[Alicia Davis] As a leader, are you really interested in building a strong bench of leaders? If so, Stacie and I want to share with you a couple of our amazing experiences this week with very inspiring leaders.

[Stacie Watson] Yes, I was with the team this week and when I had originally met with the executive director, he was really talking about this idea of creating a culture of leadership, which I loved that phrase…

[Alicia Davis] It’s very unique.

[Stacie Watson] It is unique. And as I met with the team, and we sort of began to explore what does that even mean?  One of the themes that really came up was sort of recognizing that they wanted to create sort of a sense of what it means to be a leader within their organization, and not just to support themselves, but to be bringing up the next group of leaders, right, so that there was clarity around how do I lead in this organization? And how can I support those folks as they come up? So it was really sort of thinking about not just the current group of leaders, but sort of the bench that they’re trying to develop.

[Alicia Davis] That’s right. That’s right. And I think one of the things that you were sharing with me was that they – part of it was being open to learning.

[Stacie Watson] Yes.

[Alicia Davis] And part of what they wanted was to also be able to give each other – I think the word that you used was grace – which is a word that I so love, right like that, it’s okay not to know everything, that it’s okay for them to just continuously be learning and asking questions and relying on one another, right. Like, that’s part of how they intentionally build that next level, right?

[Stacie Watson] Yeah, you know, we talked about the fact that every organization and every team has a culture, whether you intend for that culture to be in place or not, we all have a culture. And so what I really appreciated about this experience with this particular group was they wanted to be very specific and very intentional with the kind of culture they were creating, especially around their leadership. And they wanted to create that so that it would be available for generations to come is sort of the way they were talking about it. And it was really inspiring, because as you know, Alicia, over these last three years, organizations have faced incredible staffing challenges. And if you’re watching this, you probably can really relate to leaders moving on and having to pull people into leadership roles. I mean, it’s been like a shuffle within the leadership ranks of most of the organizations that we work with.

[Alicia Davis] That’s for sure. And so we just want to invite you as you’re listening to this as, as a leader, really taking a moment or two, or have 15 minutes in a meeting with your leadership team and saying what is the culture that we have? What do we value? What is important to us? How do we want to grow? And visioning that, right?

[Stacie Watson] Yes.

[Alicia Davis] Yeah. So, I’m Alicia Davis.

[Stacie Watson] I’m Stacie Watson.

[Alicia Davis] And we are the co-owners of Transformative Leadership Strategies. And we do all things leadership and wellbeing for teams. And so, please, we’d love to hear if you have this conversation, send us a note – info@transforms.com. We’d love to hear from you. And you can also follow us on Instagram at @tls_transforms. And thanks so much.

[Stacie Watson] Thank you.