Years ago I went to a seminar that John Maxwell, a leadership authority, was giving in town. He said something that has stuck with me for years and this article on the Harvard Business Review’s blog reminded me of it. The article is titled, Become An Extraordinary Leader, and talks about working on our strengths—rather than our weaknesses—to become the best leader that we can be.
Now, this is counterintuitive, I know…we’re wired to want to work on those things that we’re not good at. In school, our teachers never would have told us to focus on Math because we were just awful at English. At home, our parents never would have told us to forget about the C’s on our report card…look at all of those A’s!
But in sport we do say, this is where your particular skill set could help us out—focus on getting better at those things and our team will thrive. A volleyball team doesn’t have a floor full of setters out there, and football doesn’t have a team of centers on the field, and basketball won’t start a team of point guards. We tell them, this is your niche, now get really good at it.
So why would leadership be any different? After studying thousands of leaders, they found the qualities that separated the good ones from the great ones.
5 skills that extraordinary leaders have that we can cultivate in ourselves and others
- Developing others. If we don’t see our jobs as developing leaders (and just better human beings in general) under the guise of coaching, then I think we’ve got our priorities all mixed up. Our players are blank slates that we get to show the beauty (and work) of leadership…let’s be sure to make it a priority.
- Building relationships. I think it would be pretty tough to create an atmosphere where we could truly develop our players without having a good relationship with them. Sometimes, younger coaches think that means we have to be friends with our teams, I’d totally disagree with that…we can’t be friends when we have the power of playing time. But we can create wonderful relationship with our players built of care and respect.
- Communicating powerfully. To me, this means communicating clearly, concisely, and when necessary, emotionally. Whether we’re talking to our players about playing time, academic issues, or how their parents are doing, our players should enter and exit every conversation with us knowing exactly what the talk was about and if they have any action items from that meeting.
- Being decisive. Here’s an excerpt from my post, 3 Techniques Of Good Coaches: your team “wants to believe that you know what you’re doing and that you believe in what you’re doing. As coaches, it’s our job to explain the benefits of a decision and go with it. If we believe that a certain defense or offense or lineup is in the best interest of the team, it’s our job to “sell” it to the team in a manner that they understand and can get behind. We’ve got to alert them to the strengths and weaknesses of our plan, but also be enthusiastic and authoritative with our decision.”
- Being optimistic. This one goes a long way, in my opinion. The season is harsh enough on our players and ourselves…we’ve got to give our team perspective. It’s never as good as it seems…or as bad as it seems. Regardless of where we are in our season, keeping our goals at the forefront will help our teams stay optimistic about the future.
Since we’re all leaders, we should all want to build up our leadership muscles so that we can be the best we can be for our teams.
