Mikolaj's Monday Maunder - Come back home

Inspiration and lessons for your leadership journey!

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“Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.”
~ Bill Cosby ~

I’ve been thinking about parenting and leadership the past couple of days and today’s quote from Bill Cosby caught my eye. After five years of doctor visits, diagnostic procedures, and trying, my wife and I found out this past week that we are pregnant! This will be her first child and my fourth.

While there are many lessons from parenting that apply to leadership, I remember something else Bill said many years ago when I first became a father. As a young and idealistic young man, what he said changed how I viewed parenting and being a father.

He said that a parent’s primary role was preparing the child to leave.

When I thought about it, I knew he was right. It was my job as a father to do the best I could to prepare them (and me) for that moment – being a grownup and leaving the nest.

From the earliest lessons of infancy and toddlerhood through childhood and the adolescent years, parents are in the process of teaching and preparing a child to be an adult – helping them to develop their strengths, minimize their weaknesses, identify what they love to do, and dream big. Parents help prepare their children for whatever the next step is; knowing that the final step will be leaving home. I am so excited, humbled, and grateful to begin engaging in that process with my wife for our new little one!

The most effective leaders lead with this understanding and apply it with those they lead, as well. They nurture the dreams and strengths of each of the individuals on their teams and actively participate in their development. We call it different names – operational development, professional development, high performance culture, identifying high potentials programs, or employee engagement.

No matter what you call it, the best leaders help those they lead:

• Identify and do what they love (empower and facilitate)
• Maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses
• Learn self-awareness
• Discover what “the next step” is and how to get there
• Dream big
• Prepare to leave you

This isn’t just about high potentials. Even if an employee is perfectly happy remaining in their current role, there are always developmental steps and dreams to nurture and a retirement to plan for.

One measure of the effectiveness of this is whether your ex-direct reports “come back home.” Do your ex-direct reports keep in touch? Connect with you via social-professional media? Email from time to time? Call? Ask for advice? Stop by every so often?

While not the only thing, leadership is partly about your mentoring relationship with those you lead; preparing for them to leave one day and always being open to welcoming them to come back home.

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This Week's Affirmations
(Repeat these quietly to yourself multiple times throughout the day.)

I am a positive role model.

I am a mentor to those I lead.

I am a servant leader identifying and helping to meet the needs of those I lead.

I am preparing those I lead to leave.

I am a loving leader!

If you like this week's blog, I encourage you to share it with your family, friends, and colleagues and join me on my journey to empower and inspire millions of people around the globe.

Together we can spread words of Encouragement, Inspiration, Empowerment, and Loving Leadership... and wouldn't you agree our world could use a little more "Positivity" these days?

Together we can make a difference...

Have an amazing journey today!

Alan

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