If you want to progress in your life and work, you need to understand the different roles in your life. Whether you’re a career-minded professional or a stay-at-home parent, you must fulfill three essential roles in the stressful game of life: you are a
- Thinker
- Team member
- Leader
Upon hearing this, you may protest: “Wait! Only three roles? I’m a project manager, a loving parent, a devoted pet owner, an active volunteer, and a Scout leader — and that’s just on Monday!”
While your roles assume various forms, you’ll find each responsibility fits into one of the categories — thinker, team member, leader — or even all three! What’s more, you may notice that your level of effectiveness changes depending on the role.
For instance, you can be a highly successful leader of a team, but you find your effectiveness wanes when working as a team member with your colleagues.
The good news is that when you optimize your thinking for each of these three roles, there will be no task too daunting, no person too difficult, or team too challenging for you to handle. By examining your effectiveness in each role, you can begin to determine just where your untapped potential lies.
Let’s look at each of these roles.
1. You’re a Thinker:
First and foremost, you’re a thinker — you can conceive an idea, evaluate a situation, and create a solution. Your method of thinking can even distinguish you as an individual. When you tackle a problem, the patterns of your thinking are the original blueprints you bring to the table.
How do you achieve as a thinker? Your ability to solve problems quickly and effectively can determine your position on the ladder of success. When you gain insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a thinker and learn how to adopt the strengths of others, you can approach problems with multiple perspectives and overcome any conditioned thought patterns that undermine your success.
2. You’re a Team Member:
The art of interpersonal dynamics can be improved upon throughout your life as you strive to get along with your family, colleagues, and friends.
But to reach new peaks of performance, you must not only get along with those around you, but also influence them. Why? The team is a powerful entity that can override the individual. Your thoughts and ideas are only as effective as your ability to sell them to others.
How do you influence people?
Because humans are deeply complex, highly unpredictable, and often stubborn, you’ll need a sharp awareness of what makes others tick in order to be influential. Fortunately, by examining your own thinking, you’ll gain valuable insight into the complicated thought patterns motives of others. This insight will enable you to adapt your communication techniques to the thinkers that you are trying to influence. Equipped with this new understanding, you’ll see a drastic improvement in the dynamics of your relationships.
3. You’re a Leader:
Whether or not you consider yourself a leader, you do have the capacity to lead — effectively or ineffectively. You can steer a corporation of 1000s to the top of the stock market or drive your family of five to despair. Your leadership roles take numerous forms, but the tenets of success are the same.
How do you effectively lead?
The quality that distinguishes top leaders is the ability to not only recognize the strengths of others, but to also utilize each individual in a role that positions him or her for success. As a leader, you’ll want to first emphasize the benefits of multifaceted thought and encourage your team to use different perspectives to deal with various aspects of a problem. However, you will inevitably realize that some people are better suited for certain tasks than others due to their ways of thinking. Your potential to lead rests on your ability to make these distinctions.
As you can see, the challenges you face as a thinker, a team member, and a leader are varied and complex. But success as a project manager means you constantly develop and strengthen these roles.
How do you develop and strengthen these roles? Share your best tip below!
Wrote by: Jennifer Bridges
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