As a visionary, this is my Achilles’ heel
My biggest strength in leadership—and my Achilles’ heel—is that I am an activator.
I learned how to put words to this strength thanks to Gallup’s CliftonStrengths. Being an activator means that I’m really good at starting new things and getting projects off the ground. When I have a new idea for our team, my first thought is, “How soon can we start?” It’s why my role in our company is Chief of Vision.
It’s a great strength to have… and it can also really stress out my team.
Over the years, I’ve learned to be mindful of how I harness my activator instincts, but I don’t always get it right. In fact, I had one of those moments just last quarter. Here’s what happened:
In Q3, in addition to tackling our usual responsibilities, my team and I did a lot: We adopted a new software to take our internal processes to the next level; made a big push on Book #2; developed a new meeting structure to help with operations, logistics, and content for my speaking events; and planned a new kind of retreat for a handful of speakers who want to grow their skills.
All of that was exhilarating for me—and exciting for the team—but what I did next is what got me.
On day one of Q4, I asked, “What’s next?” All I could think about was what we could launch this quarter.
I followed my usual process: I shared the ideas I was really excited about with Monique, our Chief of Growth and my thought partner in the business, and I asked her to help me make a plan for how to start them. (I recently wrote about how Monique and I work together to bring my ideas to life here.) Monique’s role is to give me feedback on whether we should move forward with my ideas and implement them or pump the brakes.
After such an exciting and productive quarter, I was excited to keep up our momentum and keep pushing—until I heard Monique’s response. Instead of giving her input, she told me that she was feeling overwhelmed. She said that adding new projects on top of everything we had just launched would only overwhelm her—and the team—even more. She encouraged me to think about using this quarter to focus on completing the projects that were already in progress to give them the best chance of success.
I really appreciated Monique’s candor. Anytime someone on our team says that they are feeling overwhelmed, I take that to heart. One of our commitments to each other is to remain a calm organization, and that means that we think intentionally about our capacity. We try not to do things that cause unnecessary stress.
So instead of launching anything new this quarter, we decided to maximize the projects we already started. The result is that this quarter has felt so calm. Now that it’s almost done, I can’t imagine taking on anything new on top of what we’re already doing.
This experience highlights something important about my leadership style: My activation strength is a tension that I have to learn how to manage better.
I often talk about this idea of tensions to manage vs. problems to solve. Tensions are things that help more than they hurt. We don’t want to remove them; we just need to manage them. Problems, on the other hand, are unnecessary obstacles that shouldn’t exist. We need to work together to solve problems and remove them.
I consider my activation strength a tension, not a problem. It’s critical to the success of our business because we need new ideas to continue to grow. At the same time, I need to be mindful of my activation style so that I know when to dial it back and keep myself from overwhelming my team.
When Monique told me she was feeling overwhelmed, she helped me see that the team needed a break. We had been in sprint mode for much of the last quarter, and it wouldn’t have been productive or fair to try to maintain that pace. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of how hard the team had been working, but the reality is that once I come up with an idea, I’m often not very involved in its execution, unless it’s directly related to me or my role. When I’m off in idea land, I’m not always mindful of what the team is working on right then and what their capacity for new things might be. It’s not healthy to constantly live in sprint mode; we need breaks and periods of calm where we focus on executing and sustaining.
Bringing all of my new ideas to Monique is one of the ways I’ve learned to manage the tension that comes with my biggest strength. I rely on her feedback to tell me when there is something I’m not self-aware of. In addition, we’ve incorporated capacity check-ins into our weekly team meetings, and it’s been awesome. The way it works is we ask everyone to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how overwhelmed or not they feel. A 10 means you are so burned out that you have work coming out of your eyeballs, and 1 means that you have so little to do that you’re spending your workdays floating in a pool.
The key is that I can’t learn how to manage this tension alone. I need my team and their perspectives and feedback.
As leaders, we all have unique, important strengths that make us who we are. But if we’re not mindful, our strengths can also become our Achilles’ heels.
How about you? What strength of yours comes to mind as you read this post? What is the natural tension you think you might need to be mindful of so that you can better manage it? Hit reply and tell us! We love reading what resonates with you.
Speaking of keeping things calm and not overwhelming myself or the team . . . I've decided to take a break from this blog while our team is on our holiday break for the next three weeks! Our break starts December 23rd, and we will return to work on January 13th.
In the spirit of this post, I want to talk more about this decision and why I made it. Looking in from the outside, taking a break from a blog is no big deal. But to me, it signifies a lot of the personal growth that I’ve had in 2024 especially.
So here’s the context: At the end of the year, we always take a three-week break to give everyone a chance to recharge and come back ready to serve. In the past, my team and I have worked together to schedule blog posts to go out during our break. I prepare them ahead of time and we include a note with each one that reminds our readers that we are taking time off.
In doing so, I suppose I’ve subconsciously made it a “rule” in my mind that blogs must go out during our breaks to keep up with the precedent I’ve set. Doing this doesn’t usually feel stressful because we plan ahead. But this year, I started to feel differently as I was preparing blogs for our break. Trying to come up with these posts was much harder than it’s been in years past, and that’s because I’ve been activating and working on the exciting projects I’ve written about in today’s post. I hit a point where I felt creatively tapped out.
And so, I’ve decided to press pause so that I can honor that feeling instead of forcing myself to push through. This year more than any other, I’ve realized that sometimes, the best thing I can do is break the “rules” I’ve set for myself in favor of rest. Doing so holds me accountable to continuing to show up at my best for myself and for you—and it also models the behaviors I hope to see in the leaders I most admire.
The cool thing is that this doesn’t mean I’ll always pause the blog on our breaks. What it means is that I’ll follow how it feels instead of making a hard-and-fast rule one way or the other. When it feels stressful or like a heavy lift, I will pause. When it feels calm, natural, and in flow, I will continue on.
I hope that this inspires you in some way to break a rule that you’ve set for yourself and carve out some time for YOU. I hope you can give yourself permission to stop “doing.” There are times to activate and times to slow down, and this year has taught me that we can’t do one without the other.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this year with me and with us. This blog is one of my most favorite places to be, and I treasure the conversations that we have here. I can’t wait to see you back here upon our return! January 14th, 2025—the first Tuesday of our first week back—I’ll meet you right here.
Happy holidays, happy New Year, and I can’t wait to do 2025 together!
Big hugs,
