The “Zone of Leadership” explained
What are YOU really good at? What are you passionate about? We are talking here about knowing yourself, knowing what’s really important to you, what you do very well, and what you love to spend your precious time at.
Here are 3 excellent tools to help understand your personal zone of leadership.
● The Gallup StrengthsFinder is a tried-and-trusted survey that gets you to list out the 5 top items from a number of comprehensive assessment areas. It is important to understand the support material that accompanies these assessment areas. For example, Bernie’s 5 strengths came out as “individualization” (works well one on one), “learner,” “achiever,” “communication,” and “maximizer.”
● The VIA Character Strengths Survey, a second integral survey, guides you to a list of your top 5 passions. The things that really get Bernie out of bed each day are “kindness,” “curiosity,” “love,” “humor” (that’s a funny thing, hopefully), and “teamwork.”
● The Venn diagram, that you have with each client, prospect, and referral partner. Using the “Proactive Prospecting Template” (or other tools) generate as many ideas for potential activities as possible. Our examples are just to get you started thinking about the possibilities; insert your own most effective interactions. Filling in the CPR spreadsheet is great for both evaluating current business practice and generating new ideas for growth.
You can put these tools to work on an individual basis, but they are exponentially more powerful when developed within a group of your peers and facilitated by the coach.
5-step process to create your zone:
- Take the VIA Character survey (Passions) and the Gallup StrengthsFinder (Strengths) and get the 5 top items from each assessment. Read the support material provided with each assessment, so you completely understand the results.
- Review one Gallup strength at a time, and answer these questions (create a matrix, questions in columns, strengths/passions in rows), and then move to the next strength:
- Where do you experience this strength? Where are you physically?
- What activity are you doing at that time?
- When do you experience this activity, or have you experienced it, going back to your childhood or yesterday?
- Why is this strength important to you?
- Repeat the above activity for the VIA Character survey.
- Now you will have a list of 10 situations where you experience strengths and passions, so put together your “Zone of Leadership” by selecting those activities that appear on both lists.
- There is no right answer for this exercise. Keep working it until the items in the Zone really represent the activities that you thoroughly enjoy and that you are exceptionally good at and that when you perform them, you might be inclined to think “I can’t believe they pay me to do this.” Be sure to involve others in this exercise. Ask a close friend, mentor, or your coach to listen to you explain why each activity in the Zone is important to you.
This exercise helps you to understand and leverage the overlap of passion and talent. Whatever activities you engage in that are within that overlap of the two circles cannot be called work. They are your vocation. They are the things that you’re just so happy to do that it always feels just right.
So I challenge you all to take a look at YOUR strengths and passions. Let’s get you into your leadership zone. Think of yourself as a rock star, belting out your greatest hit as an encore after a sellout concert. “Man, that ain’t workin’!” It’s “Money for Nothing” according to Dire Straits, and we at PBC could not agree more.
