4 Tactics to Begin Scaling Your Leadership
What’s your level of scaled leadership?
Welcome to the first in a series of blogs focused on Strategic Leadership!
I’m deliberately kicking this off just before the holidays. For many of us, things are slowing down and we’re hopefully taking some time off before the New Year.
What perfect timing to reflect and strategize for how we want to lead in 2021.
I’ve been blessed with some AMAZING leaders in my career. Those moments when you hear them speak and you sit there and go, “damn, I’d run through a wall for them!” Or those leaders that you know are facing a sh*t storm and they’re at the helm with vulnerability, transparency, and utter appreciation for the work you’re doing to weather the storm.
Being a great leader doesn’t have to be hard. It does, however, need to be deliberate.
Leaders are required to scale. How often do you think about your own scalability? We think about scalable solutions for products, customer experiences, and more, but what about our own leadership scalability?
The effectiveness of an organization's leaders will determine whether or not that organization can grow.
What works at one level is likely to run into serious limitations at the next level.
When you look around your organization, where do you see instances of unscaled leadership? You know what this looks like? It’s the manager who can’t go on vacation because things will fall apart. It’s the team that runs everything through their leader vs operating with empowerment.
Scale comes from developing the capacity and capability of others.
But there’s a rub. As a people manager, we like to be “in it.” It feels good to be included in meetings. We love knowing how to do things and having people need our help. We like being involved in decisions and influencing outcomes.
Our ego craves unscalable leadership because it makes us feel more important. In many cases, it makes us feel like we have job security because our team or company couldn’t do without us.
Here’s the shift to be made: you will add more value to your organization when you learn to operate and lead at scale.
What’s my #1 goal as a leader? Make myself replaceable. I want to develop my people so well that I can be out for a few weeks and the train stays on the tracks. I want my team to learn the decision making filters I use so they feel greater ownership to take things and run with them.
How do we get on the scaling leadership bandwagon? Here are 4 actions to get you going.
#1 - Take Inventory - Assess your current level of scale.
Questions to help assess:
What work/projects can’t move forward without your sign off or decisions being made by you?
What happens when you log off/take time off? Can the team operate without you?
What decisions are your team members empowered to make?
How much time in your week is dedicated to strategic thinking and planning?
On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your scaled leadership? If 10 is you’re absolutely crushing it and you could take a sabbatical without anyone knowing you’re gone, where are you?
What score do you want to have 6 months from now? What will it require of you?
#2 - Assess Your Tasks and Work
Questions to help assess:
What tasks do you do that don’t play to your strengths?
What tasks do you do because “it’s faster” for you to do than hand off?
What work is on your plate that your team members could grow into?
I challenge you - identify 2-3 tasks you currently do and set a timeline for when those will be delegated to others. What skills will they need to grow in order to take these on successfully? What behaviors and skills can you model to aid in their development?
#3 - Inventory Your Meetings
Questions to help assess:
Are you in meetings the entire day?
Are you the only one who can make the decisions or provide the input?
What if you reduced your volume of meetings by 25%? What would become possible?
What is the impact of empowering and developing a direct report to attend some meetings in your place?
Now that you’ve answered those questions, can you build the discipline and muscle to a) identify your purpose in each meeting (inform, input, decision) and b) request clear meeting agendas?
What will role and agenda clarity do for your bandwidth?
#4 - Assess Your People
Questions to help spark action:
Who is your successor?
Which of your team members can grow into other roles in the organization?
How many of your team members have you promoted?
What are their career objectives and motivators?
What are their strengths and what skill gaps could be filled?
Let’s pause here for a hot second.
What did you notice reading these? Were your responses easily available? Are these harder to answer for some of your team members?
What would become possible for your leadership if all of your team members felt connected to their strengths and their development?
Those are 4 actions to get your wheels turning.
What’s coming up for you now? Notice it. Write it down. What’s shifting for how you’re thinking about your leadership in 2021?
Now, was that fun? I hope so! In coming editions, I’m going to dive into Leading with Vision, Mastering Alignment, and Building Decision Making. If you found this helpful, forward along to other leaders you know who are equally hungry to grow their leadership!
