2020 is a year that evokes all sorts of emotions, a time of stress, fear and uncertainty for many, as well as a catalyst for excitement, creative energy and opportunity brought about by a once in a lifetime pandemic. Producing a life saving vaccine in record time cannot be underestimated, nor will the efforts of essential workers quickly be forgotten. What is clear from this time was the chance for many people to slow-down, recharge and reflect, a circuit breaker to the rush culture that had enveloped us. It was also a time where we needed to adapt to our new environment, finding different ways to connect and collaborate. Perhaps you made a commitment to yourself to change some things in your life for the better, not knowing exactly at the time what the future could look like.
Research tells us that around 40% of any given day comprises habits, times where we go on a form of autopilot without necessarily considering whether these habits continue to serve us in that moment. Habits are reinforced over time because they provide a reward for us that keeps us in that pattern. Think of the newly promoted Manager who struggles to delegate because of the years of positive reinforcement around the standard of their personal work, or the Leader who is duly cautious in decision making and becomes paralysed when a pragmatic, speedy call is required. No doubt that approach worked and was valued in the past, but what about now?
Fast forward to 2023, and the busyness culture has returned in many workplaces. So have the back-to-back meetings. How did you fare in reflecting on and changing those habits that you realised were no longer valuable ones for you or others? Various researchers over the years have identified a form of leadership derailment that reflects the notion of where strengths can quickly become weaknesses, especially where we use those strengths inappropriately to our context, or overuse them to exaggerated proportions, or where others no longer see these as strengths. Habits often embody past strengths, and without a mechanism to challenge these from time to time, we may quickly stray into the domain of being ineffective and judged so by others.
Whilst the pandemic may now be moving into the rear vision mirror for many, disruptive change will continue, driven by technology and the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence reflected in developments like ChatGPT. If anything, change will accelerate, requiring us to regularly experiment around our habits and strengths as a sense check of relevance, but also a catalyst for developing new skills, capabilities and habits. The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs research is a must read for any leader aiming to identify those emerging capabilities that will need to be quickly embraced and developed, as the intersection between AI, automation and the human workforce produces a new workforce reality.
Experimentation sits at the heart of personal change for leaders, where stretch and development heat provide the perfect environment to test out new ways of operating. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey from the Harvard Graduate School of Education have done considerable research around the psychology of adult learning, finding that the biggest challenge to personal growth, change and adoption of new habits resides in the form of a psychological immune system, a system built on an underlying belief that to change certain strengths or habits is riskier than maintaining the status quo. Immunity to personal change is the main catalyst for falling back into old leadership habits and in itself, requires a dedicated effort to understand the individual forces that may see us regress.
Each year, I am privileged to work with a large number of groups of leaders across the Asia Pacific, many at the executive level. The most common question that I hear from them is around the best new habits to adopt in a disrupted landscape, and whilst this is going to depend on their context, aspiration and environment, there are some consistent trends. We call these the ‘Big Five’ leadership habits for sustainable impact in disruption.
The ‘Big Five’ leadership habits for sustainable impact in disruption
1. Create time and commit effort to creating a psychologically safe and fertile experimentation environment – this will allow you to deal with some of the discomfort that comes with learning from adversity or setbacks. Leadership and culture play a strong role here, as does prioritising time to observe, experiment and reflect. The Center for Creative Leadership in the USA holds that around 61% of executive learning occurs during challenging assignments and situations, setbacks and the like, so embracing the challenge is critical for both learning and success
2. Have a mechanism to test your lens on the world, both to mitigate the risk of unconscious bias on judgment and decision making, but also to understand how you perceive opportunities versus obstacles at work. How you frame a situation determines how you think and act, but also determines how others see and judge you as a leader and can ultimately influence the level of trust in those relationships
3. Challenge your strengths regularly to establish if they are still serving their purpose. A robust 360-degree assessment tool can assist in this regard, or you could build a regular feedback session into your team meetings where KEEP, STOP, START feedback can be exchanged between you and others. Letting go of strengths that have built over time is not easy, but data can build a case to start the process
4. Embrace outside-in thinking, a mainstay in designing and delivery relevant customer outcomes, but also critical in prioritising time to think about technology innovation and the potential impact of that on your team, function and organisation. Technology is rapidly changing our world, and those who will prosper will understand and respond to those trends quickly. To quote Wayne Gretzky, the former Canadian Ice Hockey Player and Coach, “In the game, I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
5. Travel upstream to understand the source of challenges and issues that you and your team are experiencing. Many leaders are too busy fighting fires and solving problems to invest in understanding the true sources of these challenges. This brings to mind the story of the Villagers, who are ploughing their fields one day when they notice a baby floating down the nearby river. A Villager jumps in and saves the child and the Village rejoices. The next day, they return to find two babies floating down the river, prompting two Villagers to jump in and save the children. Over many weeks, more and more babies float down the river, requiring everyone in the Village to jump into the water to save them. Exhausted, three of the Villagers approach the Village Head to ask if they can go up the River to understand why these babies are in the water. Perhaps a nasty person wants to kill the children, or maybe another Village can no longer afford to cloth and feed them. The Village Head turns and says “If I let you go up the river, we will have three less people to save the babies tomorrow. In any event, saving the children has become our purpose, so what do we do if there are no more babies to save? The story makes a valuable point around the habits that accrue in firefighting behaviour, and how important it is to break this cycle to truly understand what is driving the problems or challenges that you or others are experiencing and solving these once and for all.
During the Paul Mills Consulting Leading Change Program, we motivate leaders to set experiments focused on breaking old habits and developing powerful new habits that are sustainable in disruption. For more information on the program, reach out to us.