Building Your Leadership Habit..
You know it, I know it, being a good leader isn’t a 'set and forget' type deal. It's a daily practice which can at times be overwhelming. Well it doesn't have to be.
You’ve probably been to a leadership course, or several, where you’ve been bombarded with a bunch of different strategies. You might even get excited and take pages of notes on the printed slides. Then <insert da da da daaaa doom music> you return back to your site, or your office, and it seems like the place has BLOWN up in your absence.
You sensibly pop your slides in your desk drawer and think to yourself that you’ll revisit them tomorrow. Of course 6 months later you find the slides shoved in a drawer and have a quick flashback to all the good stuff, so you take the slides home to read. And.. Nothing.
It makes sense. You probably know a couple of things you could be implementing, but you want to do EVERYTHING so you put it off. Why? Probably because:
You've got so many ideas it's overwhelming. You want to map them all out in a huge culture change process for your team. But you’ll get to that later.
You're too busy today to start anything today - the sh*t is hitting the fan! You'll get to it on Monday when you have a minute to yourself.
You think we have to do it all. Right now.
You actually have no idea what to do or how to do it. Full stop.
Ok if you’re in that last camp, can I suggest you give me a quick call. I can give you one thing you can start doing right now that can help you on your leadership journey.
If you’re in any of the other 3 camps - great! You’ve got some knowledge. You know some stuff. It’s just time to implement.
Building your leadership habit
There are so many books about habits. Two that I love (that are quite different) are Atomic Habits by Jason Clear and Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty. Both can give you some deep, brilliant insights into the power of habits. And both have some super simple advice:
Don’t try to do everything at once.
The theory is if you try to change everything at once, you’ll end up doing nothing. Actually changing the way we think and act is a process and starting small is the key to any successful change.
You probably know what I’m going to say next…
PICK ONE THING! One thing you have been thinking about, but you haven’t quite got to. Something you underlined and highlighted from a leadership course, or that you read in that article online.
It might be something like:
I am going to spend 5 extra minutes chatting with a team member today
I am going to script out the difficult conversations need to have (email me if you’d like a template for this)
I am going to ask an extra question before giving advice (coaching mindset)
I am going to schedule in all my 1:1’s for the remainder of the year and be PREPARED and PRESENT at each of them.
The next step is finding a way to hold yourself accountable. This could be simply scheduling into your calendar, habit stacking - i.e. I’m going to eat lunch in the lunch room so I can chat to more people throughout the day or giving yourself a little incentive to meet.
Starting small will help you build your confidence to find new and easy ways to build your leadership habit.
Shoot me an email with the subject “little leadership ideas” and I’ll send you a few to get you started