Chad Silverstein reflects on core leadership responsibilities: the need for visionaries who anticipate trends, and the duty of leaders to see and support team members' career paths. He emphasizes honest conversations, trust-building, preparing successors (a bench), and accepting that people will leave while optimizing their contribution while present.
Chapters
There's so much truth to this concept. And you have to have someone in your system that's visionary, that can kind of see things before they happen. They can see the trends, they can keep their eye on the pulse of the industry, of the trends of whoever it is that your target audience is, and be able to pivot before it's too late. And I always think that as a leader, one of the biggest responsibilities that you have is to see this with the people and to be able to see, you know, people's kind of path through having conversations and practicing with them and asking curious questions and knowing what and why they're doing whatever they're doing and being honest with them, building trust so that you can, you know, know whether or not they only plan on being, you know, with you for the next year or two. And I think most systems create fear around that because they don't, they don't want to know that someone's check, checking out. But the reality is that if you're leading anything, you can expect the ship's going to change hands many times and you got to be okay with the fact that people are going to leave and you have to support it and you try to get the best out of everyone while they're there and you hope that they'll give you their best while they're there. But you have to be open about that and, you know, not talking about it doesn't make it go away. It just makes people hide it more. So I think you have to, you have to be able to see the, the, the, the path for people. If, you know, you've got a young group, you could pretty much assume that they're probably going to want to move on at some point. Some people are in school and I think it's a healthy thing to have a conversation about that and to either prepare a bench of people that you're going to be able to pull from and not get caught off guard. I think as a leader, you always have to be kind of thinking about growing your team and the fact that part of growing the team and the success of it is filling in holes, having people on reserve and challenging and accelerating the people who are doing great so you can keep them and sustain them and know that along the way you're going to lose some great ones and hopefully you'll pick up a few more.
