Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? I have worked with Jay for many years assisting organizations and individuals achieve a higher level of performance

Role Flexibility

When we start talking about making changes to your role, this assumes you have a certain amount of flexibility in your role. If you work for someone else, or have a job in a company where your role is not completely your own to modify and change as you see fit, you need to achieve some level of role flexibility. Role flexibility is simply the level of ability you have for changing your role, what responsibilities you have, the tasks and duties that you are expected to perform. Entrepreneurs have high levels of role flexibility, and the higher up you get in management the more flexible your role typically becomes as well. Even if you don’t have as much flexibility in your role as you might like, there are things you can do to change your roles to make them more authentic.

If you don’t have much role flexibility, and you can’t make much change to your role, one of the best ways to convince your manager or organization that doing so would be in their best interests as well is to share a copy of Jay’s book (What’s Your Genius) with them. It’s imperative that you get some flexibility in your role because unless you are already in the most authentic role possible, if you can’t remove responsibilities that rely on your non-talents you wont reach higher levels of performance and definitely won’t reach the 5th level.

Of course, as Michael Lorelli said earlier, it really is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so if you need to move some things around, lean on someone else, swap tasks (where someone else picks up some aspect of your work and you help them out with things they aren’t as good at) do it! If you don’t think your company will let you modify your role, don’t ask – just give it a try. Why are we suggesting you do something without permission? Because you are your own SEO! You are the one responsible for your success – no one else. Of course if you have flexibility use it, but if something in your role depends on one of your non-talents, and you can’t get “permission” to offload that responsibility somehow, it is better to offload it without permission and improve your performance than continue to depend on it and give up performance. Trust me, if you take initiative and figure out a better way to get results, and when you deliver those results, any problem management would have with how you did it shouldn’t be an issue. If it is, than it may be time to ask yourself if the role is the right one for you.

Remember, geniuses refuse to settle, and everyone Jay interviewed agreed that sometimes you just have to leave a role if it is too far from what you need it to be. Michael Lorelli represents these geniuses well when he states, “If your role is just too inauthentic you either have to suffer through or change roles because you can’t change your DNA.”