Leveling Up Your Leadership For Serious Organizational Growth

Let’s get real for a minute – if you want your company to keep climbing to higher altitudes, your own leadership skills need to make some serious gains too. That was the core truth leadership expert Alex Snider drove home in her recent Align coach webinar.

Just because you were an all-star individual contributor doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be a boss-level leader when your organization starts ramping up. Making that mindset shift from being the star player to the coach empowering and enabling the whole team to execute at an elite level? That’s a massive mental hurdle that takes deep self-awareness and emotional fortitude.

The real game-changer, according to Snider, is zooming in on your unique “zone of genius” – that sweet spot where your talents and passion converge. As you step into a leadership role, you need to deliberately re-structure your responsibilities around doubling down in that genius zone while learning to effectively delegate everything else off your plate. That means getting comfortable with vulnerability, navigating those tough conversations, and extending trust by gradually building your team’s autonomy.

But here’s the thing – while that shift can feel unsettling, extending that trust to your team is exactly what unlocks their full potential. Snider preached the “hire for excellence” gospel, emphasizing the productivity that a lineup of top performers can spark. An A-team with cognitive diversity will massively out-produce a larger group of B-players or lower. Creating an environment of psychological safety for productive disagreement and mutual accountability is vital.

Now on the organizational strategy side, Snider stressed the importance of crafting a clearly defined vision and roadmap for how to turn that dream into reality. Once that guiding strategy is locked in, translating those big-picture goals into concrete, measurable priorities with KPIs allows you to really track progress and pinpoint where to intensify efforts or pivot.

But at the end of the day, Snider circled back to that brutally honest core truth – an organization is never going to outgrow the leadership capacity of the person at the top. As she put it, “If you want to lead a scaling company, you better be a scaling leader yourself.” That means an unrelenting commitment to continuous self-improvement, expanding your emotional intelligence and self-awareness while shoring up weaknesses.

For any leader who’s seriously committed to taking their organization to new heights, Snider’s presentation was full of invaluable insights (along with 5 minute, 5 day and 5 month tools). Sustainable growth to the next level demands a special breed of leader – one with the humility and mental toughness to engage in perpetual self-actualization. Getting too comfy or resting on your laurels just isn’t an option.

The undeniable reality is that the game gets progressively harder as you advance through the leadership ranks. Thriving amid that ever-intensifying pressure to evolve requires the self-awareness to keep taking your skills to newfound levels. Stay hungry, keep growing, and embrace the mindset of a lifelong student – because stagnation is the antithesis of winning.