Laura Knights: 3 ways to create stronger teams
It’s been a privilege to speak with experts at the intersection of CSR and employee engagement about creating effective, purposeful, and inspiring workplaces that have a positive impact on employees' lives and the community. I was especially excited to speak with Laura Knights, LCSW, because her work and expertise resonates on multiple issues that are super relevant for HR leaders today. Laura is an executive coach, speaker, and facilitator who created the Black Woman Leading® program and podcast and is founder and CEO of Knights Consulting LLC. Her background in business, human resources, adult education, and social work uniquely equip her to teach others how to deal with both the "head work" and "heart work" required to succeed at work and in life.
Hi Laura, it’s so great to chat with you! I thought we’d start at the beginning: what inspired you to found Knights Consulting?
I worked in human resources for 10 years before founding Knights Consulting and really fell in love with leadership coaching and supporting team members. Something that was missing from my previous roles was a unifying thread that united all the processes that touch employee experience. My work in leadership development was always siloed, making it less effective than it could have been in terms of impacting the company culture. I founded Knights Consulting because I saw the potential of creating a holistic model around leadership development that’s incorporated into all of a company’s talent processes. When you have a common language around team development and invest in the potential of people at all levels of the organization—not just those at the top—it strengthens work relationships, improves motivation and performance, and changes the company culture in a powerful way. Finally, when team members at all levels of the organization have a leadership mindset, it has a big impact on how they communicate with your clients and constituents, transforming how your organization interacts with the world.
You talk a lot about “Heart Work” and “Head Work” — what’s the difference and why are both important?
Head work is what you typically think about in leadership development—it’s that tactical training you need to do to develop competencies, skills and action plans. The heart piece is the internal, emotional piece of leadership development that is often overlooked but is so crucial to holistic leadership development. As human beings, we bring our “stuff” with us everywhere we go. Through the workshops we facilitate at Knights Consulting, we encourage people to reflect on their families and how they developed their understanding of things like accountability and communication. Often when I’m conducting leadership coaching, we discover relational issues with colleagues actually have to do with past trauma. Working through those issues with the help of a counselor or therapist can be transformative for growth in the workplace.
What is something you wish more companies knew about leadership development?
I wish more companies understood that leadership development is not just about people managers, seniors and executives. It creates a lot of internal issues when some team members receive leadership training and some don’t. When people move into management, it takes on average 4 years for them to get leadership development training. People leave managers, not jobs, so failing to train leaders early feeds directly into the great resignation. Succession planning is another really important issue right now, and investing in the potential of your individual contributors is extremely important to ensure they have meaningful plans of growth. Finally, communicating a common language for all team members is a great way to convey a company’s values in a meaningful way.
What advice would you have for growing companies that want to create more cohesive workplace cultures in a remote or hybrid environment?
We work with a lot of companies in high-growth industries and the first piece of advice I’d give for any growing company is to invest in developing your people systems early. You have to envision and invest in where your company is going, for example, thinking about the training that your teams will need and how you’ll address conflict. Being proactive when you’re still small will preempt a lot of problems in the future.
The second thing is that any workplace needs systems to be both bottoms-up and top-down. Initiatives need to be rooted in what employees want, but they also need leadership support. For example, many DEI professionals who were hired in the aftermath of the racial reckoning have started their jobs only to realize that there actually isn’t leadership support for the change they were hired to make. That kind of false advertising is extremely demotivating.
The third thing is don’t be afraid of metrics—both on the DEI side and on the learning side. In order to grow, companies have to be transparent about where they’re starting. Being afraid of what the numbers will illuminate is not productive. Companies must invest in systems that make it easy to access the metrics that give direction for the work they are doing.
Finally, those initiatives should be connected by a common thread so the business functions talk to each other and can be aligned.
