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Tuesday, March 29, 2022

The Four Stages of a Growing Leader

Where are you right now?

Last week, we started talking about “growing capacity” which is one of the smart decisions discussed in Mark Miller’s book, Smart Leadership.

And one of the recurring themes in this decision is the fact that you HAVE TO create margin for yourself to think, to strategize, and to dream. If you don’t have enough margin, you’ll just end up getting exhausting yourself. (Been there!)

If you end up being too busy and drowning yourself under a variety of strategical, managerial, and execution tasks, you will not be able to grow your capacity.That’s why it’s important for you to design a life and leadership that will scale so you can do more and create bigger impact on the people around you.

When leaders decide to grow capacity, one of the things that they find difficult is letting go of certain roles and responsibilities. In fact, here are the 5 stages that a typical growing leader goes through in the usual journey.

Mark Miller goes into each one in his book, but I’m keeping it straightforward here. If you want to do a deep dive into each phase, you can check out his awesome book here. It’s the same book that we’ve been going through for the past couple of months!

  1. Doer –  Early in your career, you were most likely a “doer.” Basically, you start getting known as someone who can be trusted to get things done with leadership potential.
  2. Delegator – The best doers cannot do it all, so we learn to work with and through others. Most people don’t learn to delegate the best way, because they see it as “getting someone else to do my work” rather than developing team members. If you or your team need a zoom call to help in this area, let me know.
  3. Developer – Some people get stuck in the delegating phase, but some advance. As a developer, you start to focus more on the people rather than the tasks and output. You become a good leader, and hopefully a leader of leaders.
  4. Designer – Finally, this Is the phase that “design for scale” comes into fruition. This is where you serve others as you equip leaders of leaders, leading them through the privilege of designing vision, culture, structure, strategy, and systems.


Of course, there are times wherein leaders get stuck in one phase for too long. Or sometimes leaders move from one role to another. Just remember that if you stay in one role for too long, you are letting opportunities pass you by.

 

Where are you in your journey?

 

Much Love,

 

Dr. Rob

rob@leadertribe.com

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