Developing New Leaders
SUMMARY
Do you find that everybody in your organisation comes to you when they want to get things done? Do you feel like you are the only leader in the place?
Well, stick with me because this week, I want to finish this series by helping you shift that.
Every single person you've been given to lead has the capacity to lead others, and by looking at it that way, you realise there's going to be a distribution of the load. People—instead of coming to you all the time—will come to other people as well, and you’ll get more done.
What I want to do today is help you shift your mindset and beliefs about this and give you practical ways of thinking about how you can develop new leaders.
You are developing every day in your leadership capacity. As a leader, you need to create an environment where others can do the same thing.
There are two elements of that environment:
The first element is SUPPORT.
The second thing is MENTORING.
It's definitely not always the people who have the greatest technical skills or who are the highest producers.
Make sure you take two or three people under your wing. Let them be close to you and watch you make mistakes and how you respond to that. Develop them and then, utilise them to leverage you’re ability to develop the rest of the team.
So, step up. Look for people to develop.
Get them in and have a conversation with them and then walk them through all the elements of these nine crucial shifts that we've been talking about so far this year.
Utilise those things both in coaching and mentoring your team. Give your team the environment to make mistakes and get them right. Shift things, learn and get the experience. When you do these, you’ll see great new leaders coming up beside you.
Well, that's it from me for another week.
Join me again next week as we shift from just going through these three key areas of PERSONAL, PROFESSIONAL, and PEOPLE leadership to spending a month on each of those nine areas and going deeper. This will give you more practical skills to build yourself up, get more results, and work differently and more effectively with people.
I'll see you next week.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you find that everybody in your organisation comes to you when they want to get things done? Do you feel like you are the only leader in the place?
Well, stick with me because this week, I want to finish this series by helping you shift that.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue our conversation around all things people leadership by helping you Develop New Leaders.
It's been said many times that leadership doesn't take place until you duplicate yourself and develop new leaders. In my corporate career, I had a lot of problems with that because I thought that if I developed new leaders, then that was taking something away from me, which meant that I wasn't as valuable as I was before.
We've dealt with those issues in the identity area of personal leadership, however, you need to continue to work on it throughout the journey. So, what is stopping you from developing new leaders? Is it the same as me?
Do you find that your identity is in that leadership role, and sharing that with others will water yours down? Well, NO.
In my experience, the more leaders that I develop today, the greater leader that I become.
To have that shift, I first had to change my mindset from "taking something from me" to actually "adding to me".
Every single person you've been given to lead has the capacity to lead others, and by looking at it that way, you realise there's going to be a distribution of the load. People—instead of coming to you all the time—will come to other people as well, and you’ll get more done.
What I want to do today is help you shift your mindset and beliefs about this and give you practical ways of thinking about how you can develop new leaders.
As we've gone through this process, we've already realised that everybody's a leader. It's not bestowed upon you when you have a team. If you're only leading you, then you are a leader. Everybody who is in your team is already a leader. And that's why I like to use the word DEVELOPING.
You and I are developing every day in our leadership capacity. As a leader, you need to create an environment where others can do the same thing.
So, you need to shift your mindset around the following: “If I create new leaders, I won't be necessary.” Once you’ve moved beyond that and realise that that's not the case, the next shift that needs to happen in your mindset is to move from performance reviews and management to coaching.
The coaching leader provides an environment for people to grow. There are two elements of that environment:
The first element is SUPPORT. Being able to support them, walk the journey with them, and show them what they need to do gives them an environment where they can incrementally grow in those skills that they don't have. That includes being okay with people making mistakes.
Mistakes are a training ground.
I’m not advocating that we just go to work every day and make heaps of mistakes. I am saying that it needs to be okay that when mistakes are made, you can look at them as a learning opportunity.
You can have a quick look and go:
“What did I do differently there, and how could I change that moving forward?”
“Why was it that we didn't get the result that we wanted?”
As a leader, I want to ask myself, “Where did I create that?” rather than point the finger and say, “Well, they got it wrong.”
What a lot of leaders do when someone gets something wrong is they pull back from giving them any responsibility because they think:
“Well, I gave them an opportunity, and they blew it.”
What's really going on in your mind (if that's you) is:
“They didn't represent me very well, so now people are going to judge me based on that result.”
No, they won’t.
What they’re going to judge you on is your ability to bring leaders up and through.
Last week, we talked about the shift of going from DO to THROUGH which means getting results, not just from your efforts, but also from the collective efforts of others.
Building leadership capacity is your responsibility. It's not something that the HR or learning and development department does. They provide the resources, but the most effective leadership development happens when you provide not just that environment of support but also an environment of accountability.
Accountability is a mutual thing where they are accountable to themselves and to you for what they're doing, and you are accountable to them to encourage, correct, and help them. It is also your role to step up when there are things that are not going the way that they could and to speak truth to that with empathy, but also being strong and confident.
You also need to help them realise that this is not the way you do things and that you do things in a certain way. So, it's a fine balance for a leader to give people that accountability.
Accountability is a good thing. Without accountability, you and I wouldn’t do anything to change. We would just go along happily as we are. So, the first shift is to understand that coaching your people is how to develop new leaders.
The second thing is MENTORING.
Coaching is an environment where you ask questions and draw out the capacity that's already in there. However, there are still some things that they don't know, and you have to help them with them. That's where, through your example, practical development, and teaching, you pass on the skills that you already have.
You do that through your experience.
You take them on the journey with you of where you've come from and how you've learned to do things differently.
In mentoring, I'm not just talking about your technical ability (which is also important), what I'm talking about are the lessons you've learned and how you've applied them to help you go from where you were to where you are now. As you do that, you also need to help your team understand that you are still on a journey.
I tell people all the time that although I'm an “expert” in this work, I’m still a work in progress in its implementation every day.
You are either green and growing, or you are ripe and rotting.
I don't believe we have already arrived. It's just about continuous improvement and being able to step up, shift, change, and do things differently to get a different result.
A coaching leader provides those two elements of support and accountability. They can add skills through their experience and learning and create an environment and culture where the team learns from each other.
Every team is made up of individuals with different strengths, gifts, talents, levels of experience, and ideas.
Diversity is more vast than what diversity is normally talked about.
The best way to develop leaders is to give them an environment to grow, be there to support them and walk along their journey. However, you also need to let your team come together and develop each other.
I've talked about those four elements of teamwork (those pillars that underpin great teams), which are:
Collaboration, Communication, how they handle Conflict, and how they navigate Change.
The navigation of those things as a team, both individually and collectively, is where leadership gets developed.
You and I could buy many books on leadership; we can read them and apply them, and those things that you’ve learned are skills. However, there's nothing like "learned experience", where you go through things and get it wrong, where you do it differently and get a different result, where you have interactions and conflict, and where your communication is continually growing.
All these things happen in a real environment.
So, how do you develop new leaders?
- Help people believe that they are a leader.
- Give them the belief in themselves that they don't yet have.
Remember what it was like for you: where you doubted yourself, where you listened to negative conversations you’ve had in the past, where your internal dialogue was holding you back.
These are the real things that you want to help them to navigate.
Shift those roadblocks out of the way so that they can bring out their best and become the best leader that they can.
Who is it that you are developing as a leader?
I like to look at every team and go: “Let me grab two or three people (depending on the size of your team), and let me work more closely with them.”
So, identify:
Who are the emerging leaders?
Who are the people who are showing you that they have a desire to step up?
And sometimes, it's not the people who have been there the longest.
It's definitely not always the people who have the greatest technical skills or who are the highest producers.
Make sure you take two or three people under your wing. Let them be close to you and watch you make mistakes and how you respond to that. Develop them and then, utilise them to leverage you’re ability to develop the rest of the team.
The point that I wanted to get across today (and I hope I have. I’m not feeling all that well today. So, I think I've gone around in circles a few times, but I still want to commit to doing this. If you've still got questions, I'd love you to check in with me, and I can certainly point you in the right direction). You have the capacity to create new leaders, and you need to do that. Otherwise, you stagnate, and you will not be able to step up because there's no one there to fill your role.
I've done this and I've done it well. I’ve sometimes picked the wrong people. I've pulled out too early rather than stayed and developed them. I did that because I was busy and I wanted to get off and do other things. I haven't got it right all the time.
I'm going through a phase right now in my business, where my focus is on developing more people to bring on the journey with me because I don't have the capacity to impact all the people that I want to impact.
So, step up. Look for people to develop.
Get them in and have a conversation with them and then walk them through all the elements of these nine crucial shifts that we've been talking about so far this year.
Utilise those things both in coaching and mentoring your team. Give your team the environment to make mistakes and get them right. Shift things, learn and get the experience. When you do these, you’ll see great new leaders coming up beside you.
Well, that's it from me for another week.
Join me again next week as we shift from just going through these three key areas of PERSONAL, PROFESSIONAL, and PEOPLE leadership to spending a month on each of those nine areas and going deeper. This will give you more practical skills to build yourself up, get more results, and work differently and more effectively with people.
I'll see you next week.
