Many leaders are so busy with the day-to-day of running their business that they take little time to invest in themselves and their teams. Whitney Johnson has experienced this throughout her career and now helps leaders spend more time focusing on personal and team growth.
Whitney is the CEO of Disruption Advisors, an Inc. 5000 2020 fastest-growing private company in America, one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50, and the host of the popular podcast Disrupt Yourself.
In this episode, Whitney and I talk about why leaders don’t invest in their teams and how to get started.
Here are some takeaways she shared:
1. Take the right kinds of risks.
Ask yourself, ‘How am I moving about the world in a way that I’m focused on creating, not competing.’
Amateurs compete. Professionals create.
2. Play to your distinctive strengths.
Focus not only on what you do well but what you do uniquely and idiosyncratically well.
And when you feel strong, because you’re playing to your strengths, then you’re going to be willing to play where other people aren’t playing.
You’ll discover you have a flywheel effect of being able to move forward, grow — and accelerate that growth.
3. Embrace your constraints.
Constraints are what give us the friction that we need to bounce up against that needs to be created.
If you look back at the last 18 months, you will discover that whatever you accomplished in a big way, there were most likely constraints involved.
4. Examine your expectations.
Whenever we decide to start something new, we have these expectations of how things are going to be. And then we find ourselves using the word ‘should.’
When we start using the word ‘should,’ there’s a gap between our reality and expectations. We’re competing with what’s happening instead of creating with what’s happening.
5. Sometimes, we need to take a step back to step forward.
If you’re willing to disrupt yourself, by taking a step back from who you are to slingshot forward, you are going to grow. When we disrupt ourselves in this way, whether it’s personally or professionally, people might question what we’re doing. That’s okay. Believe in yourself.
When I took a step back in my career to go home and take care of my kids, I came back into a different career and grew even more.
6. Stop and slow down.
Too many of us don’t know how to rest and take a break. For some, the past couple of years has only made this more apparent.
Make sure you are taking time in your life to rest and get away from work and the busyness of life. If you want to grow personally, then rest has to be a part of the equation.
Take this newfound knowledge a step further and read Whitney’s book, Disrupt Yourself.
Startups, growth-stage companies, and private equity–backed companies all have one thing in common: They need high-growth individuals to execute high-growth plans.
As a leader trying to achieve ambitious organizational goals, you need people who can do more than just keep up; you need people who can set the pace. You need high-growth individuals.
Disrupt Yourself helps high-growth individuals — and those trying to attain this status — learn the tools and frameworks necessary to make changes that matter.