Leveraging Your Results Through People

SUMMARY

Delegation is something that a lot of leaders do poorly because they subconsciously are staying safe. It’s not that they don’t want to give away the work, because if you look at it logically, they are really busy.

What I want to do this week is help you by stepping you through some different ways of thinking and doing so that you can learn how to pass the baton to others.

People like to follow leaders who own up to their mistakes, capitalise on what they have learned from them, and pass those lessons on.

So, how do you become an influential leader?

1. Break free of the performance trap.

2. Go from performance management to performance coaching.

3. Be purposeful in your delegation.

So, it is being able to allow your team to build that muscle with you as their guide and getting to the point then when they're able to do it without your support. This is what releases energy for you to be able to do other things that you're currently not getting done.

TRANSCRIPT

Are you a leader who finds it hard to delegate things to people in your team? Do you hold on to them, yet you end up not having enough time to get everything done anyway, and you tell yourself that you are so flat out and busy?

Well, you're in the majority.

What I want to do this week is help you look at a totally different way of getting results.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to round off our conversation with the 9 crucial shifts that every leader needs to take by helping you to leverage your results through others.

We've been having an amazing conversation for the last nine weeks around these shifts that you need to take as a leader so that you can get more influence in your world and make a greater impact.

Up until now, we've been talking about our own personal and professional leadership. In those areas, we talked about how we performed, produced, and what we could give from our own efforts.

However, as you move into the area of people leadership, you need to have a different set of skills to help others to work together.

And that collective becomes what you are producing as a team.

To do this, you need to make a shift.

This shift can be a pretty big mindset shift for a lot of people (before you even get into the how-to), and that is to shift from looking at how you get your results by doing things yourself to getting the results that you want through others.

As I’ve said right throughout this series:

The challenges that you have in each of these areas stem from the foundation that you are building in your personal leadership— that whole identity thing.

How you look and feel about yourself — your abilities, insecurities, and uncertainties — has a major impact on your ability to delegate and lead others to get things done.

You fail to delegate to others because of a lack of trust. You think that if they don’t do well enough, it’s now going to be looked on as “you” not doing well.

Those three universal fears of not being enough, not belonging, and not being liked or loved pop up again. Therefore, when you are outsourcing the performance to others, you have the tendency of subconsciously thinking that this is watering down your ability to control whether people accept you or not.

When you have this kind of mindset as your foundation, you will definitely have a hard time delegating.

Delegation is something that a lot of leaders do poorly because they subconsciously are staying safe. It’s not that they don’t want to give away the work, because if you look at it logically, they are really busy.

However, what most leaders do is that they go:

“I’m flat-out busy. What I’ll do is keep all the work for myself. In fact, I have some people who could do the work for me. However, I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to do everything myself.”

It doesn’t make any sense, right?

But that is the thing with subconscious beliefs and behaviour: They don’t make any logical sense, but they do to you.

What I want to do this week is help you by stepping you through some different ways of thinking and doing so that you can learn how to pass the baton to others.

I myself have experienced this kind of thinking.

During the earlier years of my career, when someone looked like they could do what I did, I didn’t want to give them opportunities to do that because of the way I felt about myself and my low self-worth.

I thought: “If I do that, they could replace me. They could take me out of the picture, and they could even become better than me.”

Nowadays, that’s my goal: I want all the people that I work with — my team and clients — to become better than me.

I want you (and them) to go way further and way faster than I did.

The reason I'm okay with that now is that I'm not threatened by it; I'm inspired by it.

And that's the big shift right there.

When you’re in a competitive environment, where you’ve made yourself believe that you have to stand out by being better than everybody else, it becomes a problem to be able to delegate.

You can learn all those fantastic things we've done over the years about the things that come across our desks, like we can either dump them or delegate them.

They are all great.

However, unless you come from a foundation that underpins that sort of behaviour, it's not going to work.

So, as a leader, the first thing you can learn to do is to develop your powerful influencing skills.

Now, what I am talking about here is influencing, NOT manipulating.

I’m talking about becoming a leader that inspires others to want to do things.

Becoming a leader that inspires others by lighting a fire within them, and not under them.

A leader that does not use the carrot or the stick, but a leader that inspires using stories.

A leader who can be vulnerable.

A leader who is real and authentic.

Those are the kind of leaders that people want to follow.

People like to follow leaders who own up to their mistakes, capitalise on what they have learned from them, and pass those lessons on.

So, how do you become an influential leader?

1. Break free of the performance trap.

You need to remember that you are not doing things to get approval. You're doing them, as you build those relationships as we talked about last week, for the benefit of all: for you, others, and the greater good.

2. Go from performance management to performance coaching.

You need to becoming a coach and a mentor as your methodology when dealing with people. Doing this helps them become who they need to become so that they can do the things that you want them to do.

There's nothing worse than your team members having to wait for a year to get in a room with you and for you to just go: "Well, here's your tick and flick. You passed (or failed) in your performance for the last 12 months."

You need to have a relationship of mentoring with your team. You need to cultivate an environment where it’s okay for them to make mistakes and where you guide and facilitate them as they learn from those mistakes.

3. Be purposeful in your delegation.

I teach a simple three-step process to do that.

This process is all underpinned by the mindsets that we've just talked about.

It's a simple thing rather than what I used to do of just going to tell them what I need to be done and walk away; it’s now a process that goes like this:

• Watch me do it.
• I’m going to watch you do it.
• You do it. Then, I will give you some feedback.

Having that underpinned by: “It's okay to make mistakes, and in fact, let's make as many mistakes quickly as we can so that we can learn from them with that forward focus reflection that I talk about.”

So, it is being able to allow your team to build that muscle with you as their guide and getting to the point then when they're able to do it without your support. This is what releases energy for you to be able to do other things that you're currently not getting done.

It's been said that "Leadership hasn't even taken place until you create another leader.”

Doing these things and passing on the baton doesn't mean that you are now less than others. It means that you have been able to influence another person (or another group of people) to be able to work with you so that, collectively, you can do even more and have a greater impact on the world.

That's what this is all about.

I want to challenge you to look at what you're holding on to and to use what I've taught you this week to release that.

Feel how that feels and see the difference in people that are then trusted – they will feel more valued and want to work with you as you continue the relationship together.

Well, that's it from me for this week.

In fact, that's a wrap on the series on “The 9 Crucial Shifts”.

I would love for you to connect with me.

What did you learn? What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about what you can do differently moving forward?

I look forward to continuing this journey with you, whether it's here online or whether I'm actually working with you. Many of you who are listening have worked with me in your organisation.

If the latter is true for you, please feel free to reach out. I would love to support you in anything that you do in your personal, professional and people leadership.

I look forward to being with you again next week.