Who You Were Yesterday, May Not Be Who You Are Today

I tell emerging leaders, don’t let others keep you trapped, because they do not have the ability to see your growth and change. On the other side, if you are in a leadership position, stay open minded to the potential of growth and learning amongst your team. ?I was recently teaching a leadership course and one of the students raised a concern of constantly fighting perceptions around their current role and associated abilities. They felt they were only being viewed as that person, even though they had been continually growing since taking on that role. My advice was to engage with current leadership to discuss taking on more responsibility to earn the trust that they could achieve higher level expectations, but I also told them, if their leadership is stuck on who they were ?yesterday, they should change their situation.

I used the word trust deliberately, because that is the basic element needed to be promoted or handed new responsibilities. Can I trust you to achieve the stated goals and expectations of the role or task? Everyone is human and trust is a very basic human, if not animalistic, concept that can be difficult to earn and easily lost. Once lost, it is almost impossible to win back to same level. A simple example I use is having a friend pick you up from airport. They forget and it takes you an extra two hours to get home, are you going to trust them for a ride next time? Some folks can get past that with time, others cannot forget and will never rely upon them again. Sometimes, you may never have had an opportunity to earn trust. I’ve known folks that struggled to break past the college hire perception of them by their more experienced teammates, viewed not trustworthy for higher level complex tasks or knowledgeable enough to be a thought leader. As leaders, we need to not only encourage growth, but acknowledge it through trusting those who have grown with more responsibility, ?to not only earn our trust, but that of their teammates as well. High performing teams trust and value each other and don’t dwell on limitations or mistakes in the past. If we don’t open ourselves up to the notion of growth and change the best people will look for new situations where they will be viewed and valued for who they are today, and I applaud them for it. ???????????