Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 3 No 2

CORD SACHS

Multiplying Leaders

I n most organizations, the develop- ment of leaders tends to fall into the category of important but not urgent. It isn’t that organizations don’t desire to build leaders; it’s just that they don’t invest time into building a strategic plan and process for leadership de- velopment. They invest in marketing strategies, sales strategies, operational strategies, and compliance strategies, but most never invest in what they will find to be their greatest future asset for growth...Leaders Ready! CEOs across a wide-range of disciplines all say they value leadership development. The struggle tends to occur when they attempt to build a scalable process that can be measured and evaluated. Due to this constraint, one of two things happens. Either organizations try to outsource leadership development, or they fall into the trap of throwing money at the problem through conferences and books. The Summit Experience I hear the story over and over: We need to do something this year,sowho is newand exciting that we can bring in? Or where are we going to take our top emerging leaders? Others wonder about the new best-selling leadership book that they could have everyone read. We refer to this as the Summit Experience strategy. The unbelievable leadership author/ speaker comes in and delivers great content over a day or a week. Wow! What an experience this is! These events include all bells and whistles of engaging video clips and eloquent application from other great companies, and now we even have musical groups to help boost the energy in the room, like we are watching late-night TV. Your people get to drink fine wine from a fire hydrant for hours on end. When we drill down with these CEOs to learn what the ultimate leadership summit goal is, as it pertains to the immediate and

themselves given the opportunity to lead. The great military institutes understand this principle and strategically build dozens of levels within their track of movement from one rank to the next. The reason is simple: they want to give a leader the opportunity to lead others as soon as possible and, as their leadership grows, so does their opportunity to lead more people with more responsibility. Unfortunately, most organizations promote managers who can run systems and processes, but have never been given the example or opportunity to grow leaders. So how do we build a strategy in our organization? How do we provide great leadership content and expectations for application? How do we equip and set up opportunities for these individuals to lead and develop these qualities and habits on their team? For many, this will take a major shift in their organizational culture. Shifting to a Leadership Culture How do you shift your culture to value, support, and resource this new expectation of leadership-driven growth within an organization? We have found that the key to this culture shift centers on buy-in. The organization and its leaders must be willing to accept a new pathway for leadership growth. The overall strategy is to create a multiplying movement of multiplying leaders in an organization. Leaders from the top of the organization down must buy into owning the new expectation that we will build our own leaders, who in turn will be expected to build more leaders. When this occurs, our organizations become their own talent factories. It is not enough for mid-level managers to simply manage processes and systems; they must grow to also develop leaders who multiply their strengths and leadership into others.

long term impact on their entire organization, we find that they want their people to be able to apply ALL the principles and action items into the grassroots of the organization. They try to have a few of their people take all this back to the rest of their teams. Then the final question strikes: How much traction and application is being applied three months later? In essence, how is that working for you? And that is where the shaking of the head and the grin occur. Typically, not too much has changed, and they have gone back to business as usual. So why doesn’t it stick, and why is there so little long-term impact? The answer is typically twofold. Their people realized they could not communicate all that great information with the same passion and clarity. There was no system or process in place, and no plan for accountability or follow through. Please don’t hear me wrong; there is great value in leadership experts. They are writing great books and they deliver an unbelievable experience around their remarkable content. The problem is that’s just not how leaders are developed. A New (Old) Solution At WildSparq, we believe the answer lies in an age-old principle of iron sharpening iron. We believe that a leader develops as they are being led by another leader, and then are

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