Advice for When You Apply These Ideas

Simply getting your team to meet their goals, while often a good thing, is not the most you can be doing for your team. If you truly want to be one of those rarified few that people will speak of when they speak of “the best managers they ever had,” you need to be actively looking to grow your team members, even to the point where they are skilled beyond the needs of your team. It may seem counterintuitive—don’t we want our team to get to the “performing” step and just stay there, ad infinitum?—but having a team that’s constantly “graduating” people to higher-level roles and responsibilities is the height of success as a manager. Doing so is hard, and requires time and dedication on both the part of the employee and the manager, but it’s the clear mark of a servant leader, and it’s what sets the great managers apart from the merely competent.

Grow your team, and you will find yourself growing yourself along with it, without even realizing it.