Never measure your own growth to measure your growth
This single line has helped me monitor my growth so far in the last 4 years and taught me how a CXO or lead should measure his growth. This concept can be applied by any CXO, VPs, Directors or any lead across all domains.
As a founder and CTO, it became very difficult for me to measure my growth as team members will share your negative points very less. I was very young so I knew that I needed to learn a lot and to know from time to time whether I am growing or not. So how do I monitor my growth? I asked the same thing to one senior software architect who is in this industry for the last 20 years and has worked in multiple Fortune 500 companies at director’s level.
He suggested me that,
You should never measure your own growth. Measure your team member’s growth to measure your growth. If your team is growing then it means you are growing. If you are able to grow your team members one level up then you will also grow one level up automatically.
This last line gave me a very clear picture that my real job is to help my team members grow. If I want to grow faster then I need to make sure that my team is growing at a fast pace. I cannot force people to just grow as everyone has their own pace. So my job became to understand the potential of each and every team member individually and push them continuously to realize their potential and sometimes push them even little more. This single thing also helped us in making sure that our team is growing and learning continuously and growing leaders from within our own team.
Growing leaders from within the team helps any company going a long way and doing great.
Please feel free to add your points in the comments on how you measure your growth.