Why You and Your Team Need It.
The KID Leader Framework is the last of the Servant Leader Framework acronym series including the MOM (Manager of Managers) Leader Framework and DAD (Decisive, Aligned, Disciplined) Leader Framework.
I initially introduced the MOM framework, a model centered on growth-first leadership with an emphasis on accountability and clearing roadblocks for your team. Then came the DAD framework, which reminded us that being decisive and confident builds trust. In DAD we also talked about empowering both individuals and teams through the alignment of goals and the importance disciplined consistency. Of course, the KIDS Leader Framework must come next.
KIDS is about deepening your understanding (Knowledge), taking deliberate actions (Intention), having a growth-mindset as your norm (Development), and finding long-term motivation (Significance).
Knowledge:
Know Yourself, Know Your People
Knowing yourself means being able to reflect critically on both your successes and times when you’ve fallen short. We need to be able to understand the “why” behind both. For me, most of my successes result from strengths that the Gallop-Clifton StrengthsFinder puts into the Strategic Thinking family. I have a knack for seeing patterns, can anticipate roadblocks before they happen, and imagine better systems for almost anything.
That kind of thinking has served me well, but it also has a downside. Too often I’ve had a tendency to over-research and dig into details that are interesting but don’t add much value to the task at hand. I thought I’d grown past that tendency – until recently, when I took on a role that wasn’t the best fit. I spent months on a project that, in hindsight, should have taken half the time. The delay frustrated my leader and left me disappointed that I hadn’t caught myself sooner. It reminded me that even long-recognized patterns can resurface under pressure and that self-awareness isn’t a one-time achievement. It’s an ongoing discipline.
Knowing yourself means not only understanding what drives you but also what gets in your way. Understanding others is similar but you also need to understand how they like to be led. I once herd it said that leveraging strengths and minimizing weaknesses are the two sides to the “Growth” coin. And you can actually use strengths to work around weaknesses. In fact, growth comes more naturally to most of us when that’s done.
The MOM framework showed us that growth happens when people feel seen and supported. When leaders notice progress, remove barriers, and celebrate small wins. The DAD framework added this point: self-knowledge without alignment can create blind spots, but when we understand how our choices affect others, we build trust. Together, they show that real leadership knowledge is relational. It’s knowing our own patterns well enough to manage them and knowing our people well enough to bring out their best.
Leaders who consistently learn about themselves and their teams create the conditions for trust, engagement, and innovation. Test this for yourself: What’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself recently that’s improved how you lead? And what’s one thing you still need to learn about your team?
Intention:
Growth Doesn’t Happen by Accident
Being intentional means doing things on purpose and with purpose. It’s important because growth rarely happens by accident as adults and being intentional has a multiplying effect. Without applying intentionality, knowledge we’ve gained is mostly observational. Put another way, being intentional is when we purposefully seek knowledge to give us insight in order to drive our future actions.
It happens when we make deliberate choices and take intentional action, even when it’s inconvenient. A mentor once challenged me with this question: “Are you managing people according to your calendar, or is leading your people driving what’s on your calendar?” I knew immediately that I was doing it wrong. I wasn’t leading with intention. My priority needed to be on my people. The question led me to reprioritize my calendar based on leading my people. It caused some inconvenience. But my team and I were far better because of it.
Being intentional means being fully present as part of our daily rhythm. It’s the constant awareness that our choices and our actions strengthen or weaken the culture we’re building. Where the MOM framework reminded us to manage the movement of obstacles in ways that others grow, intentionality in the KIDS leader framework identifies which barriers truly matter the most. And where the DAD framework teaches the importance of confident decisions, intentionality helps us make better ones by grounding our choices in purpose.
Truly intentional leaders create environments where others learn to act intentionally, too. We can do this by modeling it. Sometimes all we need to do is slow down long enough to notice what’s working and what isn’t. And then act on it. This might mean taking time to really observe people around us – making a point to watch what energizes or drains them, listening for changes in tone and excitement to see what truly matters to them. We can ask better questions: What matters most to you right now? What do you think can wait? What’s one step we can take today that will make tomorrow easier? Questions like these help a team direct its collective energy intentionally toward progress, not just an activity or task.
This type of intentionality is a multiplier of sorts because it encourages individuals to move the team together into high performance. They gain the collective experience and confidence that comes from decision making that moves the team forward and they share in creative problem-solving that builds trust. This produces a healthy leader mentality within each of them, which multiplies the team’s influence and capabilities.
So before jumping into the next task, pause and ask yourself: Am I being intentional right now, or just active? That one question can change everything. Most leaders drift toward busyness without realizing it. Intentional leadership is what will drive you and your team forward.
Development:
Make it a Daily Mindset
Most of us live in a state of constant distraction, with competing priorities pulling us in every direction. Development – ours and everyone else’s – often becomes the thing we’ll look at “when things slow down.” But things rarely slow down. The truth is that development doesn’t happen in the margins of our schedule. Spare time rarely exists. So we have to we make it part of our daily rhythm if we want it to happen.
It’s also easier this way, because growth and development requires consistent movement. It’s less about carving out large chunks of time every so often and more about staying engaged in small, purposeful ways. This isn’t to say you or someone on your team shouldn’t take a two day boot camp to learn a new skill. Make those moments happen too. It’s simply a matter of fact that a few minutes of planned reflection each day keeps a person moving forward and growing.
When we’re learning something new, focus often narrows. We get absorbed, tuning out other things for a while. That focus is good — it’s where learning deepens — but it also demands tradeoffs. We can’t expect to meet every KPI every day and still stretch ourselves. Some days, development looks like progress you can’t yet measure.
That’s where the earlier frameworks help. MOM taught us to look for growth month over month, not minute by minute. DAD reminded us that alignment and discipline make growth sustainable. Together, they give structure to what development requires: permission to pause and perspective to persist. When team members see how today’s small investment connects to tomorrow’s results, they begin to understand that temporary tradeoffs are part of lasting progress.
Development also shows up in the little things.
This is how feedback becomes a normal part of conversation, or how a quick reflection turns a meeting into a moment of learning. Those patterns, repeated consistently, shape culture more powerfully than any training session. Growth done this way isn’t another initiative to manage; it’s a mindset to model. We learn by doing, reflecting, and adjusting. We grow through the conversations we initiate, the feedback we receive, and the humility we model. Leadership development isn’t an event — it’s a daily decision to grow with purpose and invite others to do the same.
Most of us live in a state of constant distraction, with competing priorities pulling us in every direction. Development – ours and everyone else’s – often becomes the thing we’ll look at “when things slow down.” But things rarely slow down. The truth is that development doesn’t happen in the margins of our schedule. Spare time rarely exists. So we have to we make it part of our daily rhythm if we want it to happen.
It’s also easier this way, because growth and development require consistent movement. It’s less about carving out large chunks of time every so often and more about staying engaged in small, purposeful ways. This isn’t to say you or someone on your team shouldn’t take a two-day boot camp to learn a new skill. Make those moments happen too. It’s simply a matter of fact that a few minutes of planned reflection each day keeps a person moving forward and growing.
Whenever we are learning something new, our brains have a tendency of being myopically focused on just that one new thing. Our hyperfocus makes us zone out – temporarily and noticeably detached from the things around us. This is good. We need this time. Significant learning requires even more time in that very focused state. But how do we find the time? After all, it would mean that other activities are impacted.
Making Time for Development
Remember when we talked about Month-Over-Month improvements in the MOM framework? We talked about becoming more effective over time. Notice I didn’t say that every day each of our KPIs needed to be reached. I’m not saying every KPI can be ignored. That’s certainly not the case. But it’s often not possible for every person to meet every KPI and focus a bit on development. Some days we have to give up a little of something in order to get more later. Over time this always pays rich dividends, but it can be a real struggle to make that mental shift and for others support that mental shift.
Doing this is easier and even welcomed if we’ve implemented the alignment and discipline practices from the DAD framework. When a team member’s growth goals are explicitly linked to the team’s operational goals and organizational mission, we begin to more easily see how giving up a little productivity today helps everyone get a lot more of it in the future. It’s not always easy and that’s where the discipline becomes important. Disciplined discussions around KPIs, as discussed in DAD, includes an acknowledgement of both what was given up today and what will be benefited from it in the future. This doesn’t mean you ignore your team’s core mission and obligations to customers or others. Some days development might seem small, maybe it consists of spending 15 minutes to both reflect on the prior day’s learnings and make schedule adjustments to accommodate tomorrow’s learning.
Small Changes Lead To Big Improvements
Additionally, recognize that development can show up in how we implement small changes. It might show up when coaching feedback shows up other conversations, when meetings include moments of reflection, when the recognition how development in progress is expected to improve KPIs. Over time, those small patterns create a culture that lets people develop and grow naturally every day.
The secret of growth is in doing development on purpose every day. Learning something small every day. Sharing what you’ve learned every day. Encouraging others to do the same every day. We all learn by doing, reflecting, and adjusting. We grow through the conversations we initiate and the feedback we receive. Every decision to pause and evaluate, asking what worked, what didn’t, and what we can do differently tomorrow, is development in real time. That’s leadership.
Significance:
The Why Behind the Work
Earlier we touched on the challenge people often have with being intentional throughout the day, every day. We can probably agree that it takes a great deal of self-motivation stay on track with our development plan through each day, every day. And I’m sure we all know some people who do this consistently better than others. Why is that? I believe it’s because some people naturally ask “Why” more often than others.
In John Maxwell’s Law of Curiosity, he reminds us that growth is stimulated by questions, especially by asking “Why?”. The question of Why will either transform a task into something meaningful or identify that task as lacking value. If we answer the “Why” question about a task and realize it’s important, we’re naturally drawn to getting it done. When we understand why something matters, it becomes far easier to stay engaged for a longer period of time and follow through. This explains why sometimes we’re self-motivated and stay the course, while other times we are easily distracted and veer off course.
Significance is the “Why” behind the What.
It’s what gives us the energy to keep improving and the perseverance to help others do the same. Without significance, even the best-designed plan feels more like a checklist to complete than something we’re striving to reach. With significance, every task connects to something that matters.
The MOM framework reminded us of the importance of recognizing progress month over month and the DAD framework tells us to ensure that goals or growth plans are aligned – from each individual, through the team, and with the organization. KIDS add significance – where meaning and motivation meet.
Great leaders don’t just explain what needs to be done — they help people understand why it’s worth doing. They connect goals to values, effort to impact, and growth to contribution. When the “why” is clear, energy follows naturally.
And when you understand your own significance — the value you bring to others and the difference your work makes — you tap into a sustainable source of motivation that no external reward can replace.
KIDS – Bringing it all together
The MOM and DAD frameworks gave us a strong foundation. The KIDS Leader framework provides the pillars that take us to a higher level. Knowledge, Intention, Development, and Significance all working with each component of the foundation.
- Knowledge calls leaders to know themselves and their people. It reminds us that self-awareness and understanding others are key to effective leadership.
- Intention challenges us to act with purpose and be fully present to notice what truly matters and to make better decisions. It’s what helps us identify the vital few things that make the biggest difference – the 20 percent that drives 80 percent of our results. When we lead intentionally, we choose meaningful progress over scattered effort.
- Development is a focus that gives structure and rhythm to our growth. It acknowledges that growth isn’t linear and that steady habits, practiced daily, do far more to help us grow than short bursts of effort.
- And Significance gives us the Why – the meaning behind what we do, the motivation to persevere when growth gets tough. And it always gets tough. Significance reminds us of the impact our growth makes to ourselves and others. It gives us the motivation to keep developing ourselves and others.
Great leaders have a strong awareness of self and others and are purposefully present. Great leaders maintain a growth mindset daily, and keep their “Whys” front and center. Make a commitment today, to yourself and to your team, to be a Great Leader.
As I said at the close of the DAD article, you don’t have to figure out your next step alone. I created Servant Leader Training because I’m passionate about sharing my tools and my training with leaders who have a desire to create real impact in those around them.
I invite you to schedule a free introductory session with me today.
~M