Leverage Your Superpower

As a college coach, I took a strength-based approach to leading our team. I believed our job wasn’t to fix everything about a player, but to help them do what they do best—and then build a team where those strengths fit together like puzzle pieces.

This approach to developing people and teams has stayed with me for decades.

When I think about skills, I often divide them into three simple categories:

First, I believe over time, most people will learn to identify their superpower. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s consistent. It’s the thing you can rely on when the moment matters most.

If you watched the recent WNBA Playoffs, you might have noticed moments late in a game when a team had to hit a three-point shot. When the game was on the line, a coach would sometimes insert a player who hadn’t played a single minute in the game. Why? Because this was the moment for their superpower.

Then there are all the things you simply need to be good at — the foundational skills that allow your superpower to shine. After all, you can’t hit a game-winning three if you can’t catch the ball. When we aren’t solid at the basics, our superpower is never seen.

But the last category may be the most important. This is the thing you must not do. It’s a skill that you simply don’t have, and it likely isn’t yours to carry. Stay far away from this one.

It sounds simple, but it was often the hardest lesson for our student-athletes, who were high achievers and competitors to their core. They wanted to be great at everything.

A few years ago, a rugby coach asked for my help with one of her new players.

This young woman was incredibly strong. Physically, she could move people who didn’t think they could be moved. She was the kind of player you wanted with the ball in her hands when the team needed five yards of progress—she was a force of nature.

Rugby requires a wide range of skills: speed, agility, strength, endurance, decision-making, and certainly toughness. No one athlete can do all of these at the highest level—but that’s not what this young player believed.

She was 18, strong, powerful, and unmovable. The kind of teammate you’d follow into battle. But all she could talk about was how every one of her teammates was faster than she was. She was convinced she needed to lose weight, get leaner, and get quicker.

The problem? The very thing she wanted to lose—her strength—was her superpower. If she lost it, she’d no longer be the player her team needed her to be.

It was hard to watch her wrestle with that truth. She had absorbed the same message so many of us do–that greatness means being good at everything.

But that’s not greatness. That’s a fast track to average. The most elite athletes in the world don’t do everything well; they stay in their lane and focus on their superpower.

If you’re not sure you agree, think back to the last Olympics. The athletes don’t compete in soccer, swimming, and hurdles. They do one sport. And even then, most specialize within it.

We all remember #PommelHorseGuy. Stephen Nedoroscik was an Olympian, but he was only on the gymnastics team, and he didn’t compete in all the gymnastics events. He was a Pommel Horse Specialist. He knew his superpower, and he used it when it mattered most.

As leaders, we often fall into the same trap. We try to do it all. We chase every competency, believing that leadership requires perfection.

But leadership isn’t about mastering everything, it’s about knowing what you do best, doing it when it matters most, and giving others permission to do the same.

The best leaders delegate their weaknesses. They step up when it’s time for their superpower to shine. And they build teams where everyone gets to do what they’re great at.

Yet too often, we do the opposite. We hand out performance reviews filled with ten weaknesses to work on and then we wonder why our people plateau.

What if we flipped the model? What if we started with their superpower and built everything around that?

Imagine a workplace where people were trusted to do what they do best, where leaders modeled letting go of what they’re not, and where strengths weren’t just acknowledged — they were activated.

That’s when people, and teams, start to soar.

So, what about you? What’s the one thing you do better than almost anyone else? Are you protecting that strength or trying to trade it in for someone else’s?

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