This Is The #1 Strategy For Training Excellent Future Leaders

The following is an excerpt from?Elevate Your Team,?my new book on organizational leadership that published March 7 and is now available wherever books are sold.

No matter where you work or what industry you’re in, I bet I can describe a top performer at your company:

• They have a strong understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Just as importantly, they know how to emphasize their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.
• They have a clear direction for their career that is aligned with their personal values.
• They are a voracious learner and a disciplined executor.
• Rather than being satisfied with a high level of performance, they consistently seek out feedback to help them learn and improve.
• They have developed an intentional structure to their day with positive habits.
• They have good physical and mental discipline. They make thoughtful decisions about how they use their time and energy and work smarter, not harder. They may even have a regular morning routine and a consistent exercise time that is blocked off in their daily schedule.
• They connect well with others, are unafraid to be vulnerable in the right moments, and take ownership of their actions and situations rather than blaming others.

If your organization doesn’t have someone who fits this profile, know that your competitors do—especially the ones that are leading your industry.

But if you don’t have these types of people at your organization or on your team today, not all is lost. The qualities described above are not innate to an individual or an organization. They can be developed through intentionality, training, and commitment.

Capacity building is a framework to build a team that grows with your business rather than ending up with a team that is trampled by your business’s growth. Elevate Your Team goes into detail on how to leverage each of the four capacities to elevate your team’s performance and describes actionable ways to help your team grow in all four key areas.

As I first defined in my previous book, Elevate, capacity building is the method through which individuals seek, acquire, and develop the skills and abilities to consistently perform at a higher level in pursuit of their innate potential.

Remember earlier when I described your perfect employee?

Here’s how I knew—capacity building in an organization gives employees what they need to excel in four areas:

• Spiritual Capacity: Understanding who you are, what you want most, and the standards you live by. People with high spiritual capacity have a clear understanding of their purpose in life, the nonnegotiable core values that guide their most important decisions, and their strengths and weaknesses in their personal and professional lives.
• Intellectual Capacity: How you think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline. People with high intellectual capacity are the ones who seem to get more done in less time—they set clear goals for themselves, build the skills necessary to achieve those goals, learn constantly, and develop the habits they need to stay on track.
• Physical Capacity: Your health, well-being, and physical performance. People with high physical capacity have built the resilience and stamina needed to excel in stressful or challenging situations. They manage their energy and avoid burning out by working smarter, not harder.
• Emotional Capacity: How you react to challenging situations, your emotional mindset, and the quality of your relationships. People with high emotional capacity always bring good perspective to challenging situations. They calmly navigate challenges, learn from failures, work well with others and rally the troops.

You’ll notice that these four core competencies greatly affect both personal and professional spheres of life. This is not a coincidence. The fact is that we are not different people at work and in our personal lives, especially as more companies encourage employees to bring their whole selves to work. What we do outside work affects our professional performance.

Consider the following:

• A person who struggles with time management, prioritization, and punctuality at work probably has the same issues in their personal life.
• A person who has low energy or little regard for their well-being outside work probably isn’t showing up to work with a ton of energy.
• A person who is unhappy, unfulfilled, or frustrated with their personal life will often see some of those challenges spill into their work performance, and vice versa.

Plus, employees increasingly want their employers to value them as people, not just as interchangeable cogs in a machine. They want to have a chance to advance in their careers. They want to feel successful in their roles and to have some autonomy over their work. They want to be able to create space in their lives for their personal passions and fulfillment, even if they know there isn’t always a perfect fifty-fifty balance between work and life.

Capacity building helps your employees achieve these things. It gives them a framework to gain the understanding of what they want most in life and the discipline to go get it. It helps them build better habits and routines in their day that allow them to better use their time and save energy by avoiding unimportant things. It empowers them to build relationships that make them stronger rather than draining their energy.

This investment yields a higher level of personal and professional achievement, which fuels better job performance, which drives company growth, which allows leaders to reinvest more into their people. It’s a virtuous cycle that helps everyone grow and inspire others within their personal and professional circles to do the same.

There aren’t many true win-wins in life and business, but helping your team get more out of life as they simultaneously contribute more to your business is one of them.

If you commit yourself and your organization to capacity building, not only will you unlock a better level of performance on your team, but you will also see changes and improvement far beyond your organization’s walls. But first, you need to understand two core principles needed to make capacity building a part of your cultural DNA. One pertains to personal leadership, and the other relates to organizational leadership.

Let’s be honest. You can’t effectively motivate and inspire others unless you are leading as your authentic self. This is especially true with capacity building. Whether you lead a small team, a department, or an organization—or are aspiring to lead in the future—the first step to leading a team that constantly builds capacity is to build your own capacity as a leader. To do this, it is helpful to ask yourself a few questions:

• Spiritual Capacity: Are you clear about what you value most and your strengths? Do you use that knowledge to lead authentically?
• Intellectual Capacity: Are you consistently able to learn, grow, and accomplish what you want to do each day, or do you often find yourself struggling to start, falling off course, or lacking discipline?
• Physical Capacity: Do you feel like you effectively manage your energy, or are you constantly sleep-deprived, stressed out, and burned out?
• Emotional Capacity: Do you surround yourself with people who encourage you, value you, and help you learn, or do you have a lot of close friends and family who leave you feeling exhausted after each interaction? Are you willing to be vulnerable? Do you focus on what you can control?

Your answers to these questions illuminate where you stand in your own capacity building journey. Right now, you’re either confident in your responses or you’re realizing you still have one or more areas where you need to grow.

You don’t have to master capacity building to adopt it as a philosophy for your team, but people often react more to what you do than what you say. You’ll be a much more effective coach if capacity building is visible in the way you show up each day and if you can point to examples of how you’ve used it in your own life.

Since I first published my first book on capacity building, Elevate, I have spoken to many organizations and groups about how to use capacity building as a personal and leadership development framework. I have seen many individuals use the four capacities to elevate their personal performance and then teach the same concepts to their teams.

But this individualized strategy alone won’t transform an organization. To really change your team and help your people reach their full potential—and help your business grow as well—you need to invest company time and resources in capacity building and commit to growing your team in these four areas.

You can’t just preach to your people about growth and improvement. You have to develop a culture that encourages and rewards it. Instead of focusing leadership and management training solely on job-related skills and tactics, help your up-and-coming leaders build their capacity with the strategies shared throughout this book.

Capacity building requires organizations to invest in their people holistically. It’s not just about making your team better at work or maximizing their value to your organization today. It’s also about helping them grow as people and viewing the benefits the organization receives as a primary by-product, not as the only output.

There’s an old adage where a CFO and CEO are speaking, and the CFO says, “What if we train our people and they leave?” to which the CEO replies, “What if we don’t and they stay?” In other words, you shouldn’t be worrying that your employees will leave after you’ve invested so much in them. You should be more concerned if you don’t have people on your bus who can take you to where you need to go.

Elevating your team through capacity building isn’t easy, but the rewards are immense. Your people will need you to support and mentor them and give them honest, fair feedback when they fall short of certain deliverables and goals. They will need you to help them grow beyond their professional sphere and make changes in their own lives beyond the workplace. They’ll even need you to help them gain clarity on the most important principles in their lives.

If it sounds difficult, that’s because it is. But it’s worth the work. Start today.

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Elevate Your Team, my new book, is now available in print in the US and in eBook around the world.?Order today.

Praise for Elevate Your Team:

“Elevate Your Team is the roadmap for a new generation of leaders who build organizations by helping their people thrive both personally and professionally — without burning out.” —?Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global

“This book is at once perceptive and practical. It will open new vistas for your own thinking about leadership and equip you with a host of tools and tips to build capacity in your team. Follow Bob Glazer — or prepare to be left behind!” —?Daniel H. Pink,?#1?New York Times?Bestselling Author of?Drive,?To Sell Is Human, and?The Power of Regret