How Do You Become One Of The Most Outstanding Leaders Ever In Your World?

Post 8 of the “Leading TODAY! on Wednesdays” series

Being a Billion Dollar Leader: Lesson 4: I will be promoted to my own level of incompetence—so I should employ people who make me look good!

In the last post we discussed how the Billion Dollar Leader understands and accepts this principle of taking on board the best people possible.

On the other hand, a manager who does not understand or accept these principles will often be scared of doing this. After all, how can you control people who are better than you? How can you show them how to do their job when they can do it better than you can?

For many there is the inherent fear that they will not be promoted—not get to climb the corporate ladder—if they aren’t seen as being better than the people they have working for them. They want to present a picture which says that their people are inferior and it is their own, the manager’s own, superiority that makes it all work.

Invariably, a manager like this will employ a weak team and not even realise it; simply because they will feel comfortable with being in charge. In effect what they are doing is limiting the team’s success to their own leader’s level of incompetence.

What managers like this fail to see, is that it is only through employing the very best team possible that they can avoid being promoted only to their own level of incompetence. This holds true even if that means hiring people with better knowledge or skills in those team roles, or by developing their people and enabling them to be the very best that they can be.

I learned years ago that a Billion Dollar Leader knows that they must become dispensable in their role in order to move onwards and upwards. In other words, they need to have people capable of taking over from them in order to be promoted themselves.

Some managers work so hard at creating an empire around themselves, at becoming indispensable, that they fail to see that this empire then becomes a factor which limits their future leadership aspirations.

They fail to develop—both themselves and the members of their team. Then, by default, they find that they have indeed been promoted to their level of (in)competence and that this is where they will stay. They have succeeded at being seen as OK at their job, but not as a future star.

This lack of a structure for ensuring staff development is one of the major issues I have encountered when coaching companies—they simply don’t have any succession plans! They don’t think of developing their people to take on future roles, or of the value there is in having someone ready to step into an opening within the company should one become available.

All Success

Colin

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