Leadership Transition
The Leadership Journeys: Leadership Transition
My wife and I were not on the same page about having more kids after our firstborn. It was quite the source of tension in our marriage for years afterward. Looking back, we should have seen that fight coming.
I’m from a huge family—five brothers, a sister, and more cousins that I can accurately count. My wife is from a very small family—just her and her brother and less cousins than I have siblings. And we have huge cultural differences. I’m an all-American kinda guy from a simple upbringing. I’ve been pretty “meat and potatoes” my whole life. My wife is not from around here. She’s a Jewish refugee from Moscow: a highly educated and cultured city girl with a mysterious back-story.
After a storybook meeting and romance we got married young and had a child right away. They say you don’t know how different you are until you go to raise a human together. Wow, what an understatement!
My wife wanted our son to follow in her footsteps: attend rigorous preparatory schools starting at 18 months and go to museums and classical music and theatre performances in his spare time. I wanted the kid to have the life I had growing up: eat hot dogs, watch cartoons and play outside with no shoes on until kindergarten. Needless to say, we had a different vision! That tension caused us to punt on the decision to have more kids for a long time. But biology eventually forced the issue.
When I turned 40 and my wife was a few years younger we both decided that we needed to put our differences aside and have one more kid. But we knew we wanted to do things differently this time.
Here’s what we did. While my wife was pregnant with our daughter we would take long walks. On those walks we would talk about OUR family: not her family, not mine, but our family. We had 17 years of marriage to draw on so we had a lot to talk about. From all of those conversations we came up with four values that we believe truly defined our family: Loyalty, Perseverance, Excellence and Grace. Then we hired an artist to make a Woodall Coat of Arms.
Today, we have two kids—and sixteen and a half years between them! And we have our family values codified in a way that our great, great grandchildren will know where they came from and what values they are called to uphold.
Are you in the midst of developing your next generation of leaders? If so, we at Rootstock would love to come alongside you and help you thrive as you raise them up and prepare to hand off the reins.
Before your leaders are ready to step up to the plate, you’ll want to ensure they have three things covered:
They need to be people worth following.
They need to know how to provide crucial clarity around Purpose, Vision and Values.
They need to know how to build a great team.
Being a person worth following is all about your next-gen leaders being authentic and approachable. Being authentic looks like being comfortable in your own skin and having self-awareness around your strengths and weaknesses. Being approachable is about having the humility to be open to feedback as a means of continuous self-improvement.
They will also need to provide crucial clarity in the areas of Purpose, Vision and Values. They will need to articulate why their team exists (Purpose), what their team needs to accomplish at a set time (Vision) and what kinds of behaviors will be tolerated, celebrated and rejected along the way (Values).
They also need to build a great team. They will need to know how to get the right people in the right seats. They will need to know how to motivate and develop others, and how to give their own people a path to grow.
That’s a high-level overview of what you’re next generations need to thrive as you raise them up and hand them the reins. A four-stage approach on the “how” and “when” is codified in the Rootstock Leader Transition Journey Map.