Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Elevation Principle: What Booker T. Washington Knew About Lifting Others
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Elevation Principle, What Booker T. Washington Knew About Lifting Others. Here we go. Today's reflection starts with a question most of us answer wrong without realizing it. When you think about getting ahead, what comes to mind first? For a lot of leaders, it's visibility. It's the next title, the next headcount number, the next room you get invited into. Almost nobody's first instinct is to think about someone else's growth. And yet one of the most quietly effective leaders in American history built his entire life's work on the opposite instinct. Booker T. Washington put it simply if you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. He wasn't offering a nice sentiment for a graduation speech. He was describing how he actually operated. Washington built Tuskegee Institute starting with almost nothing, at a time when very little was handed to him or to the people he served. He understood something that took most leaders decades to learn if they ever learned it at all. His own influence had a ceiling, and that ceiling was set by how many other people he helped rise alongside him. Here's a leadership moment that captures this well, even if the names are composite. Picture two managers on the same team, promoted around the same time, given similar resources. One spends the next two years building his own visibility. He takes the high profile projects personally, he makes sure his name is on the deck. He is, by every conventional measure, doing everything right. The other spends those same two years doing something less visible. She identifies which people on her team are close to a breakthrough and puts real effort into getting them there. She gives away credit that she technically earned. She sponsors people in rooms where she is not even present. Five years later, one of them is still fighting for the next promotion alone. The other has a bench of people who trust her judgment, who want to work for her again, who speak well of her when she isn't in the room. That second kind of reputation compounds in ways the first one never does. Here's where a lot of leaders misread this idea. They hear lift up someone else and assume it means something softer than ambition, self-sacrifice, niceness, something you do because it's virtuous, even if it costs you. That misreading is exactly why so many capable people quietly resist the advice. Nobody wants to be told that getting ahead requires giving up their edge. But that's not what Washington was describing, and it's not what the leaders who actually live this way are doing. Lifting others is not opposed to ambition. It's a mechanism of ambition, maybe the most durable one available. Every person you genuinely develop becomes an extension of your judgment. They carry your standards into rooms you cannot be in. They vouch for you in conversations you'll never hear. None of that shows up on a quarterly scorecard, and all of it compounds over a career. This holds true no matter what tools sit on your desk. And if you happen to be leading in an AI-enabled environment, It's worth naming directly because the tools are only going to get better at compressing tasks. What they cannot do is compress trust. They cannot notice a spark of potential in someone before that person has noticed it in themselves. That noticing and the patient work of developing it remains stubbornly entirely human. If anything, as routine work gets automated, the leaders who spend their freed up time investing in people will will pull further ahead of the ones who just spend it on more output. Here's something to carry forward this week. Think about where your attention actually goes when you have a choice. When credit is available, do you take it or share it? When a stretch opportunity opens up, whose name comes to mind first? Yours or someone you're developing? These are not abstract values questions. They're daily, practical choices, and they're the ones Washington was pointing to. The leaders worth following rarely announce that they're lifting other people up. They just do it consistently, long before anyone is keeping score. That consistency is the whole strategy. Not a slogan, not a sacrifice, just the quiet, compounding math of investing in people who will carry what you've built further than you could have carried it alone. That is this episode's reflection.