Locate your sweet pot

It is both natural and necessary for young leaders to endeavor to prove themselves by doing everything themselves. It is natural because, as a leader, you want to set the pace even as you demonstrate that nothing is beneath you. It is necessary because most of the time nobody is around to help. But what may initially be natural and necessary will ultimately limit your effectiveness as a rising leader.

As a young leader, your biggest mistake is allowing your time to be eaten up with things outside your core competencies. If you devote an inordinate amount of time to things you are not good at—things you would never be good at and at the same time investing little energy in developing your strengths, you would regret it in the days to come.

To become an effective leader, find what you are good at and continue to hone it. Stop wasting your time on what you are never going to be good at. Hear what a leader said after finding out that he was wrong subsequent to a decade of trying to be good at everything: “I am a good communicator. I am a good manager. I am a good visioncaster. I am not good at follow-up. I know how to prepare a message. I am not good at planning an event. And yet early on, I did nothing to hone my communication skills. Instead, I spent a great deal of time trying to become better manager and a better event planner. When it came to communication, I would wing it because the time I should have used to prepare talks had been consumed by other things. And this was the one area in which I would wing it. The problem is that somewhere along the way, I had bought into the myth that a good leader has to be good at everything. So I operated under the assumption that I had to upgrade my weaknesses into strengths…”

About 20 years ago, I also set out with the vision of wanting to be good at everything, because I believed that people would not follow me if I do not grow up to become a well-rounded leader. I thought I must become exceptional in every aspect of what is to be done that would make success out of me as a leader. I wrongly thought that every great leader (especially those who have gone to the land of the silent ones) that I had read about was a well-rounded leader. I also thought that all existing leaders today are good at everything. But when I began to move with some of them, I began to see that they are not good at everything. It was my walk with some cutting-edge leaders that opened my eyes. Today, I do not do everything, because I can never be good at everything. I only do what I am good at. And I only devote majority of my time to tasks that I am good at.

Mediocre and middle-of-the-road people do not work smart! They do everything, wasting their precious time on what they are not good at. This is not how exceptional leaders live their lives. Exceptional leaders work smart. The majority of their time is only devoted to tasks they are good at. They understand that their real value to their organizations lies within the context of their giftedness, not the number of hours they work.

If you can understand and apply what I am teaching you today to your life, business and leadership, you would become an effective leader in your home and business. From today, start looking for ways to redefine your job description according to what you are good at, rather than simply what you are willing to do. You will discover that there are some balls you have no business juggling. When you finally muster the courage to let them fall on the floor and roll over in the corner, you’d begin to excel in juggling the two or three balls that you are created to keep in the air in the first place.

For the umpteenth time, what are the two or three things that you and only you are responsible for? What, specifically have you been hired to do? What is “success” for the person in your position? Now, let me slice it a little thinner. Of the two or three things that define success for you, which of those are in line with your giftedness? Of the tasks you have been assigned to do, which of them are you specially gifted to do?

This is where you must focus your energies. This is your sweet pot. That is where you will excel in life, business and leadership. Within that narrowed context, you will add the most value to your organization. Success within that sphere has the potential to make you indispensable to your employer. Buddy, you owe it to yourself to identify the areas in which you have the highest probability for success. You owe it to your employer to identify areas in which you could add the most value to your organization. You cannot aim for a target until you have identified it.

The moment a leader steps away from his core competencies, his effectiveness as a leader diminishes and it will affect negatively everyone under his or her leadership. Worse, the effectiveness of every other leader in the organization suffers too. In time, a leader who is not leading from the right “zone” will create an unfavorable environment for other leaders.

See you where excellence-driven leaders are found.