Three Leadership Lessons to Live by.
Having spent two months away from all work to care for our newborn was a very nice experience. Noted, it was difficult to completely shut off the part of the brain that draws parallels and make comparisons from previous, almost exclusively work related, experiences. I shared some short posts on three of the leadership lessons I was reminded of during these two months.
Take care of yourself first.
Clarify the goals.
Excel at the basics.
My opinion is that if these three are your only guiding principles as a leader, you will do a good job and I wanted to elaborate on those a little bit more..
No. 1 – Take care of yourself first.
You must look after your physical and mental health. No one else can do it for you. Our body is the only thing that we for certain will spend our whole life with. I will not attempt to tell you what to do and how much of it, I simply want to remind you that physical exercise is the most impactful and easiest prescriptions for maintaining and improving mental wellbeing.
Speaking from experience I can honestly say that the work and discipline needed to maintain a good physical and mental health on a weekly basis is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier than having to dig yourself out of a hole of depression and burnout. There is, of course, plenty of support to find should you find yourself in such a hole, but you alone must do the work. And it is hard work.
Something that helps all humans is the establishment of routines. Simple fact, humans are inherently lazy. Not in a bad way, in an evolutionary way. We like to be on autopilot, to behave habitually. We take the path of least resistance, and our habits to a large degree define who we are. Atomic Habits by James Clear is a very good read on habits. To establish new habits, new ways of behaving, we can benefit a lot from the four laws of behaviour change.
1. Make it obvious
2. Make it attractive
3. Make it easy
4. Make it satisfying
Since we are also getting closer to a new year and the making of resolutions to start our new and better life, let me remind you that a small change that you are able to sustain is much more impactful than a larger change that you cannot. Those small, sustained changes are what becomes your habits. I.e. do not commit to spending five days per week in the gym if your track record for the past year has been zero to one. Promise yourself to make it a sustained one day per week instead.
During these two months this has for me meant an increase from 10-12 yoga sessions per month to 20-25, which meant almost every day started with 45 minutes of yoga before I prepared breakfast for the non-breastfeeding individuals. Evenings provided a window where I could add an hour of other physical activity (running, cycling, strength training or mobility). It was crucial for me to utilize this window, especially the many times I didn't want to.
The second thing it has meant has been to overcome my despise for cooking. It has never been an activity that I have enjoyed, but with a change in priorities and room to focus and practice has resulted in many of my regular "symptoms" that I take for granted has disappeared, to only show themselves when we do not make the food ourselves. Probably surprising no one, but now I have my own experience as proof that it is worth taking the time to prepare your own meals.
This will be hard to maintain while getting back to work, but not difficult. The physical health benefits and improvements I can strongly feel must be my reminder to stay disciplined.
Finally, the habits that work for others will not necessarily work for you. This because we all have different ambitions and goals, which smoothly segways us into the second point.
No. 2 – Clarify the Goals
If your priorities are clear, decision making becomes simple, or at least significantly simplified. Know your goal, derive priorities, and execute. That is strategy in a sentence. It is not just companies and businesses that need a strategy, you also need a personal strategy.
For your duties as a formal leader in a company, you need to communicate the goals of the company and connect them. They must be able coexist and crosspollinate success across the different departments, teams, and products. They cannot be mutually exclusive. This is one of the most common pitfalls I have found in companies that struggle to achieve their targets. The departments or business units have competing goals.
Clear goals are a necessity to derive priorities to enable decision making. Essentially, decision making is about justifying the work you intend to do given the benefits you believe will com from that work. Without clear goals how can you make sure the justifications you are making is inline with the overall business strategy? If you as a leader expect your people to operate with insufficient information, you will see insufficient results. A mantra I have repeatedly used is – treat people like responsible adults and they will behave like responsible adults. When you create an organization where information becomes power and individuals need to accumulate and withhold information to advance their career, you end up with a management belief that people cannot be trusted and thus not treated like responsible adults.
A final note on the personal strategy. If you for a moment accept that your personal number one priority is to maintain physical and mental health and wellbeing as a foundation, when you decide what and how to execute, personally or professionally, ask yourself – at what cost? Are you constantly pursuing the extraordinary at the cost of the ordinary? Is your workday predominantly consisting of dealing with emergencies or crisis? This brings us to the third point.
No. 3 – Excel at the Basics
If you perform the basics with high quality there is much more room to absorb unforeseen events, crises, and emergencies than if you continuously down-prioritize them. This first sentence is a reminder to go back and look at point no. 1. From an individual point of view, the foundation that everything else is built on is your physical and mental health. The first sentence is also another way of saying that when the extraordinary becomes the ordinary, we lose our sense of urgency, which ultimately leads to a sort of emergency-fatigue and can result in apathy. This also connects to point no. 2 and the importance of habits. Here I could also argue for the idea of excelling at the basics as a leader is simply an extension of clarifying the goals in the company’s context. Or rather, establishing organizational habits on an enterprise level. To not get too meta and abstract, let me bring it back to you as an individual leader in the organizational context.
As a leader in any modern organization, I will argue that three of those basics are ->
1. Communicate and repeat the high-level goal to a point where everyone starts to finish your sentences for you.
2. Share and spread any and all information you have come across, even if you do not think it is relevant for the specific person(s) you are talking to.
3. Take time to listen to your employees. They know best what is going on with the work at hand.
Excelling at these behaviours is just another way for me to say that you need to prioritize them above most other activities. These things cannot wait “until tomorrow”. If they do so once that is of course fine, but not perpetually. That will undermine the organizational health and your teams’ wellbeing, the very foundation needed to deal with complexity to reach the business targets and company goals.