Breaking Bad Leadership Habits
Leaders
have to learn and practice new management techniques to overcome the habits
that could be holding them back. In two articles, I examine the obstacles, and
later, the factors that can help senior executives overcome them.
We
have known for a long time that leaders need to continue to learn throughout
their careers. About 50 years ago, U.S. 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, characterised 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, including senior leaders, to continue
to develop new responses and capabilities. Well, there’s good news: Years
of leadership research shows that it is indeed possible for senior executives
to learn new capabilities. Their personality does not change, but it does not
have to. You can learn new skills, new capabilities – i.e., the ability to do
something new effectively and without having to think about it too much –
without having to change the set of preferences that we call our personality.
Mastering the cycle
The
bad news is that it is difficult to do. 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 behaviour 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 realised 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.
Unfortunately
though, for senior executives, it’s even more complicated than a child riding a
bike, because unlike the child, executives are not trying to learn a new
leadership behaviour from scratch. The new leadership behaviour will typically
have to override an existing – and by now well ingrained – habit.
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, including as programme director of INSEAD’s new Leadership Excellence through Awareness and Practice
(LEAP)
programme, which has led me to identify four major obstacles.
- The knowing-doing gap:
Today’s
executives often know a lot about leadership; they’ve read books and articles,
watched webcasts and videos, attended MBA or executive development programmes…
But they tend to know a lot more than they do!
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 behaviour actually does not measure up.
- 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. If it’s not in your head you can’t use it under
real time conditions. And if you want the knowledge to be in your head and
usable quickly, you must make notes and review these notes regularly. To
develop mastery of the practice, you must first develop mastery of the
knowledge.
- 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 (e.g., not say or do what we would normally say or do under these
circumstances), b) search our mind to identify a more appropriate response, and
c) produce that more appropriate response – all of this in real-time and under
performance pressure.
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.
As
a result, executives will often end up “reverting” to their “natural
behaviour”, especially when they are not paying enough attention or they’re
tired. Executives don’t like to fail and to feel consciously incompetent.
The temptation is hence very strong to rationalise the failure away in order to
be able to move back to the “unconscious incompetence” stage.
- 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 behaviours, they are often
tripped up by their environment. The first disappointment occurs when
executives fail to receive positive reinforcement on their efforts, as people
with whom they interact fail to notice their efforts (because they are
producing inconsistent outcomes and/or because the observers have blinders of
their own). More problematic still, members of executives’ ecosystem – at work
and at home – were used to interacting with them in certain ways, and changing
an equilibrium is sometimes difficult. Some of these individuals 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 willing and 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
Each
of these four challenges can be overcome through the application of a few
enabling conditions. 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, I will explain in the next article how these four pillars can help
executives to develop their leadership skills throughout their career.
Jean-Francois Manzoni , INSEAD Professor
http://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-management/breaking-bad-leadership-habits-3173?utm_source=INSEAD+Knowledge&utm_campaign=8a8c2ba6cb-27_Feb_mailer2_27_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e0791
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