Moving up to Level 2 from Level 1 is a significant advance in leadership ability. Very often an achiever or a producer will be given a leadership position at Level 1 with the expectation that the person can make the transition from worker to leader. Most of the people who fail to move up into leadership don’t make it because they never understand the importance of building relationships with the people they work with and gaining their permission to lead them. However, there are still more leadership levels to be won.
If you have worked your way up to Level 2 with people and have gained their confidence as a person who cares about them, then it’s time to start thinking the way a Level 3 leader does. To begin that shift, keep in mind the following three things:
Although the Permission level may bring you and your team great satisfaction relationally, if you stay on Level 2 and never advance, you won’t really prove yourself as a leader. The good news is that if you’ve connected with your team, you now have some influence with them. The question now is: what are you going to do with that influence?
True leadership takes people somewhere so that they can accomplish something. That requires a leader to connect people’s potential to their performance. The Permission level is foundational to good leadership, but it is not your ultimate goal.
Throughout this chapter I’ve written about building relationships. In doing that, I’ve focused on how people need to grow toward each other. But for relationships to be meaningful, there is another kind of growth that’s also needed. People must also grow with each other. Growing toward each other requires compatibility. Growing with each other requires intentionality.
If you are married or in a significant long-term relationship, then you probably understand how these dynamics come into play. When you first met your partner, you moved toward one another, based on attraction, common ground, and shared experiences. You established the relationship. However, a relationship can’t last if you never go beyond those initial experiences. To stay together, you need to sustain the relationship. That requires common growth. If you don’t grow together, there’s a very good chance you may grow apart.
Similarly, if you are to have any staying power as a leader, you must grow toward and with your people. Just because you’ve developed good relationships with your people, don’t think that you’re done on the relational side. There is still more work to do.
Building relationships with people can be hard work. But to succeed as a leader and to move up to the higher levels of leadership, you have to be willing to risk what you’ve developed relationally for the sake of the bigger picture. Leaders must be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the vision. If achieving the vision is worth building the team, it is also worth risking the relationships.
Building relationships and then risking them to advance the team creates tension for a leader. That tension will force you to make a choice: to shrink the vision or to stretch the people to reach it. If you want to do big things, you need to take people out of their comfort zones. They might fail. They might implode. They might relieve their own tension by fighting you or quitting. Risk always changes relationships. If you risk and win, then your people gain confidence. You have shared history that makes the relationship stronger. Trust increases. And the team is ready to take on even more difficult challenges. However, if you risk and fail, you lose relational credibility with your people and you will have to rebuild the relationships.
Risk is always present in leadership. Anytime you try to move forward, there is risk. Even if you’re doing the right things, your risk isn’t reduced. But there is no progress without risk, so you need to get used to it.
The bottom line is that you can slow down early in your leadership to build relationships on Level 2, or you can forge ahead trying to skip straight to Level 3—but if you do, you will have to backtrack later to build those relationships. And you need to recognize that doing that will slow your momentum, and it can actually take you longer to build the team than if you did it the right way in the first place.
“If people relate to the company they work for, if they form an emotional tie to it and buy into its dreams, they will pour their heart into making it better.”
—Howard Schultz
Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said, “If people relate to the company they work for, if they form an emotional tie to it and buy into its dreams, they will pour their heart into making it better.” I believe that is true. What is the key link between people and the company? The leader they work with! That leader is the face, heart, and hands of the company on a day-to-day basis. If that leader connects and cares, that makes a huge difference.