If you’ve ever wanted to know how a true leader should function and how you can become a truly great leader, then grow yourself and grow your company. Be a 360-degree leader and you’re off to the races in this poignant look at how you can identify great leadership. Time to fill in the gap in your own quest for self-improvement. Learn just how you can achieve this from the founder of Today’s Growth Consultant, a two-time Inc. 5000 designee with revenues that have doubled in each of the last 5 years. Started in 1992, the company is now an international, multi-million dollar enterprise. You can’t miss this one!
Ken is the author of the upcoming book Guerilla Marketing Today, part of the best-selling Guerilla Marketing series, and best-selling author of Online Income: Navigating the Internet Minefield and co-author with Brian Tracy of Against the Grain. He is currently working on his next book Trust Trumps Everything: Why Your Digital Footprint Determines Your Income.
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G S G
I’m going to call this one GSGC. This takes off from episode 308, which was about deserving to win. 308 very quickly became one of the most heavily downloaded first day podcast I’ve ever seen. I wanted to do a couple more podcasts on the concept of deserving to win. What can you do to grow a company? What can you do to just physically deserve to win? You’ll have to hear 308 to get a baseline for where I’m going with this. I’m going to take it off from the concept that you heard 308. You understand that either you do or don’t deserve to win. It’s what it is.
I want to jump into a phrase we grew up with computers and I know many of us have heard of GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. We do know that growing a company takes leadership. Somebody’s got to lead this company, somebody’s got to lead your company. The bottom line is you lead you. There’s another acronym, GIGO, grow companies through garbage in, garbage out, but there’s GSGC, grow yourself, grow your company. I wanted to give you a little bit of a taste of some of the homework I’ve been doing for myself personally. I know that months ago, I did a small series that an individual and a company promotes themselves to their personal level of incompetence. If you’re an individual climbing the corporate ladder, you will get promoted until it’s obvious to the people above you that you have reached your level of incompetence and no more promotions for you.
A company grows and it grows and it grows until the cumulative management hits their level of incompetence. How do you grow consistently every year? How do you just keep on growing? Dee Hock, acclaimed leadership expert and laureate in the Business Hall of Fame says, “Leaders must understand two things. First, they have to switch their mindset to they are a leader of people below them to they are a 360-degree leader.” If you picture a compass where North isn’t virtually pointing North, it’s pointing up to the sky. South is pointing down maybe at your desk or at your car seat and then to the right and to the left, it showed a picture of a 360-degree wheel, almost like a Ferris wheel. You’re looking at a Ferris wheel, up is North, down is South, East and West.
A 360-degree leader of course, leads the people below them to the South but a great leader also leads their co-managers, their vendors, the people that are on the same level in the company with them, and they even lead their bosses, and the board of directors. They’re constantly leading because they have to lead to their conviction. They have to lead to their passion, they have to lead to their ideas. They’re always leading, and Dee Hock says, “Most leaders make the mistake that they lead people below them and they only take input from the people above them.” That is simply not the case. The second thing that Dee Hock states is that 50% of a leader’s time should be devoted to self-leadership.
When I first read that, I physically said, “WHAT?” 50% of my time is supposed to be devoted to growing myself? That blew me away. I did some digging and I found this up by finding info from Daniel Goleman, author of the famous book Emotional Intelligence. The whole book is about why some leaders plateau, meaning, they reached their level of incompetence, and why some leaders never stop growing their companies. How come the same leader, take Zuckerberg of Facebook, can start it and he’s still at the top. Yet how many times have you seen startups, they can smash it from $1 million to $50 million, but then they are just so much in the way they got to get kicked out of their own company. Why is that? The book Emotional Intelligence digs into that.
Guess what’s the conclusion that Daniel Goleman came up with? Self-leadership. Basically, he is saying exactly the same thing as Dee Hock. These leaders that have companies that just never stopped growing are on an all-consuming self-growth program. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, but the bottom line is this, their success is in direct correlation to how often they continue to learn and grow personally.
This is me talking. I’m going to keep this short. This is a great start by you guys listening to this and other podcasts. Here’s the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I want you to keep hearing Today’s Growth Podcast, but leaders learn quickest from other great leaders. Unfortunately, most great leaders don’t stop their busy lives to podcast, but they do stop their lives once in awhile to write great books. How about setting a goal of four leadership books a year, one every 90 days? Maybe become a John Maxwell junkie like I used to be. His books are easy to read and they are jammed cover-to-cover with techniques and tips that you can put in play literally immediately. Here’s my thought to you, “Grow yourself, grow your company, GSGC.” I hope this helps. Take care.
Important Links:
- Episode 308 – previous episode
- Dee Hock
- Emotional Intelligence
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