When you first start a business, you win by being the “Lead Doer.” You are likely the smartest, fastest, and most capable person in the room. But as your company grows—as you hire and begin training managers—that “doer” mentality becomes a bottleneck.
To move from simply growing a business to truly scaling it, your primary role must shift. Over my 20+ years as a business coach, I’ve identified three specific “Leadership Superpowers” that make the biggest difference in this transition.
Mastering these three skills is the key to leading your team to heights you may have never thought possible.
Superpower #1: Prioritization and Focus
As a company expands, the corporate to-do list doesn’t just grow—it explodes. The bigger the team, the more potential for chaos.
Your job as a leader is not to ensure everything gets done, because in a growing company, you will never get to everything. Instead, your superpower is the ability to define the right priorities and help your team stay focused on them until they are completed.
The Goal: Make sure the team is doing the right things at the right times. If everything is a priority, nothing is.
Superpower #2: The Ability to Ask Great Questions
Most leadership books talk about “empowerment,” but they rarely give you the tools to actually do it. In my experience, the fastest way to empower a team is to stop telling them what to do.
Instead of providing the answer, ask the questions that help your team figure out the solution on their own. When you ask better questions, you help your team discover that they are more capable than they believed. You move from being the “solver of problems” to the “builder of people.”
Superpower #3: Listening to Understand
When I ask teams what they value most in a leader, the answer is almost always the same: “I want my leader to listen to me.”
In the “Lead Doer” phase, we usually listen to correct, fix, or redirect. But as a leader, you must develop the skill of listening to understand. This goes beyond just hearing words; it involves:
- Observing body language
- Noting the tone of voice
- Reading the room for context
When your team believes you are truly listening (and not just waiting for your turn to talk), you earn the trust necessary to lead effectively. Once you truly understand a situation, you can then decide which of your other superpowers to apply next: Do we need a new priority, or do I need to ask another question?
Are You Ready to Scale?
Transitioning from doing the work to leading the work is the hardest shift a founder will ever make. But it is also the most rewarding.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can develop these leadership superpowers and take your business to the next level, I’d love to help. Schedule an intro call to learn how to get started.
Author: Mark McNulty, Business Coach in Louisville, KY