It's been two of the toughest, best, longest, most rewarding, emotional, struggling,
significant, stressful, gut-wrenching, soul-searching, frustrating, connectional, awkward, freeing years of my life. My brilliant wife started Leadership Harbor in 2017, well, the truth is we both started the business in 2017. Actually, it was a dba before that, having started in 2015 when we first joined the Maxwell Leadership Team - though back then it was called the John Maxwell Team. Now in 2024, this organization just passed the 50,000 members mark - members from all over the world.
I can't even remember....
Before we started with John Maxwell, we seriously considered another company….. The funny thing is, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that company; and I’ve tried to figure it out and remember it a few different times. Not happening!
When we started in 2015, we thought someday we may want to start a company, but at the time, we were both working for other organizations, and satisfied with what we were doing. Nevertheless, we were investing in ourselves in order to add value to ourselves, thinking we would add value to the companies that we worked for, and that would pay off dividends in some manner. LOL
Over the next couple of years, we could see that Kris’ job was developing obstacles, such that we could envision, if the brown stuff hit the fan, she was going to feel the fall out first, not her boss. What really makes this ironic is that it happened in the Christian faith realm. Christians are people, too. They make mistakes just like non-Christians, we just tend to have a little higher expectation, don’t we?
I really love when Kris tells the story!
She paints this amazing picture of how, early in 2017, she had a meeting with her boss. The personnel committee had asked him to ask her that she would no longer be allowed to resource pastors and churches - ie. the John Maxwell training that she had invested with her own money, she would not get to do. Instead, she was told, the personnel committee wanted him to handle all of that! The plan was that she could keep her salary, to do more of the administration assistant/communications role, a role that she had done several years earlier. Unbelievable! Step back from your current level of training and service to do something that you used to do! Not use what you have invested your own money, in order to become trained, developed and have a passion to do! I love the way she turned down the idea….”I am not willing to step back. That’s my past. I’m trained and capable for much more now. I guess we need to talk about when my last day will be.”
I think the next part of the story is her favorite.
She didn’t tell me anything about this until I came home from my engineering job. She didn’t even make a big deal about it. As I remember, she asked me all about my day first……which compares in no way to, “Well, it’s time. I lost my job today.”
Sure the flexible part time job is nice……but we only get to live once. Why work with people and organizations that limit your potential?!
What about you?
Are you doing all that you are capable of doing? If you are in a role of people responsibility, are you allowing your people and teams to do everything they are capable of doing? What are you doing to develop yourself? Better yet, what are you doing to develop your people? I expect that you want all the success you can, and yet, you have a concern that your people may not handle some things and/or may even make mistakes. Yeah, I know some of them are not that qualified…..yet. Why not test some of them? Why not develop some of them? Why not give some of your responsibilities to some others so that you can do more of what you SHOULD be doing anyway to increase the business?
This often leads to the challenging question, "What if I invest in people and they leave?” That’s a good question. A better question may be, “What if you don’t invest in your people and they stay?”
We all have parts of our job that we don’t really like. I’ll guarantee you, there is somebody that does like doing what you do not like doing, and can do it even better, so you can be better at what you do!
If you’d like to have a complimentary Discovery Session to see how this may play out, let’s schedule a session. Reach out to me at brian@leadershipharbor.com