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The secret sauce of leadership might well be deliberate practice.
We know practice is essential for musicians, athletes and ballet dancers. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell highlighted the research of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and gave us a number that captured the imagination: It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master in most fields. That figure misrepresented the research, since it’s an average, but the point was clear: Practice is vital, if done deliberately on the essentials of the craft.
With that in mind, Montreal executive coach Lynn Harris says we need to reframe leadership. “It’s not a title or a destination – it’s a practice. Making leadership a practice encourages you to experiment, mess up, learn and improve over time. It also takes the pressure off being perfect,” she writes in her book, 12 ½ Leadership Lessons.
She shares five principles for such practice:
- Your mindset should be on leadership as a lifelong apprenticeship, in which you continually show up as the leader you want to be. Remind yourself it is an incredible privilege to positively impact other people’s lives. Practise aspects of your leadership every day.
- Discomfort is essential to learning. You must shake up old behaviours and mindsets to improve, interrupting your autopilot actions. Be adventurous and try something different. Encourage others to question and explore your assumptions.
- Care about what you practise. “If you’re not emotionally invested, your motivation will vanish faster than a New Year’s Resolution,” she says. When considering a mindset or skill to practise, ask why it matters to you; if it doesn’t – if there is no real emotional engagement – pick something else.
- Attention and repetition are crucial. Each morning, ask yourself, “what am I practising today?” Before each meeting, consider what you can practice during it. With each individual, what can you improve?
- Don’t practise alone – or badly. It’s a waste to practise the wrong thing or practise the right thing haplessly. Get feedback by advising other people what you are working on. Invite them to nudge, remind or encourage you in your self-improvement efforts. “Growth is better (and more fun) when done with others,” she insists.
In her book that’s the “half-lesson,” but it is really more than that because it runs through, and buttresses, all the other lessons she believes leaders must take in. Along with it, two others are particularly fundamental: Purpose and body budgeting.
Good leaders choose to lead (rather than just working their way up the hierarchy) and have a clear leadership purpose that guides their decisions and actions. Without it they can lack direction and even a moral compass. She encourages you to write a leadership purpose statement – your why for being in this role. It should be short and not a buzzword salad but have authentic meaning. Also, think about the distinctive contribution you want to make in the people you lead, as well as the organization, customers and community.
Leadership is demanding and if leaders fail to manage what she calls their body budget they cannot show up consistently at their best and fulfill their leadership purpose. “Many leaders we work with are very good at ignoring the flashing red light that they are running a deficit. They think they are getting away with it because they can keep going, but it’s not sustainable,” she says. Instead, embrace the notion that you have a budget for your body you must spend wisely. Couple with that the idea that body budgeting is a leadership competency, not just a side issue.
Leaders can struggle with holding other people accountable. Her lesson is that you will fail in that endeavour if you act from a place of control, because that just sparks an unhealthy dynamic in which you become the parent and the other individual is reduced to being a child. Instead of going into accountability conversations with the mindset it is your job to hold people accountable take the attitude, “It is my job to help people hold themselves accountable.” With that learning mindset, ask lots of questions based around what she calls the CRIA process:
- Commitment: What was the previously agree upon commitment – what did the other individual say they would do? Ask questions such as what commitment they made and when and why they made it rather than bluntly stating your own viewpoint at the outset.
- Reality: Again using questioning, determine what has and hasn’t been done. What is the situation right now? What happened?
- Insight: Use open questions to genuinely explore and help the other person gain insight into how commitments were met or not met. Example: What are you learning about yourself and this commitment? What learning could you apply to future commitments?
- Action: Make new commitments based on those insights. You might ask how they need to change to meet the new commitment and how they will know if they have successfully delivered on it?
That may be a difficult approach to get used to, but just treat it as another management skill to practise regularly.
Cannonballs
- While generative AI can summarize complex information and quickly come up with polished strategic recommendations, research by a team of academics found the large language models lacking: “They consistently recommend strategies that align with modern managerial buzzwords and trends rather than context-specific strategic logic. Across thousands of simulations, we saw LLMs almost uniformly select the same trendy strategies, regardless of context.” They call it strategy trendslop.
- The recent Global Workplace Survey by the Gensler Research Institute found AI is not diminishing human interaction. In fact, AI power users – those who use it regularly in their work and personal lives – spend less time working alone than late adopters of the technology.
- You build confidence by being willing to change you mind, advises executive coach Dan Rockwell.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.