Leading leaders is hard. Maybe scary is the right word. Heavy? Important? I'm not sure what the right word is, but the sentiment seems to be implied in those words--it's a big responsibility. When I first started in my role and formally leading official leaders by title, I was like...Oh, snap. This is real. This is real life. These are real career goals that I have an impact on. Real people with real education and real experience and they are looking to me and I'm supposed to lead them?
And then I zoomed out a little bit and started seeing everything that my team does and how it reflects leadership and that was another hefty dose of oh my geeze. I've come to recognize how much I love leadership and how much I love being part of people's growth. All three of my best friends semi-recently got promoted into more leadership roles and they all reached out to me and I was truly honored. I also realized that I hang out with leaders...now, being recognized by title, but all of my friends are true leaders. All of us thought we loved direct work in our respective industries...and we did, but then we found leadership and saw how much more of a difference we can make.
I took a screenshot from one of them that was just so nice that said: "All my fb friends are lovely but none of them display your level of insight when it comes to leadership". Is that not one of the nicest texts someone could send?!
Anyways, where all of this is coming from is not from the formal leadership titles. It's about developing leadership abilities in those who don't have (or don't want) a formal leadership title. To recognize that you don't need a title to be a leader. On my team, there are a few people that stand out as leaders and I've been trying to figure out how to really help develop them (preferably without losing them...) and how to grow that potential. I've started identifying some ways and kind of playing around with some ideas. And then tonight, I got an email from someone. The subject line was "Career growth question". In the email, they included that they are interested in learning and growing more and wanted to start to develop more career goals. I told them how proud I was of them and their growth and asked a couple of questions, which they answered thoughtfully, and then said "I honestly owe it all to you". I was about near tears. I've been mulling it more and more in my head that this is the responsibility of a leader--it's to develop other leaders. Whether formally or informally, for people to grow and develop and become leaders in some fashion.
When I called a couple of people and threw around some of my ideas and told them why I was reaching out to them--I could tell that it made a huge difference to them and they told me that it meant a lot to them. And the more I think about it, the more pressure I feel, and the more I need to reign it back in because it's heavy recognizing that so many people are looking at you and looking to you. Looking to you to guide them, to grow them, to have answers, to say it's okay to not have answers, to see how you respond and react. We often say that leadership is not for the faint of heart and that's no joke. I take the investment in people and leading leaders seriously.
A while ago, I sent this to one of my friends--switch out parenting to leadership and there you go!
