Leadership Journal

In leadership, and in life, I believe too many people put too much effort into getting better at things that they aren't that good at. Why should someone spend most of their time concentrating on honing a skill that they won't ever be really good at. To me, I think that leaders and managers should instead concentrate on the things that they do best and delegate to others the things they don't do well.

I started thinking back to when I played baseball and I would spend so much time on bunting because I wasn't a very good bunter. This took away time that I could have been spending working on my hitting or defense. I knew the coach wasn't going to call on me to bunt very often, but I wanted to get better at it anyway. When I think about correlating this to the business world, I think about the technical workers in a firm that start working on their people skills when they never will be in front of a customer. The same goes for the sales people in a company don't need to spend the majority of their time honing their engineering skills.

As far as being a leader in this scenario, you should be able to see who needs to focus on what expertise. You should be able to encourage people to concentrate on the things they are excellent at.