week 102: give authority, not assignment

a job of a leader is to create leaders

thank you to over 11,000 of you who read this weekly and share with your friends and family for behind the scenes on building a million dollar business from scratch and beyond.

i also include a personal note in the end so i am grateful that you let me do that without judgement.

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one of the greatest joy of leadership is simply this:

leading people.

not managing, but leading.

leading people forces you to ask questions like this:

- you decide?

- what would you do?

- is this the best decision for our business?

i have to learn the hard way to pass on authority, not assignment.

Craig Groeschel on his recent leadership podcast talked about this and gave me words for it.

daily, my goal is to give more and more authority and not assignments. 

for example: 

do this task or that is all about giving people assignments. 

what would you do or you decide or what about this, gives people permission and more importantly, authority. 

the job of a leader is to create leaders. 

now, this may happen on day 1 or event day 10,000. 

but the pursuit of it, as I have come to realize, is the very definition of leadership.

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on a personal note, as my teenager grows, we have to learn to move from giving him assignments to authority.

that’s scary.

instead of asking to show me your homework, we have to learn to ask, do you need any help?

instead of saying - you have to wake up to study, we have to learn to ask, how do you plan to accomplish your work with your busy schedule?

so lately, we decided to give him opportunity to pay for his strings for his tennis rackets since he breaks a couple strings a week (standard for higher level tennis).

so we have asked him to to pay for it in these 3 ways:

- $10 for every subject he gets or keeps A grade each month (goal is to promote excellence)

- $10 for reading a book or leadership podcast and bonus $10 if he writes a summary (goal is leaders are readers) 

- $20 weekly for teaching young kids tennis from his coach for 2 hrs after school (goal is to work hard and to know the value of money and also teaching is the best way to learn something) 

well, not sure if this is great so will continue to iterate but both Manmeet and I feel that the goals are aligned to the values we want to teach him. 

Krish now has the authority to make his schedule so he can pay for his strings and he can choose to read more or get straight A’s or just teach tennis.

every week, he has to come up with $50 to keep playing tennis so he is motivated to figure it out.

ultimately, we see a leader in krish and want to help him create habits that will serve him as he grows into becoming a true servant leader. 

Leader point: in business and in life, in order to grow others, give authority, not assignments.