As leaders – both in our personal lives and professional careers – how do we properly give resources to our teams? Or families? How do we give the resources needed for success to ourselves? Let’s think about this in terms of three different aspects: opportunity, access, and time.
Opportunity
When we think about opportunity, we absolutely need to be thinking default aggressive and take any opportunity that comes our way. When you’re given an opportunity from someone, take it. There may be other times when we need to make those opportunities for ourselves.
As a leader, we always need to be giving people opportunities – whether that’s our family, our teammates, or our subordinates. Give opportunities to people so they can grow, develop, and even fail. Let the people in our lives know why they’re doing what they need to do and let them act on that. That’s how we build relationships, learn, and develop.
Access
When I started a new job in a new field, I had a boss who gave me access to the things I needed to be successful because he wanted me to do well and flourish in my position. I had access to the information, the software, and the context I needed. That was critical in my being able to execute effectively. How are you getting access to the things you need to succeed?
We need to do the same for our coworkers, subordinates, bosses, and family members. Give them access to the tools and resources they need. Set them up to win. Are there ways we can find to get them more involved? That might not look like taking over a whole project, but can we get people more involved in meetings, in planning or training, or give them more of the task?
Time
Think of time in two ways: our own time as leaders, and the time of our own people to have to develop and grow. If someone is starting something new, they need time to learn and establish those new skills and time to digest information and understand key processes. Leaders also have to be available with your own time – without micromanaging or being taken advantage of – and give that to other people. Understand the process it takes to learn a new task. How are we spending time with our team members? Are we giving them the time they need to really grow and be successful in their roles?
Time is a limited resource so we must be disciplined about how we spend it. Putting effort into developing relationships is an important use of our time; it lets people know we care, we want success for them and we want support them in any way we can. The same is true of our own time; when we apply discipline to our schedule, we find freedom to engage in activities that we enjoy and that support us being better people and leaders.
Example:
This past Thanksgiving, my niece, and nephew asked if there was anything they could do to help with making dinner. I was a little taken aback – I wasn’t asking them; they came to me. So instead of saying, “no, we’re all good,” I just thought “this is awesome.” I got them on board with making the gravy and the cranberry sauce. We went through the recipes, I gave them each task best for them, and I let them take ownership of those parts of the dinner. They did great.
They had all the resources they needed. They stepped up and asked for the opportunity to help and I was happy to let them. I gave them access to the ingredients, the right pots and pans, and the space in the kitchen they needed. We spent the time together to make the dishes properly and more important than that was taking the time to teach them the why behind those things.
They got to see what goes on behind the scenes, why we have some of the traditions that we do, and now, when they get older, they’ll be able to hold onto those traditions and pass the meaning on to their families. We built on our relationship in a special and memorable way that day. This was an awesome opportunity to let the kids take the lead and navigate their way to making two successful dishes. And isn’t that our goal with our kids? To help them become less reliant on us and more independent and confident to tackle challenges and solve problems?.
Echelon Front’s Women’s Assembly is a monthly live session with a community of women to talk about the principles of Extreme Ownership and how they relate to the challenges and struggles we have as women – in business and at home. When we think of leadership here at Echelon Front, we’re not talking about traditional leaders as people.
We’re talking about any human being who interacts with other human beings. Our goal is to help everyone feel confident that they are in fact a leader and benefit from knowing that to be true.
We believe every problem you face in work and at home is a leadership problem, and the beauty of that is that we have tools, tactics, and principles that you can implement to help in solving those problems. Register today for upcoming live, interactive sessions of the Women’s Assembly.
