Making Progress as a Leader: 20 ideas

When I started out on this Leadership journey 10+ years ago I was letting my environment and manager influence and teach me what I needed to know.

The problem was, the environment wasn’t exceptional and neither was the manager.

But I thought I knew a lot.

The reality is, I was very naive at the time.

Where it changed is when I began to take ownership and got very intentional.

Your progress has to be your own responsibility.

You can learn so much more by coming off the bench and onto the playing field.

Asking questions, driving changes, creating ideas, reading material and putting your hand up for opportunities.

20 ideas to help your grow:

1/ Wake up Early - Leaders get ahead of the game. They turn up to training early and ensure they’re prepared for the session. If you arrive at the same time as everyone else you’re already behind.

2/ Read daily - a book, a blog or listen to a podcast. Something stimulating that will feed your mind with positive thoughts, inspiration and ideas.

3/ Plan - plan ahead. Line up your next steps for tomorrow, today. When you plan and think ahead you begin to move from being reactive to proactive, moving from solving problems to preventing problems.

4/ Do more - leadership and learning are investments in your team and future self, the more you do now to learn, gain exposure and stretch yourself, the bigger payback further down the line when doors start to open, and opportunities begin appearing. Serendipity has a way of rewarding those that stretch themselves, over-deliver and increase their footprint.

5/ Think big - with no vision, there is no direction, with no direction there is no progress. Where do you want to go? Write down where you want to be in 12 months, what does that look like for you?

6/ Execute - get the 3 important things done. If you have more than 3 priorities you have none. Get it done. Completed. Ticked off the list. People who execute make significant progress and stand out from the crowd. Execute.

7/ Be kind - to yourself and to others. You going to stumble and get things wrong, that’s part of it. The important thing is you’re trying and learning. Some days it’s not going to happen, but continue to turn up. Don’t lose traction by not turning up.

8/ Set goals - what are your goals for 2023? When you have a target, you can begin mapping out an action plan to get you there. Every day you are consciously or even subconsciously making small decisions in that direction. If you don’t know where you want to get to, how do you know what steps you need to take?

9/ Get a Mentor/Coach - find someone who can help you and shave time off your development with their wisdom, knowledge and experience. They can also act as an accountability partner to hold you to your plan and help you move quicker.

10/ Network - your network and relationships are extremely important. Be in the business of helping others to succeed. Stop worrying about what others will do for you in return, just focus on giving. What you give has a funny way of coming back to benefit you further down the line.

11/ Meditate - as a Leader, you need to be able to think and gain clarity. If your mind is constantly busy with day-to-day thoughts you’re going to be maxing out. Try and get 10 minutes of quiet time where you can meditate, breath and be calm.

12/ Exercise - is not just good for your mind, but also your health. Exercise flushes out thoughts, releases endorphins and makes you feel good. Your state is what sets the tone of your team, make it a positive one.

13/ Diet - I fall short on this one, but I continue to try. How you appear, think and feel is heavily driven by diet, rest and exercise. If you’re not consuming the right things you’re not going to feel your best and will not be in the most optimal state for your team.

14/ Mindset - adopt a positive growth mindset, where the focus is doing great work and improving. We’re going to hit setbacks and things don’t always go to plan, but we’ll work through that correct the problem and improve from it.

15/ Discomfort - do things that make you feel uncomfortable. This is the only way to add credit to your belief system and build confidence. Working through that discomfort and doing something that stretches you helps us grow. We need to be growing and progressing.

16/ Judge less - it’s amazing what a little bit of colour can add to a situation. Sometimes it appears things are a certain way and you get a snippet of insights and your whole opinion changes. You’ll never know the full picture or what is going through someone’s head, so remove judgement and focus on being caring and curious to understand.

17/ Talk less - focus on upgrading your listening game, mine is version 4 right now but I know people at version 12+. I have work to do. We all love to talk and share our thoughts. But where we learn more is by listening to understand, rather than to respond. What could you learn by changing your listening-to-speaking ratio by 10%?

18/ Marginal gains - identify areas of opportunity and look to improve them. Just because something works well, doesn’t mean it’s the best way or most efficient way of doing it. How could we create a better tomorrow?

19/ Flow State - for the important tasks and work, carve out dedicated time where you remove all distractions. When you’re 100% immersed in the task and doing that one thing and thing only, you’ll enter what’s called a flow state where productivity and creativity accelerate. You’re in the zone as they say.

20/ Journal - you have to self-reflect on your progress. It upgrades your self-awareness game, and helps you to think and identify areas that need adjusting. Write it down in a journal. Some questions to think about. What went well today? What didn’t go so well? What could I do differently? What must I achieve tomorrow? What’s important about that to me?

I hope these help and a quick pro tip. Don’t try and adopt all of these at once, pick 3 and focus on those for a period of time. Trying to do too much at once isn’t going to lead to much progress. If you have more than 3 priorities then you have none.

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• Book - Atomic Habits by James Clear. Currently reading this at the moment. James uses well-tested ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-follow guide for making good habits hard to avoid, and bad habits unappealing. He gives real-world advice on how to make good habits, get rid of bad ones, and master the small steps that add up to big results.

• Journal - The Diary by Steven Bartlett. I bought one of these recently, it’s not only a journal, it’s a coaching product designed and built to ask you thought-provoking questions about the 4 pillars of life: Health, Finance, Relationships and Work.

• TedTalk - Marget Hefferman - Dare to Disagree - great TedTalk on why disagreeing actually sparks creativity and new ideas. Don’t be an echo chamber, challenge the status quo.

Quote of the Week

Last week’s issue: 11 Ideas to Reboot Your Team Meetings

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