Empowering Every Employee: Revolutionizing Leadership from the Ground Up

Can empowering the vast majority of your workforce revolutionize your company? This episode promises to challenge your perceptions of leadership by advocating for a transformative approach that focuses on the 70 to 75 percent of employees who are individual contributors. We propose flipping the traditional leadership investment triangle on its head, prioritizing essential skills like seeking and accepting feedback, being approachable and coachable, and steering clear of self-sabotaging behaviors like judging, assuming, interpreting, and labeling.

Picture a workplace where every employee, regardless of their position, has the tools to lead and influence effectively. This episode explores the concept of "leadership latitude," emphasizing the importance of equipping all employees with the capacity to influence positively without a formal title. Through this paradigm shift, discover how your organization can become more inclusive, resilient, and innovative from the ground up. Tune in to learn how reversing the traditional investment in leadership can democratize influence and build a dynamic organizational culture where everyone has the potential to lead.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:37

When we think of leadership, typically we think about this top-down approach. Think about a pyramid or a triangle At the top. What do you see? You see the CEO, the COO, the CFO. Underneath that you see vice presidents. Underneath that you see directors. Maybe under directors you see managers and team leads. And then you see individual contributors.

Speaker 1: 1:00

Here's the amazing thing it's been estimated 70 to 75 percent of the population of an organization today is made up of individual contributors. Yet we spend most of our training, most of our development, most of our talent dollars on the upper part of the pyramid and triangle. What if we reverse that? What if we taught employees leadership latitude? What is leadership latitude? Leadership latitude is where we give latitude to leaders. We don't judge them, we don't label them, we don't tell other people we disagree with their decisions. You know leaders are in a position to lead, not be confronted. Now, on the other hand, I can hear people reacting saying things like yeah, but what if I disagree? And what if I don't like the direction of the company? Then leave?

Speaker 1: 1:54

Leaders are in a position for a reason and if we, as non-leaders, have never been leaders, it's really tough to have an opinion about something you've never done. So what we need to do as organizations is reverse that triangle, flip the triangle and spend more dollars at the top, which is the wide part of the triangle in the pyramid for individual contributors and employees, teaching them how to seek and accept feedback, teaching them leadership latitude, teaching them not to put themselves in jail See, jail is an acronym for judge, assume, interpret and label so often people as individual contributors will have an opinion. Go tell three people who tell four people, and then it gets back to a manager, a director or an executive. Did you hear what Joe said? And guess what happens? They now have created a brand that they don't want. They've now created their own brand that is not promotable. What if we flipped that triangle on its head? And at the top, the wide part of the triangle is where we made investments, investing in people's true ability to be approachable and coachable.