Steady On: Personal Growth Team-wide
Even if the company itself is not growing, employee growth is imperative.
“First and foremost, leaders must be willing to do their own work. If those who sit in a place of positional power are not willing to address what’s happening in them, then they will amplify the stress throughout the organization.”
– Jerry Colonna
While “life” and “uncertainty” go hand in hand (often much to my own dismay as I often don’t want to believe that impermanence is really the status quo of life’s many pulses), perhaps those terms feel even more synonymous in the current times in which we find ourselves living.
As if uncertainty wasn’t already such a large and looming reality of entrepreneurship, it’s harder to stop the tenor of these times from seeping into our organizations.
Many of us may be facing hiring freezes or the possibility of needing to downsize the team — both are never easy tasks. Our role as leaders has more weight when we may be facing some difficult conversations with investors, the whole company, and one-on-one, and we need to know how to have these conversations.
Leaders are constantly living in the “not knowing.”
More than the checklists and sets of knowns that managers tend to, leaders are off blueprint most of the time, constantly feeling into that creative edge where nothing has been written and the adventure of life happens.
Leaders often make decisions without complete information. That’s the job.
Leaders take leaps of faith. They go out ahead of the group, hold that space, and believe in their teams so that their teams can close the gap.
One question we get often is “How do I help my employees grow when the company itself is not growing?” Even if the company itself is not growing, employee growth is imperative.
When on-the-job learning stalls, because team growth (and the promotion cycle) is stalled, growing the team by building skills internally is an important part of retention. Besides being a solid investment, providing training and coaching for team members leaves room for the humans in your organization to show up. It allows them to work their own edges and keep expanding capacity and self-awareness.
Good leadership recognizes that the human does matter.
Like lobsters who molt yearly lest they die in their too-small shells, your employees require room to grow in order to flourish. Organizations that support that level of work for the individual humans that make up the whole (and allow the human to show up more fully), thrive— regardless of political or economic climates.
We hope that as leaders, you lead from a place based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others to do the same, instills hope, and facilitates growth from the inside out.
