Gathering and Guiding: Four Steps to Leading Leaders

How to lead leaders

I have been working with the Airwallex team to bring the startup, business and entrepreneur community resources to assist growth. When there is so much to do, often what makes the difference is not what you do, but why you do it. For years business educators have spoken of working ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ the business. But that is easier said than done.

As part of this wonderful content series called ‘choose growth’ I wanted to break down the steps on ‘how’ to do it. In practical real terms.

In this most recent post on the Four Steps to Leading Leaders. (ie we want all our team members to be self-starters) I cover off the following points.

Step 1: Identifying as a Leader

Often we fall into being a leader of people, not just in business but within family or community and there is a difference between leadership and management. In this section I help you work out where you are on the spectrum (and you can be and often need to be both).

Step 2: Knowing your strengths and weaknesses

It is so important to develop self-awareness, easier said than done but I wanted to give you some tools to help here. Also to know you and your team’s unique contribution. Everyone needs to play to their strengths and you need to recognise you can’t do everything. One of the hard things to do in letting go is to develop accountability structures around you in a way that helps you learn from those outcomes.

Step 3: Gathering: The Why

I ask you to challenge yourself here and give yourself permission to dream. Often if we don’t know how to do something then we limit our vision to what we can see before us. Once you have developed your future state then it is just as important to communicate that effectively and succinctly to those around you.

Step 4: Guiding: The What and The How

Setting the strategy is not has hard nor as complex as people often think. So in this section I give you the six essentials to a good strategy document. And you are not writing war and peace here. The shorter the better in many ways. Remember it is all about gathering people around you to ‘believe’ in your ‘why’.

This is not a time to be a ‘reluctant’ leader. We need people throughout our businesses to step up and be really clear about vision and values.

Your number one job as a leader is NOT to do the work, but to set strategy. And you do this simply with three words

Vision Values and Alignment.

Watch the video here too.

Also published on Medium.