Intentional Growth

For many, springtime is a time of becoming reinvigorated. Trees are blooming, flowers are blossoming and the dormant, brown yards turn green almost overnight. There is something about the reemergence of life after the dead of winter. New growth is an incredibly inspiring thing.

Leaders, much of your role is about growth, ensuring that people around you have the opportunity to bloom, blossom, and expand their capabilities. It is impossible for anyone to reach any kind of extraordinary or peak performance without continuing to grow. Therefore, it is an obligation for any leader to ensure that people around them grow.

As a leader, recognize that you still have your own deadlines – projects to complete, reports to get finished, and so forth. You also have responsibilities with your people, to examine their progress on projects and other job requirements. And hopefully you find time to slip in an occasional performance review with them as well.

Given all of that, how much of a priority is their actual growth to you? Most likely you do care about it, but do you have anything that resembles an agenda for growth with each person? Because of the typically pressing business demands, you may find that your time and effort is mostly focused on ensuring that the daily work challenges are getting handled, with a dash of hope that people are somehow growing a little along the way.

So, ponder this. In what ways have you intentionally helped people around you grow in the past few months? That is, what have you purposely done to help them increase their talents and capabilities? Perhaps you have provided them with first-time opportunities or new challenges. But truthfully, to what extent were these deliberately offered to spur growth, vs. simply trying to manage the ever-increasing amounts of work. Think about it.

Leaders don’t leave growth to hope, they make it purposeful – for themselves and for others. And the good news… as you work at helping others continue to bloom and blossom, you will be growing as a leader in your own right.