Leadership means meeting people where they are and giving them an opportunity to climb.
Last week, I was presenting a talk in Canada and one part seemed to draw more attention than almost anything else.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Not necessarily because people hadn’t heard of it before. But because we started looking at it through the lens of leadership and those under our charge.
At the bottom of the hierarchy is survival. Food. Shelter. Security. The basics.
As you move up, you get into belonging, importance, and ultimately self-actualization… people becoming the best version of themselves and reaching their potential.
I realized how many leaders are dealing with this: Where do we spend most of our time as leaders?
Too often, it’s at the bottom of the people load.
We spend enormous amounts of energy on the employee who can’t consistently show up. The person who constantly has another crisis. The person who needs to be reminded of the basic expectations of their job. The person we’ve coached five times on the SAME exact issue.
Meeting after meeting. Conversation after conversation. Chances after chances.
Meanwhile, who isn’t getting that time?
The person who shows up early. The person who wants more responsibility. The person reading books, asking questions, helping their teammates, living your core values, and quietly wondering what their next opportunity looks like.
They don’t create fires for us, so we don’t run toward them.
That’s a problem.
Now, I’m not saying we stop helping people at the bottom. Leadership means meeting people where they are and giving them an opportunity to climb.
But we provide the ladder. They still have to climb it.
What I am saying is that we need to seriously evaluate where our leadership energy is going. Imagine what could happen if we invested as much time developing our highest-potential people as we spend managing our lowest-performing people. Imagine taking the employee who already wants to grow and pouring fuel on that fire.
Maybe leadership isn’t just about pulling people out of survival. Maybe it’s also about recognizing the people who are already climbing – and helping them see just how high they can go.
My challenge to you for this week… Look at your calendar for the week or the rest of the month.
Who is getting your time? That answer might just tell you a lot about the organization you’re building. Maybe the biggest question isn’t whether we’re developing our people.
Maybe it’s which people we’re spending all of our time developing. Because every hour you spend trying to convince someone to care is an hour you aren’t spending with someone who already does.
Every meeting spent discussing the same performance problem is a meeting you aren’t having with someone who’s hungry for their next opportunity. Every ounce of leadership energy is an investment.
So here’s the question I think every leader needs to wrestle with: If your calendar showed exactly who you believe has the most potential in your organization, would you be proud of what it says? We absolutely need to provide the ladder for people who want to climb.
But maybe we need to stop spending all of our time standing at the bottom of it trying to convince people to take the first step… and start looking up at the people who are already climbing!