A Mason's Work

So continuing on the leadership conversation and delving a little bit maybe into the management side of things.

I want to caution the leaders of the world, your world, your environment to manage over reliance on key players.

This is got some sort of multifaceted perils.

What happens when you have somebody, let's say who's on your team who's sort of radically competent.

They do a good job or good enough job consistently without friction.

They show up, they do their thing, they get it done.

We all have people on our team that are the get it done people.

What will happen if you consistently rely on the get it done people is you will not develop other get it done people.

You will essentially move all of your sort of social chips to one person and not cultivate the team that you could really benefit from in a meaningful way.

To be clear, it's hard to do that right it's hard to cultivate others.

This is why leadership is tough.

But that over reliance also creates some additional headaches and challenges that you want to mitigate.

One of the big ones is your star players may get burnt out because you are leaning on them more and more and more to solve problems consistently.

That leadership or that burn out from your key players in the beginning might be like, okay, well, you know, you just need to take a break.

But over time that may erode their belief set in the organization and the objectives that you're trying to deliver against.

You are at risk of having somebody in a star player role to get the martyrdom complex or get any of the kinds of sort of messianic stuff that comes with it like they might start thinking they're the bees knees and then you know when they take off the organization collapses that's not great.

So mitigating risk here.

A big part of that has to be to develop the non star players on your team.

And in many ways you have opportunities to do this and have everybody win right so it's not about developing your sort of other players on the team to the detriment of your star player.

It's perhaps using the behaviors that your star player has helping them mentor others to replicate those behaviors moving forward.

But understanding of course that probably the reason your star players your star player is has nothing to do with skill and has everything to do with attitude.

It becomes really important to invest in the personal development of your teammates.

Give them the training and education they need to work through their own stuff like what we're doing here in a Mason's work.

Like what they might do in therapy or what have you to help them improve their worldview as we spoke to you in a couple of couple episodes ago.

So as you develop and grow as your employees develop and grow they will grow to a worldview that is more conducive to positive outcomes for everyone because they're increasing its scope and awareness and capability.

So you develop in the personal development or as you invest in the personal development of your teammates of your employees of your large members, you know, helping them achieve their personal and business goals.

And that they move from being mediocre players or poor players to being additional stars.

And as your organizational capacity increases, you will be able to then tackle bigger and better sort of goals about you know the where the business going with the largest going with those experiences look like.

And that that organizational development function is the responsible is the responsibility of a leader and a leader who consistently relies on two people to get the job done.

Or one person to get the job done is never going to be able to grow an organization past the weakest link in that organization they can't get past the person that's holding them back.

Unfortunately, we have just a whole bunch of people out there in the labor market. So the idea right now is less and less developed people and more and more replace people, which is interesting, but it's a past the buck kind of model in that you, you know, essentially passing the development costs on to somebody else and then hiring again.

As large members, that's not a luxury we have, right? So you have to work with the team you have you have to work with the people in the room and help them grow in a nonprofit environment, you can't fire folks.

At least you can't fire volunteers in a meaningful way, you can ask them to change their jobs or changes their roles in the organization, but telling them to never come back is not a productive way to help you build your team.

So as you're working through your leadership capabilities and functions start to think about how you're going to work with your key players to help nurture your, you know, middle of the road players to move them up in both their personal development and their skills and capabilities.