Better Leadership – Simply Explained
and why coaching plays an essential role on your journey
For all the complexities, vagaries and nuances about leadership, the one thing most easy to understand is that leadership comes down to having the right habits. If you develop the habits that are necessary and replace those that get in your way, you can learn to become an effective leader.
Leadership training usually focuses on skills and attitude. While both are important, and perhaps necessary – alone they are not sufficient. With an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world (VUCA) – to be effective, leaders must be agile and creative. Your skills and your mindset must be forged into solid habits in order to perform at the level today’s world demands.
Most people tend to think of habits only relative to our behaviors. They are actually a function of your thinking – often on a subconscious level – that drives your actions. You might even find that you are not aware of some behaviors that are driven by your habits.
Habits inform the actions you take without needing to give much thought to what you are doing. This is true of good habits as well as undesirable ones. in the case of “bad” habits – you might even be fully aware that what you are doing is undesirable. But habits are so strong that interrupting or halting your behavior is so difficult that you allow it to continue – even while apologizing for it.
Worse still, many people embrace their bad habits, making excuses or even flaunting them. People tend to prefer problems they cannot solve over solutions they do not like – and for some people, ridding yourself of a bad habit is more trouble than it’s worth. I am not just talking about eating with your mouth open – or even biting your nails. Doctors struggle to get patients to comply with basic lifestyle choices that can have life-or-death consequences.
Poor leadership habits are commonplace. From the parodies about horrible bosses – to epic failures of well-established companies – the root cause of leadership ineffectiveness can be traced to habits that are often reinforced in leadership stereotypes. Because leadership is always situational – there is no standard training that covers all of the behaviors needed to be a competent leader.
This is compounded by the power and authority often afforded to those who fill leadership positions. Regardless of their ability to perform effectively, the position enables people to compensate for their deficiencies by exerting themselves and controlling others either through manipulation or by use of force. When leaders believe that they make the organization successful – rather than the other way around – it is easy to become delusional about your own importance and grab credit where it isn’t due – and assign blame where it doesn’t exist.
This is why understanding and managing your habits is fundamental to leadership performance – where your actions tend to be under a microscope by those we lead. Your actions are always a flow process beginning with how your feelings and beliefs inform your thinking, which in turn defines who you are – to yourself and to others– and this translates to how you choose to act.
On some level – action is always a choice – even in the extreme moments of stress when it is difficult to allow anything but our instincts and a shot of adrenaline to urgently guide us from danger.
Navy SEALS and members of other elite special forces routinely learn to control their behavior under extreme stress because they make it necessary and possible to act in accordance with a solemn sense of duty. They make a habit of behaving this way by connecting to a profound sense of purpose that resides deep within their beliefs and personal values.
No amount of skill or training alone can cause anyone to perform at the level of those driven by a sense of purpose and a commitment to a great worthy cause. Though they may be able to perform with precision under extreme stress, they are not conditioned to be robots – but trained to make critical choices that they believe serve a greater good. What they believe is as important as what they are trained to do.
One common misconception about leaders is the idea they are responsible for making decisions for other people. Leadership is principally about making choices yourself. How you choose to influence others will determine your effectiveness as a leader. If you allow yourself to default to operating consistent with bad habits – you will be a mediocre leader at best. But if you take charge and install habits that serve how you best need to perform in your role – you might have what it takes to become an exceptional leader.
Habits make things, good or bad, easier to do. But the habit is not the action itself, but the habits of thinking that inform and drive your actions.
It might be helpful to look at habits of thinking as being essential competencies – or what it takes to accomplish the things you routinely do. Competencies encompass the knowledge, skills, talent and experience that are the basis for acting decisively and confidently.
Think of your daily habits like making your bed, washing-up at night or how you drive to work or the grocery store. You have choices – but you can easily allow yourself to operate on auto-pilot – and not think much about the details. Your habits allow you to form a predictable routine that often simplifies your life – based on your competencies.
Knowledge is information you acquire relative to whatever you aim to accomplish. Skill amounts to having command of the actions in such a way that you can actually accomplish your aims. Talent serves to amplify your ability acquire knowledge or develop skills efficiently and effectively. And experience enables you to modify the way to apply your knowledge and skills in order to adapt to the challenges you encounter.
Routine rote daily tasks may not require much talent and the knowledge and skills you need are nearly universally acquired. But more complex tasks and decisions that bear significant consequence are also a function of the same competencies. How well you perform is a combination of your competencies and how you apply them. This is where you habits of thinking matter.
Your habits of thinking are like the operating system of a computer. They control the way you function and your capacity to function. The things required for accomplishing specific tasks or objectives can be compared to software that rides on your operating system. Your physical ability to approach the task is the hardware.
If your hardware is up to the task and the software (your competencies) is compatible with operating system (habits of thinking) it is possible to accomplish what you set out to do – with the right habits.
Just because something is possible there is no certainty that it will happen. Possibility is necessary, but insufficient when it comes to accomplishing things. For things to happen they must be both possible and necessary.
Leadership effectiveness amounts to directing action in two stages. The first is discerning what is necessary and then figuring out if it is or can be made possible. The second is demonstrating to others what is possible and then causing people to be inspired – so that they take what is possible and chose to make it necessary. Getting both of these right consistently is a function of making these habits of your thinking.
It is tempting to go after things that no one else sees as possible. The challenge can be intoxicating and the rewards are often enormous. It’s important to understand that what makes all of this so enticing is the level of risk you must undertake. Challenging the status quo is dangerous. All throughout history – many who have tried have suffered at the hands of those whose power comes from keeping things as they are.
You had best first determine that what you aim to disrupt is necessary – and worth what might be a hefty price. It is essential to first ask “should we do this” – before determining can we do this – in order to avoid catastrophic unforced errors. Habits are how you either avoid temptations – or fall prey to them.
Nothing that is impossible has ever been accomplished, but countless things that were once believed to be impossible have been. This kind of disruption only happens when you determine something to be so necessary that you ignore that fact that it may not be possible (or that conventional thinking suggests it is absolutely impossible) – and are driven to find a way to make it happen.
All great human achievements across the span of history have been accomplished through disruption of otherwise conventional thinking. Progress is the result of challenging the status-quo. It involves risks. It takes courage and determination that cannot be mustered when you seek comfort and your aim is to protect and hold onto the things you have grown familiar with and accustomed to. Nothing truly worthwhile ever happens inside your comfort zone.
Getting comfortable around the idea of being uncomfortable is a matter of being conscientious. Conscientiousness literally means being guided by your conscience and driven by a profound inner sense of purpose.
People will often take risks for their own benefit and gain. The principles that drive capitalism are rooted in this idea. Interestingly, many studies have also demonstrated that people will take even greater risks in service to others. This is what we describe as having a sense of duty.
It’s easy to understand how parents make sacrifices for their children – and how we sometimes do crazy things for the people we love. But evidence shows that human beings are willing to do the same and even more for strangers. This ties into the understanding of emotional intelligence. Human beings have an enormous capacity for empathy – and find tremendous satisfaction in accomplishing things that we believe are meaningful. This is why we see anonymous benefactors making huge contributions to civic-minded causes.
You not only find deep satisfaction and joy in accomplishing things that serve a purpose beyond your own personal interests and needs, you actually find strength you may have never experienced before. This is often what we call grit. When people are bound by a powerful, and indelible sense of purpose they will choose to perform conscientiously – and work harder, longer and against far greater odds than they might otherwise do.
It may seem that when people behave with this level of devotion and dedication it is because they were somehow born that way. But this kind of behavior is a function of your habits. You may be exposed to others who you admire – and work to emulate, or you might be inspired by values you were taught by those who raised you that speak to the need to right wrongs, or be grabbed by an unshakeable cause that aligns with your personal values and sense of purpose. But regardless of what causes you to make whatever risks you take necessary, it is the habits that you form that will guide your actions.
It is easy to see how this can all be applied to leadership.
Leadership is the power to influence the future by pursuing competence and cultivating exceptional performance in order to accomplish what matters most. Leaders pursue competence in themselves and in others by making it necessary and possible think, act and behave in ways that result in meaningful, significant accomplishments – and cultivate exceptional performance in others by making this the most important thing to accomplish.
If you make a habit of performing to your fullest potential – and another habit of being dissatisfied just enough with your performance that it drives you to constantly improve and grow – you will find yourself on a leadership journey that continues to both challenge you and take you places you could hardly imagine. On the other hand – if you hold onto the habits that draw you stay safe in your comfort zone, to protect what you know and squash your curiosity – you will find that you have found yourself at a destination where you settle and allow life to pass you by.
The Essential Role of Coaching Along Your Leadership Journey
The thing about habits – is that they are invisible. We don’t see our habits – we just see the results. Tiger Woods, when once asked why he needed a coach, quipped that he couldn’t see his backswing. Coaching shows us what we cannot see.
An experienced coach knows both what to look for – and what needs to change in order to improve and to grow.
To grow as a leader, you must grow as a person. You must unlearn the things that prevent you from learning what you need to know. You must replace old habits with better ones – and develop the habits you need in order to accomplish what matters most.
Just as there is no limit to how much anyone might improve – there is no limit to how much a coach and mentor can help you realize and expand your potential.
Finally – being coached becomes a habit. Being coached requires curiosity and intellectual humility – both habits of good leaders. You must understand the strength found in flexibility and that learning is what feeds your growth and that growth is what fuels your life.
###
