2 Things to Master to Speed Up Personal Leadership

Over the years, one thing that has always intrigued me is finding the essential ingredient to achieve personal performance that leads to personal expertise. My constant zest has been to see what drives people to display a breakthrough performance. Over the years, I talked to several different leaders, managers, and consultants, and all of them viewed performance and expertise from several different angles. Many said confidence was the essential ingredient, while others said it was communication. While some favored smart work and a few others said, it was the attitude.

1. Leadership is all about Being a Specialist in One

When it comes to leadership, one key thing I find is that most regular professionals and managers doing the day-to-day job are already lost amidst tons of leadership philosophies out there. There are a thousand different techniques, methods, and guidelines floating around. Did you also ever find that several of the philosophies in the market sometimes do not resonate with your personality completely? Or did you happen to feel that it was something beyond your current job scope, and maybe you would need those ‘miraculous’ tips 10 years later and not now? The irony is that consultants worldwide and management gurus have made leadership look more like a complex science than a simpler phenomenon.

You don’t need to learn all the strange or glorious skills to be a leader

Sometimes back, I met a senior guy leading a large team of professionals selling technical solutions to large clients. His job required that he coaches and mentors his team on a regular basis. However, this guy had a feeling that his communication skills were not as good as his peers, and he had the feeling that because of this gap, he was not able to exert or demonstrate ‘leadership.’ He was under the strong impression that he was not being considered a good leader by his peers, bosses, and his subordinates and had further apprehension that he would not grow further unless he fixes his gaps in communication skills. When I asked him why he thought so, he replied that ever since he joined the university, he was taught only one thing: great leaders must be great communicators to influence others. Then I asked him if he was putting any deliberate effort to improve upon it. He apparently uses several different ways to hone his skills. I asked him one thing- is this the one thing he could do best? He replied, “no.” Then I asked him, “What is that one thing you can do best or better than your peers?” For a while, he did not have an answer. He kept on pondering over it, and he kept on thinking about it for several days before he met me again and told me that the one thing he was best at was matching customer needs with the exact technical solution. This was the single big reason for his promotion to his current level. By doing it for several years in his job, he had become so good at this that he progressed to his current level. That’s it.

That realization was enough. He did not need any further coaching or guidance. He went back, and some months later, he told me how he was exerting his “leadership” in coaching his own guys to map solutions to client needs, and all of a sudden, he started seeing himself as a leader, and others started giving him that space. He did not need to and could probably never become good at communication skills which he thought earlier was the hallmark of outstanding leadership.

Leadership is not about being a great speaker

Years back, I attended one 6-days leadership development course. The facilitator was a highly popular and sought-after ‘guru’ of that time conducting such courses. His modulus Operandi was that he would assign one topic or theme to the participants each day. Participants were asked to prepare a speech on one true incident/story on the given theme of the day and “speak” it to the audience the next day with vivid expressions, acting, feeling, enactment, etc.  The daily theme varied from sad incidents to fearful incidents, to surprise incidents, to name a few. And that’s all that was there in his “leadership” course. If the participant couldn’t perform, he would shout at the top of his volume with the most abrasive language to scold the participant publicly so that he could do it better in the next session to save his face. He also warned several of us would indeed drop off by the sixth day. He was entirely right. Several guys indeed dropped off as the course went along. Why? The reason I think is that not everyone came to become a flamboyant speaker.

Sometimes I wonder, was he able to make every one of those 30 participants in the course a true leader? He was trying to beat the hell out of everyone to “polish” the hidden, impactful, charismatic, and influential public speaker in each of his participants. I am not even sure if most of them already had this one in their personality to some extent. He was probably on one side of the spectrum of gurus who believe that leadership is all about public speaking, or they believe communication and outstanding public speaking is the key to leading.

Communication and public speaking may be the most critical piece of today’s globalized world, no doubt, but that’s not the essential ingredient to achieving personal leadership or personal performance. Let me break a common belief here. You don’t have to be an outstanding speaker to become a leader. You don’t have to have the ability to lead teams. You don’t have to be diplomatic. You don’t have to outshine others all the time in everything. The exciting thing is that you don’t have to present yourself as aggressive or dominating. All those characteristics associated with leadership are just the outer envelope and have been making the understanding of leadership so complex for a common day-to-day professional.

Leadership is ‘doing one thing to your best’

I can reasonably relate to your feeling odd sometimes that your seniors and managers seem to associate leadership with the attributes either you feel you lack or feel you have done your part in trying to acquire, but no help. Leadership in the workplace setting ought to be simple enough to be adopted by anyone. We know the history; several warriors showed leadership without getting into complex leadership theories.

I just met a guy who does train people how to use LinkedIn to find jobs quickly. This guy is good at what he does. He is a specialist, and that puts him apart from the crowd. Isn’t that make him the leader?

I have found in my research that leadership is all about being the best in what you do. And you just have to be the best in doing only that ONE thing – doing it so well that no one in your team, colleagues, peers or friends, or people in your business circle can match your level of effectiveness, efficiency, quality, vision, and drive. When you continually keep working on this “one” thing repeatedly, every time doing it better than the last time, and you invest your heart into it. It becomes second nature. This makes you shine as a leader in that “one” thing.

Don’t we all professionals do the same thing day in and day out for years and years? Don’t we have some “one thing” which we become best at over time and become specialists? We do. And that’s the door to personal leadership. This is the way a common professional can achieve leadership.

We are just common professionals. And we need simple rules for this game. That’s the RULE OF SPECIALIZATION. This fundamental rule starts with “the one thing.” Ericsson & Charness (1993) showed one method called ‘deliberate practice’ to achieve expert-level performance in that ONE THING. Sharpening the skill needs concerted efforts over a long period of time. ‘Deliberate Practice’ includes focused practice and acting on the feedback. During my research, several leaders and managers revealed the startling fact that leaders are not generalists; instead, they are specialists. They are specialists in ONE thing and they excel slowly and slowly and continuously keep pushing their limits. This is THE one thing you would want to invest your energy, time, and focus upon moving forward. The day you achieve specialization in ONE THING, you achieve leadership.

Unless you are the best in one thing, you are vulnerable to failure sooner or later. To develop your leadership, you need to identify that ONE SKILL in which you are the “best,” or you are at least ‘better’ than people, peers, friends, or colleagues around you. The challenge is to find that ONE THING where you can shine better than others.

2. Knowing Your “One” Best Thing

During one of the performance reviews, I asked almost everyone in my team just one question – “What is the single thing you can do best, that no one else in my team can do better than you?” Guess what? I did not get a clear answer from most of them. I asked the same question in subsequent reviews and have not been able to get a powerful answer. It was not that I did not know their strengths, but the question is if they knew about that “one” thing about themselves more than I do. It is important for them to find the answer to this question. Leadership and peak performance do not come if we don’t have clarity of what we can do best.

It takes time to find the one

It takes time and focused energy to identify that “one thing” that you know resonates well with your natural talents and inner personality. You need to identify that ONE THING you are best at something no one around you could do better than you. You ought to create that distinction. This one thing could be knowledge, could be a skill, could be a passion, and this one thing could be a feeling, and it could simply be the way you think about things. It does not have to be a skill.

A couple of years back, one of my closest friends, a 40 years old businessman running a garment department store, was standing on a thin line between whether to sell all his assets and move abroad to fulfill his long-cherished aspirations or continue the profession he was thrown into. He asked me what his chances of survival abroad were and what he could do. I asked only one question “Just tell me the one, just the one thing, which you can do ‘best’ in your stance or something you can do ‘better’ than people in your business.”  For several months I did not hear any news from him about his itchiness to move abroad. One day I got to know that this guy had finally decided to stay back home and continue the business he was in. The last I heard was that he was still trying to find the answer to that question. He did tell me that this single question changed his perspective. Most of the time, this clarity is necessary. Otherwise, we may end up trying to lead something we are not meant for.

A wrong answer can derail your career

It is hard to find that one thing, though the statement looks overly simple. The reason is probably that we may not know how to find the answer to this simple question. Professional life is sometimes flooded with the thought of “developing” the leader inside you with some larger-than-life corporate leadership philosophies. Your manager may start investing in communication skills, negotiation skills, meeting organization skills, executive presentation, project management, influencing and result-orientation, and whatnot. However, before that happens, the most crucial thing is that someone needs to find what is that “one” thing in which you would be an outstanding leader and performer.

Lately, one of my family members has had trouble settling into life. He is 30 years old and still did not get a stable job. He hardly finished his graduate school at the age of 29. He asked me for guidance on what he could do next to settle. I asked him to explore that “one” thing before he is too late and makes the wrong choices.

Let me caution you, that a wrong answer to this question may jeopardize career decisions. One of my friend’s nephews, a 28 years old MBA holder, was doing a decent job leading a marketing team that was selling not-so-hi-tech solutions to companies. He was successful in bagging a couple of promotions in a short span of time. Somehow, he felt that his job was not meant for him. He asked me for guidance, and I asked him the same question – the one thing he could do better than his colleagues he worked with. He took a while and finally came up with some answer he “thought” he was good in. Based on that ‘perception,’ he almost unsettled his life, left his job, and went abroad hoping to find something he would feel he would click in. Eventually, nothing clicked, and he had no choice but to return back home. Until lately, he was trying to search for that “one” thing.

You need a system to find that one thing

Over the years, I have seen several professionals jumping the guns ahead in leadership tracks without realizing that. Finding that “one” thing is not your self-construed assumptions about yourself or your own perception. You need a system or a tool to do so.

Sometimes back, one of the middle management executives with a nice job came to me to get his profile reviewed to move his career to the next level role. Lately, he has struggled to present his best in interviews and make his case. During our short talk, he showed some signs of low esteem as well.

During the discussion, I asked him to make a comprehensive list of all the capabilities and unique selling points from his own introspection. The boundaries I gave for the list were to list down those things in which he thought he was either the best at or considered that he was able to do it better than his peers around him. He came back with quite a long list. As a next step, I asked him to go over his past and current job experiences and list all the achievements, accomplishments, awards, USPs, certificates, appreciations, etc., corresponding to those listed capabilities. He came up with a pretty impressive list of over 30 claims of varying degrees of transformations and bottom-line differences he had made.

For the next meeting, I asked him to bring a published or unpublished document, certificate, award, email, or any other “verifiable” evidence for each accomplishment (and hence capability) he initially listed. Several weeks later, he appeared with evidence for about 5 of over 30 items. He made a startling revelation that during this exploration, to his own amazement, he could not source a whole lot of “verifiable” artifacts for most of the listed items. Upon retrospection, he revealed that he was not really the best at many things he listed earlier, and in several things, he was probably not better than his peers. Most of the achievements were self-acclaimed. That probably explained his low esteem during interviews.

Then I told him to build his portfolio of evidence for those items he was really good at. Guess what? He came the next weekend with a pile of documents, and I could see the energy, passion, and vigor while he was explaining to me the l relationship between the artifacts he brought with his claims. These were the “few” things he was able to do relatively “better” than his peers around him (as evident from his evidence). He found that just a few of the areas of his achievements had recurring patterns of evidence repeating at several points in his career. He simply could not identify that resonance. Answers to his self-esteem issues and the key to his success were right there in the day-to-day activities he was doing in his job for years.

He set forth on a journey to ride upon that tiny list of his key USPs with that understanding. Within a few months, he moved to the next level and seemingly was quite effective too in his new role. He just needed to identify that “one” thing from the day-to-day work he was best at rather than sitting in some complex “transformational” leadership classes.

Let me share one thing even though this case looks like career coaching, in reality, it is about leading yourself in something which can lead others as well. Doing what you can do best is leadership in itself. I have seen this being true in several other cases too. The bottom line is that if you are “best” at something, you better be able to support it with verifiable evidence which can be seen, read, felt, and recognized. The evidence could be in the form of a simple appreciation email. The scale of the evidence may not matter, to begin with.

Once you identify the “one” thing you are best at or something you can do “better” than peers around you, you set a new path for your own self-leadership and personal expertise before you embark on leading others.