Cultivating Effective Leadership #7 – Your What

Great leaders keep themselves and their organizations focused on two things – their why and their what.

If my passion as a leader is to enrich the lives of the elderly, I can live out that passion doing many things. I can run an assisted living facility, provide immersion tours to exciting places, create mobility devices, supply hearing aids, etc. The list could get very long. To be truly great at any of these, I need to focus my efforts – choose one thing I can excel at and enjoy doing. With my why and what clear, I now have the foundation for a great organization. As a leader, all I need to do is bring people into my organization who share my core values and passion and have the capacity to do my what very well.

Here are your takeaway points for this week:

• If your organization was started without a clear why and what, sit down, with your leadership team if you have one, and clarify your why (your purpose, cause, or passion) and what you are going to excel at to fulfil your why. Pick something you can be great at and focus your organization on that. Contact me if you need some help.
• If you have added people to your organization who don’t share your core values and why, these people are wrong for your organization. They will slow you down and make your journey more difficult. Replace them with people who care about what you care about.
• If you have added people who don’t do what you do very well, train them to increase their capacity or replace them with people who really get what you do, want to do what you do, and are really good at doing what you do.

Encouragement: When you have a clear why and what, and the right people on board, leading and managing is so much easier.