"THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT A SUCCESSOR" -JOHN MAXWELL
If you are in a leadership position, your job involves being a coach, cheerleader, doctor, encourager, trainer, mentor and visionary, to name just a few. But have you ever heard that your job is to be replaced… on purpose? You are to create an organization or platform that doesn’t include yourself at some point in the future.
I heard John Maxwell say several years ago, “Every leader’s job is to work himself/herself OUT of a job.” If you are not creating people to take your place, your leadership only exists for you… and will die with you. If you have to check your messages by email, text or written notes to make sure people the people under you are making you look good, you need to check your leadership motives and methods.
I meet employees as I travel who don’t have “permission” to put people over policies and wind up angering people. The CEO cares more about the bottom line (or should care if he or she wants to remain the CEO).
Move Up or Move Out
Your job as a leader is to grow yourself and stop being the lid on the pressure cooker of your organization. One day it is going to blow! If you are empowering your staff to take authority (NOT responsibility) then you will be free to grow yourself and morph into a new position and leader. Failure to do so will stagnate you in your current role forever. You can’t move up if you are still tied down to the same tasks that others are neglecting or doing poorly.
"But Jim, I can’t give these people authority! They are a bunch of incompetents!” A CEO said this to me in a conference a few years ago. “Who hired these people?” I asked him. “Well… I did!” he exclaimed. Then that’s not my problem. You hired people you knew couldn’t handle authority and you knew they weren’t capable of taking on tasks without your micro-management, so now you are paying the price for that decision (or string of hiring decisions). If you exercised more leadership in staffing, you would have to do less management now.
"The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." -Ralph Nader
"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others." -Bill Gates
