5 habits to transform your leadership Style
Leadership is a never ending development of the skill. There are new things to learn, existing skills to reinforce and improve; and bad habits to remove.
There isn’t any one article resource, book, or course that you need to develop your skills as a leader. There is too much breadth and width when it comes to leadership. For me, developing my leadership skills is a never-ending journey.
Below are some habits I believe will help you transform your leadership style. These are habits I am instilling in my daily routine. Do this each day and you will see the improvement in your leadership skills.
Reading
"We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is 'too busy to read' is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.” General Jim Mattis
Even though General Mattis’s quote is about military commanders’ reading habits to learn warfare, it still applies to all professions. Reading is learning. And it isn’t just reading book after book. It’s reading, taking notes, learning, practice the lesson and re-reading the book. You’re going deep to learn.
A few things you can do to make this into a habit.
Schedule it
Schedule it in your calendar. Make an appointment with yourself and set a time for how long you read. Make it into a daily practice.
Take notes, highlights
I grew up being taught that you don’t highlight a book or write notes in the margins.
I have now developed a habit of highlighting my physical books, writing in the margins and putting post-it notes with my insights etc. I then write down the notes and highlights in a notebook.
This helps to reinforce the ideas and your thoughts on it. Writing the notes into a notebook makes me re-read the book and embodies the knowledge.
For Kindle, I approach it the same way, I highlight and write notes on my Kindle. I then use Clipping.io to transfer all the highlights and notes to Evernote.
Practice one skill
Take a lesson or technique from what you read. Identify scenarios where you can practice it. Visualise yourself using the skills. When the scenario or situation presents itself during the workday, practice the skill. At the end of the day, review how you went. This helps to reinforce the skill that you’re learning. Spend as long as you need before moving on to the next skill.
Re-reading books
Choose a few books to commit to re-reading regularly. These would be quality books that give you insights and lessons that are worth revisiting over and over again. Some lessons take effort to learn and embed. Repetition is the pathway to mastery.
Your views may change the next time you re-read the book. You would have new experiences that would change how you interact with the book. You would gain new insights coming from a different viewpoint.
Manage your emotions
There are many facets to emotional intelligence. In Daniel Goleman’s framework, there are four quadrants (self-awareness, social awareness, self-management & relationship management). Within each of the quadrants, there are several skills that you can develop.
The key habit here sits within the first and third quadrants - self-awareness and self-management. It’s about being aware of your emotions and regulating them.
As a leader, you need to know what you’re feeling, why you’re feeling it and how to manage it. Your emotions will spread to your team and those around you. If you’re negative, your team will be negative. If you’re positive, your team will be positive.
Developing self-awareness and self-regulation
A few things you can do to develop self-awareness are:
journal - develop a daily habit of journaling
meditate - practice meditation daily.
Be present and pay attention to your thoughts and emotions.
To develop self-regulation, some of the things you can do are:
find ways to manage emotions on the spot - for example, box breathing when feeling stressed and upset
practice reframing the situation to change your thought patterns and emotional responses
practice pausing between stimulus and reacting so you can choose the best response
Decisions, decisions, decisions
Decision-making is taxing. Each time you make a decision it takes cognitive load and energy. The more decisions you make, the less energy you have. Here are a few things you can do to reduce the cognitive load:
set up a system or framework where you don’t need to make decisions. There is a famous story of Steve Jobs only wearing black turtleneck shirts so he doesn’t have to think about what to wear. And the less think you have to remember, the more space you have to make decisions.
Delegate decisions to your team. You don’t need to make all the decisions, some of the decisions can be made by your team. Work out what type of decisions and the authority level that you can delegate and talk your team through it.
When making decisions, you can do a few things to make it easier. It will be difficult initially but once you have set it up and make it habitual, it will get easier.
Bring out the assumptions
When you make decisions, there are a lot of assumptions that go unsaid which can cause misalignment and reduce clarity for yourself and the team. Bringing them up and making them explicit, will make the decisions clearer.
Slow down your thinking
Most of the work in project management doesn’t deal with crises, emergencies or life or death situations. You do have time to slow down your thinking, think through the pros and cons and understand the downstream impact of your decisions.
Take some time, a few deep breaths and regulate your emotions before making the decisions. This creates some space in your mind for the cognitive work. Some other ways to make space in your mind is to turn away from screens and inputs like chats, emails and calls. Yes, collate all relevant information for the decision but then create space for yourself and your team to go through the decision.
Standards
Having standards is key for the team. These will impact your and your team’s performance. Standards are the behaviours and actions that the team and you will meet.
Ask yourself and get your team’s input on these questions.
What behaviours, actions and ways of communication will you accept?
What behaviours, actions and ways of communication won’t you accept?
Remember, what you tolerate becomes the standard
Once you have set the standard, make sure it’s accessible to everyone and communicate it. You may have to sound like a broken record and repeat it over and over again until it gets embodied.
You need to model the behaviours of the standards. Once the team sees how you behave, they will follow suit. Last thing, be strict with yourself and kind to others. Don’t make excuses for them when they don’t meet the standard, hold them accountable but be kind.
Communicate
Communication covers both writing and talking to your team and stakeholders. You’ll need to be able to listen and process the information and able to say what you mean accurately.
In Stephen Covey’s seminal work, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the habits is “Seek first to understand, then to be understood”. What he means here is that when people talk, the other person most likely is getting their response prepared in their heads and waiting for their turn to speak.
What the habit requires is first to set the intention of understanding the person and reflect to the person what they communicated to you. The second part is then to set the intention of being understood and using “I” statements to communicate.
Covey talks about listening with your eyes, ears and heart:
Listen with your eyes, you pick up body language that will show you their nonverbal cues
Listen with your heart, means listening to the tone and inflection of the other person’s voice to understand their feelings.
Listen with your ears, to pick up on the actual words they used to express themselves.
Some other techniques you can use to improve your understanding are:
reflect what you are hearing to make sure you’re aligned with the person’s emotion
ask questions to improve your understanding
To be understood, you need to understand the listener’s needs, interests and concerns. You need to ensure that you communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly.
Small steps
There are many more techniques and habits for improving your leadership skills. These are just some of them. Take small steps to implement them. Try to build one habit at a time. Put into practice and see how much your leadership improves.
Reading List
Below are some books that I would recommend for your leadership journey.
About Face - Colonel David Hackworth
On Leadership - Lt General Hal Moore
Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink and Leif Babbin
The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Practice
Choose one habit and implement the practices to make it part of your daily life.
Let me know how it goes.
Here are some tools to help with your practice
Below are some tools I have created to help you and your team with your practice. Even if you know how to do them, the checklists will help you identify areas that need extra focus and attention.
Most of them are free. I would appreciate it if you found them useful to give it a great review.
As always, feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions about the checklists or let me know how you and your team went using them.
Sprint Planning Checklist - to help you and your team plan your sprint
Retrospective Checklist - improve your retrospective so your team can extend their performance.
Transition to Agile Checklist - identify areas where you and your team can improve or use it to transition to a more agile way of working.
Simple and Effective Project Risk Management - a paid short course to get you up and running in identifying and managing project risks. Great for new project managers with no prior training.