Seth Dobbs (he/him): How comfortable do you feel taking time off? How well does your team make decisions in your absence? How do you engage your direct reports when they take on new work? Do you tell them what to do, or do you give them the space to problem solve? And do you ever think about the long-term sustainability of your team or your organization?

Think about how will they carry on when you move on to a new role. Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast. Where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves.

And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves the third of the three core principles of leadership that leaders create more leaders. Specifically, I’m gonna talk about how this principle helps create sustainable teams and organizations and why that’s important. But before I go too far, I want to just frame this and say that at the heart of Creating Leaders is a twofold view centered around continual improvement.

You should be thinking about this concept of creating leaders, both in terms of cultivating talent within your team and in terms of how you improve yourself as a leader. Turns out these two sides are actually very interconnected, but I’m gonna focus mostly on why it’s important to take the time to develop leadership skills within your team in this episode.

So Evelyn, she’d been in a leadership position for several years, and in that time, the scope of her role expanded till she actually had a fairly sizable team under her. But at some point it started seeming to her that the opportunities to continue expanding were drying up. Now, she didn’t completely notice, so a little bit of a nagging thought because she was actually very busy keeping a handle on what she already had under her.

She was actually struggling a bit to get ahead of things, but always felt she had to keep her hands in everything that her teams were doing. A little bit of how she was spending her time, basically, no decision could be made without her involvement. She was the leader after all, so that made a lot of sense to her.

She needed to lead by getting in the middle and make decisions. Now, this would sometimes constrict or slow down the workflow of her team, but she thought it was worth it to get the best results. And then whenever new work came to the team, she meticulously assigned tasks to everyone, actually to a pretty granular level.

She was the expert after all. That’s why they put her in charge. So she thought taking this approach would help everyone else learn the best way to approach things. And then even within those tasks, she would circle back with the team to make sure they were doing all the little things right. And she had a mantra.

Correct early and often to reflect the need to keep everyone on the right track. Looking at that, it made sense to me that she was unable to take on more, to take on new challenges because even with a small group, taking that approach is a lot of work and will keep you very busy. And over time she was actually becoming more and more stressed about several factors.

There’s a growing and high turnover rate on her team, which meant she actually had to keep onboarding new people into her team. And while that churn stressed her out a bit, she actually felt it was worth weeding out the people that couldn’t meet her high standards. Her management was also pressuring her to come up with new innovations, new ideas for the company, new ways of doing things, or even new things to take to market.

But with this busy schedule around all the decision making, all the assigning work and making sure it was being done right, she didn’t really have the space for this new thing her management was asking for her for, and her team certainly didn’t have the time to think about it either. Really, they couldn’t think about much beyond the next task.

She felt she might’ve been ha able to handle some of that stress if she could just get some time off, but she felt she could barely take a couple days off at any given time. And that added to her stress because the team would in inevitably get blocked on something in her absence and then she’d come back to find they were further behind on key milestones.

Or sometimes worse, she felt that they would make a bad decision in her absence and then she’d have to unwind whatever was done once she returned. She also couldn’t get anyone to step up and take on more leadership themselves, and she lamented how she could be just so unlucky to end up with such a poorly motivated set of people.

She could have taken on so much more for the company if only her followers could do their jobs better. Hopefully you haven’t worked for a h an Evelyn, and even more, hopefully you aren’t an Evelyn, but you can probably identify a few things. Evelyn is getting wrong, especially if you’ve listened to some of the previous episodes this season.

That brings us to the third core principle of leadership Leaders create more leaders. This mindset is core to showing up as the best leader you can be. You’re going to struggle to grow a team or organization if you’re not able to embrace this concept. It’s because creating more leaders is the durability principle.

It’s because this principle is about fostering a learning organization, fostering an environment that encourages everyone that’s interested in developing leadership skills to develop them. Without this, it’s hard to create durable results. Now, recognize not everyone can take on a leadership role at any given moment, and some may never be ready for the role.

But everyone can develop leadership skills and in cultivating that in the people you lead, you start ensuring the sustainability of your organization. Structuring an environment where you’re continually creating and growing leaders involves two essential factors that I’ve actually talked about in previous podcasts.

One is aligning teams through vision and common outcomes, and the second is growing autonomy in your team through a problem resolution culture. This is why Creating Leaders is the third principle. It brings together the first two and hones them into a focus on not just leading, but leading in a way that grows others.

Now, for some that I’ve coached all this is a radical rethinking of leadership from being in charge, and I’ve seen everyone from new leaders to seasoned executives struggle with these concepts. It’s a lot of why I’ve structured the three core principles to build to this concept. Now returning to Evelyn’s dilemma, she basically, to recap, she behaved in a way that I think of as a stereotypical boss.

Her main way of engaging with the team was just telling, telling, telling. And she made herself into a bottleneck and didn’t feel she could leave work for very long because of that. And then she struggled to get more out of her team. Ultimately, she demonstrated a key problem with this boss kind of stereotypical approach that you can only lead as many people as shoulders that you can look over.

Not only is that exhausting, it’s actually ineffective. So the first thing Evelyn needed to do was start leading through alignment, getting the team to understand their shared outcomes. For example, instead of maybe dictating every last detail of an ad campaign, she could explain that they needed a campaign to increase awareness in an underserved demographic.

And with that, she could then start framing work in terms of who’s responsible for outcomes rather than who’s just checking what off the to-do list. And you yourself can start seeing this working when your team starts engaging their own expertise and come back to you with their plan on how to reach those outcomes.

In Evelyn’s case, because of the history, the team would probably be stunned by this approach, and she’s gonna need to spend a lot of time talking about the change in approach, even do a bit of handholding. It’s because some of the team would likely distrust this change , and proceed cautiously and not just doing what they were being told.

Now, over time, you could start shifting your team from simply taking orders to taking ownership and developing the skills needed to lead. Adopting a problem resolution culture in part means removing yourself from lower level decisions that don’t require someone at your level, whatever your level might be.

So for Evelyn, she’s gonna need to take the time to really build trust to do this, but that could start as simply as letting others make recommendations before running with them. Ultimately that can move to giving a much more autonomy. But it’s a good place to start because that approach starts developing confidence in the people you lead to make their own decisions and drive forward motion on their own.

Again, essential skills to growing as a leader, but also in creating a a, a sustainable organization. And you really see this working when you feel comfortable taking time off, which is an amazing outcome. It’s in part what durable results are all about. Leading a team that can deliver even in your absence, and you’ll start seeing more confidence in the people you lead and be able to see more clearly.

Who in your team is really able to step up and take on more? Best of all in this process, you’ll see that you yourself can start taking on new challenges and have the space to grow because the entire organization is growing. This is what sustainability is all about in an organization. And as for Evelyn, again, her management was pressuring her to come up with new innovations for the company and new things to take to market.

She couldn’t do this when she was deep in all the details, when she was too busy making sure everything was being done right. But with this shift, she would find herself having more time doing the things she really needed to do to make the impacts that she could make on the organization. I. Creating Leaders is about embracing a mindset of cultivating leadership, ideally every day through alignment and by enabling autonomy.

Doing this gives the folks who lead a lot of space to develop their own leadership skills, including thinking about what vision and outcomes they can handle by seeing what problems they can embrace and how they can foster problem resolution. Said another way. This third principle that leaders create more leaders is the check and balance on the first two principles.

Is your vision clear enough for the team to take on outcomes themselves and deliver results while growing their own skills? And are you fostering a strong enough spirit of problem resolution that your direct reports are also doing that rather than micromanaging? Each step forward in all of this, no matter how small will make a huge impact on your organization.

Now, unfortunately, I’ve met many leaders similar to Evelyn, leaders, that think that being a leader means creating more followers. But nothing could be more wrong. As a leader, you should want to create more leaders. Now, it can seem conceptually easier to create followers, people that just do what they’re told, but is that what you really want as a leader?

A team filled with people that are just waiting to be told what to do? Leaders think about the long term, and in doing so, you should be thinking about how you ensure that your organization has the ability to durably create results on into the future. You do this by creating more leaders, by expanding your reach and extending your ability to create results by helping others develop leadership skills.

Doing this well allows you and your organization to grow and do truly amazing things. So closing out, I want you to think about are you creating followers or leaders or neither are you just hoping some of your organization will just get it magically and become leaders themselves? And what can you start doing differently today to be more mindful in creating leaders?

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’ll talk about permission forgiveness, and alignment.