What Makes A Leader: Your Leadership Limit

What Makes A Leader: Your Leadership Limit

What makes a leader?

What makes a leader is the ability to look within to see how our actions are benefiting or hamstringing the team we lead. If you want to push yourself and your team to levels of success that you might never have dreamed of, looking within is an important exercise—one you will want to do often.

This self-examination will help you to honestly identify and work to improve the current limits of your leadership, or what I call your Leadership Limit. By doing this exercise often, you will continually develop your own ideas of what makes a leader, and you will have new personal leadership goals to work toward.

Leadership Limit

In the last post, we started to have a conversation about your Leadership Limit. As I mentioned, this is a take on John Maxwell’s leadership theory of the Leadership Lid in which he describes a person’s leadership ability as the lid that determines their level of effectiveness. The lower the Leadership Limit, the lower their potential. The higher their Leadership Limit, the higher their potential. The bottom line is that your Leadership Limit determines your effectiveness.

Have you started to give some thought to your Leadership Limit? Can you identify times when your Leadership Limit influenced your effectiveness or the effectiveness of your team or your organization? Were the outcomes positive or negative? Can you put your finger on why things played out as they did? Looking at those experiences with an open mind and a lot of honesty can be a great learning experience. It will push you to the next level of your Leadership Limit—you definitely will up your leadership game. I speak a lot about world-class leadership. World-class leaders are always looking for ways to up level their skills and ability.

Is your Leadership Limit holding back your team?

Leading rather than managing. Communicating in ways that meet the needs of your team. Leading with selfless dedication. Effectively engaging your employees. Acting with humility. Having a high capacity to plan. Genuinely caring about your team members. These are all ways you can bump up your Leadership Limit. Can you recognize when you’re getting in your own way or the way of members on your team? You’re doing great in some areas. Where can you improve?

I know I’ve given you a lot to think about. We’ll continue this conversation in my next post. Until then, be well and be of good cheer.