Learn How to Achieve Exponential Success as a Leader by Being Fiercely Introspective

Spoiler Alert: If your only takeaway from this blog post is the title, you will have all you need to transform your organization radically and sustainably.

I get to spend all of my days speaking with leaders of organizations about their successes and struggles. As a result, I have seen an overwhelming pattern that is plaguing small and midsize businesses. I call that plague conventional success.

Let’s be real: who actually wants conventional success? All of the leaders I speak to want exponential success. They want success that builds upon itself, that fosters more reward than challenge, and grows into something greater than themselves. Yet they pursue conventional success because they believe it is a necessary precursor to the exponential. This simple misunderstanding is where a lot of time, energy, and money is wasted in our industry.

Here is an extremely common example of what chasing conventional success looks like, and why it keeps an organization stuck. Let’s say Business A has a funding issue. Going on their tenth year in business, they have been working full steam ahead for years, yet every year is still a grueling crunch to make ends meet and hit revenue goals. Forget about being fully staffed, the Founder/CEO is not even able to adequately compensate themselves for their work. They are clear on their problem, and they’ve titled it “needing more money.” So, Business A ventures out to find a solution called “getting more money.” Luckily, there are about 50 solutions that fall into this category, and Business A decides to pursue a few. They pour more time and energy into marketing and ads, explore unique funding models regardless of whether or not they are a perfect fit, and pour more money they don’t have into creating a new product or service that appeals to their base.

The result? They get more money! The issue? They now definitely need a larger infrastructure to sustain all of the work they’ve added—yet they still don’t have any money for that infrastructure, still aren’t adequately paying the founder, and now don’t even have any bandwidth left to generate more money.

Sound familiar? Whether the issue is funding, staff retention, client satisfaction, or audience development, the land of general business advice is saturated with conventional solutions that solve the issue at hand yet keep organizations stuck in the struggle.

In other words, chasing conventional success as a means to exponential success is like peeling a whole sack of potatoes by hand in order to make an apple pie. You put in a lot of work, followed the directions to the letter, and have tangible results to show for it—but the whole time you were working with the wrong ingredient.

So what does the path to exponential success look like?

Business B also has a funding issue. However, the leader of Business B is mindful that how they show up for their organization is how the organization will show up in the community—and how Business B shows up in the community will inform how their community shows up in return.

After taking measures to get an honest glimpse at their behavior patterns, the leader of Business B realizes that their energy around business development blows extremely hot or cold depending on the time of year. In the months leading up to the launch of a new initiative, the fundraising, business development, logistics, and marketing consume their whole world so that once the launch is over, they are burnt out and don’t want to think about the next iteration of these tasks until absolutely necessary. Unsurprisingly, the customers, clients, community, and funders are mimicking this exact pattern, and aren’t showing up consistently in return.

So, the leader of Business B crafts a plan based on what they want to see from their community - steadiness and commitment. They make a commitment to spend x hours a week on business development and marketing, even in the off months, no matter what. After two months, they see a small uptick in interest. After six months, they see a few substantial business leads. After a year, they have multiple new substantial funders or business deals, with many more on the horizon. Now, they have more bandwidth, and more money, to take on new challenges.

The paths to conventional success and exponential success both begin with a struggle and the quest for a solution. However, exponential success can only occur when a leader takes responsibility for their part in the struggle, and seeks to first shift their behavior before fixing anything externally.

If this seems simple, that’s because it is. However, that is exactly why most leaders dismiss it. How can something so simple produce great results? Additionally, cultivating this type of leadership, the type that begins with self-examination, can be humbling and frightening. It’s a road I’ve personally walked down, and it’s a road I walk down with my clients every day. While I can’t say it’s always sunshine and roses, I can say that every person I’ve walked down it with, including myself, will tell you it was undeniably worth the journey, and has paid off in spades.