But growth has a price tag, and the currency is discomfort.
I hear this all the time: “Sam, I just want to be a better leader.”
I love hearing it. But I’ve learned something over the years: most people want to become a better leader until becoming a better leader requires them to become a different person.
Leadership growth isn’t just learning how to communicate better, reading another book, having a better morning routine, or learning five new ways to motivate your team. Leadership growth is increasing your capacity – your capacity for responsibility, discomfort, conflict, uncertainty, difficult decisions, and maybe most importantly, your capacity for pain.
John Maxwell teaches the 5 Levels of Leadership, and I’ve always loved the framework because it explains something that took me years to understand. You can have a leadership title and still operate at Level 1. You can also be standing in the middle of a jobsite with muddy work boots and no fancy title while already demonstrating the qualities that could eventually take you to Level 5.
The title doesn’t make the leader. Capacity does.
LEVEL 1: POSITION
People follow you because they HAVE to.
Maybe you just became a foreman. Congratulations. Three guys report to you now. You have a truck, a company phone, maybe even the keys to the shop. Then Monday morning happens.
One employee is late. Another is pissed because he didn’t get the hours he wanted. The truck has a check-engine light. The equipment you need is sitting on another crew’s trailer. A customer wants to know why something wasn’t finished Friday, and your best guy on your crew tells you he’s thinking about quitting.
Welcome. To. Leadership.
This is where some people begin growing and others begin blaming. “My guys suck.” “The office screwed this up.” “Sales sold it wrong.” “Nobody told me.” “I shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
Those sentences become handcuffs because the first giant leap in leadership is realizing: It’s yours now. Maybe you didn’t cause the problem, but if you are the leader, you are responsible for what happens next.
That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s also where leadership begins.
LEVEL 2: PERMISSION
People follow you because they WANT to.
Now you start learning that leadership isn’t barking orders. It’s relationships. Your team trusts you. They know you’ll jump in. They know you care. You learn their families, their struggles, what motivates them and what matters to them.
This level feels good. Sometimes a bit too good.
Because relationships can become another comfort zone. Eventually leadership requires something harder than being liked. You have to hold people accountable. You have to tell someone you care about that their performance just isn’t acceptable. You have to confront the bad attitude and stop looking the other way because “he’s a good guy.”
This is where another group of leaders gets stuck. They want the relationship without the responsibility. They want everyone happy, so they tolerate things they know they shouldn’t tolerate.
Eventually, the entire team pays the price for the conversation the leader was too uncomfortable to have.
LEVEL 3: PRODUCTION
People follow you because you produce results!
This is where leadership starts getting fun. The crew performs. Customers are happy. Labor hits on budget. The department is profitable. You aren’t just a nice leader anymore – you get results.
This is where the strong foreman becomes an operations manager. The operations manager becomes a branch or general manager. The manager starts thinking, “I could run this whole thing.”
Maybe you can.
But the skills that make you great at producing results personally aren’t necessarily the skills required to build an organization that produces results without you.
Eventually you cannot be the best firefighter anymore. You have to build people who know how to put fires out themselves.
That transition is brutal for high performers because being needed feels good. Being the answer feels good. Being the person everybody calls feels good. Until you realize you’ve accidentally built an entire organization around your own nervous system.
Every approval. Every complaint. Every decision. Every problem.
EVERYTHING runs through you.
And now you can’t leave.
That isn’t leadership freedom. That is a prison you built yourself.
LEVEL 4: PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT
People follow you because of what you have done for them.
At some point leadership stops being about how much you can accomplish. It becomes about how many capable leaders you can build.
Can you turn a laborer into the next crew leader? A crew leader into a field manager? A field manager into an ops manager? Can you take a tactical manager and teach them to think strategically? Can you trust someone else with something you once believed only you could do?
And here’s the hard one: Can you allow them to mess it up without immediately taking it back over yourself?
Developing people is SO messy. Sometimes they disappoint you. Sometimes somebody you poured years into leaves. Sometimes someone you promoted just wasn’t ready. Sometimes a leader you trusted makes a $40,000 – $50,000 mistake.
Sometimes you have to move somebody out of a seat even though you love them. Sometimes the person who helped you get from $1 million to $3 million isn’t the person who can help you get from $3 million to $10 million to $15 million.
That hurts.
This is the level people love talking about. But Very few people love what it requires.
Leadership gets heavier as you climb because now your decisions impact families, careers, livelihoods, customers, partners, your reputation, and the future of the organization.
LEVEL 5: PINNACLE
At this level, you’re not managing a crew anymore. You’re managing complexity.
Imagine running a $10 to $15 million company with 100 people depending on the decisions made by a small group of leaders. Payroll is coming whether customers pay you or not. You have millions of dollars in equipment, debt, insurance exposure, vehicles on the road, contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and families depending on the company for their livelihood.
A lawsuit could show up. A major customer could leave. Your best manager could resign. You could miss budget by $500,000. Weather could destroy your snow budget. Rain could crush spring production. A customer could owe you six figures. A key employee could make a decision at 3:00 p.m. that creates a problem you’re still dealing with at 9:00 p.m.
And tomorrow morning?
People still expect you to walk into the room with clarity.
That is leadership at another level.
The problems don’t disappear when you become a better leader. They just get bigger.
When you’re a foreman, the broken down mower feels like a huge problem. When you run the company, the broken mower barely makes your radar. Not because you don’t care, but because your definition of a big problem has changed.
Your capacity expanded.
And that may be one of the greatest measurements of leadership growth:
What used to ruin your day doesn’t even move your heart rate anymore.
SMALL PROBLEMS CRIPPLE SMALL LEADERS
I’ve watched leaders lose their minds over problems that should have been a five-minute conversation. An employee called off. A customer complained. Two employees were arguing. A proposal was wrong. A truck broke. The schedule changed. And the entire day falls apart.
Then that same leader says they want more responsibility.
Okay.
What happens when the problem isn’t a $500 mistake? What happens when it’s $50,000? What happens when it’s $500,000? What happens when 100 people are waiting for your decision and there isn’t an obvious answer? You don’t magically develop leadership capacity when you get the bigger opportunity. You build it now. How you handle the tiny fire today is training for the inferno tomorrow.
YOU SAY YOU WANT TO GROW. DO YOU?
Everybody says they want growth because growth sounds exciting. The new title. More money. The Bigger company. More responsibility. More influence.
But growth has a price tag, and the currency is discomfort.
If you want the next level, you’re going to have to leave the comfort of the current one. That means having conversations you’ve been avoiding, delegating something you like controlling, admitting you don’t know, making decisions without 100% certainty, allowing someone to fail, firing someone you care about, being misunderstood, and going home some nights wondering whether you made the right decision.
So when someone tells me, “Sam, I want to be a better leader,” the question that goes through my mind now is: How much pain are you willing to endure to become one?
Leadership will expose every insecurity you have – your need to be liked, your need for control, your fear of confrontation, your impatience, your ego, your inability to trust, and your inability to sit in uncertainty.
Eventually your company, team, or organization will grow to the size of the problems you are personally capable of handling.
Then it stops. Until YOU grow again.
YOUR BUSINESS WILL NEVER OUTGROW YOU FOR LONG
That sentence hurts, but I believe it.
If your leadership ceiling is low, eventually the organization hits it. You cannot ask your team to become more accountable if you won’t. You cannot ask them to have hard conversations while you avoid yours. You cannot ask them to embrace change while you cling to comfort. You cannot ask them to develop leaders while every decision still has to run through you.
And you cannot ask for a multi-million dollar company while still reacting to problems like the leader of a $500,000 company.
The numbers can grow faster than the leader for a season.
But eventually the gap gets exposed.
Then you either grow – or something breaks.
START HERE.
You say you want to be a better leader?
Start here.
Stop running from discomfort. Stop letting tiny problems steal giant amounts of emotional energy. Stop thinking the next level will somehow be easier. Stop waiting until you feel ready. Stop blaming the people below you for problems only the leader can ultimately fix.
Start having the conversation. Start developing somebody. Start giving away the responsibility. Start sitting in the discomfort instead of escaping it.
And ask yourself a question that has punched me in the mouth WAY more than once:
If I was already the leader capable of running the organization I say I want someday… would this problem be controlling me like it is right now?
Maybe the problem isn’t nearly as big as you’re making it. Maybe you just haven’t grown big enough yet.
Leadership isn’t about becoming important enough that you no longer have problems. Leadership is becoming strong enough that increasingly bigger problems can pass through your hands without absolutely breaking you.
From the foreman running three people to the CEO responsible for a $10-$15 million dollar company, the journey is the same: more responsibility, more uncertainty, more people, more pressure, more difficult decisions – and hopefully, more capacity.
You want to become a better leader? Start here. Don’t ask for an easier road. Become the leader capable of carrying more weight.
Because the next level isn’t waiting for you to want it badly enough.
It is waiting for you to become strong enough to handle it. Are you ready?