Rising Leaders: Your Only Job is to Grow

Rising leaders know one thing about their role as leader. There is only one job. Grow.

Leaders that rise through their organizations or find themselves stepping into increasing degrees of authority in multiple organizations know this. Their ascent isn’t merely a result of deft political maneuvers. Its not because they hit the ball out of the park on every swing and nail their sales numbers every quarter. It comes from an innate understanding that they are in their role to expand opportunity for everyone they touch.

Leaders who win in the marketplace and win with their teams rise in business. They advance into greater leadership roles in their organizations. They are sought after and recruited by companies seeking to attract the best and brightest candidates to lead their teams. What do they have in common?

Growth.

In my experience, I’ve seen these leaders do 3 things consistently relating to growth. They grow their business. They grow their teams. They grow themselves.

1. Grow Your Business.

Sales leaders know that simply overseeing the sales function isn’t enough. You must impact the bottom line for your company. Grow sales and grow profits. Keep customers and attract new ones. Minimize churn and attrition. Build your business.

Start with a coherent strategic plan. Build your plan around your current products, capabilities and resources. Align it with your organization’s mission. Involve essential stakeholders in your plan development above, around, and below you. Make sure that your customers and prospects will benefit from successful execution of your strategy. Articulate and remind your team and your organization of your strategy and commit to spending every day in pursuit of the objectives you’ve established. Be aggressive. Build your plan. Perform the tasks you’ve identified to deliver the plan. Measure the outcomes. Evaluate your performance and refine your plan and tasks as needed. Keep that cycle going and deliver results.

In sales, you’re either growing or you’re going. Make sure you and your team understand this. Your job is not simply to take care of your current customers. True, that is critically important and cannot be ignored. But you must develop the strength to identify new opportunities. Expand the products and services you provide to your current customer base in a way that expands their portfolio and profits. Find new customers in segments where you are strong as well as in segments where you may be a minor or new player. Identify product gaps and influence your organization to fill those gaps with new products. You must drive these levers as a leader committed to growing your business. You can’t simply squeeze more from your current customers. Nor can you ignore them as you look for new customers. Nor can you deceive yourself that your product gaps don’t matter. Establish a daily growth mindset and train your team to do that as well.

2. Grow Your People.

Leaders, you are only as good as your team. Your greatest legacy as leader will be the people who remain, or who do not, once you have moved on. One of my greatest thrills in management was to hear someone speak glowingly about a person who was rising in the organization, and to think to myself: “I hired her.” Hire well. You should seek people who could move into your role, or your manager’s role. Don’t defend your own turf by making sure you’re always the smartest person in the room. It will be obvious to those observing you that you’re not. Make decisions on people who are not a fit for your team promptly, but not carelessly. Your job as leader, especially if you are newly appointed, is not simply to rearrange deck chairs. Spend time understanding existing strengths and gaps across your team. Identify realistic development opportunities for employees with skill gaps. Support that development with urgency.

It is common for hiring managers to see candidates outside their organization and conclude that they have skills that fill gaps, with none of the weaknesses they see on their current team. Be careful. Outside candidates have weaknesses too. Make sure you are not discounting your current employee’s understanding of your products, your culture, your customers. It is costlier to hire and train a new employee than to address fillable gaps with your current employee. Commit to openly assessing your current employees with their full participation, and support their development in key competencies. Use 360-degree instruments, available objective metrics and subjective feedback to zero in on the highest value development areas. Then walk with your existing team members so they can reach their full potential.

3. Grow Yourself

Don’t forget you. Even Larry Bird used to spend his off-season working on a new shot. One new tool to make him more successful and increase the distance between he and his competitors. What is the shot you want to develop? Is it a hard skill? Maybe you want to be a better decision maker or improve your financial acumen? Or perhaps you would like to be a more productive leader or exercise more managerial courage? Or maybe it is a soft skill? Could you lead with more humility, empathy, or transparency? Whatever leadership gap you want to fill with a new competency, you must begin with intention, follow with a plan, and bring it to life through practice.

But the off-season? You don’t have one of those. And your 2-week vacation doesn’t count. But you do have moments. Lots of them. Short of attending a training seminar, your best opportunity to build a new competency comes in the moments when nobody can get to you. When its just you and your thoughts. Flights. Hotel nights when you’re on the road. Mornings when the world is still sleeping or evenings when the kids are in bed. Find your moments and fill those with learning around your desired competency. My favorite time to do this is on an airplane. It’s the time I can block everything else out, when calls and e-mails can’t reach me. That’s my time. Invest in yourself during your moments and keep rising as a leader.

Growth. It is your only job. But it isn’t complicated.

Dedicate yourself to building your business, your people, and yourself beyond where they stand today.

That’s what rising leaders do.

Lead well!

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