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Evolution Is An Inside Job

Evolution Is An Inside Job

Branding, Culture

I’ve said and written more times than I can count that in order for a company to grow and thrive, its leaders must evolve. For leaders to develop, this often requires them to work on themselves personally.

What’s less evident and under-invested in by many companies is that it needs to happen at every level of the organization. Think of the managers, directors, and project leaders at every level of the organization, not just the top.

Leaders of all levels must evolve at a similar rate and direction for a team to evolve as one. How can this happen?

Two primary paths to achieve this can be dovetailed together to make a hybrid path.

Here’s how.

The first path is to bring in someone with strong leadership development skills, ensuring that everyone in the organization gets trained and builds self- and team-leadership competency. 

Bringing in outside help is a solid option because it brings external expertise in-house. It may fall short if you don’t develop internal competencies to keep this leadership training and its subsequent encouragement alive. Your team becomes dependent on external support.

Your second path is to develop a player-coach leadership model. Through this path, you develop internal competency where all leaders are coaches — training them on coaching approaches and ensuring that coaching is part of your culture. When this becomes part of your norms, great things can happen.

When you combine external insights, training, and competency practice and adopt an internal self-leadership model to reinforce and create measurements, you have the makings for long-tail team leadership growth.


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