The secret to becoming a leader others admire

Are you tired of admiring others' seemingly effortless skills at work, wishing you had the same natural talent? The truth is, success often stems from a blend of learning and diligent practice, not just innate ability.

In this Two-Minute, I share lessons learned from cooking to giving feedback that reinforce the fact that most skills—including leadership—require more than intuition.

  • Do you ever look around at work and admire others who can do [fill in the blank] just perfectly with such ease, and you think, ah, I wish I had that same natural talent, that same special gifting that they have?

    Well, the truth is, yes, I'm sure there is some natural talent involved there, but likely there also is a mix of diligence, hard work, learning, and practice that got them to that point of delivering with such ease and excellence.

    I can remember when my girls were really young, when they were babies. I used to create these pancakes for them, and my goal was not to create the most delicious pancake ever. My goal was to stuff them with as much nutritional value as possible. And so I would throw in, you know, spinach and quinoa and whatever else that would still stick together, but was packed with nutritional value. Well, as they've gotten older, I can't quite do that full intuitive cooking with them. I'm not really a natural chef, however, I love to cook. But for me, when I follow a recipe and just add in a little bit of my own flavor and spice, when I follow a framework, a guide, it absolutely produces a better end result.

    It's the same thing with leadership. We need to stop expecting ourselves to just be able to manage and lead perfectly based on intuition. Leadership is often a learned and developed skill. There are proven practices and frameworks that can help.

    Even just recently, I was helping an executive plan out a difficult feedback conversation that he was going to have, and we came up with a loose script for him to follow. Was he going to read it word for word? Absolutely not. But having that script, those thoughts, some of those words and statements in his mind in advance, helped him deliver the feedback more effectively.

    This is what you will find in my program, The Management Essentials, and I want to invite you to check it out now for a $1 month trial. That's my special currently. You can check it out for $1 for a month and give it a whirl: https://www.themanagementessentials.com. Inside you will find those step-by-step processes, proven frameworks, best practices that you can follow and learn, and then implement with a little bit of your own flavor.

    Let's stop trying to just expect ourselves to have the natural talent and intuition to lead and manage with ease and effectiveness, and instead take the time to learn and study some proven practices and frameworks that will enable us to really level up our leadership, to take our management to the next level.

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