The 33/33/33 Rule for encouraging leadership growth in your team
1. Empower people to share their greatness with others.
2. Encourage them to do the same for others.
3. Help them develop their strategic, business, and financial acumen.
Sure the last few years have amped up the uncertainty, and we need to reskill and reorient ourselves.
But was there ever a bad time to train more leaders in your organisation?
In her TedTalk Susan Colantuono shares insights on how managers can be blind to their biases when nurturing future leaders.
She talks about how women get stuck in middle management positions because they are less likely to be encouraged to build an acumen for strategic financial and business thinking than men.
Our biases don't make us good or evil. But recognising a bias kick in and deciding to look the other way sure does.
We can do better.
As a manager you can help nurture leadership across your team through:
- Proper guidance
- Sponsorship
Let's start with guidance.
Make sure that each performance review or career development conversation with your team covers all three of these topics:
1) How they can make the most of what makes them special.
2) How they can empower others to be their best selves at work.
3) What skills they need to learn and improve to become better at solving strategic business problems.
And set specific goals for each. Setting clear goals with your team establishes mutual accountability.
Now to sponsorship.
It's proven that getting opportunities to work on the right projects, that highlight key leadership skills, is an essential part of career development.
I'm forever grateful to the people who’ve led me in my career. Without their sponsorship I wouldn’t have had the possibility to contribute to high profile projects.
As managers, we should be on a look out for projects that help our upcoming leaders develop skills that improve their strategic and financial acumen.
But 33+33+33 only makes 99... What about the last 1%?
Well, our leaders can open doors for us, but only we can decide to walk through.
