S01 - T02 - You are looking for leaders.

You are looking for leaders

The key to building a large team of team-building advocates is to find leaders who also see the value of and are willing to invest in developing their team of team-building advocates.

If you attract only followers and no leaders into your team, everything depends on, you.

In essence, you are looking for leaders. That is, people who are also looking for leaders. As such, you are involved in a leadership search and development process.

Inevitably, in the search for leaders, you will find many who are attracted to the benefits of building a team of team building advocates but are not yet ready to do what it takes to become a leader.

Broadly, we categorise people’s current network building activities as Leaders, Learners, Lovers and Lookers.

Leaders take consistent, proactive action to find and empower other leaders. They advocate, build trusted relationships and lead by example.

Leaders are multipliers.

Leaders plan to build their networks, with, or without you. However, they appreciate any value you can add to their team. They are continually working on their people skills as well as their posture with others.

Leaders are teachable, coachable and committed to learning and personal development.

Leaders are out to make a difference in the lives of those they lead, and, as a result, they build trusted relationships. Members of their team reciprocate by advocating for them.

These leadership traits are not talents leaders are born with.
Instead, they are learned skills born of the desire to achieve the results they are looking for in life.

Unfortunately, you can’t “make” someone a leader!
Leadership is taken, not given. As we know, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink!

You can visualise leaners as leaders with their training wheels on. They are looking for more experienced leaders to help them lead and build their teams.

The lovers in your team love everything about the CC but, for whatever reason, fail to take consistent action. However, given enough time and positive exposure, this can change.

At any point in time, the lovers typically make up the largest percentage of your team. This can be very frustrating. However, it is vital to know that you only need a tiny percentage of leaders to create an exponentially growing team.

One leader in your team who finds 5 people, each of whom achieves Core-5, means you have started a chain reaction via only one leader.

What if you found 5 such leaders. In other words, 5 leaders each find 5 leaders who achieve Core-5.

So, a great question is: how do you find leaders faster?

One of the best ways to find leaders faster is to become more involved in the onboarding process.

Let’s say one of your new team members brings a great candidate they know to a CC introductory session. Suppose that person wants to build their network using the CC system.

Your new team member will appreciate you helping them to onboard their new person. In addition, in the process of watching how you onboard their new person, your new team member will likely be inspired by and learn from what you say to their new person.

At the same time, you will start to build a great relationship with their new person.

Let’s say this person already has trusted relationships with many others who are also great network-building candidates. Let’s also suppose that this person has more leadership potential (at this point) than the team member that introduced them.
You can now decide to continue the onboarding process in-depth, looking for your next great leader below the first great leader that introduced them.

One of the great things about this process is that you can decide with whom you want to work. In addition, you can look for new people in your team that could benefit from your help.

For example, let’s say one of your team members has introduced a great candidate, and you are not confident that your team member will do a good job taking them through the onboarding process. Observing this situation, you can offer to help.

As your team grows, many of your team members will be excited about how the CC can help others they introduce. In many cases, they will register these people in the CC. However, this does not mean that they will do a great job of onboarding and leading them.

You can visualise many of the people in your team as helping you by scouting for leaders who may be more willing to take leadership than they are at the moment.

It pays to help your team members improve their profiles and messages so that they are more likely to find great leaders faster.

Initially, you will be the only person scouting for leaders. This will typically happen as you Zoom with people you have connected with on LinkedIn.

However, as your team grows, there will be progressively many more scouts in your team who will sing your network-building praises. In other words, by building your team, you can significantly speed up the process of finding leaders.

You must always example the consistent action you’d like your team also to adopt.
It’s inauthentic to expect others to take consistent action when you are not!

Also, as you take action, you can pass on your experience to your team members. For example, the words you have found to be most effective when you are searching on LinkedIn. This means you pass on current, relevant tips to your team members based on your own experience.

The best way to ensure that you and your team take consistent action is to develop a mini-habit of sending a small number of invitations to connect on LinkedIn every day.

Although team building is not without its challenges, it is very rewarding and one of the ways you can make the greatest positive impact on those you are associated with. We wish you all the best in making a positive difference in the lives of others.