Don’t Miss the Potential (Leaders) Around You
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The best leaders are the ones that recognize the next leader.
We spend countless hours training ourselves to become better individuals through conferences, seminars, and classes. We read thousands of pages of valuable resources and pour over YouTube every night (we all love Gary Vaynerchuk). But if we do all this and fail to pull our heads out of the pages and off of the screen, we will miss all the potential around us.
Everyone has leadership capacity.
If you can influence, you can lead. While some can naturally lead a dozen people, others can only lead a few, but everyone has leadership capacity, and it will always mesh with the law of the lid.
What we want to do is help you understand how you can become a better leader, right here and right now, without having to take a deep dive in to the annals of leadership history. There are principles we can start using right away, without having to attend expensive seminars or wait for leadership email #4 from this week’s leadership guru.
1. Recognize the ones that are winning day in and day out.
Most likely there are tons of people all around you the are absolutely killing it. They’ve taken what little rope you’ve given them, and are running full bore with it. They’re mixing amazing videos, driving traffic on social media, designing entire marketing campaigns and more. But if you’ve got your head so deep in a book that you can’t pull yourself away and see those that are making stuff happen, then you’re not only not learning leadership, you’re failing yourself and your team.
2. Give people the space to fail.
Don’t be that guy. You know, the one who says it’s ok to make a mistake, but then the first time it happens turn around and discipline someone. There’s this thing in ministry that says only a seasoned vet can get the job done. Ministry search committees tend to only look for those that are both young and have decades of experience. You see the dilemma here? Senior bards have unintentionally created a culture where only the young and experienced can apply, and as such, have left the young up-and-coming audience in the dust. Give your people the space to fail, and at the same time, you will be giving them the space to fly.
3. Stop looking for the perfect one, and find the right one for right now.
Jim Collins would encourage you to get the right people on the right bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. Unfortunately, too many times we are left with no options or just the wrong options. Paul became all things to all men, but even he was such a boring speaker, someone died (remember Eutychus – Acts 20). We need to not set the bar so high that only Jesus can reach it. Set the bar for where it needs to be right now and hire for description, not potential. Given enough space and direction, the right people in the right seats will far exceed your bar and return for you the right results.
In essence, what we are encouraging you to do is create a more defined culture of leadership. To start by recognizing that you aren’t the only one killing it in your organization. That there are others who are absolutely doing an amazing job at the tasks they have been given. That freedom combined with specific and measurable results is driving the train of success, and that the right person for the job is the one who can hit it out of the park right now. Now it’s your job to out the book down, open up your eyes, and join the success all around you.