Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders: Elevate Your Team by Robert Glazer

Elevate your team to new heights with Robert Glazer’s transformative book, “Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders.” Discover the secrets to unlocking your team’s true potential and fostering a culture of leadership that drives business success.

Dive into this comprehensive summary and review to learn how you can apply Glazer’s proven strategies to empower your team and take your business to the next level.

Genres

Business, Leadership, Management, Team Building, Empowerment, Personal Development, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Culture, Success, Professional Growth

In “Elevate Your Team,” Robert Glazer presents a compelling framework for building a high-performing team and creating a business that nurtures leadership at all levels. Glazer emphasizes the importance of empowering individuals, fostering a growth mindset, and establishing a culture of continuous improvement.

He provides practical strategies for identifying and developing leadership potential within your team, creating a clear vision and purpose, and aligning individual goals with organizational objectives. Glazer also highlights the significance of effective communication, trust, and accountability in building strong relationships and driving team performance.

Throughout the book, he shares real-world examples and case studies to illustrate the impact of his approach on businesses of various sizes and industries.

Review

Robert Glazer’s “Elevate Your Team” is a must-read for leaders and managers seeking to unlock the full potential of their teams and build a thriving business. Glazer’s insights and strategies are grounded in his extensive experience as a successful entrepreneur and leadership coach, making the book both practical and relatable.

The author’s clear and engaging writing style makes complex concepts easy to understand and apply. One of the strengths of the book is its emphasis on empowerment and the role of leadership at all levels of an organization. Glazer challenges traditional hierarchical structures and advocates for a more collaborative and inclusive approach to leadership.

The book provides a roadmap for creating a culture that encourages innovation, creativity, and continuous growth. While some of the concepts may be familiar to experienced leaders, Glazer’s fresh perspective and actionable advice make this book a valuable resource for anyone looking to elevate their team and drive business success. Overall, “Elevate Your Team” is a compelling and inspiring guide to building a high-performing team and a business that builds leaders.

Recommendation

Your people have the ability to achieve superior performance. It’s your job as their leader to “elevate” them so they can maximize their talents and move ahead. To achieve that goal, CEO Robert Glazer advises creating a learning-driven corporate culture that offers employees pathways for career development. He provides a planned, effective capacity-building framework for getting there. A serial entrepreneur, Glazer shares his experience recruiting people with high potential and helping them achieve their full capabilities. In this helpful manual, he explains how that works, from hiring to staying healthy.

Take-Aways

• Hire people with superior potential and develop them.
• Top employees accentuate their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
• Employees are the same people at work and at home, so their growth at work depends on their personal growth.
• To develop your team’s “spiritual capacity,” focus on core values.
• Help employees build their “intellectual capacity.”
• People need sufficient sleep, good nutrition, and exercise.
• When hiring, choose “high capacity” over “high experience.”
• In merit based firms, promising employees move up.

Summary

Hire people with superior potential and develop them.

Does your organization have a talent development problem? Do some employees have a hard time pursuing a viable career path within your firm? Then take a closer look at your employee development activities.

“[Help employees] seek, acquire, and develop the skills and abilities they’ll need to consistently perform at a higher level in pursuit of their innate potential.”

You want to design an employee development program that helps “elevate” your staff members and enables them to build their capabilities and advance in their careers. As your team’s boss, be intentional about increasing each member’s ability to succeed. High capacity equals high growth.

The most effective employee development programs address each individual’s “spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional” growth. Such programs enable firms to grow by helping their employees grow.

Top employees accentuate their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

Fully developed employees understand their individual strengths and weaknesses. They apply this self-knowledge to build on their abilities, cultivate strong habits, and address their deficits and faults. Such employees have a sense of direction, base their career path on their values, and love to learn. They relish feedback as a mechanism for self-improvement and structure their days intentionally to make the most of their time and energy.

“Encourage employees to build genuine connections with clients, partners, and colleagues, not just surface-level interactions.”

Hire and cultivate people who can connect with others, accept accountability for their mistakes, and don’t blame others. If your team members aren’t yet at this level, take comfort from knowing that you can help them develop their connections, professionalism, and discipline as well as their skills.

Employees are the same people at work and at home, so their growth at work depends on their personal growth.

Resilient employees are both tough-minded and emotionally open, but building the level of trust that allows people to be that vulnerable is a leadership challenge. Meeting that challenge begins with creating an atmosphere of open communication and psychological safety, or “trust at scale.”

Your employees are the same human beings when they go home that they are on the job. Their personal growth in one arena depends on their growth in the other. What you see and get from your employees is exactly what they deliver to their friends and relatives away from the job.

“Vulnerability and surrender of what we cannot control are not weaknesses; they’re strengths that allow us to build better team bonds and dedicate our attention to what we can control.”

Make this central truth a definitional guideline in your employee development activities. As you help employees build their job skills and psychological well-being at work, point them toward becoming more grounded, more genuine, and more aware of their actions and their impact on others. These soft skills will stand them in good stead at home and at work.

To develop your team’s “spiritual capacity,” focus on core values.

Each person has an individual spiritual dimension. In the context of work, this dimension emerges as an expression of their personal core values. Leaders who aren’t true to their inner values can’t help employees tap into their own code. Often, employees avoid or ignore insincere leaders, those who espouse one set of values but live by another.

Effective leaders are authentic. They demonstrate their spiritual capacity by living their values openly and demonstrating how their values align with their work. For example, they clarify their decisions by explaining how they drew upon their values in reaching a conclusion.

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” (unknown author)

As a leader, you must first come to know yourself and your values. Then, it’s your job to help your employees understand who they are and what matters to them. When you embody honor, fairness, and self-reliance, you help your team members develop spiritually and philosophically on the way to becoming leaders themselves, so try to set a consistent example they can emulate.

The core values you espouse and want your people to adopt should align with your organization’s stated or implied values, such as honesty, fairness, and altruism. Empower aspiring leaders in your organization to build good character. Show them how to orient their actions and activities around their moral beliefs.

Help employees build their “intellectual capacity.”

A recent LinkedIn survey found that 94% of employees say they’re inclined to remain at jobs that give them the opportunity to learn and grow.

As a leader, you want to open that door for your team members. In fact, you want them engaged in continual learning – and growing – always improving and never stagnating. In general, employees who engage in learning and pursue personal and professional growth are motivated and find their work satisfying. Those who refuse to learn and hamper their own growth become restless and start to look around.

“I am always doing what I can’t do yet in order to learn how to do it.” (Vincent Van Gogh)

Help your staff members develop enhanced skills, establish good habits, benefit from feedback, attain higher goals, and share their insights with one another so everyone improves.

People need sufficient sleep, good nutrition, and exercise.

Being an effective leader requires sustained hard work. Consider, for example, the storied career of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo and, earlier, one of Google’s first 20 employees. Mayer distinguished herself with numerous all-nighters and crushing 130 hour work weeks. Obviously, such over and above dedication requires a strong constitution and plenty of stamina. While no one advocates putting in such staggering hours, keeping yourself in good physical condition empowers you to work effectively and to get the most productivity out of the time you spend working.

“Our brains and bodies depend on each other.”

Leaders must teach their employees that sacrificing their health, nutrition, and sleep undermines their performance. Let your staffers know that their first duty is to heed their own physical well-being. Point to Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos, who both say they get eight hours of sleep each night. Being an energized, focused employee requires sleeping well, eating well, and getting enough exercise.

When hiring, choose “high capacity” over “high experience.”

Developing your employees’ highest capacities rests on these three foundations.

1. “Talent acquisition” – Link the capacity you seek with how you recruit and hire new people. Everything you hope and plan to accomplish begins with recruiting and hiring high-capacity employees.
2. “Evaluation” – Your employees’ ability to improve and build their skills and capabilities should determine who advances within your organization.
3. “Development strategy” – Develop internal career paths that invite employees to enhance their qualifications, skills, and capacities so they can look ahead and spot paths for growth within your organization.

Unfortunately, the effort to make the right hiring decisions highlights some important questions about your criteria and priorities.

Consider this example: Your organization needs to hire a sales professional. You’re considering two applicants for this one slot. Both of them brought in $1 million in new sales during the past year. One achieved this goal after being on the job seven years, while the other hit $1 million in sales after two years. Which one do you hire?

“Promoting from within is cheaper and faster than hiring someone new, and it boosts a business’s reputation on the recruiting and retention fronts.”

Some companies would hire the salesperson with the most experience. Others would go for the applicant who hit a big target in a shorter time frame, with the expectation that he or she would reach $2 million in sales faster than the more experienced person.

But consider this: The rep with seven years of experience could be overqualified for the open sales role. And, even though he or she has the skills and sales knowledge you want, you might ask whether this individual has the intrinsic ability to stay abreast of your organization’s future pace.

The best option is to hire the applicant who demonstrates a higher ability to increase his or her sales capacity rapidly. Looking ahead, that’s the rep with the most promise – and companies today should choose promise over experience. People with faster career momentum will eventually outperform lower-capacity people with more experience.

“There is no way to spend too much time on obtaining and developing the best people.” (Larry Bossidy)

Making the correct hiring decisions is critical, but many firms fail miserably at this challenge. The executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles found that 4o% of senior executives hired in the United States quit their job within 18 months. The causes varied; these employees cited a variety of reasons for deciding to leave.

In merit based firms, promising employees move up.

Companies have a clear choice: They can provide their most rapidly developing people with additional responsibilities and opportunities for robust career growth, or they can stand by, do little, and watch their best people move to other firms as they become frustrated with the lack of potential advancement.

Companies tend to handle upwardly mobile, talented people in one of three ways:

1. “Star-stifling” – This self-defeating approach characterizes many backward-looking organizations. In such firms, senior executives regard “rising talent” as a direct threat to their status. They stifle their stars and don’t invest in up-and-coming talent. These firms impede personal career growth, even for their most promising people. These companies don’t grow rapidly, and internal advancement takes forever if it happens at all. As a consequence, other firms poach their top people. Their managers tend to excel only at office politics and to focus more on tenure than performance. They have little ability to build capacity – or profits.
2. “Catch and release” – These companies invest in promising people, but those people eventually learn that top talent cannot advance internally. As a result, senior executives find themselves in the position of helping people they’ve nurtured move to other firms.
3. “Pure meritocracy” – In this approach, which is rare, firms invest in their people’s career development, using some of the same approaches that catch and release companies employ. However, when top people begin to bump their heads against career ceilings, pure meritocracy firms move them up internally.

The best leaders coach their employees to reach the peak of their individual “capacity-building zone.” This means that senior executives must decide whether to help promising employees improve in their present positions or – with greater vision – help them improve overall and prepare them to move up to the next level in their careers.

Responsible leaders pursue the second option. They enable their superstar employees to advance internally, identifying them as the organization’s leaders of the future. The best capacity-building talent must always have the scope to rise steadily to the top.

About the Author

Founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, Robert Glazer hosts The Elevate Podcast. He also wrote Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others and Friday Forward: Inspiration & Motivation to End Your Week Stronger Than It Started.