It’s Day 16 but also the start of a new week.
Spend a little time as you start your week thinking about how you want to show up this week? What key leadership opportunities or challenges do you need to make most progress on?
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 well-being suffers. If ever there’s a time to manage our energy and well-being so that our leadership is sustainable, it is NOW.
Create your own energy menu:
Starting today, notice those times during the day when you feel particularly energised and record these activities in your own ‘energy menu’. These activities may be physical, or mental, and 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. You may have heard about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg choosing to wear the same clothes each day as it’s one less decision he needs to make!
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
Leading tough change is 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, (genuine, grounded confidence that is) it tends to spread throughout their teams.
When you can 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].
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.
Day 18 - Expand Your 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 do 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 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 of 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 adaptive and integrative thinking is 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]
Day 19 - Challenging the Status Quo - Keep, lose or innovate?
A HBR article in 2016 titled “Let Your Workers Rebel”reported the results of a survey conducted of more than 2000 employees across industries enquiring about how often they were asked to think outside the box.
The results? 42% said never or almost never, 32% sometimes and 26% said fairly often or very often. Only 3% said always.
Conformity was so prevalent. And I wouldn’t think you would be surprised by these results.
We are not saying conforming isn’t necessary in some instances, but the exercise of thinking outside the box is not even enough today. That’s just the ticket to the game. To win the game we need to shake things up and bring new and different perspectives to the way we think and lead. This helps us to challenge the status quo.
According to Harvard professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “the advanced leader can move beyond “thinking outside the box” to “thinking outside the building”, implementing transformational change not just within organisations but for society and the world”.
We are not talking about challenging everything that moves.
The art of adaptive leadership is as much about conservation as it is about reinvention. Think about the fact that we share more than 90% of our DNA with chimpanzees! Successful adaptive change will come from the work we lead in identifying what we challenge and lose, what we keep and what we innovate.
None of this is easy work. But it is critical that we look at adaptive work through these three lenses. Don’t, as the saying goes, throw the baby out with the bath water.
Today’s challenge - In building adaptive leadership and adaptive capability in your organisations be curious, observe and be clear on what, in the DNA of your organisation, has made you successful so far and therefore what you need to protect.
Bring your empathy and understanding to what needs to be challenged and be left behind as it is no longer serving you or the organisation. And then be clear on where you need to innovate to set up your future success.
When you think about this, conformity plays no role. Even if you are conserving parts of your organisation or DNA, it is because of a deliberate assessment to do so. The building of adaptive muscles to challenge the status quo is as much art as it is science.
Day 20 - Maintaining Momentum
It’s Friday today and the end of the last week of your 21 Day Leadership Challenge.
Reflect on the week and how you are making progress. What are you proud of? Where do you need to make some changes so you can pay attention to this for next week?
Today I’m going to keep it short and sweet. This is your opportunity to set some short and medium-term goals to maintain momentum in your change leadership. Much of what you may have been doing is with a focus on the longer term so bring your gaze right in today.
This also helps you and the team to celebrate the small wins to keep your people motivated.
And while you are at it, please ensure you have a good operating rhythm with your team meetings, so you are reflecting together regularly, checking in and using this time to celebrate success.
Day 21 - Celebrate and Reflect
You made it!
Reflect on your journey over the past 21 days.
Your last challenge is to celebrate your growth and set intentions for how you’ll continue to evolve as a leader. What challenges gave you the most learning or inspiration? What habits have you been able to embed in your routines that enable good, regular leadership reflection?
And finally, we would love to hear from you about your progress. Please share your best tip for others who have been following along on the challenge. Remember sharing is caring!