Creating a Leadership-Driven Organization
It's paramount that you find & develop leaders who can find & develop leaders.
One of the things I always knew I wanted to build - was a place that focused on getting people to the next stage of their careers. Even in my first management position, I always told direct reports that my goal was to make sure that when they leave, they will have leveled up significantly.
In my eyes, that's one of the main responsibilities of an organization in the employer-employee social contract. I need to be able to leverage this role as a stepping stone for my next one.
So when I had the chance to build KnowCap, I made it a point to read a lot about developing leaders into people who develop leaders. Sound convoluted? It is.
Our mission at the executive level is to spot talent and give them the obstacles that help solidify our gut feeling on assessing that talent. We call them implicit "Leadership Gates" and we've built a whole framework around it.
Once our assessment is proven correct, we then begin mapping out their development at our organization. This is done via explicit "Leadership Gates." In this step, we are identifying where we see them 6 months, 12 months, two years, and five years down the road. This roadmap helps us to make sure they are being challenged and that they are connecting to the pathway we have set forth - so we ask them if the map coincides with their own aspirations. This creates long-term buy-in.
As they continue to progress through their Leadership Gates, they get pulled into more projects that will stretch them from a skillset standpoint, but also to understand their rate of learning. We know that the most successful leaders are hungry for knowledge and know-how to self-address that hunger. Make no mistake...there is a difference between someone who is hungry for knowledge and someone who can go out and satiate that hunger. The difference is nuanced, but the results are a world apart. In the latter is where you will find your future leaders.
The final step that we've built is to help them identify new leaders that come after them. They learn how to create leadership gates both (implicit and explicit).
Conclusion
I walk you through this because if you're like me, you truly believe that you will impact lives across a large population of people (maybe even the world). To do that, you need to develop leaders that are just as good as you are, and you need them to develop leaders that are just as good as they are.
Even though you need to solve for diversity of ideas and backgrounds, they still need to be elite at operating and achieving the results that make the organization successful.
What I mentioned above isn't easy. I have the luxury of being able to work on this as an addition to my full-time work as the Founder and CEO, and I think it's some of the most important work I can do. Leverage is about creating opportunities of arbitrage in time. The more leaders we can develop on our team, the more leverage I have to continue doing the things that make this company successful 100 years from now.
If I don't have compounding leverage, then we will have linear growth based on predictable metrics and KPIs.