Focus on the Potential in Others —
Look for the Gold and Not the Dirt

What you have to do when developing future leaders in
your business is look for the potential in those people and
emphasized the strengths you see. They should also be a
good performer in their area and show that they are on board
with where the company is trying to go. Another thing is
to look at who they spend the most time with to help you
identify who their influencers are.

A good test for people you see as future leaders is to give
them opportunities to lead. It could be as simple as come up
with a better procedure that requires them to include others
in their team to contribute and implement. Are they able to
get others to follow their lead?

If you have leaders in place now make sure that they are
developing future leaders. You can only grow so far with
your present group. If you want to continue to grow and take
advantage of future opportunities or obstacles you need to
be prepared. In mature businesses people do retire, or get ill
and leave employment. Other times people leave for another
opportunity. In either case having someone groomed and
ready to plug in keeps the business moving forward.

Take Ownership
The leader must own everything in his or her world. There
is no one else to blame. When you ask a leader, manager,
team leader what went wrong they do not immediately place
blame. They acknowledge a mistake was made. They take
ownership and they develop a plan to win the next time. If
you expect perfection and you go ballistic when mistakes
happen you are going to be a very unhappy owner.

This is incredibly difficult to do, but necessary if you are going
to develop leaders that will do more than just play it safe. To
maximize growth, you must have some risk and risk does not
come without the chance of failure. Most new enterprises fail
many times before they ultimately succeed. Likewise, most
new managers who are go getters will make mistakes. For the
right manager and owner this is a great time for growing their
leadership skills.

No Success Without a Successor

One final thought. One of the things I see is that many owners
are still trying to do a major task such as buying. You cannot
achieve your ultimate growth goal because you cannot focus
on both buying and leading the company forward. If you can’t
develop someone in your company to do the buying, how are
you going to develop someone to help the company grow?