You are the CEO, Growing a Business. Who do you Learn From?
At Visage Growth Partners, we provide CEO learning resources, working with humble, growth-focused CEOs who are life-long learners. They often look to those around them for lessons that help them improve as individuals and leaders. They know that both the alignment and capability of their leadership team will either enhance or hinder the growth prospects of their business.
I was reflecting upon my time as a mentor several years ago in a program run by Dr. Ilan Kogus. He defined a mentor as anyone with experience in a situation that gives their time to help someone meet their goals or overcome a challenge. They could be older or younger. Industry experts or industry "freshmen". They would “enable” the mentee to come up with answers to problems rather than be prescriptive. Differing from a coach, a mentor works to the agenda of the mentee, whilst a coach sets the learning agenda.
As I reflect on my career experiences, I’ve been lucky to have had those long-standing loyal employees who demonstrate dependability, sincerity, and punctuality. I have had staff who teach and remind me how to be open, vulnerable, and authentic and how attractive and powerful that is for a leader.
My four children also provide learning opportunities for me. Regardless of their decades less of life experiences, they remind me I shouldn’t shut myself off from what they can teach me.
I have people who remind me about how important detail can be in certain situations and I have experienced others who have enthusiastically pushed into new paradigms to challenge our strategy! I have known people who have shown me how to have a purpose and belief and how to be persistent and relentless in striving for this.
I have had front-line staff who have reiterated the importance of the customer in our business and shown me how to do this. There have been so many people I have worked with that have provided lessons that will stay with me forever and have helped shape me into who I am and who I am becoming.
We often gravitate to learn from those that have done what we do, people who are "proven" or who are recognised as experts. But if we look around us, at our management team; our back-office staff; the front-line personnel; our family members; and all of the understated people we come in contact with in our everyday life, we’ll find great inspiration and plenty to learn from.
Why shut ourselves off from lessons that can help us be our very best? As leaders, the better we are, the more effective our team are growing our business.
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