Your Team Copies All of You, Including the Parts You'd Rather It Didn't

Duplication is the whole point of this business. You do something, your partners copy it, their partners copy them, and the work spreads further than you could ever carry it alone.

We talk about it as if it only applies to the good parts. It doesn't. Your team copies everything it sees you do, and everything it sees you skip.

The pattern behind most plateaus

Picture a leader who is brilliant in front of a room. Great trainer, great speaker, everybody leaves her meetings fired up. New people join her team all the time.

Now picture what happens on day four, when a new partner has a question and nobody calls. Or on day ten, when the excitement has worn off and nobody checks in.

Her team learned from her, so they are brilliant in front of a room too. The follow-up was never modelled, so it never got copied. People keep coming in through the front door and leaving quietly through the back.

From the outside it looks like a recruiting problem, so the team recruits harder. The leak keeps going, because its source is what the leader models.

Know yourself. — Sun Tzu

The honest list

Most of us know our strengths very well. Our blind spots are blind for a reason. So write them down where you can't avoid them.

Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. Strengths on the left. Weaknesses on the right. Give the right-hand column twice as long as the left, and write the things you'd rather not admit, not the safe answers you'd give in a job interview.

Then do the uncomfortable part. Look at your team and ask which of those weaknesses they have already copied.

Don't patch yourself. Build around the gap.

The usual advice is to fix your weaknesses. Go on courses, force yourself to love spreadsheets, become a different person. Most leaders who try that end up tired and only slightly better.

A better question is how to make the weakness stop mattering. There are three ways, and most gaps need one of them.

• A system. If you forget follow-ups, stop relying on memory. Put every new partner into your calendar with reminders on day 1, 4, 7, 14 and 30, each with a short note of what to say. The calendar remembers so you don't have to.
• A helper. If admin drains you, hand it to someone who finds it easy. Paying for a few hours of help is usually cheaper than the opportunities you lose while drowning in paperwork.
• A partner with the opposite strength. Some people love one-to-one care, track every detail without being asked, and make sure nobody falls through the cracks. Find them, value them, and let them lead that part of the team.

Once the gaps are covered, put most of your week back into what you do best. For the leader in our picture, that means more training and more time on stage, with the system and the detail people catching everyone she brings in.

Model the thing you want copied

There is one more step. Your team copies what it sees, so let them see the system working.

Show new leaders your calendar. Introduce the partner who handles follow-up as a leader in their own right. Talk openly about the things you are bad at and how you have covered them.

That honesty does something useful. It gives everyone on your team permission to admit their own gaps, and a clear way to deal with them.

So here's the question to sit with. If your team copied you exactly as you are today, which column would hold them back?