HOW TO EXPAND YOUR INFLUENCE AS A LEADER
Where are you at on your leadership journey?
The leaders I work with are excited not just by business growth, but also by personal growth. Great leaders are constantly on their own growth journey, motivated not just by business growth as a core driver, but also by creating their own opportunities to evolve role complexity and influence.
Evolving role complexity is about the personal growth journey of the leader through self-actualization, realization of strengths, and professional mastery.
Evolving role influence is about growing one’s sphere of influence in either a field of knowledge, an organization, an industry or even a range of industries.
The table below is a grid of leadership roles and their relative role complexity vs influence. The leadership journey may start at any point in this table, and movement through the squares could be vertical, horizontal, diagonal, or non-linear.
Where are you at on your journey of transformation as a leader?
Where do you aspire to be?
In my work as a performance coach, I meet leaders whose major pain point is that they have become slaves to their role. Their business, or their role is no longer giving them joy. They have become trapped in a cage of their own making.
Transforming as a leader means constantly evolving yourself out of a role – bringing great people in and building systems of performance that empower and enable them to do the work you hired them to do.
My good friend and former colleague Federica Nicolao recently completed the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) course. She shared with me a little anecdote that Company Directors are “nose in, hands off”. In other words, they are accountable to performance, yet reliant on influence.
The more evolved leaders become, the more “nose in, hands off” they are.
Truly inspiring leaders are those who motivate by connecting people to shared purpose; role modelling a shared set of values and beliefs; setting and maintaining high standards of performance; creating inclusive and safe cultures; and cultivating talent. They don’t do the do. They lead others to do the do.
We often trap ourselves in roles because we’re afraid to trust others; we think we can do it better; or we are afraid of becoming redundant. None of that is true in a growing business.
In fact, the business won’t grow if the people in it don’t grow.
Personal growth leads to business growth and vice versa. Evolving yourself out of a role is about creating green fields of opportunity both for yourself and those you lead. It’s simultaneously selfish and selfless.
To accelerate your journey of transformation – talk to me about my programs to develop leadership capability; amplify culture; or lead strategy.