Everything We Want Is Just Outside Our Comfort Zone – Keep Going Beyond

Is the first thought of your morning and the last worry of the evening dominating your day? Is it looming over your shoulder and robbing your leadership from experiencing greater depth, meaning and purpose in your work?

With big-hairy challenges facing today’s workplace in greater proportions, is there any wonder why many people leaders are just surviving the status-quo? Imagine for a moment if you were enabled to tackle the goliath that awaits you around every corner. Imagine overcoming your greatest challenge and experiencing the exhilaration by unlocking leadership potential and realizing outstanding results.

Even with the best of intentions you attempt to soar, but the goliath that keeps facing you speaks in a number of ways often prancing throughout the workplace: bringing you people you can’t ever please, temptations to work harder and longer, limited funding to train and develop your team, work that continues to be ignored or goes unrewarded, having to conduct several difficult conversations with your staff or boss, or having to publicly recognize employees which pulls you out of your comfort zone.

Is your workplace like many today that are hovering around the goliaths and ending up with mediocre results when they could have extraordinary? Are you tired of looking at this goliath?

Great News

You can make the courageous choice to not only face your goliath, but take it down! All great leaders had to make the important decision during times of struggle. What seems to be your goliath today? Begin by taking the time to appropriately prepare your plan and identify supportive partners that will provide you with honest feedback and hold you accountable to achieving your goals.

Discover how to channel that energy that sits just outside your comfort zone in ways that will move action forward and help you to create positive results. Each time you move a beyond this zone, you increase your leadership potential.

How can you begin to see beyond the Goliaths and build an energizing workplace environment?

1. Recognize & publicize – employees enjoy being rewarded beyond a paycheck. Find creative ways to celebrate the small wins and achievements that are meaningful to them. Share these positive achievements with other members of management and invite them to reach out to your team via email or phone to extend a congratulations or appreciation for their efforts. The small investment of time you make may create ripples of positive energy throughout your workplace.

Learn to uncover the hidden power of recognition and the messaging delivered by great leaders. If recognizing others is uncomfortable for you, keep going beyond your zone and discover new ways to excel in this very important area of communication and leadership.

2. Performance feedback – while most managers may not enjoy conducting performance appraisals, it is essential to embrace any discomfort and learn to excel in this role. Signing on to becoming a people leader brings the key responsibility of improving organizational capability. When you lead from the front in your department and deliver timely, honest, constructive feedback, you gain opportunity to build trust among employees and impact the organization’s long-term shareholder value.

3. Make the tough calls – have you identified a member on the team whom after coaching and counseling demonstrates less than “A” level performance and organizational values? Stretch beyond your comfort zone and partner with human resources to address low-performance quickly. Build upon the performance potential in your area of responsibility by recognizing the impact both great performance and low performance has on the entire organizations’ ability to grow capability and achieve short/long-term objectives.

4. Those who need encouragement often don’t risk asking for it. As a people leader, look around your workplace for someone who seems to be disconnected or on the sidelines. Infuse your best stuff to bring them back into the game. By redirecting your focus on others you’ll begin to find the secret to ridding the goliath’s in your workplace.

As you achieve progress in each of these areas, establish new goals and keep yourself stretching beyond your comfort zone. It will help the team stay energized, pro-active and ahead of the competition.