Strong People Create Strong People

Strong people create strong people. It is one of the quietest and most powerful dynamics in any organization, and it runs in both directions.

When you have genuinely strong people, and they develop others, the strength compounds. A strong leader raises strong people. Those people, carrying what they learned, go on to raise strong people of their own. Over time this produces an organization deep in capability, where strength keeps generating more strength, often in places the original leader never touched. It is multiplication, applied to people.

The reverse is just as real, and just as compounding. Weak hiring and weak development produce more weakness. A leader who is insecure hires people who will not threaten them, and those people do the same, and the organization gets progressively weaker with each layer. Mediocrity protects itself. Strength, by contrast, is secure enough to build more strength. Which direction an organization runs in is one of the most important things about it.

I have come to believe that one of the truest tests of a strong person is whether they make the people around them stronger. Some capable people keep their strength to themselves. They perform well individually but develop no one, and sometimes they even diminish the people around them to protect their own standing. That is a kind of strength, but a limited and ultimately weak one, because it does not compound and it does not last. Real strength builds more of itself in others.

This is why I pay attention not just to whether someone is strong, but to whether they create strength. The person who is excellent and develops others is worth far more than the person who is excellent alone, because the first one multiplies and the second one does not. One person's capability has a ceiling. The capability they build in others does not.

It also takes a particular security to do this. Building strong people means developing people who might eventually exceed you, who will get credit, who will become formidable in their own right. Insecure people cannot do it, because it threatens them. Secure, genuinely strong people do it naturally, because they are not threatened by other people's strength. They are trying to build it.

The strongest organizations I have seen were full of strong people who were busy creating more strong people. The weakest were the opposite, protecting mediocrity and slowly compounding it.

So surround yourself with strong people, and become the kind of person who makes others stronger. Strength that builds strength is the only kind that lasts.

Strong people create strong people. Be one, and build more.