If you’re not creating more leaders, you’re doing leadership wrong

Look, I'll be honest: there are more "Here's how to be a great leader" articles on LinkedIn than I have time to read. Yawn. I believe that a vital part of the conversation is missing. We’ve all heard the saying that “leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.” But I don’t see enough how-to articles and posts about creating and mentoring leadership within our own organisations.?

We’re actively trying to build more leaders — fast. Currently, nearly 50% of our workforce are in formal and informal leadership training. For a traditional vertical hierarchy, that might seem like a disproportionate amount of leaders. Luckily ClickSend is anything but traditional and we’re proud of that.?

Our context ClickSend has been going through a transformation from founder-centred start-up to high-performing global organisation. We’ve had an enormous growth spurt in the last 12 months and our awkward teenage years are far behind us.?

The organisation is now too big for all decisions to be run-past the boss. We need to strengthen our decision-making culture internally. Building strong, effective leadership all the way through the org-chart is a huge part of that.?

This change is still a work in progress, but it continues to develop while we accelerate. Our teams are shipping more products, serving more customers, implementing more initiatives, and frankly, growing faster. All of these outputs are our success metrics for a decision-based culture. We have growing internal leadership, more ideas and faster decision-making.?

Our three step plan to build more leaders Our plan is simple and it’s working. We actioned the below three steps in unison to build more engaged, enabled leaders in our organisation.?

1. Launched an org-wide leadership training program
2. Built a culture of enablement
3. Re-aligned to be laser-focused on our north-star?

1. Launching a leadership training program

Investing in leadership training is not just a chance for our people to learn. It’s also a great opportunity for us to show our employees that we see them as up-and-coming? leaders. It puts them in a growth mindset and gives them some confidence.?

To run our leadership training program, we’re partnering with Australian Institute of Management (AIM).? With custom programs for Senior Leaders, People Leaders, Emerging Leaders and Organisational Leaders, we're widely investing in the professional development of nearly 50% of our people.

To support the content and courses that are being delivered by AIM we've? set up mentoring and leadership forums internally. These are a chance for our leaders-in-training to share what they've learned and discuss how we can bring those learnings into ClickSend and their day-to-day roles.?

All our leaders-in-training are given space during their working week for training, which is about 5% of their time. We think we will see a 10-20% productivity increase from that 5% investment; the maths checks out!

2. Building a culture of enablement

I'm sure many of you who have worked in start-ups have been through the founder-centred period. You know, where the founder wants to be involved in every decision? When you're scaling up and accelerating, it's great. It makes for fast decision-making that is always consistent with strategy, and is a great enabler for rapid growth.?

But, founder-centred decision making is not scalable.? Especially if your CEO or founder starts running out of capacity. At some point, if you want to keep growing at speed,? your leaders need to be able to make decisions independently and you need to build a culture of enablement.?

We’ve started building this culture with a simple on-the-ground shift. People are encouraged to ask for opinions not answers. Our growing leaders and leaders in training have gone from asking "Here's my problem, how do I solve it?" to "Here's my problem, I want to solve it this way, what do you think?".?

As leaders, we've got experience and context to share. It’s important that we're still part of the conversation when making decisions . But our teams are in the detail of the problem, and are going to bring hands-on experience. When we back our teams through this structure, they walk away with more ownership of the solution, which also builds confidence in their own decision making process.?

For us, this works. We've found we iterate faster like this.

?3. Our north star

Finally, we've set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal for the organisation. And we have shared that goal with everyone.

We want to send 10 billion messages. This is a 10X goal that we're aggressively pursuing over the next five years. It is our North Star.?

Everything we’re doing for the next five years is in pursuit of this goal. From ramping up our infrastructure and pipeline to expanding our customer reach, and building up our product portfolio — every decision we make is sense checked with: "does this help us get to our North Star?".?

It's a big goal but it’s simple enough that it really does breathe into everything we do at ClickSend. As a result, decision-making is easier. Which makes leading easier for our existing and growing leaders.

The leadership legacy?

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others" - Pericles

I love my job, and my team. The office culture of my local team and the online culture of my global team keep me pretty engaged. And we build a product that helps more than 40K businesses communicate better.?

But when I inevitably finish here, I think I'll be more proud of the leaders I helped mentor and develop than any financial goals I achieved. But I'm still learning too. I'd love to hear about how you build leadership in your own company or team!