The Leader Habit: Master the Skills You Need to Lead--in Just Minutes a Day - by Martin Lanik
Date read: 2023-01-15How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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First half of the book is focused on how to build better habits and talks a little about cognitive biases. A lot of it is pulled from other sources (e.g., Atomic Habits). The second half focuses on self-assessment to determine what type of leader you are, before going into daily 5 min exercises you can do to become a better leader, based on your initial assessment. Good for someone who is first starting out, but I found it to be a lot of fundamental practices that I was already aware of.
Contents:
My Notes
Simple behaviors are more likely to become habits than complex ones. You will have more success if you first break down a complex behavior into smaller behaviors—a process psychologists call chunking.
The trifecta of simple, individual, and consistent is the key to understanding which behaviors have the highest potential to quickly become habits.
If you want to build a new habit, you must look for a naturally occurring, embedded cue to pair it with.
People don’t change their habits to avoid negative consequences; they change only after they gain an insight. This is especially true for contemplators. They already know all the negative effects of their bad habits, and yet despite this knowledge about how smoking, drinking, or losing one’s temper harms them, they keep doing it. Paradoxically, what contemplators need to realize is how their bad habit benefits them. What is good about smoking for the smoker? How is drinking benefiting the alcoholic? What are the positive outcomes Daniel experiences when he loses his temper?
Once Daniel realized the benefits he gained when he lost his temper, he understood why he did it. This insight finally motivated him to change his behavior, because now he could brainstorm more effective ways to gain control and feel strong and powerful in situations that seemed to be out of his control.
Practice your 5-minute daily exercise in many different environments. Make it a point to practice in your office and at home, in your hotel room and on the plane while traveling, on your laptop and your desktop, in meetings and around the dinner table, with colleagues and friends and family members
For example, a leader may be great at influencing others when she speaks to them in meetings, but she struggles to exert that same influence in email messages. In such cases, where a behavior is present but not yet consistent, the behavior in question is often a good candidate for the client’s first Leader Habit exercise. Starting your workout by practicing something that you already do in one context is much easier than learning a totally new behavior.
Now that you know which skill category you tend to favor, getting things done or focusing on people, I’m going to make a recommendation that will probably seem counterintuitive: consider starting your Leader Habit workout with an exercise from the opposite skill category.
Your first exercise must be a behavior that comes to you naturally, feels easy, and that you intrinsically enjoy doing, so it needs to align with your personality traits.
DAILY EXERCISES
You can get in the habit of thinking creatively about using the resources you already have rather than wasting money on resources you think you need by practicing this exercise: After you realize that you need a resource you don’t currently have, ask yourself, “How can I use something I already have to achieve the same outcome?” Write down your answer.
Practice this exercise to get in the habit of letting others decide how they will do their work: After deciding to delegate a project to a particular person, assign it by saying, “I’d like you to figure out how to. . . . How do you think you’ll do that?” Write down the answer. For example, you could say, “I’d like you to figure out how to collect customer feedback. How do you think you’ll do that?” Make sure only to specify the end goal—the deliverable.
Practice this behavior by referencing the different sources you used to make your decision: After stating your opinion (in an email or a meeting), give two pieces of evidence to support your position by saying, “I am basing this on . . . and . . . .” For example, if you think that a meeting should be rescheduled, you could be basing it on several key people telling you they were unable to attend and the meeting agenda not being ready on time.
Learn what your customers want now and anticipate what they’ll want in the future by practicing this exercise: After finishing lunch, spend five minutes researching customer demand trends by reading an industry report or a customer survey. Write down one thing you learned. For example, you might learn that your customers now take shorter vacations that only last a few days rather than the weeks-long vacations they took in the past.
In our research, we discovered the micro-behaviors that effective leaders do when they sell the vision:
To get in the habit of thinking outside the box, practice this exercise: After you or someone else uses the word “but” when describing two opposite ideas, ask, “How are these two things connected?” Write down the answer. For example, someone could say, “Most customers love our product, but there are some who hate it,” and the connection between the two apparent opposites is that all customers have a strong emotional reaction to your product.
This exercise will help you get in the habit of focusing innovation on things that matter: After coming up with a new idea, ask yourself, “How is this addressing our most important problem?”
Practice this exercise on a daily basis to get in the habit of anticipating them: After making a decision, ask yourself, “What changes in operations, customers, or the economy could pose a threat to my decision?” Write down your answer.
You can get in the habit of helping people identify the root cause of their concerns by practicing this exercise: After someone describes a problem to you, acknowledge the problem and ask about the underlying issue by saying, “I understand that . . . is a problem, but I wonder if it could be a symptom of a different underlying issue we should discuss.” For example, if someone complains about his coworker being unreliable and missing deadlines, the underlying issue could be that the person missing deadlines took on too many tasks and is overwhelmed.
Use this exercise to get in the habit of sharing decision-making authority: After assigning a project or task to a team member, start a brief conversation on decision-making authority by saying, “What decisions related to this assignment are you comfortable making?” For example, you could clarify that the person is comfortable making decisions about travel purchases under $2,000 in value.