3 Tips to Promote a Culture of Leadership Among Your Team
There’s an old story about a business owner who is afraid his team will inevitably leave his company, so he never bothers training them. What if he invests all of his time and money in training them and they leave? At the end of the story, the flip side of the coin is revealed when his mentor asks him, “But what if you don’t train them and they stay?”
The moral of the story: If you want to build a lasting advisory firm, you have to train your team (and advisors) well.
Training isn’t just about teaching your team to do their jobs well. The best firms are built around a culture of developing leaders who can be proactive and take initiative.
Here are three tips to help you develop leaders at your firm.
1. Be Open
Too many leaders think that if they share all their secrets, their new talent will surpass them. It's simply not true. Sharing your “secrets” communicates that you trust your team, and recognize that you can help them advance and succeed in their careers.
The better path? Being open-handed and sharing your knowledge. The benefits far outweigh any downside. It encourages open-mindedness and collaboration—important qualities at any great firm.
Development can’t happen unless you share your vision and give your team what they need to succeed at their jobs.
When you treat your “secrets” as secrets, your team will be behind the curve every step of the way because they will rely on you to carry them.
Leaders often pay lip service to hiring the right people and then getting out of their way so they can do their jobs, but the reality is often much different. If you can be the kind of leader who not only believes in sharing knowledge and actually does it, you’ll be a step ahead of everyone else.
2. Delegate Responsibilities
One of the greatest things you can do for your team may seem antithetical: Allow your team to fail. If you sit on their shoulder and edit every email they write or piece of advice they deliver, they may come to understand the how, but they’ll never come to understand the why, which is an essential building block of any leader’s knowledge.
Learning by doing is the #1 method for growth among your team members. In order to gain knowledge, you want your people stumbling through the process themselves.
You’ll be tempted to correct them along the way, but if you never let them figure it out for themselves, they will always be dependent on you. People often find it difficult to retain a new skill or piece of knowledge if they are not able to actually use it in some way.
Delegating responsibilities and tasks may feel a bit like self-sacrifice at first, but your team will help you to lead by example. If the people on your team see that you are willing to take on responsibility and do whatever needs to be done to make your company successful, then they will want to step up as well.
3. Improve Yourself
A lot of leaders think the best thing they can do is encourage their team to work themselves ragged in pursuit of increasing AUM (Assets Under Management) and growing their firm. They applaud team members for staying late and coming in on the weekend, and they make sure they’re the first to come in and last to leave every day.
The unspoken message in these environments is that maintaining a healthy work-life balance will prevent them from getting ahead. Whether the leader says it out loud or not, their team carries that weight around every day.
That’s a perfect formula for burnout. The good news is that you can help turn it around.
Love him or hate him, look at Elon Musk. It’s widely documented that he was working 60 hours a week and sleeping under his desk in the early days. He would take amphetamines to keep going.
Then, when he finally started to show signs of burnout, he pulled back on the number of hours he was working, took better care of himself, and made sure that everyone around him was on the same page when it came to their own responsibilities.
If you want your team to improve themselves and avoid burnout, you have to do the same. Take care of yourself. Get some sleep, exercise, and eat a healthy diet. Find time for hobbies and relaxation.
Then go further than setting the example with your work-life balance. Tell your team about what you’re learning and where you’ve failed recently. Tell them about the books you’re reading.
Your passion for growth will rub off on your team, and you’ll reap the benefits down the line in the form of a team of people you can trust to carry your firm forward into the future—and stick around for the long haul.
Want to learn more about leading by example? Click here to watch our latest CEO Roundtable session, featuring some of the top leaders in the industry.