Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you ever wondered why some teams thrive while others stagnate, even with the most talented people? How do you create a team of empowered leaders who can amplify your success?

Hi, I am 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 in this episode involves seeing how creating followers limits your and your team’s ability to create great results, whereas creating more leaders unlocks more power across your entire team. For this episode, I’m going to talk about Margot.

Margot was a strong marketer working at a packaged food manufacturer. She had shown great promise through creating several digital marketing campaigns that delivered good results. So when a marketing manager positioned to open up, she applied and was ultimately selected to replace the outgoing manager.

This transition occurred when a new product was getting ready to launch, so Margot’s boss gave her the ability to rebuild the team and pull in whomever she wanted. Margot was very excited about this. Not only did she really want this position, but felt it was an incredible opportunity to build what she really wanted.

So she put together a plan to take the work from its current state to launch, and then decided who she wanted to have on the team. Now, there were many on the team already she was happy to keep, she also added several more folks from other teams, the kind of team members that everyone wanted on their teams

because of how great they were. They had great attitudes, their work was strong, all that kind of good stuff. So for Margot, this was a big accomplishment in her career, being able to have all these great people under her. A couple of those folks were on a path to be Margot’s peers, including Lela, who had actually applied for Margot’s position.

But even though she had more experience marketing to the target demographic of the new product, she was told by upper management that she wasn’t quite ready to be a leader. Lela moved on to the team nonetheless because she felt it would be a highly visible project and set her up to be selected for the next promotion.

Her upper management mentor felt the same and encouraged her to do this. So getting ready for the new launch involved a lot of work, much of which was in motion for Margot’s predecessor, but not completed. They needed to finalize the logo and packaging. Slogans and other messaging were not yet finished.

There was print media to be created, TV spots to be finalized, ad time purchased and digital campaigns to be created, including email and web ads. Similar to Margot. Lela had also recently created several successful digital campaigns. So she took on leadership of that team. Eager to prove she could lead this group,

she dug in with the folks already working on the digital campaigns to come up to speed with where they were. She felt there were a few problems, mostly misalignments with some of the work other teams were doing. She also wasn’t happy with some of the visual work and asked for a designer to come back to the team to rework things to make it more appealing for the young adults that they were targeting.

One way or another though, Margot ended up rejecting all of these requests and changes. Margot told Lela that she needed to follow the plan that Margot had already laid out. Of course, this bothered Lela particularly because she had just joined the team and it was one of her first interactions with Margot.

Nevertheless, she put her head down and dug into the plan that she had created, and for the most part it seemed good. So Lela shrugged and felt that perhaps she didn’t have enough background yet on the project to make appropriate decisions. Weeks later, after several moments where she decided to remain silent, and just follow the plan that Margot had laid out, she was in a review meeting.

Another team lead presented the spokesmascot that had been created for the new product. There was a lot of excitement in the room, and Lela thought overall the approach was good, but that the mascot’s few taglines were using slang of a slightly older generation than the target market. She pointed this out and was more or less ignored.

Part of the problem might have been that the slang that the mascot used was from the generation of most of the folks in the room, so they all loved it and thought it was brilliant. Lela tried to point out it wasn’t going to resonate, but was voted down, and later Margot pulled her aside and reminded her that her job was to follow the plan for her team and that she needn’t worry about others.

Well, given how bright and capable Lela was, she was quickly able to find a great leadership role at another company, and she moved on after that. The product launched several months later, and while it didn’t exactly flop, it didn’t make the expected sales, and many pointed at weaknesses in the various marketing campaigns as being key to its underwhelming success, including the mascot, and Margot is essentially demoted after that.

Now, there are several things going on in this story, some of which I’ll dive deeper into in the following episodes with other examples. What I want to focus on here is that as seen through Lela’s experience, Margot was building a group of followers. She was taking what I think of as a container approach to leadership, meaning she wanted to bring the best folks under her and contain them within her scope with the hope that would make her succeed.

The third core principle of Principle Driven Leadership is that Leaders Create More Leaders. Not followers, period. In general, you won’t be successful if you think of your team as a container of people there to do your bidding. Creating more leaders is about unleashing the potential of others, not holding their current capabilities under you.

So over the next few episodes, I’ll explore enabling principles to help improve your ability to create leaders, not followers, but it starts with you getting that basic understanding of the importance of doing this.

I am sure most of you wouldn’t want to be in Lela’s position, specifically having a boss that is trying to contain you and have you follow their plan. Yet so many of us do that when first put into a management position ourselves and often continue on with this thinking into higher levels. Getting better at creating leaders often starts with viewing the people you lead, not as subordinates, but rather as individuals with agency, with expertise, with their own aspirations for their future, then understanding that your role as their leader is to bring out their best, to align their aspirations, their skills with your vision, and create something really powerful together.

Simply put, Margot wanted followers, not leaders, and as a result, she wasn’t building a sustainable team. She wasn’t creating durable results. Lela left, and we can imagine others that were equally unhappy on that team might have left as well, meaning that Margot was losing the capability to create results.

Followers don’t bring out their best, they just do what they’re told and what they think will help them keep their job. But why would you want that on your team? How does that scale? How does that bring out the best? Creating more leaders means giving people clarity and alignment through vision. Perhaps even the ability to own a slice of that vision and then having some autonomy to execute on that vision, using their skillset, their experience and expertise,

and to enable them to resolve problems without having to escalate to you unless absolutely necessary. For Margot, not only did some of the highest potential people leave, but the people that stayed were content to be followers, so it’s no surprise that the team delivered underwhelming results. Years ago, I had a direct report who had a rising star under him that had become pretty essential to the successful operation of my direct’s team.

There was a new opportunity on another team that would give this rising star a promotion, and I thought it was a great opportunity for her. I discussed it with my direct report, who felt, on the one hand, it would be really hard to lose her from his team,

but he also knew it was the best thing for her career, his subordinate’s career, and didn’t want to stand in her way. That’s the kind of ultimate realization of this principle and ultimately led to an even stronger organization. So I’d like you to think about how comfortable would you be if someone you managed, coached, mentored, or whatever, ended up surpassing you. I suggest that if the thought creates discomfort, you should examine that more deeply and understand why and think about the purpose of creating leaders. Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it. And you can send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com, and we’ll try to address a few towards the end of the season and join me next time where I will talk about culture and the role you as a leader play in cultivating it.