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Breaking bad leadership habits
We have known for a long time that leaders need to continue to learn throughout their careers
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We have known for a long time that leaders need to continue to learn throughout their careers. About 50 years ago, US President John F. Kennedy argued that 'leadership and learning are indispensable to each other'. And about 40 years ago, Alvin Toffler became famous by saying that tomorrow's illiterate will not be the one who can't read; he or she will be the one who has not learned how to learn.
This has become ever truer in the VUCA world. This Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous environment, characterized by an ever increasing rate of knowledge creation and change, increasingly demanding investors, employees, publics and regulators who keep presenting leaders with new challenges that require new types of responses. In that world, 'what got (leaders) here may not get them there', as Marshall Goldsmith put it a few years ago. In fact, increasingly, what got them here may not even help them stay here. So it is absolutely necessary for leaders to continue to develop new responses and capabilities.
Mastering the cycle
Despite being armed with greater access to knowledge and training than ever before, executives still need to be able to integrate that knowledge into their behavior back at work. To do so, they must go through three major steps.
First, one must identify a need for improvement. When we feel satisfied with our performance in a particular area, we don't devote time and energy to improving it. The first step is hence to move from Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence.
Most of us have been here before. When learning to ride a bike, this was the part where we took off our training wheels and realized we couldn't balance. We then have to master staying up straight, which moves us from Conscious Incompetence to Conscious Competence. This requires a tremendous amount of attention, practice and persistence, especially when you fall off.
When practice makes perfect, you move from Conscious Competence to Unconscious Competence, 'just like riding a bike'. Once you know it, you will always be able to do it without thinking.
The four obstacles to change
So how do we overcome these habits? First, let's examine the obstacles. Over the last twenty five years I have spent more than one hundred days per year researching, consulting, coaching, teaching or facilitating meetings for executives, which has led me to identify four major obstacles.
1. The knowing-doing gap
Knowing something doesn't guarantee that one can implement it. In fact, sometimes, quite the opposite! Knowing the words and having understood the concept can lead executives to think that they're already implementing it. If they did not know or understand the concept they would devote more attention to it, but when they understand it and the whole thing makes a great deal of sense, it seems that 'the box is ticked' ' at least until the individual gets strong feedback that his or her behavior actually does not measure up.
2. Insufficient investment
Too often, today's senior executives underestimate how much effort is required for them to learn new leadership knowledge in a way that will be helpful in practice. They are too quickly satisfied with a vague understanding of the principle and as a result they often under-invest in developing a more granular understanding of the concept and in ensuring that they remember this additional granularity clearly enough. To develop mastery of the practice, you must first develop mastery of the knowledge.
3. Implementation difficulties lead to insufficient persistence
If we want to behave differently from the habitual response and more consistently with our new objective, we need to a) intercept the habitual response before it is produced b) search our mind to identify a more appropriate response, and c) produce that more appropriate response.
These three steps require significant time and attention, two commodities that senior executives tend to have in short supply. They also require self-control, which recent research has shown functions a little bit like a muscle: Exercising it makes it stronger in time, but weaker in the short run.
4. Insufficient support from their ecosystem
When executives do manage to become conscious of their shortcomings and to invest enough time and energy to develop and practice new behaviors, they are often tripped up by their environment. The first disappointment occurs when executives fail to receive positive reinforcement on their efforts. More problematic is that some members of executives' ecosystem may be unwilling and/or unable to change the way they interact with the executives. For example, an executive working harder at delegation is going to need subordinates and peers who are able to step up their contribution, which may be less comfortable for some of these individuals than complaining about the executive's lack of delegation.
Overcoming the obstacles
Most individuals will face more than one of these obstacles, which makes it hard to specify a set of enabling conditions that will apply equally well to all executives who wish to continue to develop their skills over time. However, with focus, mindfulness, reflectiveness and persistence, these four pillars can help executives to develop their leadership skills throughout their career.
The writer is an INSEAD professor of Management Practice, the shell chaired professor of Human Resources and Organizational Development and the program director of LEAP: Leadership Excellence through Awareness and Practice part of INSEAD's suite of Executive Development Programs.
This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge (http://knowledge.insead.edu). Copyright INSEAD 2014
