Break the Plateau: When Leadership Hits a Wall

There is this misconception that leadership skills are only a requirement for people in leadership positions. This kind of thinking does a disservice to yourself, your organization, and your team. Leadership skills don't just mean the ability to lead people. It also means the ability to lead yourself. And, as any manager worth his/her salt knows, a team member who takes the initiative on the job and who is not afraid to take responsibility for his/her domain is a powerfully effective and valuable asset.

Perhaps, your company has an in-house training program for employees to foster leadership skills. You might even have a plan for yourself. That’s great! Make use of every resource you can get your hands on. But, what happens when you hit a plateau?

The Plateau Scenario

You’ve done your homework and you’ve put a plan together. You put in the effort, and you put in a little bit more. The first couple of milestones arrive on schedule, but the next one is a bit tougher. After a while, it seems like nothing you’re doing is making any difference. You’ve hit a plateau, and you can’t seem to move forward. Sound familiar?

If there’s nothing wrong with the plan, then you need to take a hard and close look at what is actually keeping you down. Here at Stratascension, we call it The Lid.

What is The Lid?

Imagine a jar.

All that you are able to achieve is contained in that jar. You can fill that jar with all your successes to the brim, and that is your limit because the Lid sits on top of that jar and it is stopping you from filling that jar with more successes. So, how do you get rid of this limitation? By raising the Lid.

Everyone has a Lid, it's effectively the end of our ability. And, there are several reasons why that Lid is where it is. The good news is that there are several ways to raise that Lid so that good fortune and success overflow the jar.

What is My Lid?

Simply put, your Leadership Ability is your Lid. You’re probably thinking, “I’m just a cog in the wheel. All I’m really trying to do is toe the company line and bring home the bacon. I’ll never be CEO, so what do I need Leadership Ability for?”

Leadership is not just about leading others, and it’s definitely not about a fancy title or position on the organizational chart.

It’s about leading yourself to where you want to go. It’s about helping you to get the most out of your day and yourself. If you’ve been pushing yourself hard and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere, the Law of the Lid may hold the answer you seek.

“But, I’m not Leadership material!”

“I don’t want to be front and center!”

“I kinda like it where I am. I just want to lose weight.”

Leaders come in all shapes and sizes, and they don’t always have the corner office or the penthouse view. They are not always the glamorous one or the smartest one. Many times you’ll find them sitting at the next desk from you in the office. The person you go to when you can’t talk to your boss about a problem, the person you all look to instinctively when you hear about some company news - that’s a Leader.

Leaders inspire others to move in the same direction towards the same goal.

Leaders are able to get the kind of results and achievements out of themselves and the people around them. That’s because Leaders start with themselves first. Then, they share it with others. Right now, though, all you have to do is focus on yourself.

Take a look at the figure below.

On the left, you see “Success WITHOUT Leadership”. Even though the Success Dedication, or Desire to Succeed, is high, the effectiveness level is low because your Leadership Ability is low.

On the right, we’ve increased the Leadership Ability and maintained the Success Dedication. Look at how much more effective Success is with Leadership. Your level of success just grows exponentially.

Whatever your Success Desire is, there is nothing to say that you won’t achieve a certain level of success. However, your effectiveness and ability to move beyond success to significance is limited. You can achieve so much more by raising your Lid. You can overflow your jar with significance if you put your mind to it.

How Do I Raise My Lid?

There are several things you can do to help raise your Lid. And, one of the best things you can do is to value your experience with Reflection. 

Reflection is probably the most underutilized tool in our society today because it requires thinking.

A 2010 survey of 1700 white-collar workers revealed that on average employees spend more than half their workdays receiving and managing information rather than using it to do their jobs, suggesting that we spend less time actually thinking and more time just rearranging information in our minds.

Reflection

Thinking into your experience is critically important to refining your approaches and getting better. It's the equivalent to purposeful practice, in that your brain doesn’t know the difference between an experience in reality or an experience in thought. 

I practice reflection regularly. It started with reflecting at the end of every month. I would reflect on what went well, what didn’t go so well, what I could have done better, what I wanted to do, and everything that I was able to accomplish. I asked myself tons of good and hard questions that helped me think into the experiences I had over the past month.

Through reflection, I realized that I was just pushing things from one month to the next. I was getting caught up in the day to day activities, or spending too much time on one particular project when I may have allocated a certain amount of time to get that done in that month. I was spending too much time on it, and that means that other things I planned to do for the month couldn’t happen.

It doesn’t add value to the experience if you keep pushing stuff from month to month. Through the process of reflection, I was able to spot this trend, and I realized that I had to do something different. So, I initially started reflecting on a weekly basis then ultimately settling on reflecting on a day-to-day basis.

The power of reflection lies in really looking in your past to create your future.

When we reflect, we ask questions about what happened in the past, or more specifically, we ask questions about what we did yesterday and how could I have done yesterday better. The insight within the answers to those questions is your preparation for tomorrow.

REFLECTION = ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT YESTERDAY X PREPARING FOR TOMORROW

So, there’s something that you didn’t do so well - you make a note of that. More than likely, you’ll face a similar situation sometime later, which you’ll be prepared for. You might realize that you were able to get everything that you wanted to get done yesterday, but you were up all night. You have to find a way to be more efficient, or spending less time on those tasks. By looking at yesterday, you can prepare for tomorrow. That is where the power of reflection adds value to your experiences.

One crucial note here - do not discount the little things that you do on a daily basis. Don’t just overlook them. You want to really focus on them. If they’re not adding value to your day, if they’re not within the structure or goals that you want to accomplish, then you’ve really got to ask, “Is it worth it?”

You might say, “I have these goals”, “I want to reflect every day, but I’m finding that I can’t”, or “I just have so many things distracting me, so many things pop up, that I am not able to get what I want done.”

This is where your Leadership Ability has to kick in. You have to decide what is most important.

This is where you improve as a leader because you can discern what’s important and what’s not important – what’s a priority for now and what is a priority for later.

You may be saying, “Well, everything’s important.”

That’s not leadership. Leaders know what’s important and what’s not. Everything cannot be important and besides if everything is important, nothing is actually important.

Stop Doing List

Through Reflection, you can also get a Stop Doing List.

Everybody has a To Do List, a grocery list, an Action List, and so on. These are great tools to assist in prioritizing the list of things that you need to accomplish. It keeps you focused on your day. But, a Stop Doing List is equally important, if not more so.

The number one thing on my Stop Doing List is to stop spending so much time on emails. Through my reflections, I realized that part of the reason why I was pushing a lot of my tasks from month to month because I was spending a tremendous amount of time on writing and responding to emails. That’s the perfectionist in me. I want the email to be just right because I’m not talking to that person face-to-face. And, it was preventing me from doing the things that I really needed to do. So, that had to go on to my Stop Doing List.

Now, I check emails once in the morning and, maybe, once at night. That’s it. And, it’s working. I’m getting a lot more done because I’ve put those constraints in place in my workday. It has allowed me to flourish and be a lot more productive.

To help you identify the things you should stop doing, ask yourself these questions:

• What am doing today?
• How am I allocating my time toward what I'm doing today?
• Are there things that I need to stop doing?

Lid-Lifters

According to American entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn, we are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. So, it’s also good to reflect on the people in your life. More specifically, reflect on the people who have been lid-lifters in your life.

These are people who have helped you achieve your goals, or encourage you in your endeavors.

Not all lid-lifters are cheerleaders. Some may have helped lift your lid by giving you some hard advice or constructive criticism.

Here are a couple of questions to help you reflect on the people in your life.

• What characteristics make them a lid-lifter?
• Who is adding to your life?

In addition, there is two more very important questions;

Who is taking away from your life?

Who is keeping that lid on top of you?

The answer to those questions should be very clear in your mind. My hope is that you really surround yourself with lid-lifters: people that add value to you, people that care about you, people that want to see you succeed. But, the reality is we don’t always have that.

Some of the closest people in our lives may care about us, but they’re invested in us staying at a particular level. They like you like that and frankly, no one really likes change... especially when it's a change not for their advantage. So, they may not be open to you doing something different.

But, the question doesn’t change. Who’s adding to your value? Who’s lifting you?

Invest in Yourself

Your most valuable asset is yourself, your skills, talents, knowledge, and experiences. So, the best thing to do for yourself is to invest in training.

Raising your lid means doing something beyond yourself. You need to stretch yourself. Do you have a goal that you have never achieved? That’s a good place to start practicing your leadership abilities.

Challenges and goals are things that make you be a better leader. Following through with these things help you to stretch and develop beyond your current self.

I once asked an athlete I coached, “Don’t you wish that you can go play one game a year and then go to the All-Star game, or sit in a classroom one day a month and get all A's?”

Wouldn’t that be great? To be able to just train for an hour or a day, and then be the champion you always knew you were?

The reality is that there is no success in doing something once. Doing something over and over again, to gain mastery, is difficult. It’s hard. No one likes to be uncomfortable. No one. Not even me. And, I talk to people about shaking their worlds up constantly.

What you need to understand is that the discomfort is temporary. Everything that is worthwhile is up-hill. If it wasn’t, everybody would be successful. Everybody would be leaders. But, it’s not.

Greatness has to go through a town called Discomfort.

Now, remember, we don’t stay in discomfort, we go through it. To get to greatness - to get to something beyond yourself - we have to go through it. And, that will set you apart, because 90% of people are just not willing to be vulnerable enough to do it. They are just not willing to be uncomfortable temporarily, to get to the level that they want to be. They can desire it all they want. The Success Desire may be really, really high, but if they don’t have the Leadership Ability, that’s all it is. It just a desire. You have to walk through that town. You have to get through it.

Let’s Raise the Lid

I’ve worked with a number of professionals, helping them and their organizations to become better versions of themselves and realizing their Leadership Abilities. Success may not come in a day, but it will come. It may be uncomfortable now, but, remember, you only need to pass through the town called Discomfort. You don’t have to stay there.

If you’re interested in raising your lid and becoming the best leader that you can be, then connect with me or just send me a message for a quick and friendly chat. No strings attached. No purchase necessary. Just drop me a note. I am more than happy to listen and share.

Have an extraordinary day! And, remember - Excellence is a Habit.

Malcolm Tyson has always had a passion for helping others. As he worked his way through his educational and professional careers, that passion grew into a deep desire to help businesses grow into strong job-creating, revenue-injecting contributors to the economy. As a certified speaker, consultant, and leadership trainer with the John Maxwell Team, he is passionate about growing small businesses and formulating the actions and attitudes that help small business owners become successful, both personally and professionally. He has over 20 years of professional operations experience and is currently conducting research in fulfillment of his Ph.D. in Business & Technology specializing in Strategy and Innovation. He approaches small enterprises from the perspective of improving their people, processes, and tools by focusing on strategic execution and leadership development. In his spare time, as Certified Personal Trainer and Performance Enhancement Specialist, he coaches and mentors athletes to realize their potential as athletes and even more importantly, as people. He enjoys golfing, reading, writing, and spending time with his family.