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Leadership Truth #12 - Great Leaders Develop Others

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: The highest calling for any leader is to develop other leaders. But great leaders do more than that, they focus on the development of everyone in the organization. This is the way they tap the true potential of the entire population. Great leaders continually invest in improving the capability of people.

Leadership Truth #12 - Great Leaders Develop Others

The best leaders realize it is critical to leave a stronger set of people in their wake. In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell states:

"When all is said and done, your ability as a leader will not be judged by what you have achieved personally or even by what your team accomplished during your tenure. You will be judged by how well your people and your organization did after you were gone. You will be gauged according to the Law of Legacy. Your lasting value will be measured by succession."

Many leaders are so obsessed with being successful in the moment, and for their own sake, they forget about the really important joy of developing a future stream of leaders. A particularly satisfying part of being a leader is spotting latent talent and developing it. It is one thing to hire a Harvard MBA with a 3.9 average and outline a series of development assignments on the road to becoming CEO. All that takes is patience and the ability to keep out of the way. The real skill is to spot the young engineer or HR Generalist who has talents unbeknown to even herself and develop that person to become a stellar leader.

Thegreat leader seeks to develop everyone in the organization. That means allocating significant time and energy (I recommend up to 30%) actually working on developing others. This includes having a visible strategy for development that people participate in every day. It means spending more time in the classroom teaching leaders than in the boardroom holding musty meetings. Jack Welch with his University at Croton was an excellent example of this. He used to relish the times he could escape to Croton to interface with and personally influence the future groups of leaders for GE. This constant focus on development is what created the incredible run he had in GE, and the lasting string of leaders after he departed. Jack modeled most of the items in the trust model very well, but he struggled with reinforcing candor and coaching people in private, which shows that even the best leaders have room to grow. As Jim O'Toole relates, "One former GE executive who had been dressed down by Welch for daring to question his boss, admitted to the moderator of an Aspen Institute Seminar that Welch's furious tirade ‘caused me to soil my pants.'"

Becausegreat leaders are not busy tacking and fighting the wind all day, they have time to devote to growing more leaders. Developing people is the most enjoyable part of being a leader. Get involved in this personally; do not delegate the function to the HR Department or some consultant. If people want to know why you are spending your time teaching Leadership 101 to new recruits, tell them it is the very best investment of time you can make as a leader.

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Article Tags: capability, development, investment, Leadership, skills, training



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