Do You Embrace Responsibility?

How do you increase your influence? – Embrace Responsibility

We have talked about building trust and increasing our influence a lot, because they are the essence of leadership. When it comes to building trust with our boss, what is the easiest way to do that? GET RESULTS!

When it comes stopping your boss from micro-managing you and the team, what is the easiest way to do that? GET RESULTS! When it comes to increasing our influence with our boss, what is the easiest way to do that? GET RESULTS!

If you were the boss and one of your team members is getting excellent results for you, what would you do next? It’s pretty obvious, you would ask that team members to take on more work or be involved in more projects.

The reason for that is because as a team, your ultimate role is to get results for the organisation, no matter what field you are in. So, you would encourage the team members who gets the best results to do more so they can achieve similar results in further projects.

Being a boss and encouraging your best people to take on more work will encourage the rest of the team to work harder, and hopefully increase their potential to get the same or similar results.

However, in my experience, I have worked in teams with individuals who will not put the extra effort in to get good results. They do this because they know what will happen if they do get good results.

They know that their boss will ask them to do more if they do an excellent job. So, to avoid being asked to do more work, they will do just enough to get the job done to a satisfactory level.

By doing just enough ensures that they are still part of the team, still in a job, and still being paid for their efforts. It also gives the impression that they do a good job every day, but they know they can do a lot more, and a lot better with more effort.

I’m not suggesting that these individuals are poor or are the wrong people to be in the team, they are just not high flyers or looking to make a difference.

They are average doing an average or a just enough kind of job. If we had a full team of average people who were not achieving the best results they could, then something would need to change.

Doing a good job is just average, doing an excellent job is just excellent. What kind of job would you rather do?

To be a leader within your team we need to increase our influence with the leaders of our department and the organisation as a whole. How do you do that?

You become an excellent team member and hard worker who achieves excellent results. You do not do that by being an average team member who achieves average results.

To be a high flyer, you need to make sure that people know who you are, they know the impact you have made already, and they know that you have the potential to make an even bigger impact.

If you are working with average people in your team then they will leave the pathway open for you to get noticed and make that big impact.

All the best,

Tom Lawrence (Highly Effective Leader)