Today we are going to be talking about lifting your leadership lid. If you have ever read the book, ” 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John Maxwell, you will recognize this term. This is a term that really encompasses the way John Maxwell teaches leadership and the essential principle of “lifting the lid,” which is this, every leader has a lid or a ceiling over their leadership and they will only ever be able to lead to the point of their ceiling or their lid. If you want to grow in your leadership and you want to grow your organization, recognise that the one thing that is going to stop you is your ceiling, your limitations. So the way you grow as a leader and the way you grow your organization, is you start to lift that lid. How do you do this ?
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I want to give you a couple of ways that you can look at this and assess how you can lift the lid in your own leadership.
1. Identify what your lid is.
You first need to identify what your lid is. You need to start off by being self-aware as a leader and being honest enough to say you know what your limitations are- those limitations are your problem, not everyone else’s problem. I have worked with a lot of leaders that will spend a lot of time blaming their people for the limitations of their organization. They blame them for having a bad attitude or not working properly or they say that the team does not do it the way that they want it done. Ultimately, as John Maxwell says,
“An organization rises and falls with the leader.”
So if you feel that your organisation is struggling or not going in the direction you want it to go, the first thing you have got to do is say, “How am I contributing to this ? How am I putting a cap on this ? Is it a skill deficit on my part ? Is It a lack of relationship ? Have I not taken the time to build relationships with my people ? Is It a lack of strict strategy or ability to plan strategically ? Is there a lack in my ability to actually lead other people and gather other people?” Whatever those deficits are, once you identify them, then you can start doing the work to lift the lid off your leadership.
How do you Identify your Weaknesses ?
The first place you can start is with some competency assessments. You can do a DISC assessment. The Myers-Briggs is an oldie but a goodie. There are lots of different personality tests out there that will help you identify your personality type, your weaknesses in your style of leadership and then give you suggestions to help you improve. So start to assess yourself. You can also talk to somebody, find a confidant- somebody who will keep you accountable and be honest enough to say, “Hey you need to address this in your life”.
Lastly, talk to your people. Ask your people, ” What is it like to be on the other side of me? What is it like to be led by me? What are some of the things that I do that hold you back or stop you from being the best that you can be? How can I be a better leader?” If you take the time to do that and take some competency tests, have accountability- people that can speak into your life and who you can ask about the areas that you can improve on, what you will find is, your self-awareness will start to identify those areas of weakness and the areas of blockage and you will start to lift the lid on your leadership.
2. Become a Learner.
The second thing you need to do is, you need to become a learner. Once you identify the problems, you need to go out and do some work to understand the problem and what it is going to take to fix the problem. The reason you need to be a learner is this, not all weaknesses are things that you should focus on. Sometimes focusing on a weakness that is just not within your capacity to lift, is going to mean that you expend too much energy on trying to fix something that is just ultimately a deficit for you and your personality. You may find that you improve one or two points but it is not going to lift the lid in the way that you need.
You might find that once you learn about your deficits, you realize that you might not be that person, you might need to hire somebody to fill that void. For example, I am not going to be effective at marketing so I need to bring someone in to do the marketing. I am not effective at doing speeches so I need to get someone who can do the public speaking for me. Learn and understand your weakness before addressing it. Do not just say “I can fix it.” It is not necessarily going to fix the problem because you may find that your deficit is so large that you need to fill that void with somebody, who is actually talented in that area and has a natural skill set that fills that need.
So be a learner, understand your problem and understand the solutions that are required to fix it. Make yourself accountable to somebody. Have a coach. I am a big advocate of people having leadership coaches. I have a coach myself- somebody who I sit with once a month and I just talk through my leadership, get them to challenge me, give me ideas and success strategies. Set out your goals and then share them with your accountability partner and say, “I want you to help me stick to it; I want you to help me to stay on task so that I can actually lift this lid in my leadership.” If you have accountability and you understand your problem and you are self-aware what you will find is that the lid will start to lift.
As the lid lifts, what you will find is that the organization grows with you. The other thing you can do is, you can also lift the lid off other people.
I alluded to this in my previous point. You might find that your skill deficit needs to be filled by someone else and not you. When you lift the lid off other people in your organization, by releasing authority to other people, you give them the ability to take on what they’re actually good at. What will happen is, it will lift the lid off your organization and lift the lid on your leadership because you are no longer the weakest link in the chain. You replace yourself with someone who can actually do it better than you and that will actually increase the capacity of everybody on the team.
So these are a couple of little ideas to help you lift the lid off your leadership. I want to really encourage you to take this seriously and to make it a priority in your leadership.
- Become self-aware.
- Identify how you are holding your team back.
- Then do the work to fix the problem.
Lift the lid and watch your leadership rise.
If you would like to learn more about effectively growing in your leadership, why not check out our FREE Goal setting guide. See below for details.
https://leadcommunicategrow.com/free-goal-setting-guide/
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