Chapter 16 How to Create a Leadership Factory
How do you recognize potential leaders, nurture them, and then facilitate a process where they can continue that development of leaders—down hundreds or even thousands of levels in your organization?
You won’t accomplish this through strength of personality, training longer, or sharing more motivational quotes in your WhatsApp groups.
You’ve got to create an institutional culture that values leadership, recognizes potential, and rewards results. And throw in a little celebration too. Let’s unpack that process to analyze what good leaders look like, where they come from, and how they’re developed.
Having built teams of more than 200,000 people, I’ve had a great vantage point from which to witness the leadership development process firsthand—starting with a talent pool of potential leaders and tracking the behavior patterns that cause them to develop into actual leaders. And one surprising discovery I’ve noticed is the huge disparity in the various origin stories of leaders in our profession.
There are kids who were raised in wealth and privilege and kids who grew up on the street. Kids who were raised in strong traditional families and kids with no family to speak of. Pampered kids with helicopter parents and kids who were abused.
At the time distributors reach your team, they could be Fortune 500 CEOs, homemakers, or gangbangers. Schoolteachers, serial entrepreneurs, or Uber drivers. There is no template from people’s past that ...