I want to talk about finding your lane and sticking to it. What do I mean by that? It means that you need to find out what you are good at, what tasks are essential to you and what you need to focus on. You also need to find out what tasks are not for you and what tasks other people can help you with, so that you can become a more effective and productive leader. In other words, how do you reach the full potential that you have in your leadership? Here are some pointers:
- What are you passionate about?
- What are you really good at?
- Where are you getting the opportunities?
- Focus on areas where you can be consistent.
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So, why is it important to find your lane ? I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story about somebody that I’ve been coaching recently. She’s an amazing woman and she has so much potential in her leadership. One of her positive traits is that she is a very willing worker. She will get in and help anywhere you need her to and she will work harder than anybody else I know but one of the frustrations for her was that she didn’t feel like she was growing in her leadership. She didn’t feel like she was getting opportunities to develop her leadership skills.
So, we recently had a conversation about it. I asked her, “What area do you want to focus on?” “In what area do you think you have a particular gift or skill?” Initially, her response was, “I’m willing to do anything, I’m willing to help anywhere.” It’s an admirable quality and I appreciate the attitude but one of the problems with that attitude in leadership is that until you learn to focus, until you learn how to hone in on what you’re actually good at, you will not actually grow as a leader.
You need to be able to identify the skills and the giftings that you have as a leader and learn how to make that your strength as a leader. Don’t try and be everything. The flip side of that is, you get some leaders who are control freaks. They are not necessarily trying to do everything because they have a willing attitude or they’re trying to help everybody but they just want to do everything because they think they are the only people in the world that know how to do it well.
Here’s a “newsflash” for you. You are not good at everything and if you insist on doing everything by yourself, what you are really doing is that you are preventing yourself and your team from growing. So whichever extreme you sit in, whether you’re a willing person wanting to do everything to help people or whether you want to do everything because you’re a control freak, either way you’re holding yourself back and you’re stopping yourself from leading most effectively.
So, let’s look at some of the pointers I mentioned earlier.
1. What are you passionate about?
How do you answer this ? You’ve got to do some self-examination, to figure out a little bit about yourself as a leader. The first thing you need to start asking yourself is, “What am I passionate about ? What really lights me up?” Very often we get stuck on the things we do. Sometimes the things we do are not really our passion, they are just what we do because we are passionate. We really need to be able to dig deep and understand if what we do is our passion and whether that passion actually aligns with who we are, our skillset and who we are aspiring to be.
Sometimes our passion is not necessarily our skillset and this is a hard one to swallow. I know, I’ve experienced this and I know other people have experienced this too. You can be really passionate about something you do but it isn’t the actual strength in your leadership.
2. What are you really good at ?
The second question you need to ask after passion is, what am I really good at? Either it will be something that you have trained for, that you’ve put hours and hours of work into practising and studying for or it will be something that other people tell you that you are good at. It could be something that you are comfortable with and that you do with ease, and that other people seek your help with because they know that you’re the go-to person in that regard. So have a look at where your passion and your skillset interact. That’s where you can really start to find your lane.
I’ll give you an example. When I was a younger person, in my teenage years and in my 20’s, I was very passionate about playing music and writing music. I was a guitar player, my heroes were people like Slash from Guns and Roses, Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix. I wanted to be a musician. That was what I was passionate about. I believed that being a musician was what I was meant to be. I spent most of my 20s recording and touring, trying to get opportunities in that field. What I eventually realised was, that although I was pretty good and I had moderate success as a musician, I certainly wasn’t of the calibre of the people that I admired.
The amount of work I put in to become a great guitarist was probably nowhere near what many of these other artists did. So, I had to come to grips with the fact that there was a mismatch between my skill level and my passion. I found that my skill level was letting me down. My skill level was not equal to my passion. I had a choice, I either had to put in some work to raise my skill level to a point where it matched my passion or I had to find a way to outwork my passion in line with something that was actually a skill for me.
What I discovered during that time was that one of the skills that I was pretty good at with my music was storytelling. As a songwriter, I had learned how to tell stories in song. As a performer, I was really good at engaging audiences and telling stories. I discovered that my ability to tell stories was a strong skill set that other people noticed. It still aligned with my passion, although it wasn’t necessarily the music part of it, it was the ability to be creative.
So I actually went into public speaking and now, of course, I do a lot of public speaking. So what I found in public speaking was, that there was a part of my skillset and my passion that did intersect. That’s where I decided to put my energy and my focus. There was no point chasing music when there was no match between my passion and my skill set.
So you also, need to do some deep self-reflection to ask yourself if you are passionate about something with which your skill doesn’t align. If your skill is not up there, you either need to do the work to raise your skill level or you need to analyze your passion because your passion and your skill need to intersect.
3. Where are you getting the opportunities ?
The other thing you need to ask yourself is, where are you getting the opportunities ? Sometimes we get opportunities in areas that we don’t expect or maybe they don’t align with what we originally wanted but they may be perfect for our skillset. I realized that I was getting a lot of opportunities to speak, but very few opportunities to play music. Because the opportunities were coming in an area that I could actually focus on, it gave me a chance to say, “You know what? I really enjoy getting public speaking opportunities and I feel passionate about them!”
So I had to let go of one part of my passion and skillset (music), in order to fully embrace my public speaking opportunities.
You may find that you are getting opportunities in an area that is not exactly aligned with the direction you thought you were going to go but that leads you to be able to become stronger in another area. I ended up becoming a school teacher. School teaching led me to become a behaviour specialist, being a behaviour specialist led me to become a leadership coach and that has in turn led me to become a leader of organizations and also run my own business.
I started off as a musician. But I started getting opportunities as a speaker and storyteller, so I transitioned into teaching others and now I lead my own business and my own organization. So you see, sometimes the opportunities lead you to things that you can become even more passionate about because they open up areas that you’re very skillful in and where you have the ability to make a difference and make your mark. You need to be pouring your energy into areas where you’re going to leave a mark – where you influence people for good and where they can say, “We got there because of your contribution.”
When you pour all your energy into things that can be done by anyone else, you’re not leaving your mark and this is true of leadership. If you’ve got a team and you insist on doing everything yourself, you’re not allowing your team to make their mark. You’re not allowing your team to do the things that they are really good at but you are also not giving yourself enough time to do the things that only you can do. You’ve got to be really aware of that. Don’t focus on everything, focus on the place where you have the opportunity and your skill and passion intersect.
4. Focus on areas where you can be consistent.
Finally, you need to focus on the areas where you can be most consistent. This is really important. One of the things I see with young leaders- and this was true of me when I was a younger leader as well- is that you want everything to happen now but real growth and real leadership happens over a long period of time.
So you need to focus on something that you can keep practising and developing over a long period of time. Great leadership and great success comes with the passage of time. If you are trying to do things inconsistently and are unable to sustain or commit to something for a long period of time, stop doing it. If you can’t do it consistently over one, two, three, four or five years then it’s never going to become something that is really significant for you. It’s never going to become something that you’re really excellent at and you’re never going to be able to leave your mark. Focus on the things you can do consistently and remove the things that you cannot do consistently.
One of the things I was inconsistent with was the social media posts for my business. When I was first starting out, I couldn’t post consistently. I found it very hard, so I set myself a goal of doing one post a day and that was it until I got to the place where I could actually hire somebody to do my social media and put up three posts a day. I just did one post a day because I knew I could be consistent with that.
So you’ve got to stick to what you can do consistently until you can take the next step. The next step with my content producing was, recording one video a week. That was all I could manage at that stage until I was able to get a production team; somebody to edit my videos and somebody to post my videos. Until I had this team working for me, I could only manage one video per week.
Now, I am producing multiple videos and blogs a week because I have a team that helps me. I’ve got people that edit my blogs, post for me on social media, edit my videos and get them out there. These are scheduled tasks that I can’t do without my team.
The reason I delegate these tasks is because I understand what I’m good at and what other people are good at so they can help me. I’m good at talking to a camera, I’m good at producing content. I need other people that are good at doing what they do, to help me do everything else consistently. If you are not at that level and if you can’t be consistent, then just do the things with which you can be consistent. Start to bring other people into your team and build that team so you can go for the long haul.
You’re never going to leave your mark if you don’t focus on the things that you’re passionate about and skillful at doing- skills that give you opportunities to influence others. As well as being passionate and skilled you must be consistent in what you do.
So these are four tips to help you become a more effective leader and grow in your leadership.
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