Next Generation Leader

YOU ARE DOING TOO MUCH!The secret of concentration is elimination.

[Dr. Howard Hendricks]
It is both natural and necessary for young leaders to try to prove themselves by doing everything themselves. It is natural because, as a leader, you want to set the pace even as you demonstrate that nothing is beneath you. It is necessary because most of the time nobody is around to help. But what may initially be natural and necessary will ultimately limit your effectiveness.
Perhaps the two best-kept secrets of leadership are these:

1. The less you do, the more you accomplish.

2. The less you do, the more you enable others to accomplish.

As a young leader, my biggest mistake was allowing my time to be eaten up with things outside my core competen- cies. I devoted an inordinate amount of my first seven years in ministry to things I was not good at―things I would never be good at. At the same time, I invested little energy in developing my strengths.
I am a good communicator. I am not a good manager.

I am a good visioncaster. I am not good at follow-up. I know how to prepare a message. I am not good at planning an event.
And yet early on I did nothing to hone my communica- tion skills. Instead, I spent a great deal of time trying to become a better manager and a better event planner. When it came to communication, I would often wing it because the time I should have used to prepare talks had been con- sumed by other things. And this was the one area in which I could wing it.
The problem was that somewhere along the way I had bought into the myth that a good leader has to be good at everything. So I operated under the assumption that I had to upgrade my weaknesses into strengths. After all, who would follow a leader who wasn’t well-rounded?