Development is hope! Certainly for Executives as the role of an Executive at any size organization is demanding. It is also rewarding so it is no wonder why people aspire to rise to a level of greater impact, but not all are willing to put in the work to make that happen.
For individuals and organizations to continually grow and develop, they must receive continual open and honest feedback.
The further you move up in an organization, the harder it is to receive unbiased straight-forward feedback. The larger your organization, the more difficult it is for the leadership team to receive accurate, timely feedback and act collaboratively and appropriately on that feedback.
I learned early on as a leader that a leader’s role is not to make people comfortable, but to make them better. It is the leader’s responsibility to set the expectation through teaching and coaching. Leaders should share lessons learned along their career paths and always understand that team members also have important contributions to make. The best leader in any achieve situation uses all the tools and talent around them to think and act strategically about what is best for the people and the organization first and foremost.
One of my greatest mentors was Sam Walton. In this picture you can see Myself and the Management team at Store 1326, Grand Island Nebraska, visiting with Sam Walton. The Chairman could not make it to the grand open, but showed up unannounced a few weeks later and walked through the store. In the picture you will notice a yellow legal pad that Sam took notes on to learn and get better. He asked the people closest to the business to give him honest unbiased feedback. Sam also encouraged us to do “what ever we were big enough to do”. This was the precurser to understanding our innate or natural talents. I would later come to learn these were described perfectly with Gallup’s Clifton Strengths.
You do not become the world’s number one retailer because the competition hands you the title. You do not employ more people than the federal government because you like a big payroll. You do not change the face of retail by simply opening your doors every day. Wal-Mart never planned to be the biggest. The company merely chose to strive for excellence and to push its executives a little farther every day. All of the “titles” are an outcome of “striving to be the best.”
Sam Walton did not create Wal-Mart by accident. He very simply and methodically attracted those individuals who understood that how you do anything is how you do everything.
It was at Wal-Mart that I learned that leaders attract who they are, not who they wish they could be. As a manager and district manager at Wal-Mart, I also learned that my role was not in the retail business but in the people business.
While I have moved on to help other organizations and individuals develop themselves and their leaders to achieve results, those past learnings have not changed. They have become more obvious.
We will be the same people/leaders in 10 years that we are today with two exceptions:
Where do you want to be in 10 years? Could it really be that simple?
Let me share my experiences to help you get to where you want to go.
