The privilege of leadership brings responsibility … the responsibility of helping those that you lead to grow and develop so that they can become leaders as well. Consider …
Some managers see themselves as being responsible for assembling a staff of people who can meet the needs of their customers. Once they put that staff together, their primary concern is to keep the staff intact so that it is not necessary to identify new talent and develop it. For these managers, the status quo is the ideal that they strive to maintain.
Other managers, however, recognize that they have been given the privilege of leadership. With that privilege comes the responsibility of helping people improve their skills and cultivate new talents so that they can advance in their chosen careers. These managers have the potential to become Great Leaders. Attaining this status, though, requires that they adopt a new mindset; a mindset that measures success against a standard that involves the number of people they send out into the world to accept new challenges and opportunities. I had the privilege of working with a Great Leader who had adopted this standard.
My first agency manager, Ray, realized very early in his career that he was helped by those around him who recognized his ability to recruit, hire, and develop new agents who had the ability to advance into agency management; and, they encouraged him to use this talent and helped him increase his skills in this area. He saw the help he received as a debt that he could only repay by doing the same for others.
As he grew his agency, Ray sought out talented people and exposed them to the possibility of career growth and the opportunities that agency management could offer them. Even though promoting people out of his agency reduced his income (at least temporarily), Ray began measuring his own success in terms of the number of new agency managers he developed and allowed to leave to develop new agencies. He never begrudged them the chance to grow their careers in new directions. In fact, he encouraged them to do so if that is where their ambitions led them. At the time of his death, Ray counted 29 new agency managers as one of this greatest legacies. Ray was a Great Leader. He accepted the responsibilities that being a Great Leader entail and he thrived on those responsibilities.
Have you had the privilege of working such a Great Leader? Share your story by commenting below.
Tom Hoisington is a speaker, trainer, and author whose goal is to provide leaders and potential leaders with tools that empower them to build teams that are creative and cost effective along with a clearer understanding of how personality types interact within those teams. He can be contacted at tom.hoisington@eagleoneresources.com