Welcome to week 3 of the 21 Day Leadership Challenge. We have designed this to practically support you as leaders to show up as the best version of you.
This 21 Day Challenge encourages your daily reflection, action and growth. It is designed to help you as leaders stay focused, adaptable and effective.
Each challenge will be conveniently delivered to you, via your inbox or social media stream, however you currently read our content, each working day morning throughout the month.
Day 14 – Share What You Are Learning
Some days are not easy. I remember facilitating an executive offsite with a new client a few years ago having had an unplanned biopsy that morning. The ice pack stuffed down my bra was quickly melting along with me, due to not being able to take my jacket off! But the best thing I did was share what I was going through. It wasn’t my intention as I was driving to the offsite location. I thought I had a way of masking and hiding not just the ice pack but my emotional state! Sharing with the team completely reinforced my belief that we are better together.
Today’s challenge is to reflect on what you have learnt about yourself and your leadership over the last 2 weeks. And find ways to share with your teams, with your colleagues and others leaders. Pay it forward! Then you will all benefit.
Day 15 – The Law of Priorities
Today is your opportunity to reassess your current priorities.
The Law of Priorities is lesson number 17 from John Maxwell’s book – The 21 Irrefutable Law’s of Leadership. He says the key to leveraging the law of priorities is called “the Pareto Principle” or more commonly “the 80/20 principle.” Maxwell says that is we will spend most of our time working on the things in the top 20% of importance, it will give us 80% of the return we are looking for.
But most of the time we are adding to our To Do List and our diaries rather than removing or re-prioritising.
Today - delegate or eliminate meetings or jobs that don’t align with your strategic priorities and top leadership goals.
Be brutal! Removing one or two things won’t make much difference. Really challenge yourself.
Day 16 – Master Your Energy
Many of the leaders I am working with now are extremely time poor, working anywhere up to 16 hours a day. They’re running hard for today, and at the same time building for tomorrow. What gives? Our energy and eventually our health, our home life - the very things we live for. So how do we manage this better?
Most often we go to time management to try and solve this, however, with increasing demand for performance and time being a limited resource, this doesn’t work. Our energy, however, can be restored and renewed so therefore a much better option to help us meet the challenges, whilst allowing us to show up as the best version of ourselves. If we don’t manage our energy, our wellbeing suffers. If ever there’s a time to manage our energy and wellbeing so that our leadership is sustainable, it is NOW.
Create your own energy menu:
Starting today, notice those times during the day that you feel particularly energised and record these activities in your own ‘energy menu’. These activities may be physical, mental, involve a change of environment or connection with others.
The part of our brain reserved for complex thinking and executive functioning (the prefrontal cortex) has 2 hour’s worth of ‘fuel’ when we wake up. It is replenished when we engage in activities that energise us. It’s therefore in our best interest to prioritise our intentional activities and ensure they have a permanent place in our diaries. This way, we conserve our prefrontal cortex for the more complex decisions we need to make each day.
Review your diary and book in those intentional activities that you need for you. You will be a much better leader because of it.
Day 17 – Grow Your Confidence
Leadership can be hard work. And at some point, most leaders question themselves and whether they have what it takes. Their confidence may take a little or a big dip in the process of this.
Confidence is a quality that, when cultivated by leaders, can have a profound impact on your team’s performance and the overall success of your organisation.
Confidence is contagious. When leaders exude confidence, (geniune, grounded confidence that is) it tends to spread throughout your teams.
When you are able to take calculated risks, make decisions with conviction, and stand by your choices, you send a clear message that confidence is a crucial element in the success of the business. But this can be so hard when in the middle of messy, uncertain and complex change.
Today your challenge is to reflect on your own confidence right now. What is giving you confidence and what is depleting it?
Confidence is not something you are born with or without. It is not a personality trait or a fixed attribute; it’s the outcomes of the thoughts we think and the actions we take. Confidence is learnable.
If, on reflection, you find your confidence is challenged right now then please reach out for a copy of my book – The Power of Real Confidence – [email protected].
Day 18 – Expand Your Brain Bandwidth
Today you will need a little help with your challenge. Today your challenge is actually your opportunity. Book in a Whole Brain team session with me!
Dealing with complex new challenges, (with no obvious precedents and no clear-cut answers), transforming customer experiences whilst significantly reducing costs and dealing with competition, which is not only growing, but taking new forms and posing new threats – particularly as everyone pursues the same narrowing slice of market share. And that is what we now call 'business as usual'. It is funny that even the language of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), which was first introduced by the US Army, is now old school.
I am a big believer that what got us here won’t get us there. Daily, I am reminded of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. To better position ourselves as leaders and maximise our potential we need to develop a different capacity to respond. Our world requires adaptive and integrative thinking, which needs to be developed in you, our leaders. We no longer have the luxury to relegate ourselves to ‘limited brain bandwidth’ and doing what we’ve always done.
So, the challenge is to build and develop your adaptive and integrative thinking. To develop your ability to access different ways of thinking to increase your performance. To build your ability to lead into the future. And to expand your thinking and your brain bandwidth for yourselves and your teams.
Different people prefer different ways of thinking. This impacts your leadership and impacts how your teams perform.
The HBDI® Whole Brain model gives us great insights into our thinking preferences. I have utilised HBDI® for some time now. It is a brilliant way to understand the thinking preferences for your teams to improve how they think, communicate, solve problems and make decisions - ultimately leading to elevated performance and employee engagement. It provides you with the opportunity to become more whole brain as a team. To strategically leverage the full spectrum of your team using whole brain thinking. In other words, to use whole brain thinking as one tool to build that adaptive and integrative thinking so important for future leadership.
As we know from our own team experiences, it’s not as simple as just bringing people together and then expecting high performance. To make a measurable, lasting impact on the team’s actual performance and to achieve desired business goals, you need to invest in understanding and developing your team. To respond to shifting demands and help build the adaptive capability, I recommend understanding your thinking preferences and building whole brain capacity in your team.
Get in touch today – [email protected].
And as always, we would love to hear from you about your progress. What’s working, where you are getting stuck and what else you need.
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