Leaders who do not actively pursue development opportunities minimize their growth and unintentionally limit their prospects for success. You deal with the pressure of casting vision, dealing finances, making deadlines, personal and corporate mistakes. At the same time, you are the source of hope, peace, and wisdom for every person in your world.
In order to move to another level success, whether in ministry or the marketplace, it is imperative that you maximize your potential. Mastering your current level hinges on influence, capacity building, and the systems approach to leadership. Your constant pursuit should be to expand your scope or sphere of influence.
When you look at leadership, simplified, it is influence. Influence, however, is not power. Power is the ability to impose your will on others, whereas influence is the ability to deeply affect behaviors and beliefs. Influence is the ability to affect change in the actions, beliefs, and the choices of others. Increasing your influence is not increasing the size of your organization or group, it is about growing in capacity. Capacity building is an important key to increase in any area of leadership, especially believers.
In the bible, there is a, “Parable of the Talents,” where the master gave the servants talents according to their ability. One servant received five talents, another received two, and the then one. The first two servants doubled their talents, but the third servant buried his. If the master would have given the third servant five, it would have resulted in waste because he did not increase with the one. The master took the talent from the one and gave it the one that had five and doubled it.
There are times that God places ministries and business into your hands with the seed of what it will become. It is your responsibility to increase what he gives you. The leaders that commit to increasing their capacity reaches success. Your capacity is the ability to receive or contain. Your capacity is a measure of what you can receive, hold, or absorb. It reflects your potential, your resourcefulness and skillfulness. To increase your capacity, you must take it beyond the current ability to receive or contain, and augment your gift, your skillfulness and cutting edge. Capacity building may require that you do four things, reset, regroup, revisit, and reorder, not just because things are going wrong, but because things are going right.
- Reset
The reset requires that you look at your current operations system.
Then, you must be willing to abandon strategies that are merely taking up space.
Strategies that use to work can become antiquated the world evolves and as you grow.
A reset will free up space to implement new strategies that will move you forward. Even our phone requires a reset from time to time. Apps that we are no longer using are taking up space in the operating system. The problem is fixed when you reset or close those apps.
- Regroup
In a world that moves fast, it is so easy to get caught up on doing what everyone else is doing, and if you are not careful, you will find yourself doing things that are not relevant to your vision. Just because it is popular or getting results for the next ministry or the business does not mean that it will render the same results for you. Authenticity increases your influence.
- Revisit
It is imperative that you take some time to revisit your why. Failures, trauma, or just life in general will make forget why you started the church, why you started the business, why you wanted to work in your career. When you revisit your why, you will discover a new level of passion and motivation.
- Reorder
As you increase, you may discover that your internal framework will not support your vision. Many leaders start moving and realize that they didn’t staff far enough into the future.
In order to maximize your potential, you must be open to change. Ultimately, there no growth without change. There are times that a new direction in strategy is necessary to prevent stagnation.
Stephen R. Covey said, “Reinvent yourself every three years, so that you can remain relevant and able to make new contributions in a world of constant change.” Reinvention is the key to longevity.