Developing Your Sponsorship Leadership Practices

Stopping to evaluate your efforts as a sponsorship leader at least once per year is a MUST if you want to get to next as a leader.  Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church has a goal of developing your leadership by just 10% per year (this church puts on the leadership summit every year where hundreds of thousands of leaders all over the world tune in).  10% doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you consider the fact that in just 10 years you could be an entirely new leader, that doesn’t sound too bad.  Reflect for a moment on your last 2 years – how are you a different leader? Have you been intentional enough to grow?  Can you get specific as to how you’ve grown?  As my old boss used to say “know your scoreboard – it’s the best way to gauge progress.”  Let’s talk about a few items to evaluate and points to consider as you grow:

1.  According to Bill Hybels; it takes “fantastic” people to activate change.  If you are a sponsorship director, a property manager, brand manager, or lead a sponsorship related team of activators in any form; this is a relevant point for you.  When you put a team together, it’s critical for you to consider the true abilities of the talent you hire.  I found in my first years of management that I tended to under estimate the abilities of my team.  I got excited about performances that really should have been satisfactory; what they were hired for – not above and beyond.  My boss coached me to remember that if I expected extraordinary results, I had to expect extraordinary practices.  That doesn’t happen unless you hire extraordinary “fantastic” people.  The next question you must ask is: are you developing your talent?  How are you coaching them, challenging them, requiring them to think beyond the way they did yesterday?
2. Idea days – Daniel Pink, author of: Drive, indicates that autonomy is one of 3 key motivators. He references the fact that Google really has this down.  They give their employees the freedom to do whatever they want with 20% of their time.  Obviously you can’t really do this overnight, but you might consider giving your staff freedom to get creative.  How are you enabling them to strategize ways to become better at partnerships?  More productivity is accomplished when a passionate staff member is given the freedom to invent, get creative, etc.  It can be a very structured effort to allow for a bit of unstructured work time.  Keep in mind that “idea days” can’t just be offered overnight – you need to coach your team so that they know what you expect out of this time.  And accountability around this effort is a must, at least until it can be proven that this time is used well.
3. Builders and Bankers: These are two types of leaders according to T.D. Jakes.  Builders are able to build a fire out of little to nothing.  They turn things around, typically they’re better at building than in maintaining.  Then you have Bankers: they are able to keep the fire going that the builder started; they’re the maintainers.    What are you?  A builder or a banker? In order for your efforts to grow, you really need both on your team – so make sure you have built a team that complements whatever mindset you bring to the table. 

I’d love to hear insights from other great leaders who have made leaps and bounds as a result of intentional practices.  Please offer your best practices for leadership development should you be inspired to teach and grow the leaders in our industry.