7 Steps to Leadership Success - Kirk Dando (Author & Leadership and Growth Expert)
Kirk Dando helped to grow a business to more than a billion in sales, and is a leadership and growth expert who has been working to unlock growth in business for more than 20 years. He believes that when it comes to leadership, people often try to do a post-mortem on success and failure until the concepts are overly complicated. Kirk prefers the Albert Einstein school of thought, which is very fitting for Paper Napkin Wisdom: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” On his Napkin, Kirk shares leadership and growth sound bites that have stuck with him.
As a total reversal of this sort of reactive leadership, Kirk says we can only really grow when we practice what he calls "Predictive Leadership." The best leaders predict and proactively solve challenges by making sure they are deeply connected to what's really going on.
The sound bites Kirk shares are about different aspects of business but all of them revolve around the idea of being active: You have to purposefully choose your perspective and your reaction to situations, you have to stay authentic, you need to get everyone involved and invested in the processes that lead to your goals, and you have to show your people you care. These things cannot happen without the impetus coming from you. Being purposeful in what you do and how you choose to approach situations, is about looking into the future and preparing for it to the best of your ability as a leader.
Kirk talks about choosing to be a problem predictor rather than a problem solver. You can be a problem predictor, prepare, and innovate or you can be a problem solver. As leaders, says Kirk, we are called to look around corners and really predict problems. If we can see what’s coming and if we know and understand how to share that with our team in a way that puts everyone out front, we give ourselves the opportunity for remarkable growth. However, if we only work as problem solvers we will miss that opportunity and could potentially stunt the growth of our company. We have to choose to look forward.
Many times we, as leaders, get stuck in the hero mode - where we have customers, suppliers, and staff come to us for solutions to problems. We fix them, we're the hero. Kirk reminds us that this is not scalable, that entrepreneurs need to shed the cape to really grow themselves, their teams, and their businesses.
The conversation with Kirk is one jam packed with good advice. It’s easy to talk about the way things should be done or the way to be successful, but Kirk’s sound bites remind us that it is up to us to implement the wisdom we have. If we don’t use the knowledge at our disposal, we rob ourselves and our companies of the potential for growth. We need to ask ourselves: Are we problem solvers or problem predictors?
Problem solvers make companies work, but as Kirk explains to us, problem predictors make companies grow.
Listen to my conversation with Kirk here:
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