Following the Leader: How Buying into the Vision Creates a 360 Degree Leadership Culture
One of the most exciting parts of working with the Lead Sports Co. team is the opportunity to learn from the experts we partner with during the Summit and at the Academy. Recently I was thinking about Toni Armstrong’s discussion of 360 leadership in her module on “Following Like a Leader,” and how followership has played a huge role in the growth and success of our very own Lead Team.
So what is 360 Leadership?
In her course, Toni shares that 360 Leadership is a situation where everyone in a group is actively engaged in the leadership and followership dynamic. On a team, this might mean that coaches, captains, and teammates share respect for each other in a way that values everyone’s ideas - rather than only accepting ideas or feedback from coaches and captains.
But why do people choose to follow others? Glad you asked!
Toni shared 5 reasons why people follow leaders with some examples for how this might look on your team:
Fear of Retribution
Example: “If I don’t perform well at my meet, my coach will get angry!”
False Hope
Example: “We need to get motivated and our captain was the only one to share an idea. I hope this works!”
Faith in the Leader
Example: “My teammate is always nice to me, so I’m sure they know the right thing to do.”
Intellectual Agreement
Example: “I understand why my coach wants me to do this in practice. It makes sense.”
Buying into the Vision
Example: “I believe in this goal for our team! How do we make it happen?”
I want to dive into buying into the vision - and why teams who aspire to 360 Leadership should strive to inspire everyone in their group to buy into a vision. As a member of the Lead Team, I aim to fill roles as both a leader and a follower. I would almost argue that my role as a follower to Lead Founder and CEO Kara Lynn Joyce is even more important than my role as a leader for our Communications Team.
As a follower, I’ve been able to watch and participate in Lead’s growth from an annual summit with 75 girls in 2017 to over 125 girls in 2019. We launched an online Academy available to all female athletes in 2020 and plan to launch summits in three different sports this year.
From the very first month Kara created the idea of Lead, she expressed a true passion for the vision: empowering and elevating young women in sports. We’ve also shared a mantra from the very early days: Be who you needed when you were younger.
“Kara’s vision of a company run by female athletes for female athletes that provided education and tools for success that had nothing to do with your actual sport - like confidence, leadership, sports psychology, and nutrition - was a vision I bought into. I believed in why we were doing what we were doing, and as I continued to work alongside Kara, I gained a trust in her as a leader that her vision would take us where we needed to go in order to make a difference. ”
Since the early days of DIYing pretty much everything, we’ve grown to an incredible, intergenerational team of 8. Every woman on this team brings her unique strengths to the table and the one thing that drives all of us is a belief in Lead’s vision. As Communications Director, my role is not just to understand and buy into the vision Kara has grown since early 2017 but also to share and communicate that vision to my team in a way that inspires them as well. And with 360 Leadership in mind, I try to regularly check in with my teammates and more often than not learn from them, their experiences, and their expertise. I fall firmly into the definition of a millennial but love to soak up all the energy and second-nature tech savvy of my younger teammates.
I hope this inside look into the Lead Team has not only been a fun “behind the scenes” post but also a step towards creating a vision and culture of 360 Leadership for your team.
For more on followership (and of course all things leadership), check out Toni Armstrong’s Leadership Course at the Lead Academy.
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