Focus on Your Best

As you lead — your team, your organization, your project, your work — you likely devote more of your time to your underperformers and less on your superstars.

When we tend our gardens, we know that nourishing the strongest plants yields the best harvest.

What if we gave ourselves permission to spend more of our time with our best leaders? Those leaders:

• who “require” very little time, but who reliably deliver
• whose customers are consistently delighted
• whose staff are continually growing and becoming capable of taking on more.

These are the leaders who are never satisfied with good. They are driven to improve — themselves, their teams, the way work is accomplished, the plans they are leading — really, in every dimension. They are often innovating with new approaches to benefit those they serve.

These are not the leaders that demand your time. In fact, they use every minute of your time with great care, with great intention, for maximum value.

Focusing on your best leaders, (and those right behind them who show greatest potential to become high-performing leaders), this is where your time and energy is best spent!

Your attention here will pay great dividends.

In your time together:

• They will soak up insights into where you see the organization going and what you are contemplating.
• They will ascertain how best to align their efforts and teams in order to contribute exponentially.
• They will test out new ideas with you as a sounding board — combining their ideas and your insights to create possibilities not yet envisioned.

You will learn from them as much as they will learn from you.

You may learn new insights about the customers they serve and those customers’ needs.

You may discover a member of their team who is primed and ready to take on a special project or an expanded role or is ready for a next-level promotion.

When you open the door to dialog, without a rushed agenda, you may discover how well their needs are being met (or not). You may uncover what they see as their ideal role, and how you might be able to help them to realize that.

You may unearth unique approaches that they utilize which can be replicated in other areas of the organization.

The possibilities are endless when we focus more of our time on our best (and high potential) leaders.

Instead, these are the individuals who often get the least of our time and attention.

We spend countless hours, both in-person and over sleepless nights, on those who are not living up to what we need from them. We seek to motivate, and coax, and counsel our underperformers. We expend our finite time and energy.

In doing so, we may miss the opportunity to cultivate those who will yield the bountiful harvest.

If you'd like to receive these Inspirations in your inbox every other week, you can subscribe to Kathy's Excellence Advantage Inspirations Newsletter.

Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.

Feel free to contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.