Five ways leaders can reinvent themselves and start the countdown clock over

by. Kris Dunn

Yesterday I posted and said that every leader in the world has a shelf life of five years or less. At the five-year mark, if not way before that point, all the value you brought to the table and all the ways you were different as a leader cease to be unique.

Everyone has heard it before. As one of my sons once famously uttered as a four-year-old at the dinner table, “It’s the same ‘ole s###.” Turns out he heard that from this Nickelback song in the SUV (all the bad stuff can be tracked back to Nickelback-kids…)

Anyway, once things become stale for you with your peeps, you really need to reinvent yourself as a leader. Here are five ideas to freshen your game up. Think about it and try some of these out after the holidays:

  1. Become a better coach. Maybe you ought to actually invest yourself in making those around you better at what they do. Most of us don’t do this enough.
  2. Act like a career agent for the people around you. The most powerful thing you can do is care about someone’s career, up to and including being open to tell them when they ought to take a opportunity outside your company. When’s the last time you invested time in that?
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