5 Most Challenging Lessons I Learned in Leadership
In the last episode, we’re moving into a new year. We looked at five ideas that I got wrong about leadership. We’re going to go a little bit deeper in this episode and we’re going to talk about five more ideas, but these are challenging lessons that I learned um in the last decade and I want to go straight into that content to value your time. Uh the first thing is this.
I used to think and it was painful to learn this personally but I used to think that I had to be involved in almost everything organizationally and that was just naive. I learned number one is this very important lesson. You must discern uh what deserves altitude and what deserves attention.
You have to look at your own leadership, your time, your organization, your people and discern and the answers may change over time. uh but what deserves altitude and what deserves attention. And the reason this is painful is because we as leaders want to believe that we’re more important than we really are. And the truth is you are important in your leadership, but you’re often important for different reasons than you understand.
And so to be really really clear, um whenever you’re starting, you’re launching an organization, um you’re in the early season, you want to be involved um in the day-to-day details. you have to be because without you things aren’t going to work. But as your organization grows and matures, you don’t want to just be in the details.
In fact, at often times you have to rise above the details and you actually have to stay out of them. So let’s talk about altitude first. Um for our context, altitude means staying above the noise or staying out of the details. um staying above the chaos, the smaller problems that are not missional uh that are not mission critical.
You’re staying out of the just the everyday activity. And it’s important to maintain altitude often, not all the time, but if you can stay above it, what’s going to happen is you’re going to get a different perspective on it, and you’re going to start to see trends that are forming. You’re going to see patterns that are emerging, either positive patterns or negative patterns.
you’re going to start to see opportunities that are coming. Um, leaders need to do this. You should be seeing things first and more often than most people. And the only way you do that is to get above it. Um, in the book, it’s an old book. If you haven’t read it, uh, if you please do.
It’s called the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Um, one of the many valuable principles he talks about scaling um, and systems. He says in your business or in your nonprofit um most people just are are working in it. But what you have to do is you want to work on it, not just in it. Work on it, not just in it. To work on it, you have to get above it. And this is so important.
And this is where I got it wrong. Um early and in the maturing season in in the beginning years, I stayed too low for too long. This was a problem. I stayed too low for too long. I was overly involved in details that I should have been delegating and and trusting others. Then later on when I learned okay I need to rise above it.
Then later on I made the opposite mistake and I stayed too high or too removed for too long. So early on it was too involved for too long. Later on it was too uninvolved for too long. Uh both created problems. And so as a leader what you want to do is you have to learn when to rise and when to dive. when to stay above and when to get involved.
