Manila, 7 November 2024 — How to get your leadership challenge done. 

Story

It happened in 2019. In our increasingly multipolar, siloed, and turbulent world, leaders from many countries started taking the Grow3Leaders Challenge with us, recognizing the call for more leaders and leadership. They set out to influence a positive change in their workplaces in just 6 weeks. The challenge was carefully designed with the results of international leadership research that showed how our leadership will grow the most when we take on challenging assignments.  

Taking leadership challenges allows us to lift our consciousness to a higher level to tackle the more complex problems we face in our world, like how to influence change in our teams and organizations. We have diversified the leadership challenges we offer, with durations now ranging from 11 days to three weeks, six weeks, and up to a full twelve months for our ‘marathon’ Trusted Leaders Challenge. Among these, the six-week challenge, now called The Workplace Challenge, has seen the most graduates.

Over the years, we have together learned valuable lessons with the leaders taking these challenges. One is, unsurprisingly, that finishing a leadership challenge is harder than starting it. Dealing with the inevitable ups and downs along the way while working for everyone to stay on track with their Collab’s three weekly on-the-job tasks is what truly generates an experiential transformation in their leadership. Making it to the finish line with your Collab is, therefore, a big deal. Not everyone does.

Challenge

As the participating leaders take these experiential challenges together with the three workplace colleagues they have invited to form a Collab, they typically discover three things. First, the experience to practice matters more than the structured learning. Second, difficulties in keeping everyone going with high motivation continue throughout the challenge. Third, they learn and achieve more together with their Collab than if they would have taken the challenge individually.

Along the way, they experience what the DAC model for leadership means in practice. Their sense of a shared Direction is challenged from the start, followed by their ability to create Alignment among the Collab members. Then, it’s their continued individual Commitment to collective success that will determine the Collab’s success, for which there is no guarantee. We love it when they get to the finish line.

To make a successful finish happen in The Workplace Challenge, we discovered a powerful practice, for each Collab to meet for 15 minutes on weekdays to discuss and work on their tasks together. We’ve started calling these important meetings The Dailies. More than anything else, we saw that keeping up with these daily meetings (or calls or chats) will determine if the Collab will finish the leadership challenge and gain their full transformational learning benefit from it.

Question

With our passion for growing leaders who want to change the world, we are spending this month of November helping Collabs to ‘get it done’ and finish the challenge they started. It’s only human to need some extra push and support, which we provide with our on-demand coaching and mentoring in the Grow3Leaders community of practice.

My question for you this week is what kind of leadership challenge will help you grow your leadership from where you are at now? Please let us know. All our leadership challenges are freely available when you and your three Collabmates join the community with monthly memberships. On request, corporate memberships are also available.

As you can see on the Grow3Leaders landing page, we are starting The LEADweek Challenge this weekend to help you build a strong weekly set of routines for your leadership, with a different leadership practice for each day of the week. Why not form a Collab to enter the challenge together? It takes only three weeks to finish by 30 November and experience a transformational result in your leadership. See you inside!