INsight/ Taking a Challenge
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Photo by Hannah Busing on unsplash.
Manila, 10 January 2024 — What challenges do for your leadership growth.
Story
It happened last week. In preparation for the January book club meeting of the International Association of Positive Psychology Coaches (IAPPC), we are reading Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, by Adam Grant, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. From reading the book, I learned three things about how taking on leadership challenges will bring out our hidden potential. First, it matters how far we travel in the challenge, not where we start. To develop our hidden potential during the challenge, we need to practice being proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined.
Second, by taking on challenges we build our character, defined by Grant as the learned capacity to live by our principles and prioritize our values over our instincts. “If personality is how you respond on a typical day,” says Grant, “character is how you show up on a hard day.” Moreover, stressing that “no one is immune to burnout, doubt, or stagnation,” he explains how coaching will help to build our character by providing the necessary scaffolding to let us grow. With a coach’s objective insights and encouragement, we can sustain our motivation so that we can travel farther in the challenge. That is the experiential learning process for bringing out our hidden potential.
Third, Grant’s research about building character resonates with what Asia’s wisdom traditions have encouraged us to do for over two millennia: to cultivate virtues and nurture character in how we show up daily in our lives and work. Leadership challenges are part and parcel of what Grant describes as systems that expand opportunities for growth—they provide the scaffolding for us to go farther in bringing out our hidden potential. I found Grant’s book to be a valuable guide for transforming the ways we learn—in schools and in our life-long education—including the value of leadership behaviors (he calls them character skills) that will make a difference.
Challenge
Grant’s focus on building character resembles our practice at TransformationFirst.Asia to help leaders in mastering effective leadership behaviors. Invariably, this is a challenging process, and it is best done during challenges that we deliberately create together on the job. Grant calls that ‘deliberate play.’ This includes individual leadership practices as well as challenges to look for collective intelligence in our teams of leaders. We can also practice effective behaviors in a community where leaders learn out loud together by sharing the experiences they gain during challenges.
Taking on a leadership challenge means that we commit to Grant’s ‘deliberate play’ that is all about experiential learning how far we can travel for our growth. I often hear leaders say that they can’t join a challenge because they are too busy with their current responsibilities. For sure, they are right about being busy—I have never met a leader who wasn’t busy. And yet, by holding back, leaders risk missing out on the lessons of research. We know that taking a hands-on leadership challenge—one that is designed to be integrated into our daily work and life—is the way to become better leaders. Taking a challenge will accelerate a leader’s growth and expand their influence and impact. The research is clear on that.
We see this working in practice. The leaders we work with are taking on challenges in their one-to-one coaching programs, in the team-of-leaders coaching engagements, and in the Grow3Leaders community of practice. Over the past decade, we have realized that the leader’s journey of transformation only begins ‘for real’ when they take on challenges. And not just one. We observed how effective leaders will keep up their practice by taking on new challenges, one after the other. That’s how leaders grow farther, in Grant’s words and as pointed out by the research of the Center for Creative Leadership, including the 70-20-10 rule of leadership development.
Question
As we have seen, challenges help leaders build character, travel farther on their leadership journey, and bring out their hidden potential, both individually and collectively in teams. My question for you this week is—unsurprisingly—about taking on a leadership challenge. What is the challenge that will you take on this week, thereby opening the door to a year of transformational growth in your life, work, and communities?
Working on this by yourself has many drawbacks. As Grant points out, we can’t see our hidden potential by ourselves. Working together with a coach will help you discover what will be the right challenge to take on at this time. In our coaching experience, the first problem people raise is rarely the challenge to work on. It takes some digging and discussion to find the right one. In our one-to-one leadership coaching programs—such as Leader in Transition, Move to Excellence, and Perform for Purpose—we discover the challenge to work on together in a personalized and private manner.
In our teams-of-leader engagements, we will coach you to decide together what your team’s next challenge will be, drawing on your team’s experiences, available skills, and what your organization requires. Meanwhile, over in the Grow3Leaders community of practice, we offer several leadership challenges you can choose to participate in. They are integrated with your work and life and include driving a positive change in your workplace with a cross-generational team (10 weeks, starting this week), becoming Trusted Leaders by mastering effective leadership behaviors (12 months, starting anytime), and more to come. We can’t wait to hear about the challenge you decide to take on.
P.S. If you have just returned to work after your holidays, you may have missed our earlier announcements about The Crossgen Challenge. Let us know this week if you’d still like to join and we will get back to you right away.
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