In previous leadership roles, I would lead a group of peers to complete a certain task. In this position, my job was to mentor and cultivate young leaders.

Your job as a leader is to replace yourself

When I first started in this role, I had a sit-down meeting with my supervisor who ran the program. In that meeting, he told me something that I will never forget. “Kyle,” he said, “your job as a leader is to replace yourself.” It took me three years to figure out what that meant and why it was the best advice anyone had ever given me..

As a new leader, I didn’t want to be replaced. After all, I had worked hard to get to where I was and I liked my position. I worked with high school students and got to play games and goof off. I had just the right amount of responsibility: enough to be a part of the leadership team but not enough to have to worry about anything particularly difficult. I had a good gig and didn’t want to lose it. But then I grew as a leader.

Leaders should never be stagnant

Leaders should never be stagnant — perhaps the topic of a future post.

The day you stop developing as a leader is the day you should consider changing positions.

Over the next couple of years I developed and matured as a leader and I became ready for more responsibility and for a new and exciting role in the program. Not only was I ready to move up, but our program went through a two-year period of high attrition where we lost most of our long-term, senior leaders. In three years I went from being a rookie junior leader to one of the longest-serving leaders.

It was time for me to move to a more senior position inside the organization, but to do that I had to replace myself. Luckily, thanks to the advice and counsel of my supervisor and mentor, I had been mentoring other people to become leaders, and there were people ready and willing to step into my role. The transition from one position to the next was made that much simpler by the fact that I had someone ready to step into my role.

Do not let an opportunity pass you by because you failed to create a succession plan

You may be thinking that you will not be getting a promotion any time soon, so why bother mentoring someone to take over your position? That’s a good question. The answer lies in organizational growth.

When your organization grows, your organizational need for leaders will also grow. Maybe that person you are mentoring is not going to replace you; maybe there will be a new position that is created that needs to be filled and you have already mentored this person to take on the leadership responsibilities of that role.

On the other hand, as an organization grows, maybe there will be a new position created for you and even though you are not being promoted, you still need someone to take over the role you held previously.

The point of replacing yourself is to be ready for organizational change. You never know when an opportunity will arise, and if you are not ready to grow not only as an organization but as an individual, you can miss the opportunity. Do not let an opportunity pass you by because you failed to create a succession plan.

No room for insecurity

There is an instinctive fear within human beings of being replaced. It is the classic dictator mentality: if someone else becomes too powerful, they might depose me. This is why some leaders choose to not groom their own replacements.

This mentality will stifle the growth of your organization and will turn you into an ineffective leader. If you are worried about someone replacing you, you should focus on making yourself better, not on making everyone else worse.

There is no room for insecurity in leadership.

You are paralyzing your team if you do not mentor your team members to be the best leaders that they can be. Edwin Catmull, head of Pixar Studios, wrote in his book, Creativity Inc. (co-authored by Amy Wallace), that he promotes independence, leadership, and responsibility among all of his staff. He empowers his staff to fix issues as they come up rather than have to go through an approval process. Leaders empower others.

A strong leader should always be looking for someone to replace them.

Such a mentality profits the organization as a whole. Your protege will bring new ideas to the table that you never would have considered; their experience will provide a new lens that could benefit everyone. Even if your protege does not end up replacing you, by involving them in the leadership process, you open yourself up to the influence of their creativity. This addition to your vision is invaluable.

So, if you are insecure about your position in your organization and are worried that if you begin mentoring someone that they may replace you, it is time to take a gut check.

Your insecurity is paralyzing your organization and you need to start empowering the people you work with rather than compete with them.

Dynamic lessons

Stagnancy not only kills leaders, it kills organizations. You should always be looking for people who can replace you so that you can move forward to bigger and better things. If you fail to create a succession plan, you may miss out on an opportunity simply because you can’t afford to pass the torch on to someone else.

If you are insecure about your position and find yourself competing with your team rather than empowering them, you have a problem. While healthy competition is good for an organization, leaders should be focused on the future, not on maintaining the present.

Have you ever made a succession plan or been involved in such a plan? How did it work? What worked well for you? What didn’t work?

Books that influenced this article:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

The post Leadership Succession: Why You Need to Find Your Replacement appeared first on Great North Dynamics.

Leaders adapt to change.

We have all heard someone say that leaders adapt to change, but there is a huge disconnect between believing in adapting to change and actually going through with it. Adapting to change can be the hardest thing you have to deal with as a leader, especially if you have to lead other people through a change.

1. Don’t make it personal

When change happens, a good leader does not take it personally. Often, change is outside of our control. Something happened in the outside world that has affected the way you do your job. If the change is part of a bigger trend, either in your organization or in the larger world outside of your corporation, there is nothing you can do about it and you need to accept that the world is not out to get you.

In other circumstances, change might be completely within your control and you have had to make the choice to make a change in your organization or team. It might be a change to a structure or a process, but it heavily affects the way you do your job. Even if it is within your control, change can still be difficult. As a leader, even if it is a difficult choice, you still have to own it, but that does not mean you make it personal. If someone disagrees with your change, do not make it a personal vendetta. I will be talking more in a future post about how to win your team over on large-scale changes.

Sometimes change comes from someone in leadership over you. Whether a boss, manager, or Board of Directors, this leadership figure dictates a change that directly impacts you and your team. Regardless of whether this change has a positive or negative impact on you, remember again to not make it personal. Business decisions are rarely (and should never be) made based on personal feelings toward someone else. Your boss is not out to get you, so don’t think that he/she is.

In very rare instances, a change might be made that affects you that is, indeed, personal in nature. For example, you may get laid off simply because you have a personality clash with your supervisor, or you have an emotionally-unstable boss who has made a rash decision based on personal feelings rather than reason. This is so rare that if you think this has happened to, it probably hasn’t and you took a business decision far too personally. But, in the rare cases where this does happen, my advice is, again, don’t take it personally.

When you make change personal, you are building emotional walls and attachments that have no place in leadership. Emotional responses lead to people getting hurt. If you make a personal connection with changes occurring in your organization, not only do you risk hurting yourself, but you risk hurting your team. Yes, you should take ownership and buy into the mission and vision of your organization, but do not make changes personal.

2. Remember to breathe

Change often brings stress. After all, people are hard-wired to be cautious of change and to desire consistency and routine. There is security in familiarity, and when your security is threatened, you experience stress.

The most important thing you can do in a stressful situation is to take care of yourself.

Sometimes you just need to stop what you’re doing and focus on breathing. You need to deal with this stress before it burns you out. You have enough problems without adding mental health to the list.

I have written about mental health before and will continue to do so because your mental health is vitally important. You cannot be a leader if you cannot take care of yourself. Sometimes simple breathing exercises are enough to help you manage the stress. Sometimes you might need to seek professional help. The good news is that there are many options available to you in between breathing exercises and professional help.

3. Imagine the opportunities

It is easy to get stuck on the negatives when considering change. While this is a common conception, it is a narrow-minded view of change.

With change comes opportunity.

In a new environment, you will have new opportunities available to you. Consider the story of Andre De Grasse, Canadian Olympic sprinter and winner of two Olympic medals in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Before he became a world-class sprinter competing with the likes of Usain Bolt, De Grasse was a high school basketball guard in Markham, Ontario. In his final year of high school, his school was unable to put together a roster for a basketball team, so De Grasse’s senior basketball year vanished.

Without basketball, De Grasse ended up competing at a track meet, something he had never done before. He ran the 100 metre sprint in 10.90 seconds. His performance caught the attention of a professional sprint coach, and De Grasse’s whirlwind ride to the top of professional sprinting took off.

Change is inevitable. There will come a time in your career that something will happen that dramatically changes your situation, or even your career. Always remember that with change comes opportunity. Andre De Grasse would never have won two Olympic medals in 2016 if he had chosen to mope about his school’s lack of a basketball team. Instead he accepted the change and took advantage of a new opportunity. Today he is one of the world’s elite sprinters.

4. Maintain your vision

At the end of the day, your vision is what defines your success. Everything else can change, as long as your vision remains absolute.

The organization with which you work should have an overarching vision. Any changes made to organizational structure or processes should be made in order to better achieve the goals set out in the corporate vision. If you are bought into your organization’s vision, you need to frame these changes in a way that asks, “How will these changes help us achieve the goals set out in our vision?”

This can be a huge roadblock for some people. I have been in a situation where an organization I was working with went through a structural change that I did not support (this has happened to me several times, but I am thinking of one instance in particular). At the end of the day I had to get past my personal biases against the change and ask if these changes would help us better reach the goals we had set for ourselves. When I realized that the changes would have a positive impact on the vision, it was easier for me to accept and embrace the changes.

You should also have a personal vision for your own life, a place that you want to be with goals of how to get there. Ask yourself, “Will this new change have an effect on my personal vision?” If the change provides new opportunities, it may even help your personal vision.

There is still the possibility that this change will have a negative impact on either the corporate vision or your personal vision.

If the changes affecting your organization do not harmonize with the corporate vision, you should expect your organization to face an identity crisis in the near future.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed by the leadership, either in amending the corporate vision or removing the change. If you are not in a decision-making capacity, it is still your responsibility as a leader to express your concerns to someone who does have the authority to make these decisions.

If corporate leadership decides to not address the issue, your corporate identity and vision could be in jeopardy. At that point it is up to you to decide if you want to continue working with the organization.

In situations where your personal vision conflicts with the new corporate policies/environment, you face a similar crisis. It is up to you to decide if you want to compromise your vision, change your vision, or leave the organization.

There are times, too, when your vision must change. For Andre De Grasse, he had to change his vision from basketball to sprinting. Even Walt Disney changed his vision several times; he began with cartoon shorts, which evolved into cartoon feature films, which eventually evolved into designing and building his own theme parks.

As long as you remain true to yourself, your vision can change.

Just remember that changing your vision will take a lot of work and a lot of soul-searching.

If you are in charge of a corporate vision, then there may be certain situations where your corporate vision must be altered to accommodate a new situation. Once again, such a change should only take place if it is in the best interest of the organization and if it maintains the spirit of the corporate vision.

Dynamics Lessons

In conclusion, I presented four ways that strong leaders adapt to change:

1. Don’t make it personal. The world doesn’t have it out for you, so don’t act like a victim.
2. Remember to breathe. Take care of yourself and your mental health.
3. Imagine the opportunities. With changes come new opportunities. Don’t miss out on them just because you were focused on the changes.
4. Keep your eyes on the vision. At the end of the day, your vision is what sustains you. The changes you are facing could have a positive, neutral, or negative effect on your vision. If you have to change your vision, make sure that you remain true to yourself (or your organization).

Have you had to adapt to a massive shift in corporate culture, environment, or processes? How did you deal with it?

Books that influenced this article:

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell

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