Our leadership development “pipeline” is weaker than it needs to be. I believe each of you has potential – not only to become a stronger, more effective leader yourself, but to teach and develop other leaders.
In fact, I can assure you that you will hit plateaus in your own development as leaders until you pour into others.
What holds you back from this work? Fear, most likely, a set of fears that swamp your logic. You simply don’t feel adequate. You don’t know who. You don’t know how. No one ever told you that you’d be developing new leaders.
We can be hard on ourselves. Fears are fueled by our own leadership faults, imperfections, and screw-ups. What qualified me to teach someone else, when I’m still learning? I don’t have answers for my own questions let alone theirs! What if I steer them wrong? What if they find out I’m… _____ ?
Acknowledge your weaknesses, and use your failures and mistakes as teaching stories and teachable moments.
Logic won’t get you past the fears. You need to imagine a different future. Ask yourself a different category of question: What if I took a chance on <person>? What if I delegated some work to others, and gave them feedback? What if I shared a few stories, especially about what I learned from that major screw-up, over lunch with those two people?
We can do leadership development the cheap way or the expensive way. The cheap way is to spend beaucoup bucks to send hundreds of people off to fancy “training” courses and they’ll come back loaded up with certificates and initials. The expensive way is to pour into them, one person at a time.
I know which way I’m called to develop leaders. I hope you’ll see it that way, too.
