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G – Gaining Knowledge
Leaders need to start with a very high self-awareness. What are your strengths? What are your learning styles and preferences? What are your passions? How do you prefer to lead? What is your dominant style? Do you prefer to delegate or to coach? What is your personality type? What are the implications?
Leaders also need to gain knowledge about others—both those they currently lead as well as those they want to lead in the future. They should seek to understand individual strengths and preferences as well as group strengths and preferences.
Leaders also need to be knowledgeable about their industry and the field of leadership. What are the trends? What are the best practices? What skills can you acquire? What skills can you sharpen? What books do you need to read? Who can serve as your mentors?
R – Reaching Out to Others
Leaders must be intentional about building their networks—both formally and informally. Ralph Waldo Emerson provides great advice when he says, “Trust men and they will be true to you: treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” Building relationships and a network ultimately helps you achieve greatness as a leader.
O – Opening Your World (At Work & Outside of Work)
Blanchard and Miller encourage leaders to be on the lookout for experiences inside and outside work that will make you a better leader over time. They say leaders need to meet with leaders from other departments to understand their issues, and have lunch with someone different every day until you run out of people, and then start over and do it again.
As a leader, you should find a mentor—someone who embodies your organization’s core values—and spend time with them.
I followed this advice early in my career and found this approach to be invaluable. Seeking out mentors from a variety of different perspectives…mentors who can help me be a better husband, father, church member, and leader…people who have walked the path I’m currently walking. Their perspectives are invaluable…and it’s definitely worth one or two lunches per month for me to hear about their journey and lessons they’ve learned along the way.
W – Walking Toward Wisdom
Blanchard and Miller explain that growth in wisdom has no formula, but it almost always involves at least one of four elements: rigorous self-evaluation, honest feedback, counsel from others, and time. You must be able to look in the mirror and tell yourself the truth…not your version of the truth—the real truth. What are you doing well? Where are you struggling? What are your real strengths? What are your weaknesses?
You need to ask people you work with what you should start doing, keep doing, and stop doing. These 3 simple questions can yield a wealth of information and help you see those “blind spots” that we all have. Surrounding yourself with people who will tell you the truth and help you improve as a leader is invaluable.
Blanchard and Miller close the book by noting that the entire idea of how to GROW as a leader is best summarized as a never-ending journey. You want to become a leader for life. Don’t ever try to finish. If you ever think you’re finished growing as a leader, you are finished as a leader…
Hope you take these tips to heart as you shoot for the stars!