Building a Culture to Empower Future Leaders

Written by OGantry

When you scale a business, it comes with growing pains. One is learning to let go of enough control to delegate responsibility to someone else. It’s hard to let go of something you worked hard to build and know better than anyone. But that’s key to growing a business. You need to be able to develop leaders to take over parts of your business as it scales. You won’t be able to manage it alone, and at some point, you’ll have too many people and things to keep track of on your own.

Many struggles come with not being able to promote leaders within your business. You love your business, but you also need to take time off. You might burn out if you can’t trust someone enough to run your business. You will be constantly pulled in different directions to make decisions because your teams can’t. The truth is, it’s not that they can’t make these decisions. You know you hired intelligent people. Now all you need to do is ensure you have an environment where they can use those skills to help you grow.

If you have a system that doesn’t allow you to give full responsibility for data management, you need something better. You need to let your people in on your data and give them responsibility for managing it and making decisions. Most importantly, you need a system that enables you to do that.

A System That Enables Visibility & Delegation

From the start of your business, you have data to manage. It’s best to devise a process for managing it as early as possible, so you don’t get behind. You must create a cadence for collecting, organizing, analyzing data, and making decisions your entire team can participate in. The more you can clue them in on the business details, the better prepared they will be to help you achieve your goals.

First off, everyone needs to be looking at the same data. You can let people manage data in their way but need a company-wide system to do it. Not only that, but everyone needs visibility into the data they are responsible for or their job impacts. That way, they are more knowledgeable about how their decisions impact the business. Data transparency and easy visibility are essential for delegating responsibility and knowing everyone is working the same process. To give them full ownership, you will also need to give them access to make changes to the data they are responsible for.

By building data management into a foundational process of your business, it will adapt as your business scales. With a consistent data management process that includes all your employees, you have an opportunity to mentor your company's future leaders every day.

How to Mentor Future Leaders

The best way to mentor future leaders is to have regular meetings and conversations where you work through problems, forecasting, budgets, client interactions, sales, etc. When you bring other people into these meetings, you teach them what to look at and what decisions to make. If you’re the only one solving problems and making decisions, no one will know how to do it on their own when the time comes. Use everything as a teaching experience and allow them to ask questions about what’s happening in the business—the more information you can share, the better.

When you give transparency around the financial plan, everyone can be more alert about variances or why we’re not hitting the goal. Then, together you can come up with a solution. When you work closely with your people and train them to manage the business the way you would, you empower leaders to make decisions you don’t have to be a part of. People will be more diligent when they understand the impact of their decisions on the business.

Why You Need This Type of Culture

It’s impossible to scale if you don’t mentor and promote leaders in your business. If you don’t provide people with a career path, they will have nothing to work towards. Without a goal, they may get burnt out and leave. Intelligent people want to be trusted and valued, impact their job, and support their business owners.

When you build a culture where you commit to developing your people and making them an integral part of your business, they will commit to you. With a culture of strong relationships, trust, and value in your employees, you will be able to scale exponentially with a strong foundation for mentorship and empowerment.