Who Has Leadership Potential Within The Organization?

If you’re a leader who wants to develop other leaders, you need to encourage them

 

Excerpted from The Leader's Greatest Return: Attracting, Developing, and Multiplying Leaders by John C. Maxwell (HarperCollins Leadership, 2020)

Where is the best place to begin looking for potential leaders to develop? In your own organization or on your team. It just makes sense for so many reasons: 

Unlike when you interview people from outside, you don’t have to imagine how insiders will perform. You don’t have to rely on what they say about themselves. You’re not limited to hearing the opinions of their handpicked references. You can look at their actual performance to see what they can do. You can observe their strengths. You can personally talk to everyone who works with them to find out about them. 

Anytime you bring in someone from outside, you have to guess whether that person will really fit your culture and be able to work well with the people in your organization. When someone has already been working in the organization for any length of time, you know if he or she fits. And that individual is already a part of the community. 

Good leaders, even those with little training or experience, influence other people. When you’re trying to identify potential leaders to develop, look for influence. It’s a qualification that must be present in someone you wish to develop as a leader, because leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. If people can’t influence others, they can’t lead. And if they already have some degree of influence in your organization, they already possess an asset that they will be able to use in the future to get things done. It’s like having a running head start in a race. When you give them tasks, they will be able to mobilize the people they already influence more quickly.
 

How do you measure their influence? I recommend you use the 5 Levels of Leadership. Here they are in order from lowest to highest levels of influence:
 
1. POSITION: People follow because of title.
2. PERMISSION: People follow because of relationships.
3. PRODUCTION: People follow because of results.
4. PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT: People follow because of personal life change.
5. PINNACLE: People follow because of respect from earned reputation.
 
Andrew Carnegie was a master at identifying potential leaders. Once asked by a reporter how he had managed to hire forty-three millionaires, Carnegie responded that the men had not been millionaires when they started working for him. They had become millionaires as a result. The reporter next wanted to know how he had developed these men to become such valuable leaders. Carnegie replied, “Men are developed the same way gold is mined. . . . Several tons of dirt must be moved to get an ounce of gold; but you don’t go into the mine looking for dirt,” he added. “You go in looking for the gold.”
 
I wouldn’t call the people who can’t lead dirt, but I would definitely call the people who can gold. Where do you put your focus? On those who can’t lead or on those who can—the gold within your organization?
 
One of the best leaders I know is my friend Chris Hodges, the founder of Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama. He started the church in 2001. It has a weekly attendance of fifty-five thousand people on twenty-two campuses, more than $260 million in assets, with no debt, and more than twenty-two thousand active volunteers on what he calls his dream team. If you don’t know anything about the church world, then let me tell you: that’s extraordinary!
 
I love meeting with Chris periodically to talk about leadership. On one of those recent occasions, I asked Chris how he identified and developed thousands of leaders. He shared with me his two principles, and I want to share them with you. 

Chris starts by taking a broad approach. He told me, “I never know who the next leader will be or where they are going to come from within my organization.” So, he developed a leadership farm team, similar to the way Major League Baseball does. Professional baseball teams have farm teams at multiple levels. The players they sign are put on one of those teams according to their current performance level, and they have a chance to work their way up. Their big dream is to make it from the minors to the major-league team.
 
Chris follows a similar model, except that instead of having single, double, and triple A minor-league teams, he has eighteen campuses. Each one is a farm team where volunteers are recruited, trained, and given a chance to serve. The potential leaders naturally rise to the top and have places to practice and hone their leadership skills. 

All eighteen of Chris’s campuses are farm teams for leaders, but not all campuses perform equally in that process. Certain campuses identify and develop leaders at a much higher rate than the rest. I asked Chris why, and he said that when he discovered this, he asked why too. It took some research to figure it out, but Chris learned that the successful campuses were led by leaders who not only saw the potential in leaders, but as Chris said, “spoke leadership potential to them.”
 
My friend speaker and author Mark Sanborn says, “Great leaders help people have a larger vision of themselves.” That’s what Chris’s best campus leaders do. That’s what all good developers of leaders do, because people often become what the most important influencers in their lives think and say they will become. If people you care about tell you how terrible you are, you’re going to have a difficult time rising up to a better life. If you’re told every day that you can’t lead, you probably won’t even try.
 
But when people believe in you and communicate it repeatedly, you gain confidence and try harder. Nothing erases self-doubt quicker than when a person of influence speaks belief into your life. No wonder Abraham Lincoln said, “I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”
 
Stop reading for a moment and think of someone you look up to who believes in you, who believes you are a person with potential. Is there someone in your life like that? Now think of how you behave around that person. Doesn’t his or her confidence bring out the best in you?
 
Here is what I know: we will do everything in our power to measure up to the spoken belief we have received. That’s why as a leader who develops people, I recognize the importance of my words. I look for opportunities to speak potential into the lives of people, especially leaders. Why? Because when I look back at the high points of my life, I recognize that most of them came when someone important to me spoke words of encouragement into me. Encouragement is oxygen to the soul for the leader, and if you’re a leader who wants to develop other leaders, you need to encourage them and help them breathe.
 
Do you have a way to “farm” talent in your organization, in your department, or on your team? If not, can you start one? People need a place where they can rise up and practice leadership. And are you speaking positively into the lives of people, especially potential leaders? If not, start doing it today.

John C. Maxwell is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker who has sold more than 31 million books in fifty languages. His latest book is THE LEADER’S GREATEST RETURN: Attracting, Developing, and Multiplying Leaders. He has been identified as the #1 leader in business by the American Management Association and the most influential leadership expert in the world by Business Insider and Inc. magazine. He is the founder of The John Maxwell Company, The John Maxwell Team, EQUIP, and the John Maxwell Leadership Foundation, organizations that have trained millions of leaders from every country of the world. A recipient of the Horatio Alger Award, as well as the Mother Teresa Prize for Global Peace and Leadership from the Luminary Leadership Network, Dr. Maxwell speaks each year to Fortune 500 companies, presidents of nations, and many of the world’s top business leaders.  Visit www.johnmaxwell.com Follow @JohnCMaxwell