3 Powerful Leadership Habits

Everyone talks about leaders needing to have a clear direction, a company vision, compelling goals don’t they – but what if these things were overrated and/or not the only answer?

Here’s more – what if these sorts of leadership and management books were wrong, and something else was needed to get your team on board to deliver the changes your organisation needs.

Leadership habits, and not leadership strategy, might be part of the modern day answer. Here are 3 Powerful Leadership Habits to change your thinking.

Habits seem the new thing, it’s as if the science behind them is a new discovery.

For example, the British Cycling team used habits as an approach to gain incremental improvement. It has been key to their success. Habits has been a consistent approach to improving times, and from this winning medals.

They talked a lot about the process of marginal gain and how to apply it and improve.

How can habits benefit us at work?

Habits can relate to our behaviour and our attitude:-

1. Our behaviour in what we do each day. We can develop leadership habits to support our success.
2. Our attitude in terms of always being a learner. It’s helpful to have habits in being curious about how we can improve.

In his book “Atomic Habits”, James Clear has a step by step approach to develop habits. He says they need to be:

• Obvious
• Attractive
• Easy
• Satisfying

Making habits obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying is the way to help them become part of your identity – how you do things round here.

Most of us know what happens if our habits do not become part of who we are – our fitness regimes and BMI are quite often examples of when it goes wrong!

In contrast, an example of a good habit here would be to put your swimming costume on first thing to make sure you get to an early morning swim! (It might be a bit uncomfortable to wear it all day otherwise!)

Habits really are something to probe. What might the leadership habits be which would really benefit you to cultivate? How could you make part of your daily practice and an integral part of your identity as a manager and leader?

These are all skills developed on our STL Leadership and Mentoring courses, but first here are three things for you to consider:

1. Communication Habits
   What could you do each day to improve your communication with your team? Could you give more immediate feedback on performance? Could you help your team anticipate and plan by sharing what is coming up or be more proactive generally? These daily communication habits will help your team succeed!
2. Relationship Habits
   Are there tiny things you could do each day to develop, enhance and nurture your work based relationships? Habits that could strengthen their trust and performance? Remembering to say “Happy Birthday”, asking how a sick family member is or how someone’s holiday was can make a big difference to how willing someone else is in supporting your success.
3. Emotional Intelligence Habits
   Could you make it a daily attitude to think about things from the other person’s pair of shoes? Rather than approaching tasks from your frame of reference, could you make it a habit to always listen and ask questions that might be useful for problem solving from their vantage point? You may find this makes a huge difference to outcomes and results.

These tiny changes could build a firm foundation from which you and your team can deliver results.

What would make you want to start today?