Are You the Smartest Person in the Room?
With all your best efforts, you might not be aware that you are diminishing the potential of your team or coworkers.
Symptoms of a Diminisher;
You come up with ideas for new strategies or products ?
You are a proactive manager who embraces a "can-do" attitude, recognizing possibilities and firmly believing that most challenges can be overcome through dedication and the right mindset.
As the leader, you establish both the pace and the benchmark for producing work of exceptional quality.
You see your role as protecting your employees from distraction and negative influences from people in the broader organization.
You react quickly when problems or opportunities surface by making rapid decisions that keep the organization moving forward.
You appreciate excellence and exactness, so you offer helpful critiques and point out mistakes to help people improve their work.
When you see people failing, you jump in to rescue them or the project in order to help them avert failure and get on the path of success.
You are a big thinker and lay out a compelling vision of the future that you evangelize to those around you.
You’re passionate, energetic, and articulate and can consume a lot of space in a meeting.
You are respectful of organization boundaries and hierarchy. When you need to staff a project, you generally turn to the people who work directly for you or the people with the most seniority.
Some leaders drain all the intelligence and creativity out of their teams and organizations because they insist on trying to be the smartest person in the room. These leaders can be termed “diminishers.” At the other end of the spectrum are leaders who bring out the best in their people and help them get smarter. This second group of leaders can be termed “multipliers”. In a study of more than 150 senior leaders across 35 companies, it was qualitatively shown a definite “Multiplier Effect” exists. Specifically, leaders who act as multipliers get at least twice as much productivity as diminishers and in some cases multipliers get a lot more than that from their people. In obvious and direct ways, it pays to be a multiplier.
*Thanks to Liz Wiseman, Lois Allen, Elise Foster for the marvelous book "The Multiplier Effect"
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