INsight/ The Inconsistent Leader

Photo by Shilmar on Pixabay

Manila, 8 March 2023 — Where I see many leaders fail.

Story

First off, on this International Women’s Day, let’s acknowledge the women leaders around the world who create better futures by building and sticking to strong daily and weekly habits. They are succeeding where many leaders fail, and that is in getting out of the first of Three Leader Traps: The Inconsistent Leader who is short of habits. By now, the power of strong habits is sufficiently well known. Moreover, in recent years several additional resources have been shared online, so it’s hard to remain ignorant of what you should do and why.

And yet, habit-building remains a challenge. In my experience, I typically see people respond in three different ways when the challenge of habit-building comes up. About one-third will show up as Leaders who instinctively get it and decide to get started building a habit in practice — even if the habit they select at first may be too big. They are the clients who are easy to work with. 

Another third show up as Learners who understand that habits are important and are open to learning more about it — they might even buy a book about habits — yet typically with little or no action after their initial interest. When coaching helps them get into practice, progress usually follows quickly. Finally, the remaining one third show up as Skeptics who believe that some of the people around them might need habit-building — but not them. They are the hardest to help, yet potentially with the greatest benefits awaiting them.

Challenge

Our ambivalent relationship with habit-building is one that can lead us to join the Skeptics in their camp. This usually comes from a familiar experience, that of repeated failure to put our intentions into practice long enough to get the results we want. I see this a lot in my coaching work with people who are frustrated about not making enough progress in their careers. They could gain the highest benefits from coaching, yet frequently resist asking for support.

There is a variety of reasons why habit-building is a challenge for most leaders. In our Grow3Leaders LEADyear 2023 Challenge to become a Trusted Leader, we explore these reasons this month as we practice building strong habits together. For me, my curiosity — an essential ingredient for leaders — can easily trigger my mind to explore one idea after another. With only my curiosity to drive me, little would get done. 

In my coaching experience, I found that failure in habit-building can also result from a lack of self-confidence and from deciding to work solo, without the support from a coach and a community of like-minded peers for inspiration and accountability. When working by yourself, your self-critical voice (often called saboteur voice for a good reason) can cause you to resist change, especially when the habit you want to build holds a significant change. 

Question

That’s why, when working on habit-building, we need to outsmart our brain, including the self-critical voice in our head. How to do that? One of the ways is to ‘fly under the radar’ by using Japan’s Kaizen method of continuous improvement to select a small habit to build and work on it incrementally, without triggering your saboteur voice. My question for you this week is: what habit do you want to build to become a consistent leader?

In our ACE Coaching method, we allocate a lot of effort to the Execution phase after the Assessment and Challenge phases. If we don’t make time to build strong habits around our good intentions for new leadership behaviors, like scaffolding around a new building, the leader might not achieve the result they want to see. Teresa Liguori, one of our graduates from the Leader in Transition Program, shared on our webpage how she started out in the Skeptics camp and then experienced how the program changed her life and attitude to gain confidence in her leadership and make changes happen.

In the meantime, Teresa has joined the Grow3Leaders LEADyear 2023 Challenge to become a Trusted Leader. That’s where, by learning and practicing together ‘out loud’ in our community with fellow leaders, we support each other and hold ourselves accountable for progress and results. At the end of this month of March, we will open the door again for a short time to allow more Collabs of 1+3 leaders to join us in the Challenge. If you’re up for this, then start now by inviting 3 colleagues and get ready to join us. Read more about it here and book a free call to set yourself up for the Challenge.