Are You Holding Yourself Back? Part 1
Have you hit a wall? Has progress ground to a halt? Is your team stuck? Mired in an inability to make decisions? Maybe it isn’t them. It’s you. Leaders, especially ones that experience a level of success, often unknowingly began to hold themselves back with beliefs, operational methods, or task orientation. These things might have worked at a second, or third, tier of leadership but have stopped working as more responsibility has come to the leader. The worst thing a leader can do is to stop learning. You never “arrive” at an apex of leadership ability. There is no mountaintop. Particularly in church leadership.
Are you confident enough to say, “I don’t know”?
Do you know your own emotional strengths and weaknesses?
Do you understand your giftedness?
Leaders who stall out in their own growth and development might achieve greater levels of position, but will stop growing in influence. Leaders develop blind spots the longer they lead people. And it can be very easy to try and blame outside factors for that tall in your leadership growth, or the growth of the organization. But it is rarely an outside factor that stalls out the leader. Nearly always, it is internal blocks that exist in the belief system of the leader that impacts growth both inwardly and outwardly. In other words, you are to blame, not others, not circumstances, and not attitudes. Your own beliefs are holding you back. Maybe some of these will hit home. Some won’t. Let’s take a look at beliefs that will hold you back in leadership.
I have to decide
There are plenty of decisions you make as a leader. But the higher you go up the ladder the fewer you should be making. This idea isn’t about what’s to eat for lunch, or which route to take home. These are the organizational decisions. The belief here is that you have to be a part of the decision-making at all levels. If you, as a senior leader, feel you need to decide what paper needs to be ordered for the copier you are way too far in to the weeds and you are hurting the organization. Basically, you are creating a logjam right at you for everyone else. Decisions will be delayed, or won’t even get tried because the staff doesn’t want to have to deal with your micromanaging. Pretty soon, they won’t even offer ideas. Why bother trying to decide something when you are just going to overrule, or change everything out from underneath them?
The truth here is that while, as the leader, you have the right to be engaged in the decisions, you can’t be a part of everything. You don’t have the capacity and the team isn’t always interested in you being a part of it. Empower the team to decide things on their own. Let them own both the decision and the results. Encourage them when good decisions are made. Celebrate it. Stand with them and evaluate what happened when bad ones are made. Learn from them. You have limits. God-given limits. And you need to accept and recognize that you being a part of every decision is bad for the organization. That doesn’t mean don’t be involved in any decisions. But by freeing yourself from micromanaging everything you will be able to build guardrails that help define what sort of decisions you should be involved with and where to not be involved. That margin will help you grow as a leader and your team grow as well.
This is urgent
Very little in life and leadership is actually urgent. VERY LITTLE. Some things really are. There is no reason to form a committee to discuss whether the water should be turned off when a pipe freezes and breaks. That is urgent and demands quick action. But believing that everything is urgent and demands immediate results creates a greater margin for error, frustration, and burnout. Not just in you, but in the team as well. How many times have you launched a program, new ministry, or outreach at your church and it didn’t get the kind of results expected soon enough so you assumed it was a failure? How many times as a church member come to you with an “urgent” issue that they just know needs to be addressed as soon as possible by anyone other than themself? Demanding immediate action on everything will create a false sense of urgency in everything. Eventually nothing will really matter. You will all lose sight of the things that are really important in the light of all the busyness. The team will burnout.
The truth is that not nearly as much is as urgent, or important, as some might make it out to be. As an organization, especially a faith-based one, you should be seeking to define and understand what is truly important both for the organization and for your own lives. If the busyness of the office begins damaging your family at home it is vital to recognize that God isn’t going to ask how you did at leading that team instead of your family. Not everything is urgent. Not everything deserves top billing. As a second, or third, tier leader you will find your time focused on a lot of second and third tier decisions and ideas. As you move into more senior level leadership roles you will have to learn to let go of a lot of things so your time and energy can go to bigger and more important decisions. But again, not every decision, action, or meeting is truly urgent. Trying to treat everything like it is will sabotage your team and your own growth.
Growing as a leader requires that you never stop seeking to learn. Learning about your own tendencies, giftedness, background, and experiences is vital. Often, a leader stops learning and develops blind spots. These areas end up stalling the leader out. But you can restart your learning and work to overcome these false beliefs to grow as a leader. Stay tuned for the next few beliefs that hold a leader back.