Lessons on Leadership from the Little Things in Life: Work Within Your Strengths
Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. With that in mind, I want to take some time to do just that – share examples of circumstances and stories experienced in everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those examples, and it serves as a reminder that you will typically work best if you work within your strengths.
My younger brother is two years younger than me, but when we were kids it seemed like we were always viewed as a pair. At Christmas time, we would get the same clothes, but in different colors (it seemed like often I would get the blue shirt and he would get the green one). We would get different versions of the same toys, like G.I. Joe action figures. And sometimes people would even refer to us as a pair, calling us things like “mutt and Jeff.”
However, and in spite of the fact that we were often connected together, it became apparent as we grew older that we had very different personalities and traits. I was as introverted as he was extroverted. I was an internal processor, and he was an external communicator. I was reserved, and he was expressive. I strategized, and he motivated. Clearly, we were two different people with different sets of strengths. As we grew older, we learned to use those differences to our advantage, whether it was to sell candy bars for a school fundraiser or to do a presentation in our youth group. We learned to work together, with each of us using our strengths, so that together we could be more successful.
That’s an important concept for your leadership. Like everyone else, you have strengths and you have weaknesses. You will tend to be more successful if you learn to work in a way that uses your strengths, while working with someone else who has strengths where you have weaknesses. When you do that, your strengths can compliment and offset each other. The end result is that you become better working together than you would have been working alone. But that can only happen if you know and work with your own strengths and are willing to let others work with theirs.
That’s the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from the way in which my strengths were complimented by my younger brother’s. It’s like when my dad was teaching me how to use a saw, and I remember him saying, “Let the saw do the work.” Rather than fighting against the saw blade, he was trying to teach me how to let the tool work in the way that it was designed, and to let it do its job. Learn to see your strengths in the same way. You have been designed and equipped to function best in a particular way, so as much as possible, let that be the way that you operate, and be willing to let others do the same. If you want to work your best, work within your strengths.
