Welcome to article #9 in my new series - the final article!
The AIM Leadership Roadmap helps leaders who have a new mandate, new team, or who need new ideas to lead with confidence, accelerate impact, and deliver results in their leadership role. In this article series, I’ll break down the steps you can take to inspire growth in your people and your organization and build your leadership legacy.
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Today’s topic is Inspire Growth. Step 9 in the AIM Leadership Roadmap.
Inspiring growth is the third step in the Create the Movement phase and the final step in the AIM Leadership Roadmap – with a focus on moving your organization from status quo to creating impactful change.
Inspiring growth will help you go from striving to thriving as an organization.
Here are three ways to achieve this, these may sound familiar – it’s the three phases of the AIM Leadership Roadmap – one more time with feeling!
- Commit to Action – as the leader: set your focus, assess your situation, and synthesize your ideas. These steps will take you from feeling overloaded to creating clarity and confidence to do what’s next.
- Make an impact – with your team: create plans, align your team, and measure results. These steps will take you from game plan to game day and every day.
- Create the movement – in your organization: enable change, develop leaders, and inspire growth in people and business. These steps will take you from status quo to creating impactful change.
What else can you do to inspire growth? For this I looked to some of the Conversation Considerations in my book – Talking Change: Must-Have Conversations for Successful Leaders.
- Build trust – get to know people and let them get to know you.
- Speak their language – leading with ‘I’m from head office and I’m here to help’ does not start you off on the right foot. To inspire people to grow and deliver, you need to understand and empathize with their situation. Speak their language by using their terms and phrases, not your head office jargon. And in some cases, you may have a language barrier, so figure out how to help them understand what you are asking of them.
- Keep an open mind and a closed mouth – as the leader people won’t always contradict what you say and just because you are the leader doesn’t mean that you have all the right answers. Keeping an open mind to other ideas and letting people voice those ideas before you voice yours will facilitate broader thinking, new solutions, and different points of view.
- Have fun – this gets missed a lot when leaders are focused on budgets and bottom lines. Generally speaking everyone knows we need to manage money and resources, so don’t always lead with that. I recently worked on a project that involved the need to reduce the number of files and emails kept by employees, I instituted the Golden Plate Prize – the person and department who reduced their files the most each month received chocolates and the Golden Plate (which I crafted from dollar store supplies) to display at their desk. It made the painful tasks of sorting emails and files much more fun.
- Celebrate success – celebrating small successes along the way can help to maintain motivation and momentum towards larger goals. Take the time to acknowledge and celebrate accomplishments, no matter how small. Check out this podcast on the Celebration and Thank You Conversation from my book for more ideas.
All nine steps in the AIM Leadership Roadmap ultimately create the environment to Inspire Growth!
Inspire growth is the result needed to create your leadership legacy. Where you may have started your new role with a fear of failure, by following the AIM Leadership Roadmap you will leave a legacy of inspiration and growth in both your people and your organization!
Inspiration to Lead Better
Check out these free resources. And reach out any time!
Thanks for travelling along the AIM Leadership Roadmap with me.
Connect with me today – jen@actionimpactmovement.com or book an intro call.