Bad News: Your Leadership Limits Everything
Updated: Sep 15
Good News: You Can Lift Your Leadership Lid
Or, as Dave Ramsey puts it:
“The bad news is ... you are the problem. The great news is, you are the solution. You got this!”
If you have experienced even one leadership transition, whether political, or organizational, you know the difference that leadership makes.
Whether things went from good to bad, bad to good, good to great, or bad to worse, the lesson we have all learned is that leadership is the single most powerful variable to a family, organization, nation, and even global success.
Why?
Because no other factor can influence everyone, and everything, everywhere like leadership. And this leadership is often vested in one person.
Turning to you, as a leader, did you know that your people, and organization, cannot rise above your leadership effectiveness?
Imagine engaging the best minds, investing in the most sophisticated technology, and employing the most competitive tactics, yet still not getting results, and wondering why.
The answer usually lies closer to home than we would care to admit. Regardless of other people's roles and circumstances, you, the leader, are the measure of your people and your organization's effectiveness.
How effective you are as a leader raises the roof, and places a cap, on how effective your people and organization can be. This is what John C. Maxwell calls The Law of the Lid.
The good news is that you can lift your leadership lid by increasing your leadership effectiveness with these six interventions.
1.Get a Coach
"Executive Coaching has a 788% return on investment."
- American University
You currently have at least one specific area where your leadership effectiveness scores less than a 5/10, which itself is not ideal. Getting a coach will not only help you identify specific areas for growth, your coach will help you to adopt targeted strategies, to produce measurable results.
2.Implement a Balance Score Card
"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."
- Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland
Implementing a Balance Score Card is like having a GPS-enabled dashboard that shows you where you started, where you are going, which routes are best, what to expect on the way, and where to "recalculate route" so that you can make it to your destination within the bounds you set for yourself.
Want to measure how well you're doing? Integrate measurement in everything you do, then track and adjust to ensure that you truly are progressing towards your desired destination.
3.Enlist Other Leaders
"The strength of the team is each individual member. And the strength of each member is the team."
- Phil Jackson
Want to increase your leadership effectiveness? Recruit, develop, position, and defer to the leadership effectiveness of your people.
This is because the higher you climb, the less your effectiveness and success depend on your individual performance.
Your leadership effectiveness and success depend on how well you manage yourself to create a conducive training, coaching, and mentorship environment that maximizes the contribution of others' knowledge, skills, talents, personalities, experiences, and leadership.
Being surrounded by other leaders, not followers, will increase your leadership effectiveness.
As you focus on what only you can do, and assign the rest to those you have empowered and now trust to own and deliver (sometimes even better than you), you become more effective in your leadership role.
4.Integrate an I.D.A. Feedback Process
I.D.A. stands for Immediate, Detailed, and Actionable. Haven't heard of it before? Not surprised, I just made it up.
You lift your leadership lid when you get useful feedback you can implement on the go.
Waiting for quarterly, semi-annual, and annual formal performance evaluation sit-downs is one of the causes of friction between leaders and their people.
Integrate an I.D.A. Feedback Process that encourages two-way constructive feedback on what you or another needs to improve to move things forward.
Communicated in a positive, helpful, non-retaliatory spirit intent on supporting the entire team to win, giving and receiving I.D.A. feedback gives you the opportunity to learn about, and work on areas to improve your leadership effectiveness on the go.
5.Tailor Your Approach
Did you know that you could be given the same score on leadership effectiveness by five different people for five completely different reasons.
Once you align your position expectations, make sure you also make time to find out what each of the people you are connected with needs from you as a leader, so that you can tailor your leadership approach to their thinking, personality, motivation, and work style.
6.Leverage Systems
People forget, change their minds, twist the truth, and a myriad of other fallible reasons not to depend on individual will and motivation alone.
Adopting Management Information Systems, for example, however, simple or sophisticated, helps to record, store, monitor, control, evaluate, improve, and retrieve the decision-making information you and your people can all access to stay ahead.
Leverage systems to streamline data-driven performance and results, and remove arbitrary, subjective decision-making based on limited human insight and biased preferences.
This not only creates efficiencies, but also fosters transparency and fairness in dealings, qualities critical to building trust in your leadership effectiveness.
Lift Your Leadership Lid to Grow Your People & Organization
If you get the feeling that your leadership is sabotaging your, your team's, and your organization's performance and results, don't ignore it.
"Everything rises and falls on leadership." John C. Maxwell.
Book a Consultation Call to identify specific areas you can work on to increase your leadership effectiveness, and lift your leadership lid so that you, your people, and your organization can soar!