Leadership has little to do with you know; it’s a set of behaviors. You can know absolutely nothing about leadership on an academic or intellectual level and be an extraordinary leader.
Your success as a leader is not a function of what you do; it is a measure of what you accomplish. How you go about whatever you must accomplish might be important in terms of demonstrating things like good character, integrity, and graciousness. But being sneaky, dishonest, unkind, or even malignantly narcissistic doesn’t necessarily prevent you from being an effective leader. Leadership is not a popularity contest. More to the point, having all the personal qualities of an exquisite leader – and not accomplishing anything worthwhile pretty much rules out any possibility of being considered an exceptional or even a good leader. Leadership is performance art. Your success is a measure of your performance, and what you accomplish will always measure up to the habits that inform your actions.
Learning how to be a leader is like learning to ride a bicycle: you cannot learn to master it without doing it.
Understanding what to do may help, but you must develop a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Like riding a bicycle, leadership must become a force of habit rather than something you have to think through each time you find yourself wanting to move forward or navigate a turn.
Being thoughtful is different than having to think about what you are doing. In fact, it is very difficult to be genuinely thoughtful when you need to think about how to do so. Thoughtfulness is a habit. It is one of many habits you find in highly effective leaders.
If you want to be a better leader, you need better leadership habits. It’s not surprising that one of the most revered and wildly successful self-help books of all time is Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.” Covey observed that there is a gap between knowing what to do and doing it. He could have offered seven recipes for people to follow, but he understood that the cook’s ability and the quality of the ingredients make all the difference. He also could have offered seven strategies. While people might understand what to do to make their lives more effective, it is unlikely that most people would ever employ the strategies effectively.
Covey clearly understood that the make-or-break for people comes down to their habits. He also understood that most people need to replace existing habits with new good habits and that this process doesn’t come naturally to most people. Instead of focusing on what habits are better than others, he provides clear and convincing evidence as to why people must change their habits if they want to change the circumstances of their lives. And despite the success of the book and the groundswell of personal leadership development it started, it is no easier to change your habits having read his book or anything written by anyone – including this essay.
There are two significant problems with developing better habits. One is that you learn new habits more easily when you are young, and the other is when you get older, and learning new habits becomes a matter of unlearning old ones.
You learn new habits more readily when you were a child. Your survival depended on learning certain rote routines that either kept you safe (like staying away from a hot stove or looking both ways before stepping into a road) or made you socially adept (learning to be polite, gracious, and helpful). You were born with certain basic instincts, but these were replaced or augmented by your parents and caregivers.
At first, you learned to speak and to socialize by instinctively imitating others. But in short order, you were given instructions about what you should or should not imitate. Children learn that there are certain adult-only behaviors were unsuitable for children. They also learn that certain children-only behaviors are tolerated and only appropriate until you reach a certain age or station in life, like sucking one’s thumb, for example, or demanding attention by interrupting those in your surroundings. Other controlled behaviors are necessary until you proved yourself capable of doing things safely or reliably independently and without the need for supervision.
Some habits are a function of repetition and reward. If you do your homework diligently, your teachers reward you with good grades, and a good report card might win you some favor at home. Some parents enforced disciplines like attending homework before playtime with uncertain results. Some children thrive due to the structure, while others begrudgingly attend to their tasks, become resentful, and learn to dislike doing homework. Some develop the habits of rushing through their assignments and learning little, and some children develop the habit of lying to avoid things they find unpleasant. There are good habits and bad ones.
Other habits are more clearly a function of repeated practice. You do something over and over again until you get it right. The issue is how and what you practice. The adage, practice makes perfect is nonsense. Practice only makes permanent: you can just as easily develop poor habits as you can good ones.
Some children learn faster than others, and while some of your development is a function of nature, much of what you learned was habits developed through being nurtured.
Nurturing new habits as an adult is far more difficult. Your life becomes a web of habits that control everything, just about every aspect of your life from the moment to awake in the morning – until you fall asleep at night. What you eat, what you wear, how you speak, the route you drive to work, and the things you do for entertainment – are all functions of your habits. Whether you are sloppy or neat, diligent or careless, generous or stingy are all driven by habits. Even your health, while certainly in some measure a function of your genetics and your environment, is also a function of choices made by habit.
I know a health coach and fitness trainer who instructively uses his genetic disposition to being obese to make a key point about changing habits. He shows pictures of his grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles: all blissfully and morbidly obese. He explained that his cultural heritage was one of over-indulging in food – which not only included cooking and over-eating but “making mama happy” by cleaning your plate – ideally multiple times each meal. This coach was one of the excessively large-bodied humans in the picture he showed. But by what could seem to be a miracle, today he is thin, fit, and muscular. It wasn’t easy to change his habits. He needed first to change his beliefs and even his values. His eating habits were a function of the values imparted to him by his entire extended family, suggesting that massively consuming fattening foods was a lifestyle choice steeped in love – and that being obese was a prize and an exhibition of that love.
You change habitual behaviors based on the evolution of your beliefs and the hierarchy of beliefs that form your values. (No longer being supervised, you are free to eat what you wish, sleep when you choose to, and make the bulk of your decisions on any whim you see fit. Accordingly, you develop habits around your thinking that guide how you achieve your objectives. These habits of thinking inform what is called emotional intelligence, or EQ.
While your native intelligence or IQ is hardwired into how your brain works – and is relatively constant throughout your life, absent any impairment, your EQ is largely malleable. Studies demonstrate that people can improve their emotional intelligence. Studies also show that changing deeply ingrained habits is difficult.
The typical approach to changing out undesirable habits for better ones is to rely on willpower. However, there is little evidence that willpower actually works.
Anyone who has struggled with attaining or maintaining a lower body weight knows something about willpower. Unfortunately, what they learn is that willpower becomes an excuse – not a strategy. While self-control might be considered a virtue, being unable to conjure enough self-control to change your body shape is hardly a vice. For many people who exhibit so-called self-control, it involves minimal effort. And for others, no amount of effort seems to make a difference.
The relatively newer field of study known as Positive Intelligence, or EQ, shifts the focus from exercising self-control to resist bad habits and instructs people to learn self-command. The critical difference is that self-control is a deletive process. You resist the urge driven by habit. There is a large body of evidence that suggests the human brain doesn’t operate this way. It’s akin to trying not to think of something. The mere suggestion causes you to think of whatever you are instructed not to think about— regardless of whether it comes from an internal or an external source.
It is possible, though, to think of something that will replace a thought you have. Instead of not thinking about the color red, you can command yourself to think of blue instead. Self-command is an additive process. It is also inherently positive, whereas self-control tends to be negative.
You might also believe that fear is a powerful motivator for getting people to eliminate bad habits. Doctors note that a patient is more likely to replace a sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet with healthier lifestyle choices following a heart attack. While this may be true in many cases, it is also untrue in the long run. People tend to drift back to their bad habits when they feel the loss of what they have given up.
When people feel that healthier habits add more than just increased longevity and enjoy the new habits, they may remain compliant with the doctor’s orders. But, as the observation goes, if you head to the gym to workout 3 hours a week, you may increase your lifespan by some number of years, but that you had better enjoy the time you spend in the gym – because you will have spent the equivalent of all those extra years in the gym. The suggestion is that it is a zero-sum game. It may not be factually accurate, but it is often enough reason people to head from the gym and back onto their couch.
Learning self-command is a function of supporting better habits of thinking by seeing them as adding to your life joy and meaningful things. Not surprising, though, it turns out that changing your thinking doesn’t directly change your behavior. But changing your beliefs might.
People tend to cling hard to closely held beliefs. Your beliefs, more than just about anything, define who you are and how you choose to behave. Changing a belief is generally requires learning something new. The paradox here is that your beliefs surrounding your ability or need to learn will govern whether or not you do. Even well-educated people get out of the habit of learning new things and instead seek to confirm or embellish what they already know. In this respect, some people feel that learning exposes weakness or some kind of inadequacy. For them, curiosity requires a willingness to be vulnerable.
Leaders must be perpetual learners, discovering what they need to know about their circumstances relative to opportunities or threats, understanding the people they must influence, and must be capable of learning about themselves in the face of the dynamics of their responsibilities. Leaders who are unwilling or unable to demonstrate vulnerability can only be reactive in the face of challenges. Strong evidence suggests that effective leaders must exhibit creative tendencies in a world where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity define the problems they must solve.
Learning is the most important habit to develop.
People accustomed to being looked up to and being in control are often the most resistant to replacing the certainty of knowing with the uncertainty of curiosity. Operating in the knowing-mode is a fierce habit that leaders must learn to change.
Leaders who adopt and maintain the habit of real learning demonstrate what it takes to change one’s own beliefs and keep growing. Moreover, they influence others to do the same. It is how good leaders grow to become exceptional leaders and how they help ordinary people do extraordinary things. They build the habits they need to see problems and find solutions. They elevate their understanding of what can improve and what must improve. And they apply their habits of thinking to make what is necessary possible – and make what’s possible necessary.
You can learn good (or bad) habits, but it is impossible to teach habits to others. Habits are always a matter of personal choice. Your job as a leader is to be an exemplar of the habits that enable you to accomplish what matters most. You must do your best to encourage those you influence to rid themselves of the poor habits that feed incompetence and dysfunction and replace them with habits that will give them the personal satisfaction and joy of accomplishing something significant and truly meaningful. If you make a habit of just this one focus, your influence will grow, and so will the joy in your life and the lives around you.
