It’s not what you achieve — but the number of future leaders you help create. And 6 tips to help you succeed.
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash
The One Leadership Metric That Matters
It’s not what you achieve — but the number of future leaders you help create. And 6 tips to help you succeed.
The meeting room quieted, and everyone looked towards me, expecting me to decide. Jane highlighted three issues we faced and highlighted how one severely impacted the project and might derail what we were trying to achieve.
Jane had prepared a comprehensive analysis of the issues and provided recommendations on progressing. However, no one wanted to be the one to decide what to do. The implications of a wrong decision were too high, and they felt it needed to be elevated to me.
They were right, and the stakes were high. A wrong decision could result in a financial loss, extending the project, and dissolving a solid customer relationship. But I knew I was not the right person to make that decision.
Sure, I will be accountable for the decision, but everyone in the room knew nobody understood the problem like Jane. At this point, I had two choices. Make the decision, knowing as the leader, and I am accountable for the outcomes. Or emancipate myself from the decision and create space for the team to choose the path forward.
It feels good to make decisions. You feel valued and are earning your pay. However, one of my mantras is “measure me not on what I achieve, but how many future leaders I help create”.
I believe this is the true measure that all leaders should be judged by, and I wanted to give some insight into how I create leaders.
Don’t judge me on what I achieve, judge me on the number of future leaders I create while I achieve.
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
Leadership philosophies
I was asked a few years ago what my leadership philosophy was, and I didn’t have a great answer. As someone invested in talking more about leadership and personal development, I thought I better clarify my answer, and I’m glad I did.
I use the article I wrote about my leadership philosophy regularly so that people can understand me a little better and what they can expect from me. It has been beneficial to write down. My philosophy is to balance the tension required to be a good leader, and I’ve written the below to characterise this.
To lead is to see the shape of people — and the empty space in problems, then fit the people to that space and let them grow. If the problem space is too large, the stretch too far, you have failed them. If the problem space is too small, the fit too tight, you have failed them
You must balance the tension between care and challenge to achieve this outcome. You need to understand, know, and empathise with the person to know when you can push them harder and when to pull back. Without care, you are all challenge, and that leads to resentment. Without challenge, you are all care, leading to friendship, not leadership. It is in this tension that good leaders live.
Managers focus on the outcomes, and leaders focus on the people.
I must establish practices supporting those outcomes if that is my leadership philosophy. I ask that you reflect on what your leadership philosophy might be and what your regular practices are that support that? But, in the rest of the article, I will give you six things I try to incorporate into my leadership practice.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Leadership practices that support the creation of more leaders
Leadership is a practice, like the things that Doctors and Lawyers maintain. They call them a practice because they are required to keep learning, adjusting, and getting better. The same applies to leadership. The following topics give you an idea of some of the practices I maintain right now, but I will continue to learn, adjust and get better at this too.
These practices align with my leadership philosophy, know the people you lead, then challenge them to achieve more than they thought possible.
1. Mentor first
I am deliberate about establishing the right relationship with my direct reports. If I want to establish a foundation where tension can exist, where I can balance genuine care and challenge. Then I need to know who they are and what they want to achieve.
The best way to do that is to establish a mentoring relationship. Get to know your reports in a way that no other boss of theirs has ever tried to. To do this, I follow a three-step process:
- Establish boundaries using I request-I offer;
- Discover their personal values; and
- Understand their version of success.
This establishes a solid foundation for understanding who they are, and what is important to them, allowing for goal-setting and outcomes to be communicated in their language. This allows you to find the tension point related to care.
2. Create space for people to suck
To get better, people have to suck first. I have done a fair bit of coaching kids’ sporting teams. Now, I’m no master at this, but I do know that you have to teach kids in a specific way to get the best out of them.
Show them something, let them try it out, and then offer them little corrections until they improve. I can guarantee the first time they try something, and they will suck at it. And you have to let them suck for a while; eventually, they’ll work it out. The same applies to people at work. You must give them space to suck at something, then offer corrections. I have a rescuer tendency, I will step in when I see I can help, and I have had to temper that such that people know I am available to help them but will not step in if they’re making some progress.
They know I will let them suck for a bit, and I want them to be comfortable doing so, because that is the path to growth.
The path to growth is through discomfort
Ryan Holiday wrote a pivotal book explaining stoicism called ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ in which he talks about the opportunity that challenges present. But I prefer to listen to Chuck Norris.
I’ve always found that anything worth achieving will always have obstacles in the way and you’ve got to have that drive and determination to overcome those obstacles on route to whatever it is that you want to accomplish — Chuck Norris.
3. Understand attitude and aptitude
Leaders need to get good at identifying the individual strengths of the people around them (I’ll talk more about that in a second). In this, I am being specific about my strengths of character and competence.
If you have people in your team with a fantastic attitude, you foster their aptitude. If there a people with fantastic aptitude, then you foster their attitude.
Lift up attitude, foster aptitude. Recognise aptitude, and foster attitude. Find the greatness and shape its utility.
But how do you do this? Again, think back to the junior sports example. You have someone in the team who isn’t very good but loves to see progress. You give them simple things to do that have a significant outcome. You keep coupling them back to a much larger outcome, then focus them on the easier thing in front of them. Foster their attitude, and grow their aptitude. These people are humble and curious; you need to stoke that curiosity and encourage their progress.
Similarly, you have someone in the sports team (or your team) who is brilliant at a certain thing but doesn’t want to try hard to learn a different aspect. In this case, you refer them back to what they know and tease how easy it could be for them to develop a larger skill. You must foster that unique skill by exposing it to new challenges. These people are good at what they know and are often worried that trying something new will expose them aren’t good. They need you to create safety for them to try new things.
Find their strength and use it to foster growth.
4. Be a strength-namer
I hinted that leaders need to be good at identifying strengths, but what they need to be doing is naming strengths.
If you have someone in your team who is good at organising to achieve outcomes, tell them. Give their strength a name they can identify with.
“Hey Steve, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you are really good at focusing our efforts. I think it is a real strength of yours.”
If you have someone that is insightful during presentations, always ask pointed and specific questions that help get a better result. Tell them.
“Felicity, I love having you in these presentation reviews. You always have a very insightful question that helps us make it a bit better. It is a real strength of yours.”
You get the idea. People often do not understand this specific thing about themselves. Your noticing gives that specific aspect of power and permission.
Always name strengths, and let them know their special type of amazing.
You don’t inspire others by speaking about how amazing you are. You inspire others by showing them how amazing they are — Lolly Daskal
Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash
5. Accountability
One of my favourite sayings about accountability is;
When three people are responsible for feeding the dog, the dog goes hungry.
When you are leading a team, you must make sure there are clear accountabilities. For yourself, of course. But also for each member of the team.
Growing leaders is about growing people who want to take accountability for the outcomes assigned to them and eventually for the outcomes assigned to the team, project, business, or whatever…
Leadership is not about title, pay, or responsibilities. It is about accountability. When you are a leader, you choose to take accountability for the outcomes — all of them.
So, how do you create leaders? You have to let them take accountability.
To do this, I borrow language from one of my favourite leadership and cultural change books — Turn the Ship Around!In this book, David Marquet talks about the fact that empowerment is a poor term for delegating responsibilities and accountabilities. Instead, we should think in terms of emancipation.
Leaders must create a vacuum of accountability and responsibility around a particular outcome so that someone else can step into that vacuum and assume accountability. If a leader empowers, they are still standing in that space, leaving no room for the next leader to grow. They cannot assume accountability.
Photo by yang miao on Unsplash
6. Leadership language
The words leaders use are important, and words have power. We have heard the great speeches of previous generations and watched movies where a rousing speech is given to motivate the team and find a way to success.
That is not what I am talking about. Sure, leaders should try to be good storytellers, and they need to know that there are times when they will be looked to in difficult situations. But I am talking about the smaller moments. The everyday interactions, often in smaller groups or with individuals, and the power that the words used in those situations have been just as important as the crescendo speeches. More so, even.
In those smaller moments, something special happens, but it takes longer. Those moments allow for small inflections that aggregate into something more significant for the individuals.
A great example of this and the simple shifts that can happen also come from David Marquet, in describing his ladder of leadership language.
Essentially, you continually level up your conversations with your team. You help them climb the ladder.
When someone walks up to you and asks, “what do you want me to do?” you reply with, “what do you see that needs to be done?”.
If they say, “I can see some things that need to be done…”, you respond with, “what do you think needs to be done next?”.
When they say, “I think this is what needs to be done next”, you can reply with, “If that’s what you intend to do, why is it the right thing to do next?”.
In this way, you continually level up their thinking. You test their competence and clarity, and they get to have a say in what they do.
To assist in this conversation, David created some pocket cards with the ladder of leadership. I have grabbed a copy from David’s website, where you can buy a pack of intent-based leadership cards. The ladder of leadership is one of these leadership cards. These level-up conversations aim to increase the individuals’ psychological ownership, and “I Intend” is the sweet spot.
Further, leaders that ask more questions tend to be more effective than those that give answers.
Image from David Marquet on Intent Based Leadership
Your goal is to change how the people in the team think about the work they are doing and, in doing this, change how they communicate. This shift in language identifies their accountability and ownership of the problems and outcomes, making them accountable for feeding the dog (😉).
Measuring success
You can often measure your success when managing outcomes. Did the team succeed in achieving the aim? Did we overcome that problem we were facing? Did I deliver on time? These are specific outcomes and have clear descriptions for success.
But how do you measure if you’ve created future leaders?
For this, I don’t have an answer that offers the same satisfaction as managers will. Remember, I said that don’t measure me on what I achieve. Measure the number of future leaders I create while I achieve.
Instead, you must focus on creating a leadership culture with that impact. Impact and inspire those around you to think and act differently. Carve out opportunities for those that are demonstrating the behaviours you have instilled, act as a proponent or advocate for them, and they will assume those leadership responsibilities.
The gratification of seeing the results might be delayed, but impacting so many people’s lives will be far more satisfying.
Just as a bonus for reading this far, I encourage those future leaders to conduct one specific activity. Form a two-column sheet (on a piece of paper, in a spreadsheet, or some other platform), and in the left column, write down all the things leaders/bosses/managers have done that they don’t like. And in the right column, note down all the things those people have done that they did like. Then encourage them to be more like the person on the right and less like the person on the left. That will help them define their leadership style.
What are your tips for creating more leaders? Please leave a comment with your favourite practices.
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Inspired by life. Leadership, Growth, Personal Development. Engineer and Sports Enthusiast. Top Writer in Leadership. Editor of Sparks Publication. leonpurton.com
By Leon Purton on March 1, 2023.
Exported from Medium on December 22, 2023.
