#87 - The two skills that set successful leaders apart with Gabriel Goldberg

Gabriel’s path to mentor and coach

Today, Gabriel is a mentor and coach for startup and scale-up companies. He uses his own experience and success story to guide his clients towards the same path. After being the first Belgian employee at Google, he used his experience to set up his own agency called Semetis and conquered the Belgian market after a few years. He eventually sold the company to a large international group and left to become a full time coach and mentor.

So what distinguishes a successful leader from the rest?

When looking back at his own success there are two factors that got him where he is now: focus and positioning. This combination is truly effective, it allowed Gabriel to spend the right amount of time on the right tasks and people. At no point did he think his company was better or worse than anybody else’s, but they found their own uniqueness. If you want to truly make a change and you can define in concrete terms what you can offer to the market that others cannot, you have found a great positioning. After you have found that positioning, you should devote your time and resources according to that positioning and your core values. This is where the focus is so important.

The power of focus

Focussing; deciding what tasks and projects you’re going to say no to, is an incredibly powerful tool. It allows you to tackle root causes instead of symptoms and keeps you – well -  focussed on what your main goal is. But this is no longer a secret. So why do so many people have trouble focussing and instead keep jumping from one urgency to the next? You might have heard of the Eisenhower matrix. It splits up tasks in four categories according to their urgency and importance. We can all agree no one does non-important and non-urgent tasks anymore. The problem according to Gabriel, is that most people are systematically doing only urgent and important stuff. But this is not sustainable over time and will not make you a good leader. So plan in some important, but not immediately urgent work!

So here are two tips that Gabriel gave us to help focus

1-   Automate

Automating repetitive tasks can gain you a lot of time and most people already know this. But somehow, they are too blinded by the non-stop work they are doing to see that it can be made easier by automating some chunks of that work.

2-   Stop

Simply stop doing certain tasks, not even automate them. As an exercise, take a piece of paper and write down three tasks that you won’t do anymore, at all. You will see that the world won’t burn down and you won’t get fired.

I hope you guys got some helpful information and seethe importance of picking a good positioning and focussing on the right tasks accordingly! Don’t forget to check out Gabriel Goldberg if you enjoyed this content!

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