Five Leadership Essentials to Reach Your Next Level

When you want growth AND the freedom to take your business to new levels, what is the key? Imagine if your team members gave you their discretionary effort. Not just what they’re required to do, but to willingly and enthusiastically go beyond your expectations.

Are you thinking those are just special people (we call them A-players) that are hard to find? Maybe. Decades of employee engagement research from Gallup show that 70 percent of the factors that create the fertile environment for A-players to emerge are within YOUR control as the leader. What that means is that it is YOU at the center of the universe (finally, right!?).

How this works is simple, but not easy. It’s about leadership mindsets you must adopt and practice.

5 Essential Mindsets for Growth: True to Self, Self-Awareness, Qii, Humility, and Vulnerability

1. True to self. What do you want and love to do more than anything in the world, in your personal life and in your career? If you don’t know, or if you don’t apply what you know about yourself to your professional trajectory, you are leaving the most effective fuel available to you on the table.

2. Self-awareness. How do you impact the world around you? What are the instinctive behaviors that come naturally to you? When you discover your strengths and modus operandi, and how these are received by the people around you, you can be more purposeful in how and when you wield these tools to get the best results.

3. Qii. No one ever “has time” to do the important work that’s not urgent. You have to squeeze that time into your schedule. That’s the quadrant 2 (Qii) mindset: important, not urgent activities should never go on the back burner. Make your team members your #1 client and dedicate prime time every week to develop them and learn from them.

4. Humility. The traditional definition refers to a kind of “lowness” — but embedding your leadership with humility is actually a really high aspiration: to believe that you can learn from anyone and anything, and that others may do certain things better than you regardless of their title, years of experience, and sometimes even when they themselves don’t know they can.

5. Vulnerability. The only way we grow is by moving forward, and every step we take isn’t always the right one. We all make mistakes. In fact, the more experienced and successful you are, the more mistakes you have made on your way there. If you want your team members to give their discretionary effort, at some point you have to let go and let them own the path to the outcomes you want.

If you’d like to learn more about how to practice these five mindsets as a leader in your organization, reach out to me today.