Today’s Highlight - Our intern is a few days away from finishing up her time with us. Today I was able to get her exposure to a leader within the company that she was hoping to meet. Not only that, but he loved hearing her findings from her summer project. I suspect some of her content will be used in the future within the company. It was that good.
Today’s Biggest Challenge - Staying focused. 🤪Today I pulled in all kinds of directions. I’m considering going back to a 2x/day email schedule and leaving it closed during the rest of the day.
Today’s Study Topic - JOT tokens.
Now, on to today’s post.
As a leader, it is your job to help your team members get exposure to their ideas and work.
I’ve been focusing on that lately. I’m fortunate to have a team full of straight killers, who are amazing at their jobs. Which is even more incentive to help them get the exposure they deserve.
Here are of few examples of that at play.
A few weeks back we presented a restructuring of roles and responsibilities to our department head. In that meeting, I made a deliberate decision to have the presentation led by three of my team members, rather than lead the call myself. The framework for the discussion was something that I have been working on for a few years. So, it might have been natural for me to lead. Except, I wanted my team to get that opportunity. To get that exposure. As suspected, they crushed it.
Today, I was able to arrange for our summer intern to walk one of our leaders, who was on her wishlist, through some of her findings from her summer project. She had given me a private screening of those findings and after noticing her propensity for high-level strategic thinking I pressed for her to dig deeper into a separate project she played a smaller role in.
It’s one thing for your boss to tell you that have a big future ahead of you because they see something in you. It’s an entirely different feeling for someone else, whom you didn’t think knew who you were, to say the same thing.
All of this exposure is meant to do one thing - to give my team the chance to show other leaders, further up the command chain, what they are capable of doing.
I’m not going to bore you with the old managers versus leaders comparison. It has been overplayed.
So, I’ll revise my first sentence from this post. It isn’t just the leader’s job to get their team exposure. Because you don’t have to be a leader to do that. It’s the job of any good person to promote the excellent work of others, so they don’t have to promote it themselves.
Questions to ask yourself.
Who does amazing work at our company that most people don’t even know about?
Who has the best ideas but they don’t ever seem to get recognized for them?
Which team member within the organization would I love to learn from and work with because their quality of work is leagues above everyone else’s?
Find the chance to help bring a spotlight to their work. Push them out in front. Find the opportunity to tell them how much you respect them. You will make their day. Better yet, you might just make a friend.