want you to jump in on this as well, but feedback or difficult conversations often presented to us as performance reviews. Our people aren’t doing performance reviews. It’s because unless we’ve been taught otherwise, having a difficult conversation with Ben and having Ben get a little upset in front of me feels bad, and so I avoid it. But what we have to recognize and what we do, a lot of reframing is that I can’t enable Ben as my team member to grow if I avoid those conversations.

And so I’m actually doing more of a disservice to Ben by not having the difficult conversation. I’m actually doing more damage to his growth and career by not, and typically when we reframe that, we reframe people’s motivation from conflict avoidance or pain avoidance in those conversations to like I’ve gotta suck it up because I want what’s best for Ben. Most of our people want what’s best for their teams and don’t recognize that their behaviors are accidentally running counter to that.

Jackson Sprayberry: I think what you’re mentioning is another pattern that I didn’t mention just a second ago, but I actually think is much more meta.

It’s this pattern that I have yet to come across a manager or an employee in any of our portfolio companies that aren’t deeply invested in their own learning and their own development, as well as those of their team. And so that is a pattern that I have noticed that maybe is different than other maybe industries or kinda work environments.

Every single person that I’ve come in contact with thus far is deeply committed to being a better leader, being a better manager, being a better employee, whatever that looks like, where they are in the organization. I do find what is I

think most special in the work that we do is really helping identify, we just talked about it, but really helping create space, spaciousness, if you will, to kind of pull these folks out of their day-to-day grind and really pause to think what is the highest leverage thing that if it were different tomorrow, would drive value and make my folks feel more supported in the work they do every day and more successful in the work that they do every day.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, and one of the ways that we frame that and have from the beginning of Shore University is a few key shifts. We talk about the shift between leading and managing or managing and leading and knowing when to do what and what’s the best use of your time given your team, given your company, given your role right now?

You are likely both leader and manager, and if you need to be leader, but you’re spending 95% of your time managing, you’re doing your team and your company a disservice. If you need to be a manager and you’re spending 95% of your time being a leader, you’re doing your team and your company a disservice. So that’s one of the things that we try to get people to think about.

The other is, how do you transition from captain to coach? How do you transition from needing and desiring to be on the field with your team and in the team working to setting strategy, developing people, game planning, organizing, prioritizing, adapting prior to the team even knowing that there’s something to adapt to, this is that shift between a captain and a coach.

And then the third shift that we talk about is this idea of the time you spend working in the business versus on the business and in any growth oriented company, and anybody who is in a growth company who is growing themselves must make a shift in their time.

I don’t know what the right shift is, but they must make a shift in their time. To recognize that protecting minutes and hours in a week where they’re thinking about their people, when they’re thinking about their strategy, when they’re thinking about those kinds of things and not just doing, doing, doing that is a critical transition pattern, and it’s always difficult.

We spend a lot of time helping people learn how to close their door, even if it’s in a cube, right? How to set a boundary. We talk about. You know, as an aspiring leader in a growing company, I can’t step up into a new opportunity unless someone behind me is ready to step up into the space I create. Well, that should emphasize to you as a leader, that part of what you gotta do to step up is develop people behind you. And I can’t step up if others aren’t ready and they can’t step up and get ready if I’m not willing to step back. So that means I also have to think about the things I need to let go of.

So, these are some of the psychological patterns and shifts that we know underlie people’s stress, their conflict, their inability to manage time. That’s another thing that often gets presented to us. Well, it’s hard to manage time if you don’t know how to value time, and if that value of your time has shifted, then we need to go back and reset. What’s the best use of your time and what’s the best use of your team members’ time?

Jackson Sprayberry: I think what you’re hitting on there related to time. Is one of those fundamental shifts that has to take place when you move into a manager leader role. You know, sometimes we talk about the tragedy of the commons, which we won’t unpack here, but really it’s this understanding that your time, your bandwidth is a resource to be managed and allocated appropriately.

And so when you talk about closing the door, even if it’s a cube, it’s not to shut out your team. It’s actually in service of being a better manager and being a better leader for your team. And so for some, it’s really helping them understand that fundamental shift to my time is resource, and it needs to be allocated effectively.

For others it is an Eisenhower Matrix understanding actually how to better block my week out as it relates to my meetings, when my work time is and all of those types of things. And so it’s just an interesting concept to really diagnose alongside our managers and leaders across our companies to really meet them where they are, um, and provide support and resources in a way that feels meaningful to them.

Ben Gilbert: Yeah, and I think that extends to when you talk about stepping back so that others can step up, is it’s valuing your own time to be able to do that. But then also part of that development for your people is like things like problem solving, right? Where we talk about it in our Leadership Academy programs as leaders are problem solvers, but they don’t have to be the problem solver in chief.

And so being able to help your team understand what problems that they can solve. And what decisions they should make versus the ones that you have to make. Because as you mentioned, Jackson, your time is a precious commodity, especially in the roles that you hold as a leader within the company. And so it starts with you respecting and honoring that time so that you can communicate that down to your team, so that you can stay focused on working on the business while they can step up into that opportunity and develop as professionals as well.

Anderson Williams: So I want to step back and talk about the process from that initial call where maybe it’s a COO, maybe it’s a CXO, maybe it’s a CFO.

Somebody calls and says, I’m looking for X, and we have this conversation.

Who’s the audience? What are you looking for? What are they struggling with? What would success look like?

Those kinds of things. And then as we develop a curriculum or a program design and so forth. So I wanna share just an example of one of those. I’d love for you all to think of something to illuminate this process as well. And it goes back to something we were talking about that’s a common pattern for what requests come in.

Is had a company call and say, you know, we’ve got a performance management issue. And so we started the conversations about, okay, well what does your performance management system look like? Say, well, we haven’t had one real formally, historically, but we’re trying to roll one out. Okay. So that gives us a little bit of information.

Performance management is a problem, but it also hasn’t been an investment and it hasn’t been systematized yet. But we also know that that’s forthcoming and the team is working on it.

So now we step back and say, okay, so what does your performance management rollout look like? What are you trying to accomplish? How are you doing it? Who are your managers? You’re rolling it out to, how are you holding them accountable? How are you planning on training them?

So then we say, okay, how do we fit into that? One of the things that’s important in that story is that we make really clear that there’s a difference between training and professional development.

We don’t get down into the weeds to train our portfolio company team members on the business of our portfolio companies. We develop their skills as team members, as managers, as leaders, and so forth, but we’re not down in the technical weeds.

So as that conversation evolved, we began to align a plan. Around their rollout of their performance management. Long story short, we did a couple of virtual sessions where we talked about value creation. How do you create value as a company? If I’m gonna hold you to goals and standards of performance for our company, then it’s only fair for you to understand how we create value as a company. Otherwise, it’s completely arbitrary.

So we worked with the team to define those things. What are the company values? How does your business work? How do you create value for your customers? And then developed just a two virtual session series in the months prior to their performance management rollout that was about value creation.

One, from the perspective of me as an individual, what do I need to do? Growing company, growing customer base. Here’s how we create value, and then how do we create value as a team for our customers? That then supported their rollout of an initiative they were already planning to do anyway.

So just a brief example of the flexibility from a single virtual session or a multipart, from solving a specific problem to aligning and contributing additional professional development to something you’re already rolling out internally.

These are the kinds of partnerships we’re working on developing. Any other ones come to your mind? Just again, so that people listening can understand how we do partner to roll out the right solution for the portfolio company.

Jackson Sprayberry: I wanna stay on that thread. Just a moment related to performance management.

I think part of the work that we’re doing right now as it relates to standardizing some of the content and curriculum and standards that we work on is really getting a working theory on where the forks in the road are, if you will. Back to that leading lagging indicator we talked about.

One outcome around an initial call might be performance management and end up with the outcome that you mentioned around value creation.

Another one of those conversations might look like, well, we have a strong performance management in place. We’ve already rolled it out, but it’s fallen flat in execution. Well, through excavating and you know, interview style conversations with those folks, you start to understand we don’t have strong goals, we don’t have KPIs.

So really the, the problem isn’t your performance management system necessarily. We can’t know that yet because if you don’t have strong goals, what are you holding your employees to? So what is that performance management conversation centered on?

Alternatively, we might have a company that has a really strong performance management system. They’ve got really clear goals, and then when they go to execute, the only time their employees are receiving feedback is in these formal settings around performance management. And those feel incredibly high stakes. And so for that company, we’re able to diagnose, oh, actually we need to talk about more frequent feedback loops so that the first time your employees are getting feedback, it isn’t in this formal setting that feels so high stakes.

But rather it’s ongoing and you’ve created this culture of feedback. So I think that’s just one example of how somebody might call about performance management. And depending on where they are, one ends up with, here’s how you create value, another one might call and we end up having a conversation around creating really strong goals and values.

Then the other one might be actually equipping your managers to create a feedback culture that’s a little more frequent than just waiting for those formal settings.

Anderson Williams: Great insight and additional layer of that. You may have a bunch of new managers who don’t really yet know what it means to be a

manager.

Mm-hmm. Like that’s, that’s real in our environment. That just go back and let’s define the role. Mm-hmm. ’cause it’s really hard to put the other things in context. Holding somebody to goals or holding somebody accountable for things or communicating difficult conversations when you don’t know and you’re not clear that that’s what your role is now.

Jackson Sprayberry: And inside of that, it’s really helping them shift and understand the difference between feedback and accountability. That’s another thing that we notice inside of these conversations. You can help your manager shift from captain to coach, but then you really have to help them shift to understand why I give feedback. And that’s really the input on the work that employees on my team do. But I’m not seeing traction. I’m not seeing change. Oh, well that sounds like an accountability issue. Here’s how you hold someone accountable to the feedback that you’ve given along the way.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Ben Gilbert: What I love about that is you have to think really holistically about each of these individual companies and so beyond what the presenting problem is or beyond What we think based on this conversation, we believe to be the solution, is to really think about it deeper within their context.

And the only way you’re able to do that is by being Shore University, partner with these companies. You can’t get that from a third party consultant, and so the fact that we understand the setting in which they’re operating in and are able to do these onsite kinds of developments or even virtuals, you get to the real crux of the issue with examples like that where you’re trying to set up a system of feedback, but really it’s an issue with accountability or goal setting.

Jackson Sprayberry: I think something that we’re talking about here that really is implicit is I think what differentiates the work that we do, than maybe some more traditional leadership development programs or even frameworks and books is that we work really hard to create deep lasting, meaningful relationships with the people at our companies.

And so Shore, we have these broader pattern recognitions and we understand, you know, you’re at this stage of the hold, here’s likely what’s happening, but the ability to take it from good to great is the work that this team has done to create these strong relationships. To generate trust, to be able to be honest and vulnerable with us about where they’re seeing things break down.

And that’s really where the magic happens in terms of being able to deliver content that isn’t just a theoretical framework, but hyper specific to their specific team member needs. And that really only comes through trust, which you have to work hard for.

Anderson Williams: Well, and I think it’s a really important point about our approach is yes, these companies are within the Shore Capital portfolio, but we recognize we’re going into your company and working with your people, and you’re the one who brought us in.

So it better be good and it better be on point and it better be relevant. And we take that very seriously, which is why we’re talking about in this episode, our custom work, because this is how we get to the root of delivering not only quality professional development, but something that makes your people feel special.

That feels like you’ve been invested in. You didn’t just hire some keynote speaker who came and talked about whatever it is he likes to talk about, or some trainer that has their tricks and tools that they come in and make audiences go through. We a bore those things. That’s why we do what we do and why we love doing the custom work with our portfolio.

I just wanted to hit a couple more examples just to, to make it tangible and if I skip some, please jump in. We worked with one company that was rolling out a mentorship program and did some development prior to the mentorship program to prepare the mentors to best support the younger team members, and then did a launch with the mentors and mentees together as an in-person.

We did another where we had a manufacturing company and a single location, but had some shift managers who just needed to better understand how to manage their people on their shifts. They knew how to manage the shift, they know how to run the line, but were dealing with some people challenges that needed some support. So we went onsite and spent a day with them in their factory and customize that conversation to their particular roles.

We’ve mentioned before, we’ve got a virtual series we’re doing with a company focused on their frontline team members, specifically those who are individual contributors and also interfacing with customers.

Think about how high value every one of those customer interactions is, and we haven’t, in many cases prepared them to manage those, especially when they get difficult or when they get complicated. And as soon as someone is unprepared for that situation, we run the risk of losing a customer. It’s that high stakes, and yet these are frontline team members that often get overlooked for professional development. So we’re really excited about some of those things.

So I just wanted to give a few more examples of how we can take what we’ve built and what’s the foundations of the leadership Academy and the foundations of our other large professional development offerings and customize those to the portfolio company need and the particular audience.

Ben Gilbert: What I love about that is it really shows how we can flex to meet our companies where they are. So one of the examples that springs to my mind is we have a company who’s much older and they’ve actually brought us in to do, like speaking on their leadership summit, right? So they had like a annual conference that the heads of each of their regions we’re a part of. And they only brought us in for like a two hour session, but to help set the tone and the theme for the year, which was on like operational growth.

I mean, how do we activate our managers as communicators, as change leaders? But then we’ve also shifted to where we can do the same thing, but for a hundred person company that’s virtual. And so what I love about it is it just shows the depth and the variety in which we’re able to operate to really just meet our companies where they are.

Jackson Sprayberry: A couple of things that come to mind in addition to what’s already been highlighted here. I think one is the one that we’re working on right now to help really break down some of the mental models that we’ve just talked about or touched on briefly inside of their work on leading change.

So some of these managers and leaders for this particular company have gone through the Leadership Academy program. They’ve gone through some custom work with us and we’ve done the traditional things. We’ve had those conversations around leading change through like a Cotter and that type of work. But the reality is that something still isn’t working.

And so in that conversation that we had, what we started to unravel and understand was, actually, there are some pretty deeply embedded frameworks of thinking or these mental models that both leaders and employees have about what should be true and what could be true given the the specific challenges they’re facing.

And so you could be the best in the world at understanding a framework around leading change. And if you haven’t been able to take a step back and understand, oh, it’s not a knowledge gap that’s holding my team back, it’s actually a mindset gap that’s holding my team back.

And so right now what we’re doing is developing a essentially a two day intensive with some of their more senior leaders to really start to drill down and unpack, what are some of these mindsets that both we on our leadership team have and the employees that I lead every day that they have, that actually might be the things holding us back, not can we do X, Y, Z process? And so I think that’s critically important to highlight.

Anderson Williams: Well, and I jump in there, Jackson, because I think that notion of the mindsets and mental models is important, but I think it’s also really important in this environment because one group we’re working with right now.

Is a particular functional team within a large organization, and they’re moving from growth based thinking in their work to scale based thinking in their work. So they’re on the tail end of what is our typical hold period, and even they’re reframing the mental models for what the previous version of their work looked like to the imminent future version is shifting the very mental models we would have also helped train them on or teach them two years ago at a different stage of the company. It’s all dynamic and it’s all rapidly evolving.

So just before we wrap up, I think one of the things that’s really important, that’s always been important to this team is that these conversations with our portfolio company leaders enable us to do better work and enable us to design new opportunities, new programming, new content that builds our library, builds our own skills to be even more flexible.

Ourselves as the work evolves. So I would love to hear maybe Jackson, you talk a little bit about something that we’re working on currently that’s pushing us. Thanks to a portfolio company coming to us with a request.

Jackson Sprayberry: Yeah. Um, so I think what you’re referencing there is the train the trainer model that we’re thinking about.

I come from an education background and in that field in particular, one of the models, as you think about how many educators there are across the country, you can’t send them all to one place to get the training. Instead, you have to think about how do you equip their managers, their leaders inside of a certain context to go and deliver their own sort of leadership development to their employees.

And so that’s a similar approach that we’re thinking about now in particular around frontline employees. You know that these folks need and deserve development and you want to provide that to them, but how do you do it in a way that is cost effective, that manages resources well? And so we’re thinking through this idea of a train the trainer model.

Where managers and leaders from our portfolio companies come to us and we really start to train them not only on the content that’s going to be delivered to their employees via a virtual model, but also how do you extend that learning and empower that leader or that manager in their local context to extend that discussion and learning.

So perhaps they get the content and the framework around leadership development from us in a 20 to 30 minute virtual session. And then the local leader or manager is the one that steps in and says, okay, here’s an activity that we’re going to do. Let’s actually explore what you just learned in our specific context and equipping them with facilitator guides and the training they need to really better understand what it means to facilitate learning with adults.

The second thing that comes to mind that we’re working on is case studies, in particular around mindsets that people have. It’s really hard to push and prod on a mindset, especially if you’re not with that person every single day.

And so the idea around case studies, you can think a typical Harvard Business Review style case study, is that really through developing a strong fictional situation that we know to be true from the patterns that we kind of see across our companies, you’re able to help these individuals really externalize the problem. It’s much easier to see the problem when it’s not in your specific context. It’s a lot easier to diagnose a mindset.

When you read about it and you’re able to talk about it, and then once they’ve really started to illuminate in this fictional situation, they start talking about these mindsets that are in this fictional version. You’re able to say, okay, that’s great. How is that similar to the work that you’ve been doing this week? Do you notice these patterns in your organization?

And so rather than just calling specific attention to what you know to be true as it relates to a mindset, as adults, we value the idea that we can come to our own conclusions, that we are the ones who surface something. I think that’s the beauty of this type of work, is that they’re able to come to their own conclusions outside of their context and then kind of back their way into, oh actually, I did notice that specific thing in my context as well, and I really think that’s where the magic of adult facilitation is.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, so if you couldn’t tell, we love working with our portfolio companies and feel profoundly privileged to learn and adapt in real world and meaningful ways, what we’re doing with Shore University.

Go back to something we said earlier, none of this matters to us or to our portfolio partners unless our people can put it into action. And so just to wrap us up, just a reminder that nothing that we’re investing in is theoretical. Everything is intended to be put into practice to create immediate value. And to create longterm value for our portfolio companies and our investment team, and our investors, and so forth, which is really going back to the root of the first episode, why Shore Capital invested in talent development in the first place.

So thanks, Ben and Jackson, until next time.

Ben Gilbert: Until next time. Thank you, Anderson.

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes, as well as our Microcap Moments and Everyday Heroes series at www.shorecp.university/podcast, or anywhere you get your podcasts.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the

Andrew Malone Podcast Studio. With Story and Narration by Anderson

Williams. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. sound Design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Jackson Sprayberry and Ben Gilbert.

This podcast is a property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.