Working in Your Genius: 6 Leadership Lessons from Dave Pennington

These lessons come from a conversation I had with Dave Pennington on The Learning to Lead Show.

Are you doing the right work, or just a lot of work?

Sit with that for a second. Most leaders never stop long enough to ask. We measure ourselves by hours and output — but rarely pause to ask whether the work itself is the work we were built to do.

Here’s what I’ve learned: the leaders who burn out aren’t lazy or incompetent. They’re grinding away in areas that drain them, while the work they were genuinely made for sits on the shelf. They’re busy in all the wrong places — and from the outside, everything looks fine.

That’s why I wanted to share what I took away from my conversation with Dave Pennington, founder and CEO of Penn Coaching and Consulting. Dave has spent thirty-five years walking alongside leaders, and he sees the same pattern over and over: discouragement, overwhelm, a quiet sense that something is off. And almost every time, the diagnosis is the same: the leader is doing too much of the wrong work and not enough of the right work.

Here are six of his most powerful lessons for fixing that.

Dave didn’t set out to become a coach. He became one because he needed one — and nobody showed up. Early in his career, while leading churches, building schools, and navigating nonprofits, Dave was scrapping for knowledge no one was offering to give him. The leaders around him were absent, inconsistent, or too consumed with their own agendas to pour into the people beneath them.

“I felt like I would’ve been really helpful to have someone who would’ve leaned in and mentored me and helped develop me. I had to scrap and work and grind to develop all these different things because I just didn’t have the support and help I needed.”

That gap shaped his entire philosophy. When he finally had the chance to lead others, Dave made a decision: he would be the person he’d never had. Over the years he’s led churches of more than a thousand, served as head of school at six institutions, led a statewide network of private schools, and built a coaching practice that helps owners scale their companies and prepare to sell.

What ties all of that together is one deeply personal conviction: great leadership isn’t about you. It’s about the people you develop and the clarity you create around you.

At the center of Dave’s coaching philosophy is one idea: the work that energizes you and the work you’re genuinely gifted at should occupy the majority of your time. He calls it the 80% Rule. And this, Dave says, is the source of most leadership discouragement. Not laziness. Not incompetence. Leaders are discouraged because they’re overloaded with the wrong work — tasks that eat their time without producing energy or results.

“When you’re doing things you like doing, and you’re good at doing, it exhilarates you. You can do it all day. And when you’re doing things that you don’t like doing, and you’re not necessarily good at doing, it depletes you. It exhausts you.”

He once coached a business owner with an 80% close ratio in sales, a gift most salespeople only dream of. But the man was spending 85% of his time on operations and only 15% on sales. He was doing almost none of the thing he was best at. “It’s not working,” he admitted. “Right now, I hate my life.”

The fix wasn’t working harder; it was working differently. Get an operations person; get back to sales. Within eighteen months, the company doubled.

Reflect: What percentage of your week is spent in work that energizes you versus work that depletes you?

What would it take to shift even 20% of your week toward the work you were made to do?

Dave’s first move with every new client isn’t a strategy session; it’s a conversation about identity.

• What do you love doing?

• What are you really good at?

You’d be surprised how many leaders struggle to answer with any confidence. They’ve spent so many years adapting to organizational demands that they’ve lost touch with their own wiring. Dave uses assessments, DISC, StrengthsFinder, and others as tools for self-discovery, not labels. The goal isn’t to put someone in a box. It’s to give them language for what they already are.

His own self-awareness is instructive. Dave identifies as an integrator — someone who takes vision and translates it into strategy and execution. But many of his roles have required him to be the visionary too. Doing both simultaneously, he admits, has been exhausting.

“The roles I’ve enjoyed most, believe it or not, are not when I’ve been the main leader, but when I’ve been the integrator for a visionary leader who just had visions off the wazoo. I could come in and actually strategize and execute on the vision and make it happen.”

That kind of self-knowledge is liberating. It lets you stop pretending and start operating from strength. The people around you can tell when you’re in your element, and they trust that leader far more than the one grinding through something they don’t naturally do well.

Reflect: How well do you know your own wiring, your strengths, your energizing work, your genuine weaknesses?

Are you leading from strength, or compensating for weakness by working harder in the wrong areas?

Once you know your strengths and your gaps, the next step is obvious: build a team that covers the gaps. Dave calls it the complementary dream team. And the concept is deceptively simple.

“Believe it or not, there are actually people that love doing what you hate doing, and they’re really good at it. You need to find those people and get them on your team.”

This isn’t just practical wisdom; it’s backed by real results. Dave has watched it play out in business after business: the founder who hates operations finally hires an operations person, and the company doubles. The visionary pastor finds an integrator, and the organization takes off. The broker gets help with onboarding, and grows from one broker to fourteen.

Dave illustrates this with one of the most memorable coaching moments in the book. A business owner was spending eight to ten hours a week doing his own financials, work he neither liked nor excelled at. Dave asked what he was worth per hour. Around $250, the man said. Dave laid out the math:

“You could get a bookkeeper for $35 to $40 an hour. What could you do with ten hours a week back in your life?”

The aha moment was immediate. Every hour you spend in a role someone else could do better, at a lower cost, is an hour stolen from what only you can do. It’s not laziness to hand things off. It’s stewardship.

Reflect: Where are you spending time on tasks someone else could do better, faster, and cheaper?

Who on your team genuinely loves the work you find most draining?

You cannot lead people effectively toward a target they cannot see. And yet vague expectations are one of the most common leadership failures Dave encounters in every kind of organization.

He tells the story of a sharp professional who, when asked what she needed to do to be successful in her role, said honestly: “I don’t know.” She had asked her supervisor. The supervisor didn’t know either.

Sound familiar? Good people grinding away with no real definition of what winning looks like. The solution Dave walks clients through is simple: define the three to five things a person must accomplish to be considered successful in their role. Write it down. Have the supervisor sign off. Build metrics so progress is visible.

Dave distills this into three requirements I’ve been teaching for years:

• Clear Expectations,

• Timely Feedback

• Accountability

Organizations that operate with all three transform. Those that don’t stay stuck, not from lack of effort, but from lack of clarity.

Reflect: Could every person on your team articulate what success looks like in their role, in three to five specific, measurable outcomes?

If you asked them right now, what would they say?

One of Dave’s most vivid phrases captures something every leader eventually discovers: it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.

When you’re running the company, leading the church, managing the team, you’re too close to everything. Your emotions are in it. Your identity is in it. That proximity is valuable in some ways. But it makes objectivity nearly impossible.

This is the core argument for coaching. Capability alone doesn’t produce clarity when you’re submerged in the work. Remember the owner doing 85% operations and 15% sales? He had never stopped to see what he was doing until someone from outside held up the mirror.

“By having someone who’s not emotionally attached and not too close to it, it gives a perspective that you might not even see.”

The best leaders in history have all had this: people around them who could say what no one else was allowed to say. The leaders who plateaued often did so precisely because they surrounded themselves only with people who agreed with them. Stay with me here: there is no version of growth that doesn’t require this.

Reflect: Who in your life can tell you what they actually see, not what you want to hear?

When did you last genuinely take that kind of feedback in and act on it?

We’ve arrived at the principle that holds everything else together — the one I most want you to wrestle with. The leader is often the ceiling of the organization. When the leader is the hub every spoke runs through, the decision-maker on every question, the relationship every customer depends on, growth stops. Not because the market dried up. Because the leader became the bottleneck.

This is where Dave connects leadership to legacy. A business that can’t function without its owner makes buyers nervous. When you go to sell, they’ll want you to stay on for another year or two, to make sure the relationships don’t walk out the door with you.

“I’ve spent 25, 30 years building this business, and now you want me to work for you for another two years… I don’t want to work for you. I want to get out of this, but I didn’t build it right so that I could step away.”

Twenty-five years of effort, and the very person who built it can’t walk away from it. That’s not a business problem. That’s a leadership problem.

The fix is what Dave spends much of his coaching practice on: building systems, developing people, and distributing authority so the organization runs without you at the center. And here’s the parallel principle: develop your people or watch them walk. Good people leave because they weren’t developed. Leaders who refuse to invest end up with the weakest possible staff; the capable ones go, and the people who can’t do the job stay forever, because they know they can’t go anywhere else.

Lean in. Invest deeply. Make it genuinely about the person, not just what the organization needs from them. When people know you see them and are committed to their growth, they don’t want to leave. And when they eventually do, they go out as advocates.

Reflect: If you disappeared tomorrow, what would happen to your team?

Which decisions or relationships are so dependent on you that they would struggle without you?

What is one thing you could do in the next ninety days to build capacity that doesn’t require you?

Dave’s leadership philosophy can be summed up in a single image: the pebble in the pond. Throw one stone into still water, and the ripples spread outward, quietly, persistently, touching shorelines you can’t see from where you’re standing. “If I can help that leader,” Dave says, “I can help everyone in that organization. I can improve their lives.”

That’s the vision behind every principle in this chapter. Leaders who know themselves deeply enough to work from their strengths, who build teams that complement rather than copy them, who invest in their people with genuine care, and who build organizations that can outlast them.

The ripple effect is incalculable. The leader who grows becomes the team that grows becomes the organization that grows becomes the community that benefits. Because, as Dave likes to say, it always comes back.

That’s the kind of leadership worth building. And it starts today.

Dave teaches one principle in every seminar he leads, and it may be the most practically transformative idea in this entire chapter: don’t try to absorb all of it. Find one principle that would really help you, and take action on it this week. Because it’s the implementation of knowledge that brings the results.

So pick one. Just one. Whichever one your gut already knew you needed when you read it.

• Maybe it’s auditing your week and reclaiming time for the work you were made to do.

• Maybe it’s hiring (or finally trusting) the person who loves the work you find draining.

• Maybe it’s defining, in writing, what success in one teammate’s role actually looks like.

• Maybe it’s calling the coach you’ve been telling yourself you don’t need.

• Maybe it’s starting to build a successor for the role you can’t imagine handing off.

Whatever it is, take the step this week. Then come back next week and take another one. That’s how leaders who work in their genius are built. One intentional decision at a time.

Now go out and Learn, Grow, & Lead and take your team to the Next Level!

• Rocket Fuel — Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winter

• StrengthsFinder 2.0 — Tom Rath

• DISC Assessment — for understanding your default style and how to adapt it

• LinkedIn

• Website