“Leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness.”
This is the first law of leadership according to the sagacious John C Maxwell, an author, speaker, and pastor who has written numerous best selling books on leadership.
In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, Maxwell asserts that the lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his or her potential. Therefore, the higher the leadership ability, the greater the effectiveness.
This means that if the leader’s ability, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 4 then their effectiveness will never be more than a 3. However if that same leader can increase his or her leadership ability to an 8 or a 9, their effectiveness will in turn increase to a 7 or 8.
This profound lesson is vital for every leader to understand and apply. If you are not being the best leader that you can be, this has a direct impact on how effective your team and your business can be.
The aim of this article to provide insights into how you can apply the law of the lid to improve your leadership effectiveness.
The Laws are built on four foundational principles:
- The laws can be learnt – some are easier to understand and apply than others, but everyone of them can be mastered.
- The laws can stand alone – each law compliments all the others, but you don’t need one in order to learn the other
- The laws carry consequences – if you ignore them you will be unable to lead well. If you implement them people will follow you
- These laws are the foundation of leadership – once you learn the principles, you have to apply them to your life to achieve your full potential as a leader
Where is your lid?
As a leader, one of the hardest things to admit is that you lack leadership effectiveness. If the team or the business is not succeeding, then you, as the leader, need to take responsibility and work on your own effectiveness first. The starting point is to assess where you leadership lid is. This can be achieved by getting feedback from others, particularly those you lead.
Raising your lid to increase your effectiveness
Once you have determined where your lid is you need to take action. Here are 4 practical actions that you can take to raise your lid:
Understand your leadership style
Once you understand the major characteristics of your dominant style, explore how these qualities are helping or hindering, then you can begin looking for ways to improve your capabilities.
Try new things
As well as learning from the things that have been effective in the past, be on the lookout for new ways to improve, inspire, motivate and grow.
Develop your knowledge
Leadership development is a never-ending journey. Focus on enhancing your effectiveness by reading books written by great leaders, join a leadership mastermind group, seeking out exemplary leaders and asking for advice.
Hire an executive coach
Working with an executive coach has a range of benefits, including gaining an objective perspective, leveraging existing strengths and improving performance, creating an executive strategy and action plan, getting regular and on-going feedback and support.
Conclusion
Low level leadership ability brings only limited effectiveness.
The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. There more ambitious your business goals, the more effective your leadership needs to be.