By: Jason Pistillo

This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to share about one’s leadership “game.” When I think about developing someone’s leadership game, I see three distinct areas to develop:

1. The Leadership Toolbox
2. Practice/instinct
3. Confidence

Let’s begin by discussing the Leadership Toolbox

The Leadership Toolbox

As we all develop as leaders, we get new tools with every new challenge. We get them from sharing experiences with coworkers, in our networks, by reading and learning from formal sources, or by creating them all on our own.

When I describe this toolbox, I am not referring to skills and innate talent. For instance, some individuals are “people-people” and are good at presenting to crowds, networking, etc. I’m talking about something far more granular. For instance, I have a great set of tools that I use for setting personal focus, settling my mind, and generally getting shit done.

Have you ever talked to another manager that was struggling with how to approach something, yet you had a very clear idea in your mind on exactly how to approach it? It might have been a personnel issue or something more tangible like data analysis, budgeting or project planning. Have you ever looked back and thought, Wow, I have an approach for a lot of what I deal with? If so, then that’s because you’re toolbox is pretty full, and as most handymen and women will tell you, “you can never have too many tools.”

I remember when I got my first house, with every new house project ‘assigned’ to me, I was excited about the work because I knew I would get to buy new tools to complete the task. You really never can have too many.

The next time you are dreading an approaching leadership task, think with optimism the new leadership tool you get to add to your toolbox.

If you talk to another leader that runs into challenges that you don’t, chances are they don’t have a tool that you do. Take the time to help and share it with them. Use the language of the toolbox to make it easier.

What tools do you have in your toolbox?

As an example, in my toolbox, I have a lot of team based facilitation exercises (which are very useful when I host leadership retreats for my team), on-boarding techniques, interview techniques and question banks, motivation and personality approaches, and a number of tools associated with quickly building trainings and presentations.

Of course, having the tools in your box does not mean you are good at using them. In addition to having a breadth of tools, you must master the use of them. Read more about how to do that in my next post.

Jason Pistillo
President & CEO
University of Advancing Technology