The dream of every entrepreneur is to evolve his or her leadership.
“But wait, Dan!” you might say. “Isn’t the dream of every entrepreneur to post ridiculous videos of themselves on Instagram standing in front of a Gulfstream jet holding flutes of champagne, dividing the world into winners and losers?”
No. That is not the dream. It is a facade.
Every entrepreneur’s dream is to create a culture of performance so strong that great teams work in the business, enabling them to work on the business.
Leadership bridges the state in which an entrepreneur runs their business and the one in which a crack team of true believers does so. Leadership unlocks the will inside of others to actualize a worthy outcome.
The higher the level of leadership, the greater your team’s investment to own more and execute better, enabling the leader to focus on strategic elements of the business.
The simplest way to put this is that someone has to be thinking about the business. When the leader is consumed with the tasks of execution, he or she lacks the bandwidth to think about the business, brewing both burnout and stagnation.
Imagine, if you will, the pilot of a commercial jetliner working through the checklist of a flight attendant. If you saw the pilot serving coffee, you would not be out of line to emphatically admonish him to get his @&#$?&! butt back to the @&#$?&! cockpit.
More often than not entrepreneurs start a business because they know they can do it better, whatever it happens to be. As the business grows from seed to seedling, the founder does everything–chief cook and bottle washer.
Past a certain point, however, the demands of the business evolve to a point where it requires the founder to build a team, culture, and strategy.
The business needs the founder to evolve his/her leadership.
This is a tectonic paradigm shift. And, as one of my mentors often quotes, “The system is designed to defend the system,” which means that your comfort zone of being chief cook and bottle washer, i.e., of doing everything yourself, tries to drag you out of leadership and back into the day-to-day.
“Comfort zone?!” you may protest. “But Dan, I’m goin’ nuts working around the clock!”
“Dear Reader!” I would reply. “Why, then, aren’t you building your team?”
This is often referred to as Superhero Syndrome. It’s the flipside of the Impostor Syndrome coin. Impostor Syndrome is your voice trying to convince you that you can’t do anything. Superhero Syndrome is your voice trying to convince you that you must do everything.
Just as Impostor Syndrome is the expression of fear, so too is Superhero Syndrome. Impostor Syndrome is the fear that you won’t be able to grow. Superhero syndrome is the fear that you won’t be able to grow other people.
And just as the cure for Impostor Syndrome is building new leadership skills, so too Superhero Syndrome. So when you hear the voice of the Superhero in your head, start by burning your cape and tights, and take the following mantra for a spin:
“80% done by someone else is far better than 100% done by me.”
Then set a clear intention to become excellent at building capability in others. Here are three leadership habits that will get you there.
Recognize capabilities in others: Consistently evaluate the “zone of genius” for each of your employees. How does each person in your organization create value? The answer brings you to find their proper place in the company. This requires a paradigm shift to see people as human beings rather than as human resources. Only then will your attention be tuned to the inherent gifts inside of them.
Create great training opportunities: Your role as the leader is either to manage or delegate the training cycle. Professional development is an investment in your team’s ability to surmount the challenges of the future. If your company does not offer training, when those challenges inevitably arise it will either be impossible or debilitatingly costly to win.
Let go of perfectionism: Leadership scales when more people in the organization grow in skill and autonomy. The only way people can grow is if they are encouraged to take thoughtful risks and are rewarded for doing so. This is what author Josh Waitzkin calls “investing in loss.” Give your people the resources they need to learn. And then show them how to learn from failure.
Also, let go of perfectionism in yourself. Remember, when it comes to day-to-day execution, 80% done by someone else is far better than 100% done by you. Unless you want a company with zero percent leadership.
Every task that you do in the business consumes time and energy that could be invested in building your team, culture, and strategy. The more you recognize others’ strengths, provide them with great learning opportunities, and teach them how to learn from failure, the more capacity your team will have, and the less you’ll feel the need to save the day.
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