In Patrick Lencioni’s organizational leadership book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, he talks about the importance of assembling and maintaining a cohesive leadership team. By “cohesive” he’s not talking about surrounding yourself with yes-men and clones. Paradoxically, cohesive looks more like hiring people who are diverse, smart, experienced, and skilled in fields or ways that are very different than you are.
When you hire intelligent, experienced people onto your team, there’s a good chance someone else is going to notice. Often they will invite him or her to leave your team and join another.
One of the biggest leadership challenges today is retaining these power players. Effective leadership looks a lot less like controlling and a lot more like delegating. If you don’t let those who are called and qualified to lead, they’ll go somewhere else to fill that need.
