HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN LEADERSHIP REVOLUTION. FIRST LEAD YOURSELF.
Yesterday, I was interviewed on The Audacious podcast and there was one recurring theme that seemed to thread through the entire interview. I said, ‘When you stop learning, you stop leading’.
And I really believe this. I believe that leaders need to always be learning so they always have something to offer. If you stop learning, the world will continue to evolve without you. You will be left behind and eventually you will become irrelevant.
If you want to lead, you need to be proactive about your own learning and development. And this is a key foundation of the leadership philosophy of First Lead Yourself.
There are three foundation elements here. Face Up, Show Up and Step Up. I notice that the Step Up piece sometimes doesn’t get quite enough attention. Yet this is where the evolution and revolution of your leadership occurs.
You need to drive your own leadership revolution with new learning that you experiment with, and then you choose the things that are going to add to your leadership and begin to embody them.
Leading is active. It is not passive. It is not stagnant.
Being a leader is exactly that. A being.
So you must keep moving, changing, growing and becoming ready for the future. You need to take responsibility for your leadership and take responsibility for your learning. They go hand in hand.
So my questions to you are:
- How do you plan on growing yourself as a leader?
- Where will you focus your learning? And,
- What will this enable you to contribute as a leader?
Within the next few years millennials will be the largest generation making up the workforce, yet almost 69% feel there is a lack of development and training of leaders at their company. And shockingly, they are apparently right, as research shared by FounderJar shows more than 55% of those in senior management roles have not had any formal training.
Don’t wait for others to sponsor your learning. You might be waiting a while. You need to take the lead in your own learning. After all, it is in your best interest and in the interest of those you lead, because you have even more to offer them.
When I partner with organisations, sometimes what I encounter is a situation where the most senior leaders are very prepared to sponsor the learning and development of those leaders who are earlier in their leadership journey. And they forget about themselves and their own development.
This can create a challenge or potential problem because if the most senior leaders are not learning, growing and evolving their leadership to the next level, they are taking up the space that other leaders could grow into.
So when I hear leaders say, “My people are not stepping up. They’re not ready for the next level.” I wonder is it because you are in the way? Because you have not developed to the next level? Because you have not grown yourself and created space for others to grow into.
The objective is to grow yourself out of your current space, creating headroom for your people to grow their leadership. If you are still being the expert in something, then it is really hard for your people to become the expert in the same thing.
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Just because you are CEO, don’t think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization.”
~ Indra Nooyi, Former CEO & Chair PepsiCo
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A few years ago, I was talking to a CEO who was on the verge of retirement, and he was complaining that he had no successor. He had been working with his direct reports for years, but unfortunately, he had not created room for them to grow into the ‘next CEO’ because he was still occupying the space.
He had stopped growing and developing himself and it had created a problem because he did not have a successor who was prepared, equipped, and confident to step into the soon to be vacant CEO role. This was a problem he could easily have avoided if he had simply made room for these people, his direct reports, to grow.
So when you stop learning, you stop leading.
What is your big opportunity for learning, to create your own growth and development, leading to the evolution and revolution of your leadership? Ensuring you stay current, relevant, contributing, and proactively future proofing yourself, your people and your organisation?
I’d love to know your thoughts.
I share simple, practical & actionable ideas for developing Big Leadership, helping CEOs (and their teams) future proof their leadership, their people, and their organisations.
Helping leaders move from reactive to strategic leadership by developing their competence, confidence and credibility.
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