Leaders who hope to exit are stuck because they don’t have leaders who can carry the organization.

Organizations facing growth are bottlenecked because they don’t have leaders to support expansion.

Others are struggling to navigate change because they don’t have leaders who bring focus, direction, and stability.

Where are the leaders?

It’s a common question.

Actually, the question tends to shake out in two different ways:

• Why aren’t there any leaders?
• Why are those leading not motivated/trustworthy/reliable/and so on?

Follow me down the rabbit hole, let’s see if we can find an answer:

The truth is that there are leaders (or people with the potential) out there. People who are incredibly motivated, trustworthy and reliable.

If those leaders are out there, and they aren’t (as far as you can tell) in your organization, we might be asking the wrong questions.

Maybe the real question is just one question: Why don’t we have the leaders we need and want?

That’s a better question. It leads to great follow up questions:

• Is our organization attractive to the kind of people who’d be great leaders?
• Are we pushing potentially great leaders away?
• Are we building leaders and giving them opportunities to grow?

Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s dig deeper:

• What kind of organization is attractive and would retain a high-potential leader? Are we that?
• Do we want an organization full of great leaders? In other words, are we willing to:
  • Lead at a higher level ourselves?
  • Let go of authority and decision making?
  • Learn how high trust/high accountability environments are better together?
• What is the leadership journey or experience in our organization?
  • What happens when someone demonstrates initiative or drive in an unanticipated direction?
  • What happens if someone rocks the boat? Challenges the status quo?
  • Is there time and room for emerging leaders to really help encourage their staff?
  • Are values and expected behaviors consistently modeled by leadership throughout the organization?

Organizations Have the Leaders They Deserve

I practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. There is a concept in this martial art that you will end up in the position you deserve.

If I keep getting stuck underneath someone, it’s because I deserve to be there. I haven’t yet learned what I need to do to deserve to be somewhere else.

If I focus on feeling frustrated or just wanting something else, I’ll stay stuck.

If I focus on what I need to learn, I’ll grow.

Organizations that are full of great leaders share these characteristics:

• They create visionary organizations, filled with purpose and meaning.
• They give people room and opportunities to lead, to make mistakes and to grow.
• They provide parameters and support, so those same people can be successful.
• They identify, nurture and guide the capacity of potential leaders.
• They build a culture of ownership and responsibility throughout the organization. An organization of leaders.

What You Need to Build, To Attract, Retain and Build Great Leaders

1. Build Your Culture

Great organizations build cultures that assume competence in their staff. They push decision making and responsibility to the lowest levels of the organization.

The author Shawn Achor shares how the hospital Kaiser Permanente pushed basic medical skills and decision making (leadership) throughout their organization. All the way down to front desk and reception jobs.

This led to a 40% growth in early identification of cancer. Which saved lives.

Which, among other things, increases an organization-wide sense of connection to the mission. Which is ownership.

A previous client of mine did this when they began to de-silo their company and push companywide ownership and responsibility. They helped different departments become more specifically aware of how they could better serve another department’s success.

They clarified and increased the authority of their front-line managers to more quickly and effectively resolve customer complaints.

They engaged all of their management in creating the vision and strategy for the company.

The net results? Attraction and retention of ideal staff went up. Bottom line was benefitted.

2. Build Systems That Support Leadership

I recently talked with a small business owner. She operates a business that should be able to run itself.

Great brand, respected service, loyal customer base, very simple business model.

It should be running on auto-pilot. She should be able to just check the instruments once in a while to make sure everything is running smoothly. She should only have to touch the controls for unique situations.

The auto-pilot on an aircraft is a system. A system of systems, actually.

But it doesn’t work that way for her. Like many small business owners, she’s enslaved herself to her business.

The answer? A little bit of time spent making it easy for others to help lead and manage the company. By building systems.

This doesn’t take that much time. In my experience, with a willing group of people, you can convert a business from “fully manual” to a functional “autopilot” set of systems within six-months to a year.

But, the ability to trust and let go is too often missing. So, the only people who remain are those who prefer environments where responsibility isn’t offered.

How to Build Your Autopilot

Briefly, the following steps are needed to build systems. Walking these steps with others is a great opportunity to build leaders in your organization:

• Identify the core values and purpose of the organization. This provides guidelines for decision making and behavior.
• Identify goals and key metrics. What are you trying to accomplish? How will this be measured? This lets everyone target and track progress.
• Define expectations for behavior and performance. These should be manifestations of your core values as applied to accomplishing your purpose and goals.
• Clarify roles and responsibilities. When everyone knows what their job is and what everyone else’s job is, there is less conflict and more focus.
• For repeated decisions or events: Create & write policies or procedures that describe, step-by-step what the expectations are and how they should be handled. Then it should be done the same way, each time.

That’s it.

Then senior leadership can spend their time looking for new opportunities, growing people or (if you are a business owner) taking a well-deserved vacation without worry. Because they mostly only need to check the dials and make minor adjustments.

When senior leadership takes the time to walk through these steps, particularly if they include others in this process, they create space and direction within which new leaders can be.

3. Build Your People

Usually, when people think about leadership development, they first think about training or coaching new leaders.

That is important (crucial, in fact) but if you can’t attract or retain leaders or give them a sufficiently defined environment to be successful in – you won’t keep the leaders you build anyway. Or at least not many good ones.

An encouraging fact is that your process of changing your culture and building your systems can actually be (and for my clients usually is) part of their leadership development process. It all can grow at once.

So, you don’t need to wait to get everything right before you start building leaders. Include them in the process of making everything right to build them.

There are many different kinds of leadership development methods and tools out there. There are pros and cons, more and less applicable times and situations for all of them.

But in general, here is what you need to consider when building individual people in your organization:

• Values and character: Their leadership will be an expression of who they really are and what they are really motivated by.
  • Select people whose values and character match those of the organization.
  • Use organizational values as a compass. All training, concepts, and decisions should be guided by and reinforce those values.
• Encourage Self-Efficacy: Self-efficacy is the belief that, “I can act and make things happen.” Encourage this. Actively address and change habits or policies that undermine the self-efficacy of others. When people no longer believe they can make a difference, they’ll stop trying.
• Give and Demonstrate Ownership: I mean this in two ways:
• Personal Responsibility for Behavior and Consequences. Great leaders (and emotionally mature adults) take responsibility. They do what needs to be done. They do not avoid, deflect, minimize or rationalize. This takes courage.
• Organizational Responsibility: Great leaders feel responsible for everyone’s success. You can tell an owner of a business when you see someone in a suit picking up a gum wrapper in the hallway. You can tell ownership in a regular employee when they do the same and were never asked to do it.

Responsibility comes from a sense of ownership and belonging. Give them something they want to own and belong to.

• Teach Leadership Skills: The job of leadership is unlike any other. Many highly skilled people from one profession struggle significantly at being effective leaders.

It isn’t that they don’t have the capacity. It’s just that their original skill sets don’t transfer into leadership. This classically happens with doctors, attorney’s and engineers. But is true in any other profession.

Conclusion

Become an organization that:

• Attracts good leaders.
• Retains good leaders.
• Allows leaders to give you their best.
• Builds good leaders.

The existence of good leadership, or lack thereof, is a reflection of your organization. Not the hiring pool.

What changes do you need to make to be the place where good leaders want to be, can take root and flourish?

Take good care,

Christian

P.S. Need quick clarity on next steps in your organization? Contact me to set up a 20-minute strategy call. Together we’ll identify the top 2 or 3 strategies you need to give your organization the leaders it needs.