Your Team Can’t Grow If You Don’t

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to the Leaders Kit Bag, your go to podcast for practical leadership insights in just six minutes. In each episode, we tackle real challenges faced by leaders and managers, offering actionable tools and strategies you can take away and immediately apply. And because leadership doesn't happen in a studio, these episodes are mostly recorded outside on the move. They're raw, unscripted and straight to the point. So wherever you are, let's dive in and sharpen your leadership skills six minutes at a time. The leadership skills and behaviors that got you and your organization to where you are right now today are rarely the ones that will get you and your organization right where you want to be in the future. So says Marshall Goldsmith, and in my experience this is particularly true in high growth organizations and scale ups. In these companies, the major bottleneck is rarely sales, operations or even access to funding, but rather it's the leadership capability that exists with within the organization. If you and the immediate team around you can't or won't grow and develop, then your organization certainly can't scale effectively, if at all. Leadership becomes one of the major bottlenecks or log jams in an organization when leaders try to stay involved and in control of absolutely everything that is happening within the organization and they start to become spread too thin to be effective. You see, as the scale and complexity of an organization grows, leaders struggle to make sense of and analyze and retain all of what is going on. And as a result, decision making slows dramatically. So you can see, without leadership development, without effective leadership, the organization hits a growth ceiling. So how do we do it? How do we scale leadership so that the organization can grow and scale well? As is often the case, I've got three simple ideas and tactics for you to take away and try. Number one is about changing your own mindset about what it means to be a leader. The leader's role changes as the organization goes from startup to scale up to maybe pre sale and exit. So we need to shift from being the hero leader or the genius with a thousand helpers to being an enabler. We need to create more leaders in the organization and we can do that by starting to let go and relinquish some control that we've been clinging onto before. Because whilst we might be incredibly smart, we might be an amazing entrepreneur, we all have a finite amount of mental bandwidth. Number two is about creating a culture of accountability and autonomy within an environment that is characterized by psychological safety. What does that mean and how do we do it? Well, we need to make sure that every, everyone in the organization is totally clear about where we're going and ultimately what we are trying to achieve. Part of our job as a leader is to constantly communicate that message, remind people of where we're going, what we're trying to achieve, what the main effort and true priorities are. Once we've done that, give people the freedom and autonomy to act and make decisions and do it in an environment of psychological safety, which means making sure that there isn't a blame culture. If someone makes a decision in good faith that they think is moving them towards the organization's goals. Make it okay that they made a mistake, encourage them to flag it early so that you can fix it. And when people do make those autonomous decisions that work out well, then we really need to shine a light on it. It's about rewarding and recognizing and praising the behavior that we want to see. So it's about empowering people, giving them a sense of autonomy, and ensuring that they can safely make mistakes. The third and final tip that I've got for you is to invest in the leadership development for you and those around you in the senior team and the layer below as you start to scale. As I said at the start of today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag, the leadership capability within your organization is potentially the last remaining, the only competitive advantage that you have. We see it time and time again on shows such as the Dragon's Den in the UK or Shark Tank in the US where the investors say, actually, what I'm investing in is you. Investors invest in the senior team and much as they do the business or the product, if you need support with leadership development, as one of my childhood heroes used to say, Hannibal from the A Team, if you've got a problem and no one else can help, then you know where to find me. Hope it's been useful. As always, until next time, look after yourself. Look after the people. You've got the privilege and and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.