What role do you take in your leadership development?
If the pandemic taught us anything, it was the importance of seeing the big picture without losing sight of the small details. This requires tremendous skill in balancing priorities, energy, and focus. While most great leaders can take pride in their ability to multitask under stress, these past few years have really tested their abilities.
Leaders are repeatedly called on to shift their attention from one priority to another. They must consistently and consciously choose (and judge) what deserves their attention and ignore impertinent distractions.
Developing the right leadership skills and habits is critical to personal and organizational success.
The Importance of Habits
According to Joseph M. Juran, 80% of our results stem from only 20% of our efforts. In terms of productivity and efficiency, only about 20% of our activities provide the results we are looking for, professionally and personally.
To devote more time and energy to our most important activities, we need to recognize and say “no” to the people, places, and things that distract us from achieving our goals. This isn’t always easy, especially when we really like our distractions or, worse, our distractions become bad habits.
Disrupting counterproductive habits is important, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Unless a new routine takes its place, the pattern will continue automatically. Fortunately, we’ve come to a new level of understanding about habits, and we’re learning and practicing new techniques to improve them.
The Importance of Focus and Concentration
In ConZentrate: Get Focused and Pay Attention–When Life Is Filled With Pressures, Distractions, and Multiple Priorities (St. Martin’s Press 2000), Sam Horn identifies essential keys to concentration that are helpful reminders:
- Develop your ability to be single-minded. This requires making choices as to priorities and scheduling.
- Put your interest(s) in action. Engage yourself in an activity that is in a state of flow.
- Discipline your thoughts. Focus on what is needed, and say “no” to outside distractions.
- Begin again, and again, and again. Persist in spite of distraction, opposition, discouragement, and counterinfluences.
An important key to focus and concentration is to recognize when one is on auto-pilot or taking action out of habit.
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When Distractions Become Habits
To be sure, some behaviors make for good habits. This includes the behaviors you stopped doing, especially when distractions become habits. This can make a big difference in your success in today’s business world.
In his recent book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2020), behavior scientist BJ Fogg, PhD, illustrates how behavior happens when motivation, ability, and prompt converge at the same moment. Fogg illustrates this in the Fogg Behavior Model, whereby motivation is your desire to do the behavior. Ability is your capacity to do the behavior. The prompt is your cue to do the behavior.
A Simple Model to Create New Habits
To create a new habit, work through the model or formula:
Motivation+Ability+Prompt=Behavior
- Is there a prompt for the desired behavior?
- Is there the ability to complete the desired behavior?
- Is there motivation to complete the desired behavior?
As any great leader or manager can attest, all of these questions must be answered as they relate to the individual completing the behavior.
The process of habits includes neurological cravings for the pleasure-inducing neurotransmitter dopamine, which motivates us to take action. However, motivation alone is not enough to help us change our behavior and create a habit.
Motivation: Motivation is complex, often comprised of competing or conflicting motives: opposing drives related to the same behavior. Therefore, we must outsmart motivation by focusing on behaviors: something you or your employees can do right now or at any given moment.
Ability: Understanding and strengthening our skills and abilities is critical to success. To make a behavior easier to do and increase ability, successful leaders improve skills, get the tools and resources needed to complete the behavior, and/or make the behavior tiny with a small step toward the desired behavior.
Prompts: Prompts are the “invisible drivers of our lives,” according to Fogg, and can be simplified into three categories:
- Person (reptilian brain; internal cues)
- Context (environmental; external cues)
- Action: a behavior you already do (an anchor) that can remind you to complete a new action until it becomes a habit. For example, after I (anchor), I will (new habit.)
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The Habits that Transform Your Leadership
As a leader, which of your habits yields the greatest productivity and efficiency for you and your organization?
Identify the 20 percent of your efforts that bring you 80 percent of your results. If you need help with this, consider working with a qualified executive coach. Then, identify three important behaviors you can turn into habits.
Identify Transforming Habits
- Clarify your aspiration (or desired outcome).
- Explore specific behavior options without censoring yourself. Consider those you might do once, those that would become a habit, and even habits you would stop.
- Match with specific behaviors. Identify your “golden behaviors:” those that are effective (impact), desirable (motivation), and doable (ability).
- Start tiny.
- Find a good prompt (anchor).
- Celebrate successes: Emotions create habits. Positive emotions trigger the feel-good reward of dopamine, so celebrate immediately: give yourself a pat on the back, a high-five in the mirror, bust a dance move, congratulate yourself—whatever works for you.
- Troubleshoot, iterate, and expand.
Questions for Leaders
Here are some things to discuss if you’re working with a coach:
- What are you paying attention to?
- What are your biggest distractions?
- What three habits would bring you quality results?
What do you think? What new habits will transform your leadership development? I’d love to hear from you.
Creator of the KASHBOX: Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Habits
Helping You Realize Your Potential
I help people discover their potential, expand and develop the skills and attitudes necessary to achieve a higher degree of personal and professional success and create a plan that enables them to balance the profit motives of their business with the personal motives of their lives.
