I’m a big fan of the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz.
In each episode you learn about challenges entrepreneurs have navigated and how they achieved success.
Now, I realize we hear the success stories, and there are hundreds of unsuccessful stories for every success.
But there is a consistent theme among the How I Built This Episodes, entrepreneurs identify a problem or need and then work with a small team to create a solution.
Whether it’s a new digital application, a restaurant, or a novel product, the founders focus first on solving the problem.
Then, as their companies stabilize and grow, they need to learn how to lead others.
Guy will ask the guests, “what did you think of leading others?”.
The common answers?
“I learned over time” or “it wasn’t for me”.
Understandably, founders focus first on solving the problem and will “figure out” leading people later.
Thinking beyond entrepreneurs, this is a common approach for many people in their careers. We work hard as individual contributors, receive a promotion, and then figure out leading others later.
Focusing on our clients, especially with our upcoming AI-powered leadership development tool, I now understand there are two underlying assumptions driving why we wait to grow as leaders.
First, we commonly think of leadership as leading direct reports or an organization. But as we identified in our book, Lead Without Limits, a more modern definition of leadership focuses on the impact and not a position of authority.
A second assumption, we typically overlook leading peers. Leading your peers is challenging and if you rise in an organization, has an even greater impact.
To demonstrate this impact, imagine if senior leaders of a large company, heads of commercial, operations, finance, R&D, and other areas, collaborated really effectively. Because of how the senior leaders worked together, the entire company is more likely to work effectively together.
Unfortunately, far too often these senior leaders have huge egos and only superficially collaborate, thus creating silos.
To prevent the siloes due to poor senior leadership collaboration, we all need to improve with how we lead our peers.
If we set clear peer leadership expectations from the start, then people would more effectively partner together and be better prepared to later lead a team or an organization.
Circling back to How I Built This, I wonder if entrepreneurs had access to actionable and practical tools to grow as peer leaders, would they be more successful.
If yes, then the challenge becomes, how to integrate growth and learning into their existing activities and within their limited time.
This is exactly the approach we’re taking with our upcoming AI-powered leadership development tool. A tool that supports you on your terms, on your time, and prioritizes actions to grow (not theory).
Because then, people can benefit now by developing as strong peer leaders and prepare for potential larger leadership opportunities later.
Christopher Sprague, PhD, is the CEO and Cofounder of the Enluma Leadership Group.
At Enluma, we elevate leaders who inspire. By combining analytics and AI with practical, modern, and actionable leadership development, we help organizations unlock focus, energy, and sustained success.
If you’d like to learn more, reach out via LinkedIn.