7 Things you can do to create leaders

An entrepreneur good friend of mine said this today and I thought what a brilliant quote and decided to think about what it means to me.

Reflecting on my own leadership journey I reflected that creating leaders can be harder than it seems

What does it take for a leader to create leadership in others?

Based on my experience of working with great leaders, I have come up with 7 things you can do to create an environment for leadership to flourish.

1)  Give up the desire for recognition. As the leader, the buck stops with you and if you are like me, that is a great motivator! However by giving up the need for personal recognition, the environment changes and the achievements of the team begin to shine through. One of my first bosses was a master at this. She found lots of ways to get her teams recognised whilst staying firmly in the background. It made us more likely to take on challenges and happier to work harder to achieve them.

2)  Giving up the “my way is the best way”. When we are in a position of responsibility and we have a team relying on us to lead them, its often easy to just expect them all to work the same way you do and to do everything your way. The great leaders I worked with, always left room for the team to decide which was the best way, many of them had decades of experience and yet would still be open to try out something new.  This gave the teams under them a sense of freedom. 

3)  Always be ready to help when things go wrong. It can be easy if you are not taking the recognition, to also not help when things go wrong. The best leaders I worked for would be there when stuff hit the fan and shielded their teams. They were also supportive and helpful when fixing whatever went wrong. This lead to teams trusting their leaders and having the courage to take risks. 

4)  Allocate work and opportunities fairly and in turn. Many of us have worked with our own “dream teams”, those people we have completely trusted and knew how to get stuff down.  It is very tempting to always use the same team when new opportunities come along. Thereby only developing the people you have an affinity for. Great leaders don’t do that, they give opportunities out to everyone that work with them, even the people they might not know well or haven’t worked with before. This creates an atmosphere of fairness and reduces unnecessary competition.

5)  Give up the attachment to a result. I have always found this the most difficult to give up, I tend to have a fixed idea of the result I want in my mind. I would also steer my team to that result sometimes unconsciously. Once I had given this up, I was open to other possibilities and sometimes these were bigger and better than my own ideas. On reflection the great leaders I have worked with have done the same, they have steered their teams to do their best, and yet have kept themselves open about the results. 

6)  Letting the leaders you create move on. This was the biggest risk for me. I have worked with so many amazing people, and often once I found them, I kept them in my team. Allowing them to grow and to move on was sometimes the hardest thing to do. Thinking about my own career and my own journey, I realised that the best leaders I worked forward, always steered me to new exciting opportunities.

7)  Have the intention that your teams are already leaders. I am thinking about one of my first managers once again. She was someone that assumed her team we all leaders from the onset. It was a dream to work for her and with her. Many of us went on to lead big teams and some to lead organisations, she sowed that seed in our minds. Thank you Sue O'Hare.

Shamela helps organisations that feel they need to boost their leadership development offerings for their staff. Regarded as an expert in her field she develops bespoke programmes designed to meet the specific needs of each of her client organisations. Clients find that Shamela is able to provide them with the space and stillness for them to explore some of blockers, and be a mirror to their own values and strengths.