244. Scaling Leadership: 9 Keys to Success with Mick Spiers

Are you ready to revisit your leadership approach and scale effectively? Join us in this engaging episode that dives deep into the core principles of scaling your leadership alongside your business. Reflecting on a recent enlightening conversation with Garrett Delph, we explore crucial strategies that not only enhance your leadership style but also empower your team to flourish. 

We unpack the importance of defining your purpose and instilling clarity within your organization. As Simon Sinek aptly puts it, "People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it." Understanding this concept can transform your team's engagement and productivity. Explore the three key pillars of sustainable growth: investing in people, refining processes, and establishing performance accountability. Recognizing that leadership is not just about output but also about cultivating an environment that inspires and motivates is fundamental. 

Embodying professionalism, integrity, and empathy are vital traits that create trust and allow team members to thrive. The autonomy and freedom matrix emphasizes how to balance oversight with empowerment, ultimately fostering creativity and innovation. Great leaders understand that they don't just command action; they co-create visions with their teams, fostering a culture of shared ownership. We urge you to reflect on your leadership strategy and consider the insights shared here. Share with us the key takeaway you plan to implement in your leadership practice. 

Tune in and learn about these transformative insights, and as we celebrate our podcast's milestone, don't forget to vote for your favorite guest from our last four years. Your journey toward exceptional leadership starts now—let's grow together!

Chapters

• 0:24 What it takes to scale leadership and business
• 16:19 Key leadership insights for sustainable growth
• 1:50:30 Celebrating our podcast's anniversary and voting announcement

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

What does it take to truly scale a business and scale your leadership at the same time? How do you grow an organization without becoming the bottleneck yourself? And how do you create an environment where people take ownership instead of just following orders? If you've ever struggled with these questions, you're not alone. In my recent conversation with Garrett Delph, we unpacked the critical role of leadership in scaling a business, not just in size, but in impact. Today, I want to take that discussion further and break down my biggest takeaways into actionable leadership insights that you can apply immediately. Hey, everyone, before we start today, I'm cutting in with an exciting announcement the Leadership Project Podcast is turning four years old. For four years, we've been on a mission to bring you world-class insights on leadership, mindset and human potential, and we couldn't have done it without our incredible guests, and we couldn't have done it without you. And now, as we celebrate this milestone, it's time to hear from you who has been your favorite guest, which conversation had the biggest impact on you, who challenged your thinking, inspired you or helped you grow as a leader? Introducing the podcast guest of the year awards Voting is now open, and this is your chance to show your appreciation for the guest who left the biggest mark on your leadership journey. Head to mickspearscom to cast your vote now. We'll announce the winner in mid-March, so make sure your voice is heard. Thank you for being part of the Leadership Project community and this journey. Here's to four years of learning, leading and growing together, and many more to come. Now go vote.

Mick Spiers: 1:54

Welcome back to the Leadership Project. In today's episode it's going to be a solo cast where I reflect on the amazing conversation with Garrett Delph. I'll be reflecting on our conversation and building upon it to give you nine clear areas where you can scale your leadership. Number one let's start with purpose, and specifically purpose alignment, the foundation of scalable leadership. As Simon Sinek famously puts it, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and the same applies to leadership. As Simon Sinek famously puts it people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And the same applies to leadership. People will do almost anything if they understand a powerful purpose behind that action. They'll understand the vision and the mission of where we're going, the macro why, but even down to things like tasks and decisions, they will do a task if they understand why the task is important and they'll accept a decision if they'll understand the rationale behind it.

Mick Spiers: 2:59

One of the most overlooked factors is purpose alignment. This comes from our amazing conversation with Zach Mercurio, a thought leader on purpose-driven leadership and the author of the book the Invisible Leader. Zach showed us that one of the most powerful things that people are looking for in the workplace is meaning they want to feel that they matter. They want to feel that they matter and they want to feel that what they do matters. People have their individual purpose and it's when we have purpose alignment of a team that great things happen. And this reminds me of the powerful quote from our conversation with Ivan Meisner, the founder of BNI If you get people in the boat rowing in the same direction and I, if you get people in the boat rowing in the same direction you will dominate any industry. So it's not just about hiring smart people and letting them go off and do their own thing. It's about aligning them towards a shared mission, because when everyone is rowing in sync, your business doesn't just grow, it becomes unstoppable.

Mick Spiers: 4:03

Number two is this powerful word, clarity, and the difference between clarity and chaos. Once you have alignment, the next critical factor in scaling leadership is this clarity. Lack of clarity leads to stress, confusion and inconsistency. If your team doesn't know what's expected of them, they leave work wondering did I even do a good job today? As leaders, we must provide three types of clarity Clarity of expectations no one should ever have to guess what success looks like. Clarity of vision and mission People must understand why their work matters. And clarity of process, which includes guardrails, not micromanagement. We empower people when we provide the structure they need to succeed setting them up for success. Chaos slows down the team. Clarity speeds them up. I've made mistakes on this one. I've made an assumption in the past that people with 30 years experience in the industry, they know what to do you just let them go. But even they crave clarity of expectations and when they don't have it, they leave work confused.

Mick Spiers: 5:21

Number three is the three pillars people, process and performance accountability. Scaling leadership means scaling three elements the people, the heartbeat of any organization. Invest in them. Invest in them. Process Systems create consistency and scalability and performance accountability. Consistency and scalability and performance accountability People thrive when they have clear goals and support and there's an air of accountability in the business. This sounds like it might be something that people don't want, but they thrive on this. What they want is accountability, but with the accountability. They want to be empowered and they want to be. They want to be empowered and they want to be enabled with the right resources. When people shirk away from accountability, it's usually because they don't feel that they are empowered to make the decisions that impact the outcome or they don't feel that they were enabled with the resources that set them up for success. That's when they shirk accountability. When there's clarity of expectation, empowerment and enablement, people willingly take accountability, and when we get these three pillars of people, process and performance accountability aligned, your business grows sustainably.

Mick Spiers: 6:42

Number four we succeed through our people, not at their expense. Here's the hard truth. Too many leaders focus on outcomes instead of people. They push for short-term results without realizing that the real long-term strategy is taking care of their team. The best leaders understand this. If we care for our people, our people will care for the business. Understand this If we care for our people, our people will care for the business. When people feel valued, they give their very best work. Culture isn't a side project. It's the foundation of sustainable growth.

Mick Spiers: 7:15

Something we've discussed on the show before is the three dimensions of leadership leading self, leading others and leading the business. The best way to bring this to life is to always think about decisions we're making and getting balanced, making sure that we don't make a decision that's good for the business but bad for the people. But equally, don't make a decision that's great for the people but really not good for the business, and don't make a decision that's good for the business and good for the people but it's at your own personal expense. So it's balancing those three, and the fourth dimension is time. Make sure it's not a seemingly good decision in the short term, but in the long term it has disastrous consequences. So balance decisions where you succeed through your people, not at their expense.

Mick Spiers: 8:06

The fifth element today is this pie framework that Garrett showed us Professionalism, integrity and empathy. Professionalism show up prepared, be consistent. You're setting the tone in the business. Integrity do the right thing always. This is what builds trust and empathy. Understand your people, not just their performance. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. As Teddy Roosevelt famously puts it, when you lead with pie, you build trust, and trust is the foundation of great leadership.

Mick Spiers: 8:45

Number six is the other acronym that we got from Garrett T. Where are you spending your time, energy and attention. As leaders, we often say I don't have enough time, but the truth is it's not about time, it's about focus. Ask yourself where am I spending my time? Is my energy going into the right things? Am I giving my attention to what truly moves the business forward? What you feed with your tea grows? So be intentional, and if you do find yourself saying I don't have enough time for that team meeting today, I'm going to tell you you don't have time not to. It's the consequences of things that we don't do that usually come back to bite us.

Mick Spiers: 9:36

Number seven comes from the great work of Liz Wiseman in her book Multipliers. And that is to be a multiplier, not a diminisher. Diminishers believe they need to be the smartest person in the room. They micromanage, hold on to control and limit their team's potential. Multipliers bring out the best in others. They create an environment where people rise to the occasion. When a leader tries to do everything themselves, they become the bottleneck. The business can only move as fast as they can handle. They don't scale, they burn out and they hold their team back. Multipliers, on the other hand, create more leaders. They delegate, empower and develop talent. If you want to scale your leadership. Stop trying to be the hero. Instead, be the coach. Remember that you only have 24 hours in one day, but if you've got a team and it could be a small team or a big team if you're a multiplier, you're then multiplying impact, if you're creating the environment where those people can do their very best work.

Mick Spiers: 10:46

Number eight is the autonomy and freedom matrix that we got from our conversation with Garrett Delph. It's not about giving people total freedom or micromanaging. It's about balancing autonomy with accountability. Garrett breaks it down like this High autonomy plus clear guardrails equals empowerment. Low autonomy and high guardrails feels like micromanagement and stifles creativity. High autonomy and no guardrails equals chaos and you might have wonderful people, but they're all going in different directions and it leads to a lot of inconsistency. And low autonomy and no guardrails is just disengagement. People just stop caring. People thrive when they have the freedom to execute, but clear boundaries to guide them. So think about this, the autonomy and freedom matrix. You also need to apply situational and adaptive leadership on this. There's going to be certain roles in your business and certain situations where the guardrails need to be quite clear and work very much about process. Garrett told the wonderful story about the person in the factory that's putting on the lug nuts on a car. Yeah, they need to follow a process. There's safety critical elements involved. You don't give them the autonomy to just do whatever they want. So make sure that you're applying the autonomy and freedom matrix situationally and also adaptively to the people that you're leading.

Mick Spiers: 12:24

Number nine is one of my own philosophies. You hold the pen. This is something I truly believe in. As a leader, you are writing the script for your organization's future. But here's the key it's not just your script. The best leaders co-architect their vision with the team. Why? Because when people feel like they were part of creating the solution, they take great ownership of the results. So are you engaging your team in shaping the future? Are you empowering them to write the story with you? Are you building a culture of shared ownership, not just compliance? Great leaders don't just tell people what to do. They invite them to help build the path forward. If we come back to one of Garrett's pillars around process, invite people to help you write the process. If they don't like the process, turn to them and say hey, you hold the pen, help me rewrite it and you'll see them step up and step in and take great ownership. So Scaling Leadership is about more than just growth. It's about creating clarity, empowering people and then getting out of their way.

Mick Spiers: 13:38

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's one leadership insight you're going to apply from this week's conversation In the next episode? We're going to be joined by the amazing Pia Silva, the founder of the no BS Agency Mastery and author of the book Badass your Brand. We're going to be talking about branding branding you, personal branding, and also branding your organization.

Mick Spiers: 14:08

Don't forget to vote for your favorite podcast guest over the first four years and five seasons of the Leadership Project podcast. Head to mickspearscom and cast your vote now. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Project at mickspearscom. A huge call out to Faris Sadek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP Joanne goes on, gerald Calabo and my amazing wife Say Spears. I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey, as we learn together and lead together.