Clay Nelson gave a presentation on Leaders Growing Leaders at Construct 2009 CSI Show in Indianapolis. His position is you have to train your employees to do what you do. This give you the ability to stay on the cutting edge and continue to be the visionary.
So this concept, of growing leaders to advance your vision, grows the diversity and depth of your business. If you constantly answer questions and tell people what to do, you will have no time to do visioning. Clay says as a leader your job is to know what you don’t know. So if you set your goal to be right all the time then you have stopped learning.
Hence you should look for things you don’t know and focus on learning those things. Let your employees do all the things you already know. If they can’t, then you have not done your job of giving them the power. This is the only way to be one of the leaders growing leaders. Your staff will do what you let them do through your actions. If you always give them the answer, or if you tell them they are wrong when they bring you an answer, then you have given them no power to learn and grow themselves. Therefore, as a leader you have to stop telling and start asking questions.
Write down all the things you do for two weeks. As a result this will give you a job description of what you do now. What on the list can you have someone else do? Figure this out and you can start doing things you don’t already know how to do and you can grow.
A leader is only as great as the weakest part of his team. Don’t worry about making mistakes, mistakes = growth. Set an example, be what you want other to be. This will give you the leaders that you need in your firm.
This was a great seminar with a tremendous speaker.
