INsight/ Three Leader Traps

Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash

Manila, 4 March 2020 — Leaders build habits, a toolkit, and integrity.

Using the metaphor of building a house, we will unpack what leaders do to build their practice successfully. Hold on for a moment... are you still wondering who are leaders in today’s world and if you can be counted as one? Let’s get that out of the way first.

What is Leadership

My favorite leadership definition is from the experts at the Center for Creative Leadership, who see it as a process of influence with three outcomes: direction, alignment, and commitment. It follows then that leaders are influencers. 

In the past though, leaders were seen as people wielding power from a position of authority: people who were ‘up there.’ Now we know better and have a wider view that everyone can learn how to become a leader, wherever you are in the organization. 

What describes leaders in everyday language? 

Who are leaders

From my experience as a coach, I see leaders as high achievers or wannabe high achievers. They are people who want to make or influence changes that matter to them personally, to their team, the business, and even to the planet. They are on a quest for continuous learning how to do that better. 

There’s more. Leaders are also people who are keen to grow more leaders around them: they bring people with them and believe in collaboration and experimentation with room for making mistakes. 

Bottom line: leaders are people who keep challenging themselves out of their comfort zone to create (or influence) meaningful changes together with others. 

Do you have such a fire burning inside you? Then this post is for you.

Developing Personal Power

We know from research that developing personal power—including the so-called soft skills—is the key to becoming an effective leader and that it works best to learn leadership together with others. 

Moreover, research also shows that you can learn leadership from a young age. We now see many young leaders modeling the way with inspiring initiatives. On the other hand, it is never too late to start developing your leadership skills and behaviors. So wherever you are in your career, I recommend that you don’t put off investing to grow your leadership now and find others to join you. You won’t regret your decision.

Back to our building metaphor. 

Three Leadership Traps

My passion is to help enthusiastic, self-professed leaders to grow their leadership. In my coaching work, I have observed that many enthusiastic and well-intentioned emerging leaders are held back from making progress and getting better results by three traps. 

I call them the Inconsistent Leader, the Ineffective Leader, and the Inconsequential Leader traps. You want to avoid these, and while that is actually not difficult to do, it does require work. Good intentions and enthusiasm are simply not enough to build a house—more is needed. 

Let’s double-click on each of these traps, shall we?

Trap 1:  Short on Habits ~ The Inconsistent Leader

If you’re short on strong habits such as setting and keeping to schedules, your performance will remain inconsistent and unpredictable. Former tennis pro Yumiko Sawano shared in a recent interview how her performance and ratings went up as a result of consistently keeping to her training schedules, come sun or rain. There’s an important lesson there.

As I observed, many emerging leaders struggle with time management. Without building skills to prioritize, schedule, and execute tasks, your results will suffer. That’s why I have and still spend lots of time researching how people develop strong daily and weekly habits that boost their performance.

Mistaking the buffet for your plate will tempt you to load more food onto our plate than you can handle, is the powerful metaphor used by Andre Taylor, my collaborating partner in Australia. Many enthusiastic leaders are prone to overloading themselves and letting their attention jump from one thing to the next without growing healthy habits to stick with getting their priorities done. You simply can’t expect to get sustained results that way.

Typically, therefore, the Inconsistent Leader has work to do on self-leadership, which Lars Sudmann in his TED talk has helpfully broken down into three dimensions: self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-regulation. Until you develop strong habits for self-leadership, your consistency is at risk. The more leaders I meet—including myself!—the more I realize this.

Trap 2: Short on Tools ~ The Ineffective Leader

The second trap is where leaders fail to build a strong toolkit for their leadership skills and behaviors. What we see here is that they tend to stick with one or two leadership styles and don’t expand their toolkit further. The reality, however, is more complex and requires you to build a toolkit with a diversity of tools. If you’re short on that, you can’t do what’s needed, and you’re at risk of being ineffective. 

Some use a horse metaphor here. When you’re in this trap, you can appear to be a one-trick pony, while what’s needed is horses for courses meaning different tools for different situations. In the building metaphor, you need many different kinds of tools to build a house. Having only a hammer or screwdriver won’t do it. Worse, you’re in danger of seeing every problem as a nail to be hammered. 

Our Work In All Colors training illustrates this point. To be a skillful communicator who connects with various audiences in their language as Nelson Mandela learned to do, you need to speak and work in seven languages (colors) representing the main worldviews you will encounter. That shows that your toolkit is growing.

Furthermore, you need to address different kinds of leadership, from self-leadership (for yourself and others) as well as leadership for teams, organizations, and communities you’re involved with in society. There’s a lot to learn. That’s why I keep spending a lot of time developing, adapting, and fine-tuning more tools that help leaders in various situations. 

The quality of your tools also matters, of course, not just the variety. Poor quality tools will fail to get the job done well. Every builder knows this, so good builders invest in quality tools that will support them effectively and for a longer time. It’s no different for leadership tools, which should not look like quick fixes that lack the benefit of quality research and design.

Without building a toolkit of diverse and quality tools, your leadership is at risk of being ineffective, no matter how enthusiastic and well-intentioned you are. 

Trap 3: Short on Integrity ~ The Inconsequential Leader

The third trap is where leaders are short on integrity. That term can mean different things to different people, depending on how you look at the world. In my experience as a coach and trainer, a good place to start unpacking this is how you show up for others. “Are you walking your talk?” is how it is often put.

For example, distracted and overwhelmed as many enthusiastic leaders are today, what happens if you keep showing up late for appointments, or not at all? What if people around you are unsure of whether you will respond to their emails? That has an impact. Unfortunately, these behaviors have become ubiquitous. You see them far too often and it has become a curse of our time, it seems. Buffeted by the many challenges people face in their life and work, we can observe how they can disappear from time to time, without knowing what’s going on.

Whatever the cause of these pressures, such behaviors will reduce your credibility and impact, which is why I called this third trap the Inconsequential Leader. After a grace period of tolerance, people can stop taking you and your work seriously. With an evident lack of commitment, it’s easy for a trust deficit to open up, which is hard to reverse. You want to avoid that at all cost.

Integrity also means that people know what you stand for as a leader, what drives you, and why you keep doing the work you do. For enthusiastic leaders, especially those who want to help everyone and who favor a facilitating style in discussions, your audience can easily experience a lack of clarity about you and your values. I know this from personal experience as a leader with a passion for facilitating discussions!

Another way of putting this is that you lack a clear leadership signature. Such a lack of clarity among the people you work with can hold back your progress and results. Imagine that you’re the site manager leading a team of experts building the house. If they don’t know your values and your style to run the project, it’s going to affect the collaboration and results for sure.

Moving Forward

Which of these three traps is putting your leadership at risk?

Fortunately, you can work on avoiding or getting out of these traps to put your leadership growth on a strong and stable footing. In the next posts, we will unpack what you can do to build that. The tunnel has a light at the end and you can work your way to get there.

Building strong habits, a diverse and quality toolkit, and integrity in how you show up is not too difficult, yet it requires a sustained effort with commitment and discipline (self-regulation). It starts with recognizing which trap or traps you may be at risk of. 

All of this building work is easier, faster, and more fun when you do it together with others. That’s why we created the Grow3Leaders community where you join together with three workplace colleagues you have invited to work together on creating changes. Joining is free of charge—not free of commitment. Look forward to seeing you inside.