The First Law of Leadership

In John Maxwell’s “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”, he notes the first law of leadership is “The Law of the Lid”.

This law states that “leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness. The lower an individual’s ability to lead, the lower the lid on his or her potential.” 

This idea is not very comforting for some leaders, because no matter how much you’d like to be a 10 on the leadership scale, your ability to rise to a 10 is based on a number of factors including how great your people skills and planning abilities are, the clarity of your vision, your dedication to success, and your past results. Very few leaders are a 10. 

If you leverage this law of leadership to assess your own leadership, then you’ll have a clear idea of who your followers are, where they might be on the leadership scale, and the areas where you can grow to raise your leadership lid. 

The reality is that if you are currently a 7 on the leadership scale, you can offer valuable leadership to those who are at a level of 5 or 6 but in most cases you won’t be able to lead someone who is an 8, 9, or 10. The good news is, this law has room for flexibility, and as you grow and develop your leadership skills you can support leaders higher on this scale.

Where do you start?

Lead yourself before you can lead anyone else. 

The relationship with yourself is the only one you can't get out of. The fact is, the one person we know we will be with until the end of our lives is ourselves.

Leading ourselves first begins with a deeper journey into self-awareness, by getting clear on what self-awareness is, and by instilling it as a practice. 

It can’t be celebrated as an accomplishment, and self-awareness is not something you can check off a list. It is a never-ending, moment-to-moment exploration that requires deep curiosity and non-judgement. 

It also requires personal accountability, and a willingness to ask the question “What will I do with this information?” 

Awareness, after all, is simply information. If we don’t do something with the information we gather, we’re wasting it. Even a choice to not do something with the information is a choice.   

Choices like this require conscious effort and consistent ownership of the process. Owning this process keeps the onus on us to work on growing and developing what is in our control - ourselves. 

Owning this process means self-awareness must not be weaponized externally, as in “you have to change, not me.”

Weaponizing self-awareness can show up as:

• I’m self-aware, so you have to change.
  

• I’m self-aware, and that’s enough.
  

• I’m self-aware, and you are not giving me what I need.
  

• I’m self-aware, and I can tell that you are not. 
  

Here’s an example:

Self-awareness is getting up early and going to the gym because you care about your health and know that exercise helps you feel better.

Self-awareness is not getting up early and going to the gym so that you can post photos of your workout and tell other people how often or how hard you work out. 

If you are getting up early to go to the gym so that you can post photos of your workout, self-awareness would have you ask yourself “Why am I telling people this about myself? How does this serve me?”

Another example:

Self-awareness is realizing that when people don’t use brevity, you get impatient and irritable. Self-awareness prompts the reflection “What does this mean for ME?” and it helps you recognize that “when I get so impatient, I get overly direct.”

Self-awareness is not focusing on the fact that by getting to the point quickly, you are saying the hard truth and saving everyone some time.

If you’ve upset someone by your focus on brevity in an effort to save time, you end up having to spend more time going back to fix the conflict.

Self-awareness is not enough.

Like one client of mine in particular, you might be self-aware enough to acknowledge that you often play the part of a fixer and a rescuer.

You may, however, like them, get frustrated when your team doesn’t step up. 

What’s left to be explored here? 

They aren’t stepping up because you’re doing the work for them. 

And, self-awareness of your tendency to be a fixer doesn’t change anything - you’ll continue to play this part and see the same results.

Instead, you have to understand how to impact change, instead of taking the shortcut. You get to do the more difficult thing, teaching your team how to fish, so to speak.

This means exposing them to the process and allowing them to make errors so they can learn, gain confidence, and do it on their own down the road.

On a recent call with the client experiencing the team performance challenge I’ve mentioned here, I asked “What’s more important than perfection?”

They replied, “Connection.”

Is there something you have self-awareness of that is holding you or your team back?

Ask yourself, if you’re struggling to change a behavior, what could be more important than that behavior changing?

For more on tapping into your true potential as a leader, subscribe to The Leadership Mind Podcast on YouTube and stay tuned for announcements about my new book coming soon!