Great Leaders Think Exponentially

A desire for personal growth and improvement is important for all leaders. Not just desire, but a plan to grow our leadership capital and capacity. When we improve, our organizations improve, and that’s important.

But for great leaders personal improvement is not enough. Great leaders see their job as helping everyone in the organization get better at what they do, especially leaders. Great leaders see themselves as not just leaders of people, but also leaders of leaders. They invest in more than their own capacity to lead. They invest in the leadership capital of those they lead, and train those they lead to invest in the leadership capital of those THEY lead.

Let me give an example of what it looks like to think exponentially and have exponential leadership impact. Let’s say Sue recognizes that improving her communication skills will help her to be a better leader. So Sue invests in the training to make her a better communicator. As a result, her team experiences more clarity and less confusion, they begin to perform together at a higher level, and her department’s productivity increases significantly. That’s good! If every leader just made that much investment, we’d all experience the benefits.

But Sue thinks exponentially. She thinks to herself, “If I can learn to be a better leader by improving my communication skills, so can others. Why not help others learn to do what I learned to do.” Sue decides she would like to train Brian, Gwen and Adam, three of her direct reports, to do the things that now make her a better communicator.

Sue also recognizes that doing something well and training others to do it well are different things and require different sets of skills. So Sue invests in the training she needs to become good at training others. Now she has not only grown her own leadership capacity and the productivity of her department, she now has the skills to grow the leadership capacity of more people. This is where Sue’s leadership capital begins to grow exponentially.

Now Sue trains Brian, Gwen and Adam to be better communicators, exponentially improving clarity and productivity and decreasing confusion in her department. And that’s just the beginning. Sue now has the skills to continue training others to improve various leadership skills for the rest of her career.

Here’s where Sue’s leadership capital goes parabolic, creating the opportunity to leave a lasting leadership legacy: Sue thinks to herself, “If I can learn the skills to train others to improve their leadership skills, then other leaders can learn those skills too. What if I learned to train people to train people?” So again Sue invests her own leadership capacity with the intention of using her new skills to train leaders who will train more leaders to grow the leadership capital of others. Now she can not only train people to improve their leadership skills, she can also train people to train more people to grow THEIR leadership skills, and so on. Eventually Sue creates a culture in her organization that holds leadership development as one of its key values, and her organization earns a reputation as the place to be if you want to be developed as a leader.

This is the essence of “Catapult Leadership.” It’s a selfless commitment to seeing our organizations and ourselves as multipliers of great leaders, for the sake of our departments, our whole organizations, our families, our communities and our world. Because better leadership really is key to better, more effective organizations and communities.

If you share my vision of not only being a better leader, but also being a better leader of better leaders, then consider joining my Catapult Community. Read here for more info.