5 strategies to develop other leaders with your own leadership

By Tommy Mello, Owner of A1 Garage Doors, a $100 M+ Home Services Company. Sharing what I learned to help other entrepreneurs grow.

When I spoke to Julian Scadden, the CEO of Nexstar, he asked me this question: "How are you going to develop leaders?"

He explained, "Tommy, you'll do amazing things. [But] the only thing you have to figure out is how to develop your leadership...How do you integrate that into each person and make it happen? so she cares like you do?"

I thought about it and remembered what I wrote in an email to my subscribers: your people and your systems are more important than you.

What does this mean? As a leader, your job is not to manage everything or solve every problem. Your job is to lead your team and then make them leaders.

Many hear it and nod, "That makes sense, Tommy." But here's what they do instead.

Failed leaders have a secret addiction.

They go about their business... and they always end up fighting fires. Day after day! And I understand. It's hard to see the problems and not be the one solving them. It's frustrating when your employees don't do things “your way”. It's addictive to solve one problem after another, like one of those mole games.

Here is the reality:

While you're busy fighting fires, you let your team down. Sure, they might like you in the moment, but everyone loses in the long run: they don't have your leadership, and you don't have a business that's growing faster than your competitors.

So how do you go from firefighting to developing leaders to scale your business?

1. Think like a soccer (or soccer) coach.

In football, you have your starting 11. In soccer, it's seven. Whether it's soccer or football, if a coach doesn't know who his players are and where they should be, he will lose the game. p>

The same goes for leadership: you need to have a "map" of all the roles in your company. In other words, a flowchart. Once you've drawn the flowchart, do the following three things:

• Define what each role is responsible for

• Set monthly and weekly goals for each role

• Create a system to hold them accountable (this can be through a CRM or simply by having a weekly meeting to review the results.)

This may help clarify my next strategy.

2. Hire the best people for what you do least well.

Most leaders have more than one role, and that will be painfully obvious with an organizational chart. And when you're pulled in multiple directions, you won't be working on what you're good at.

The solution? Hire any roles for which you are not the best person. Reviewing the org chart will give you a better idea of ​​who to hire first. I also recommend that you write down the top three things you need to do each day and then keep track of what distracts you from them.

3. Hire leaders who can "split the seas" for you.

For lower positions, it is acceptable to hire for attitude and train them. But if you hire a manager, director, or senior executive, you not want them to learn under your watch. Instead, they should be able to tell you exactly what to do, execute the strategy, and hold themselves accountable to their KPIs.

For C-level executives, work with a high-level recruiter who is experienced in hiring A-players. For other roles, turn your employees into your best marketers. Whenever I can, I record the fun times we have as a team and share them on Facebook. We also give everyone $1,500 if they find an employee who joins us.

4. Train your leaders at the top and from the bottom.

I have hired many consultants over the years to teach us about leadership and other subjects. Along with getting advice and training, we've also visited thousands of stores across multiple industries to learn their secrets to success. We make every visit an experience that pushes us out of our comfort zone so we can get the most out of every trip.

At the same time, we build leaders from the ground up with learnings. (We have a flood of people applying for our apprenticeships because we aim to provide the best training in the industry.)

5. Dream bigger to suit everyone...