(Forbes) -- Most of us know by now that a primary job of the leader is not to create followers, but to develop more leaders.
I’ve observed this process up close and personal.
I worked with a CEO at Campbell Soup Company who, rather than hoard all the leadership power for himself, gladly shared both responsibility and authority with many others.
I see similar behaviors by top leaders in agribusiness, high tech, nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, engineering and healthcare.
These leaders are unusually effective because they understand their roles as developers of people.
This process of multiplying leadership lies at the heart of The 100X Leader: How to Become Someone Worth Following.
Leadership experts Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram explain how forward-thinking leaders help others achieve their full potential.
Becoming someone worth following, the authors insist, requires much more than merely “letting go” of leadership prerogatives. And it’s more than a shift in mindset. It requires deliberate, day-after-day attention to the nurturing of others. The result is a collaborative culture and a deeper talent pool of leaders. Everyone wins.
Rodger Dean Duncan: The four ways to multiply, you say, are Informing, Training, Coaching and Apprenticeship. How can a leader decide which approach to emphasize in a given situation?
Steve Cockram: It really depends on the size of group you’re working with and what your intentions are.
Informing is about efficiency, but is less transformational. If you want to communicate new information or share an inspiring event, then an email or a keynote address are examples of speaking to many people in one setting, but has different impact.
Training, on the other hand, is more focused on 12 to 70 people where there’s a specific agenda to provide information in more of a teaching session.
Coaching provides more relational access and depth as the goal becomes helping people on specific issues and providing more accountability.
Apprenticeship is truly meant to transfer knowledge, wisdom and skills to expand people’s capacity.
The leader must know when to apply each to what group and for what reason.
Duncan: You talk about leadership as an act of liberation. What does that mean? Who’s being liberated from what?
Jeremie Kubicek: To liberate is to calibrate high support and high challenge in order to empower someone in a true growth culture. Most people suffer from some form of self-preservation and fear. A liberating leader learns what the other person needs and provides appropriate support or challenge to help people overcome their negative patterns and get to a higher level of influence.
If you give support but no challenge, you are protecting. If you give challenge but no support, you will tend to dominate. If you give neither, you are abdicating.
Truly liberating leaders fight for the highest possible good of those they lead.
Duncan: It’s been said that we never graduate from the school of self-awareness. How does that relate to a person's ability to lead?
Cockram: We can't give away what we don't possess. We as leaders must live out what we teach. I think that's why we’re all so disgusted when we see political, sports or religious leaders in the news who have committed a crime, been dishonest, lost their cool, etc. We think to ourselves, "If they can't lead themselves, why would we follow them?"
We must constantly know ourselves, so we can lead ourselves. We lead ourselves by understanding our patterns and making better choices or actions. Once we practice that, then we can start leading others because we become credible.
Duncan: Why do you use a greenhouse as the metaphor to describe organizational culture?
Kubicek: The greenhouse is such a great visual picture of health. The gardener (leader) spends time, cultivation and attention to make sure the plants (employees) are thriving.
A gardener wouldn't think of buying a beautiful plant and then just leaving it to die, or expecting it to thrive on its own without needing tending. But some organizational leaders think they can just leave their people on their own and expect them to thrive.
Who has responsibility for a plant’s growth? The plant or the gardener? We say both. The same is true for employees. They want to grow and the leader should want them to grow as well. People need time, vision and encouragement in the same way that plants need water, sunlight and the proper soil.
