Most types of sports equipment like a golf club, a tennis racquet or a baseball bat have a certain spot that, if the ball hits it, will give the player the optimal result. Hitting this sweet spot yields a long drive down the fairway, a swift crosscourt return or home run swing. Every sport has a sweet spot of some type. If you have experienced it, you know when you hit the sweet spot, you barely feel it. The ball goes where you want it to go - even further and faster. Doesn't get any better than that!

But what about the sport of leadership? Aren't we professional athletes in our own right?

Those in professional sports practice 90+ percent of the time and actually "play for keeps" less than 10 percent of the time. As professional leaders, we are almost always "playing for keeps." So it's particularly important that we take time to plan and ensure that we are optimizing our sweet spot.

Did you know the average person possesses between 500 and 700 different skills and abilities? A common defining moment for people is finding that skill or ability that's right in their sweet spot. As leaders, we have a huge opportunity to help our employees find their sweet spots, too.

The first step is ensuring a good fit between an employee's natural abilities and interests and the requirements of the job. This would ensure the "highest and best use" of their talents toward the realization of our high-definition vision. Wouldn't we just love having every single team member working in their sweet spot? We would always be in "the zone" and work would feel like play.

Our ability to match sweet spots to job requirements is the best predictor of job success and, ultimately, of excellent performance. It all starts with a moment to plan for the use of talent on our team.

Let's not forget about ourselves in this matching process. Gaining insights into our own sweet spot as leaders helps us better determine how to design roles and deploy the talent on our team. For example, if my sweet spot is conceptually designing complex deals, I better ensure I have a strong analyst on my team. If my sweet spot is analyzing lots of details and numbers, I want some conceptual, big picture thinkers on my team.

Want to know an easy way to find your sweet spot? Look at the intersection of these two questions:

1. What am I absolutely passionate about?
2. Which tasks are very easy and natural for me to perform?

Most of us vividly remember the moment we found our professional sweet spot. Others told us we made it look easy, that we really excelled and we looked like we were having a ball. Think of the last time when others made these comments to you. What were you doing? Like finding any sweet spot, it's worth hitting these questions around for awhile and practicing our answers before we can serve up a winner.

Ralph V. Gilles understands this process. He dropped out of college and was spending most of his time, by his own admission, slacking in his parents' basement, eating granola, watching "Dukes of Hazard" reruns and lamenting the sorry state of automobiles being made in America.

Growing up, Gilles was typical of most boys who played with Hot Wheels and Formula 1 model cars. But, as a teenager, he also was extremely talented in sketching vehicles. In fact, his aunt wrote a letter to then Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, saying he should hire her 14-year-old nephew.

A Chrysler executive responded, recommending three design schools. Soon afterward, however, the letter was lost and forgotten. Meanwhile, the car-crazy Gilles completed high school and enrolled in college to study engineering, but dropped out quickly. His reason: "I was in a funk and was really not sure I wanted to be an engineer."

As he continued his granola, "Dukes of Hazard" routine down in the basement, Ralph's older brother, Max, recalled the letter from Chrysler. He remembered that one of the recommended schools was Detroit's College for Creative Studies. Upset to see Ralph wasting his time and talent, Max pushed his brother to apply to the local school although the application deadline was only a week away and would require 10 sketches.

At that point, the whole family became involved, making Ralph coffee so he could complete his sketches, cheering him on and helping wherever they could. By the end of the week, Ralph was covered in pencil lead, but the sketches were complete, so his mother sent the packet to the school by overnight delivery.

Today, Ralph V. Gilles is recognized as the innovator of the Chrysler 300 sedan and the Dodge Magnum Wagon I in addition to being responsible for the 2002 Jeep Liberty, 2003 Dodge Viper SRT-10 and several concept cars. Dubbed as the Chrysler Group's newest darling, Gilles has earned numerous national and international accolades. He has since been promoted to Design Director for Chrysler.

If we consistently misidentify sweet spots, we will find our team stuck in a funk, like Gilles.

If we correctly match employee's sweet spots to the job requirements, we will all be living the sweet life!

Today's fast-paced, efficiency-minded organizations make it especially challenging for leaders to always ensure a good fit. It's common to find employees picking up the slack for positions that have been eliminated. If personnel reductions aren't executed carefully, the remaining employees can find themselves underemployed and consumed by "leftover" tasks that drain their time but don't tap their minds.

These situations start a cycle of "lowest and worst use" of talent, resulting in a downward spiral of self-doubt, anxiety and frustration. If you've ever experienced this, you know it feels more like a sour patch than a sweet spot.

To prevent this cycle and the resulting decline in team performance, we can plan the work for our teams to optimize sweet spots by:

• Combining tasks that require similar skill levels, so we can more easily match an employee's sweet spot with the position's requirements.
• Automating repetitive tasks.
• Streamlining inefficient processes and eliminate redundant tasks that rob us from getting the highest and best use of our talent.
• Outsourcing tasks that require a high level of people power but have little impact on our organizations. Stay within our own sweet spots and let other vendors use their sweet spot to serve us.

Take a moment to optimize the sweet spots on your team - including your own. It's a defining moment for most people when they can arrive at work on Monday morning and say, "How sweet it is!"

Author's Bio - Lee Colan

Lee J. Colan is a highly sought-after executive advisor and leadership expert. He has published seven books including the best sellers Sticking to It: The Art of Adherence and Passionate Performance. Learn more by visiting http://www.theLgroup.com.

Many years ago, very early on in my people management career, I was conducting a performance review on a young employee who was working part time while going to University. Although his performance was adequate, it most definitely was not stellar. During our conversation I asked him why he didn't perform up to his obvious capabilities. I'll never forget the reason he gave me for not giving 100% effort while at work. He said, "this is just a temporary job for me, I'm not going to be here for very long, so why knock myself out." He was right...he wasn't there very long.

This person, as educated as he was, missed a very simple and important point. Repeated actions become habits, habits become character and your character follows you wherever you go. By giving less than his best, he was creating a habit of mediocrity that would follow him throughout his life and on into his chosen profession.

It has always amazed me how many people believe that they can turn habits on and off like light switches. How many people work at less than their best while at work and then complain that they can't seem to get the results that they desire in other areas of their lives. The fact of the matter is that we are defined by our habits. If you make a habit of not giving 100%, that habit will follow you wherever you go and in every context of your life. If your unorganized at work...your probably unorganized at home. If you procrastinate at home...you probably do so at work too. Habits rarely change from one context to another.

Search your past for examples of when you began to create a habit that doesn't serve you today. Whether it was doing less than your best at school, skipping practices to go hang out with your friends, waiting until the last minute to begin a project, not following through on commitments or just spending your spare time lying on the couch watching TV instead of doing something productive. How many of those habits are still with you today? How many have impacted you in a negative way? How many continue to impact you in a negative way? Most importantly, why do you continue to repeat such habits?

The answer is "secondary gain." Even the most harmful of habits hold a benefit that keeps us repeating the patterns that we so want to escape. If we look into our self destructive habits and behaviours we can usually find some sort of secondary gain that we derive from the habit. Secondary gain is something of value that the behaviour satisfies. Take smoking for example, I think we can all agree that smoking is bad for you, even the smokers among us will agree to that. People smoke not because they don't believe that the habit is harmful but because it provides them with some sort of gain, usually a feeling of some sort...secondary gain. If there were no gain or benefit derived from the behaviour, we wouldn't do it. Being a former smoker, I know that for me smoking was a way of dealing with every day stress and providing much needed quiet time and down time. Inevitably every attempt at quitting failed once I was faced with a stressful situation and/or gave in to the feelings of monotony and boredom.

The same is true for all habits, limiting decisions and behaviours. Once you can identify the secondary gain derived from the behaviour you can loosen the power it has on you by finding alternative ways to achieve the gain in a more positive and healthy manner. This must be done prior to letting go of the unwanted behaviour or habit. If this is not done, even if you are successful in quitting the habit or behaviour, it is often replaced by an equally harmful behaviour. One of the biggest complaints given by people who have quit smoking is that they have significant weight gain as a result of quitting. The reason for this is because the lack of a positive alternative to smoking has resulted in the unconscious mind providing something to fill the void created by not smoking, in this case food. Unless you consciously and deliberately replace the unwanted behaviour with a more positive behaviour, you risk replacing one unwanted behaviour or habit with another.

Secondary gain is prevalent in every aspect of our lives. The child that acts out is doing so because of the secondary gain that it provides. The employee who constantly resists management authority does so because it provides secondary gain. The supervisor or manager who bullies his staff does so because to satisfy a need for a specific secondary gain. The student who is constantly failing to hand in his homework on time is doing so to derive secondary gain. The trick is to find out what that secondary gain is so that we can provide that without the unwanted behaviour.

A good rule of thumb is to provide three alternative ways to satisfy the secondary gain that the habit provides. If you can get the gain, you don't need the habit.

The good news is that it is never too late to erase bad habits and build good ones, it just takes conscious commitment. More importantly, it takes consistent and purposeful action. Start by targeting a simple habit, for example, watching too much television, find the secondary gains that habit satisfies, find three alternative behaviours or habits that satisfy that secondary gain, replace the original habit with one or all three of the alternatives, sustain it for a 30 day period at minimum and create a new habit. Once you have tackled a couple of easier ones, start to tackle progressively more difficult and important ones until you have replaced all your limiting habits with empowering ones.

I will leave you with one of my all time favorite quotes.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

Author's Bio - Ray Bertani

Ray Bertani is a corporate trainer, public speaker and personal development coach. He is the founder of Cura Solutions, a leadership and personal development firm dedicated to adding significant and lasting value to each and every one of its clients. Ray's first book entitled "Breaking The Deal" renegotiating your deal with life, is due to be completed by Winter of 2010. Cura Solutions is based in the Metro Vancouver area and serves clients all through Canada. Ray can be reached by email at ray@curasolutions.ca. To learn more about Cura Solutions, visit thier website at http://www.curasolutions.ca