Growing up in Minnesota, a.k.a. the Land of 10,000 Lakes, a fair amount of my childhood was spent on the water. We’d go swimming, boating, and my favorite - canoeing. As a kid, I’d jump in the canoe and take a seat; as the youngest, I was often seated in the middle of the canoe. While this position didn’t require that I paddle, my enthusiasm had me do so anyway as I wanted to participate in our progress. As a youngster, I wasn’t always focused and at times, I was rowing in the opposite direction! My energy was being wasted instead of moving our boat forward. I was dragging my team down because my efforts were not aligned with where we were going.

Have you struggled to find 90 minutes for your leadership team to meet every week? Do you continue to shoplift time and hijack people throughout the week when there are issues in your business? If so, it’s time to give your Level 10 Meeting a tune up.

If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you started your business with a great idea and did everything yourself. You generated sales, delivered your products or services, handled the finances, managed customer service and emptied the wastebaskets. As your business grew, did you fully remove yourself from most of these functions, replacing yourself with a more energetic, competent version of yourself? Did you begin with those things you weren’t good at and didn’t enjoy, or happened to be good at and didn’t enjoy? Did you “let go” once the new person was in place and established their competence?

Millennials get a bad rap, but are they really that different from any other generation of people?

When I stopped to think about the common millennial characteristics we hear about so often, I realized how many of those same traits are also prevalent among entrepreneurs. How we outwardly demonstrate these traits may look different, but at the core our values are shared. I believe this is an opportunity for tremendous results if managed from a place of shared values and effective communication.

This is part two of a two-part series exploring what it means to develop leaders throughout your entire organization. See part one here.

You’ve begun to produce a leadership legacy when your leaders are producing other leaders. If you’ve guided your leaders on your own team well, they will do this independently of you – if they still need your help guiding their team, your work isn’t done yet.

When you start to see that third-generation leader rise, you know you’re almost there. You’ve created a leader equal to or better than yourself who has created a leader who is in turn equal to or better than they are. This allows everyone to rise as the company wins.