In this article, Xavier Lederer asks leaders what their number one area of personal growth is and shares what they can do to improve it.
“I don’t know what I should focus on to become a better leader!” perplexedly answered the CEO. He was boasting that he had everything under control regarding his business growth – but neglected his own personal growth. Many CEOs do too.
The more effective a leader you become, the better your business performance. Yet only 20% of leaders are effective, according to Bob Anderson in Mastering Leadership. The good news is: “Leaders are not born; they are made.” What is your next step to improve your inner Operating System and become a more effective leader – so that your company can grow faster?
As leadership effectiveness improves, so does business performance: stronger growth, higher quality of products/services, stronger pipeline of new products,…
Bob Anderson and his research team analyzed the results of 100s of leaders and demonstrated this positive correlation, illustrated here:
The biggest barriers to success come from within
If you are like most leaders, you don’t invest enough in yourself: You probably have a much better view of your team’s personal development needs than of your own. As a result your “biggest barriers to success come from within”. Your limiting beliefs (ie the false assumptions you have about yourself and how the world works) lead to ineffective leadership, as you fail to tap into your full potential and that of your team. This leads to suboptimal business growth. In other words: you become your company’s #1 growth bottleneck.
“We all tend to react to situations by deploying the strengths with which we are identified, notes Bill Anderson. Hence, we over-extend our strengths, and this becomes – unintentionally – a main limitation.” The problem is not your strength, but linking your self-worthiness to the strength.
These beliefs are self-limiting because “they restrict your behavioral options.” For instance: leaders who have been successful by managing the minutiae, want to keep controlling as much as possible – since this strength made them successful in the past. This over-extension of their strength has significant negative consequences though.
In other words: your strengths are a hammer that you wield skillfully, but sometimes you treat every problem as a nail, even when a screwdriver is needed.
Key points include:
- Over-extending strengths
- Identifying the consequences of stagnation
- Uncovering limiting beliefs
Read the full article, What Is Your #1 Area Of Personal Growth This Quarter?, on AmbroseGrowth.com.
