What’s Your Magic?

Many years ago, I was hired to be Director of Sales for three radio stations, and at the time it was a major career step for me at the time.  After getting hired I met with the President of the company who asked me a novel question: “what’s your magic?”  I was confused by the question, so he reframed it with a very simple clarification: what are you best at and what do you love to do the most?

I don’t think a day has gone by where I haven’t thought about this question. It gets at the heart of so many aspects that drive our productivity, performance and in essence, our leadership capacity.  Having spent well over three decades building and leading teams, scaling established brands and new concepts, I’ve mastered the idea of both finding my magic and deploying it every day.  Let me share a little bit more.

As a leader, one of the challenges we face is the profound creep to our jobs. And in today’s world, the volume of information hitting our desk can become a major obstacle.  There are so many more challenges, but I want to crystallize the underlying issue: the greater the volume on our plate, the more it gets in the way of spending critical time with our teams. Very simply, if your head is in the computer and you are spending the bulk of your time behind closed doors “getting stuff done”, you are often missing the key ingredient.

Back in the day, when I answered the question “what’s your magic”, I rambled a long list but over the next decade as I got into my 40s, I realized what my special sauce really was.  Here’s “my magic”. Building Teams. Establishing culture. Creating vision, Strategy and Plans.  And investing personally in my team to help grow their skills and maximize their impact on our business.  What I didn’t do well, I created a rule for that.  If I could find someone who could do something equally well as me, I would delegate it…always.

I wasn’t delegating responsibility; it would always require me to remain engaged as the coach and leader in the room. But it would free up my time to pivot back to the things that I was uniquely qualified to do and loved to do the most.  To do this end, we must work on our self-awareness and need to extract the “narcissistic tendencies” that often come with success. If you read your press clippings and focus on your success too often, it creates a distorted sense of reality that clouds your judgment and limits your ability to grow.

As part of this journey, I also recognize that sometimes I’m the weirdo “left brain / right brain” guy in the room.  I have an MBA in Finance, but I’ve spent the bulk of my career creating brand strategies and leading complex teams.  I love people and I love engaging and teaching, so knowing myself and clarifying my magic has always led me back to the most important leadership question of all:  am I surrounding myself with a team of high performance leaders who perfectly complement me, add different skills to the team, challenge me to be the best I can be, execute at a high level and seek out council when they need it.

So, if I summarize exactly what I think all leaders need to do as they’re building their toolkit and building their business, here goes:

• Clarify your Magic
• Figure out exactly what stays with you and what you delegate to others
• Get the best people around you who can get it done as good or better than you
• Guide them, coach them, and build them up to set an example for how they need to lead their team
• Create a culture of growth throughout your system
• Continue to invest in your own personal growth

To that end, I have rolled up so many of my learnings around business and dealing with the complex challenges of life into my new book titled: GROW or FOLD: transform yourself in midlife and beyond.  And I’ve come up with a concept that I call “pure growth”, which is a blend of three areas of personal development: functional growth, emotional growth, and creative growth. If we are going to lead at a high level, we must continue to challenge ourselves to refine and evolve our toolkit to drive personal excellence and a culture of excellence throughout our organizations.

Written by Matt Ross.