Are High-Potential People Leaving Your Organization?

I have been exploring the meaning of inspired leadership for the past ten years. That’s a long time. You see, the word “inspired” is seriously intentional for me. It means something.

Let me break it down.?

What I've come to realize is that being an inspired leader isn't about the leader being awesome. It's about the leader's ability to help people around them feel awesome.?

Because when your people feel awesome, they are far more powerful and productive than when they don’t.

When I was working in an organization in my mid-30s, I was lucky enough to be working for someone who I now identify as my favourite inspired leader. She was very strategic, and intelligent, and articulate, and masterful at leading at a senior-leadership level in a big organization.

As a manager on her team, she inspired me because she helped me believe in myself in really empowering ways.?

She gave me a runway to explore my ideas.?

She created opportunities for me.

She moved roadblocks so I could run with things.??

Here’s an example of what I mean. Back in the early 2000s, corporate social responsibility was just dawning on the horizon. I had done a bunch of work to create a framework for a corporate social responsibility strategy within the organization.?

At the time, this was fairly forward-thinking — and some leaders would have found that threatening.

But she didn't. She thought it was an opportunity. She saw how passionate I was about the topic. And she eliminated a lot of roadblocks for me to be able to pursue that passion that I was so fired up by at that time.

So when I think about inspired leaders, I think about her, and about how she made me feel. She believed in my strategic thinking and in my creativity. She believed in — and facilitated — what was possible when I put my all into something.

But I only had a year and a half with her before she left the organization. And her successor was pretty much the opposite of what I would call an inspired leader.

Suddenly my dynamic environment of possibility and high regard had shifted to a place where I felt limited, minimized, and not appreciated for my unique strengths. It felt suffocating.?

I did not feel valued…and so I left.?

I was in my late 30s and full of potential. And I left the organization because I wanted to be in a place where I was valued. I wanted to be given opportunities to stretch into my potential.

I think this happens all the time. High-potential people leave organizations when they're not encouraged, supported, valued, and given the space to thrive.

So my mission now is to create more inspired leaders. And I’m doing it on behalf of those young managers — nowadays, they’re millennials and gen Zs — who are craving the opportunity to demonstrate their strengths, to take some risks, and to try new things.?

We need new thinking right now. Agree?

Inspired leaders create the space for that thinking.?

And I want you to know how to do that. How to be that for your people. How to be able to set clear expectations, and then get out of the way. How to coach your people, not command-and-control your people.

But this requires a shift. It's uncomfortable. And it’s totally possible.?

It is learnable.?

I have created a program for you to learn how to become that inspired leader that people reflect on and think about, like I am thinking about mine.

Just like those great teachers who shifted your destiny with the things they did and said, we all have great leaders in our past. They are part of our stories — part of what we commit to becoming in this lifetime.

You can become that kind of leader.

I hope you'll consider joining us for the Inspired Leadership Signature Program in 2022. Our next cohort kicks off in January. We've got some incredible leaders in the group already, poised for this next leg of the journey to becoming the leaders the world most needs, right now.?

You belong here, too.