10 Reasons We Don’t Get Better as Leaders
The Navy SEALs say that in a crisis, you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training. What’s true for special operations is true for leadership as well.
Image by Kanawa_Studio
Leadership is a challenge. If it was easier, we’d all be great leaders. So why is it so hard to step up to the challenge and get better? Great question.
This is where a proverb from the Navy SEALs gives us some insight:
“In a crisis, you don’t rise to the occasion.
You sink to the level of your training.”
In a leadership crisis, we can only be as effective as we’ve intentionally prepared ourselves to be. But the reality is, most of us haven’t developed our leadership behaviors. We just go with whatever comes naturally, and hope that we can somehow, magically, rise to the occasion.
I’ve identified 10 challenges we must train through to get better as leaders. I’ve listed these challenges as “Levels”—think of these as floors that you reach by riding in an elevator. The elevator stops at each floor, and you can’t move up until you’ve trained through the challenge on that level. If you decide not to train yourself to overcome a specific challenge, that’s where your development—and your leadership effectiveness—will stop.
Level 1 – Mindset
This is the ground floor, where the challenge is embracing the mindset that getting better as a leader is normal and possible. To get beyond this level, you have to actually believe that there is leadership competency that you’re leaving on the table if you don’t choose to develop—and this has to bother you. If you don’t believe this (and if it doesn’t bother you), then get comfortable in the lobby because you’ll never even get on the elevator.
“You have to actually believe that there is leadership competency that you’re leaving on the table.”
Level 2 – Complacency
The level above the lobby is where we deal with indifference. After all, development takes effort. If there’s no urgency to become the best leader you can be, then you’ll avoid the effort to objectively assess yourself to learn how you might improve. You’ll not discipline yourself to read and reflect, or develop the transparency to pursue mentoring or coaching. You’ll settle for the results that come from operating at level 2.
Level 3 – Poverty of Time
After complacency comes the management of your bandwidth for development. Everyone’s under pressure to do more with less in today’s marketplace. But when we don’t set aside focused time and energy to develop, we simply don’t improve.
In truth, poverty of time isn’t a reason for a lack of development as much as it’s a symptom—a result of a lack of urgency and/or priority. More to the point, it’s an excuse.
So do you aspire to improve? If you do, you’ll create at least some margin for it and move on to the next level.
“Poverty of time isn’t a reason for a lack of development as much as it’s a symptom.”
Level 4 – Positional Authority
It’s easy to mistake the use of positional authority as leadership because it’s so easy to leverage our position in the org chart to get people to comply with our direction. After all, title is not a leadership competency.
Consider this: How would you influence people if you didn’t outrank them? What if the only leverage you had was the relational capital you’ve invested in them to earn their trust and respect?
When we use our positional authority muscles, our relational competency and emotional intelligence muscles atrophy. Want to stay stuck at Level 5? Then keep exercising your positional authority. Want to be genuinely effective as a leader? Let positional authority go and work on building relationships.
After all, everyone already knows you have the title; reminding them won’t help you.
Once you train yourself to move away from using positional authority, you’ll be ready to move to Level 6 and start seeing real development.
Level 5 – Aiming for the Wrong Target
If we’re going to get better, we have to accurately define what we’re trying to improve. In my experience, leadership is most commonly and broadly thought of as “getting stuff done.” This definition may bring you results in the short-term, but eventually it falls apart.
“Everyone already knows you have the title; reminding them won’t help you.”
This is where I lean on one of my favorite Peter Drucker quotes: “The function of leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers.” The role of the leader is to cultivate an environment where the team members …
Are intrinsically motivated to perform on their own initiative
Have the autonomy to make decisions about their work
Are equipped to make good decisions
Collaborate together, creating synergy instead of competition
Equip others in a similar approach (to build leadership capacity in the organization)
Defining leadership as getting stuff done is the ultimate myopic approach to leadership because it puts the focus on you (your performance and ability to control) instead of where it should be: on the team.
If you want to move beyond this short-sighted approach (see David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around for a great resource), then change your definition and you’ll be ready to move to Level 6.
Level 6 – Success
Most leaders are in their roles because they’ve had some level of success. But often this success is the result of natural characteristics (e.g. personality, work ethic, intelligence, experience, wit, etc.). While these can contribute to leadership effectiveness, they usually aren’t the product of intentional cultivation. This creates a couple of issues:
It’s easy to over-rely on these characteristics, creating an imbalance in our leadership behaviors.
Success often removes the urgency to get better, creating a don’t-fix-what’s-not-broke mentality.
Both of these together cause us to plateau in our leadership effectiveness. Recognizing that effectiveness comes from moving beyond past successes to hone our leadership craft, we’re finally in a position to see what’s on Level 7.
“The function of leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers.”
Level 7 – Blind Spots
Every leader has blind spots. A minority of leaders actually seek them out and expose them. Make no mistake: You can’t fix what you can’t see.
Blind spots are what the Harrison Behavioral Assessment calls “derailers.” They often come from an over-reliance upon a certain behavior trait that’s assumed to be a strength.
The Harrison Assessment’s use of paradoxical leadership behaviors reveals how this works. For example, one of the Harrison’s 12 paradox traits is Respectful Candor, a pairing of the traits of Frankness and Diplomacy. Because these traits appear to be opposites, it’s easy to default to either Frankness (“telling it like it is”) or Diplomacy (“being politically savvy”). Doing so overuses one trait at the exclusion of the other, creating an out-of-balance behavioral blind spot.
When this blind spot is revealed we see that being both frank AND diplomatic is a higher-order leadership behavior. That assumes, of course, that we are prepared to look for it.
Exposing our blind spots reveals leadership potential we didn’t know existed. This gives us the courage to move to the next level, where we gain awareness of what’s behind many of our limiting behaviors.
Level 8 – Fear
Level 8 houses the stuff that few leaders are willing to admit: fears. Obviously, leaders need to be careful talking about fear. Mishandled and haphazardly exposed, fear can be cancerous to a team’s effectiveness. But leaving fear unaddressed and unrecognized is just as dangerous, and it will ultimately reveal itself in destructive ways when we least expect it.
Some of the blind-spot biases we dealt with in Level 7 are sourced in fear. Things like fear of how others will perceive us or the of loss of relationship. Some fear the loss of control. For those leaders who have a competitive bent, the source of their competitive behaviors is often fear-based. It’s not uncommon in my coaching experience to have leaders admit to being afraid of failure or the loss of status. Some fear that they don’t measure up to expectations.
The goal of development is to maintain leadership effectiveness while shifting away from fear-driven motivations. As Jack Canfield says, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” Once we get on the other side of fear, we’re ready to move up to Level 9.
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
Level 9 – Ourselves
Getting to Level 9 requires not so much hard work as it does brave work. Level 9 is all about our character, which means using a mirror to accurately see the issues that most profoundly shape our leadership as a legacy. This includes things like pride, self-interest, consumerism, etc. Training through these issues moves us from being expedient and opportunistic as leaders to being truly impactful.
We must be willing to change ourselves. This usually requires additional outside perspective (an accountable peer, coach or mentor). It must also be paired with an internal conviction to do the right thing, purposefully, for the sake of others’ best interests, all the time—especially when everyone else chooses not to.
Once you can commit to leading out of character, you’re at last in a position to elevate to Level 10.
Level 10 – Identity
Are you the leader you want to be? I don’t mean your performance, I mean your identity: Who you are. It may be tricky to separate identity from performance, but you’ll need to in order to navigate this Level.
Performance, after all, is an external, situationally-dependent outcome. Identity is … you, who you are as a living soul. The two couldn’t be more different. Behavior (i.e. performance) is an outflow of our identity, not the source of it. Identifying yourself by your performance means you’ll never be the same person one day to the next—which is nonsense.
“Behavior (i.e. performance) is an outflow of our identity, not the source of it.”
Leaders who get to this level sometimes say, “This is complicated.” Actually, it’s not … in fact, it’s pretty simple. But it does take courage. Because when you’ve identified yourself by your performance all your life, to make a sudden shift in identity means you’re stepping into the unknown: You’ve haven’t really been you yet.
Making this change opens up whole new possibilities you never knew existed. Fear goes way down. Concern for others and for timeless values goes way up. You don’t worry about yourself nearly as much because you’re thinking more about everyone else. You’ll stop chasing situational success and be free to engage more with purpose than self-preservation and self-interests. Knowing your identity lets you become an authentic servant leader.
Want to Know Your Identity and Live Your True Purpose?
3 Reasons Why Your Past Identity Doesn’t Determine Your Future Identity
When it comes to defining leadership identity, our default is to look back to who we’ve been in the past as a starting point. This is natural, but actually handcuffs our ability to make any forward progress on stepping into the leader we can be.
Photo by francescoch
When it comes to defining leadership identity, our default is to look back to who we’ve been in the past as a starting point. This is natural, but is actually incredibly limiting, handcuffing our ability to make any forward progress on stepping into the leader we can be.
For example, our self-perception might be negative because of an important influence in our past, like a significant failure, a traumatic event, negative comments from an influential person in our lives, an addictive pattern or simply not living up to our own personal expectations. Even if our self-perception is positive, it can have detrimental impacts if this becomes our primary identity. There are many people who have based their identity around their success in a previous role, only to be thrust into a significantly different role and create uncertainty about who they’re supposed to be.
I see this backward-first tendency frequently in my coaching sessions when working through the results from the Harrison Behavioral Assessment, which provides data-driven insight into how we set ourselves up for trouble when we base our identity on our self-perception from the past. Ultimately, our past identity shapes our ability to accept ourselves, or in the terminology of the Harrison Assessment, we struggle to like ourselves and accept that “I’m okay the way I am.”
A Real Life Example
The image below is a Self-Actualization graph from the Harrison Assessment (one of the 12 Paradox Behavior graphs used in the Harrison) of a coaching client. This client had a number of influences that drove him particularly hard to excel in life. As a result, my client developed a life-long pattern of rigorous self-improvement behaviors, always trying to get better and be successful.
But his pursuit of perfection was unknowingly inspired by a belief that he didn’t quite measure up. His self-critical behaviors were often interpreted positively as “setting a high bar for himself.” Yet the warning signs are also present. As the graph indicates (see the red “storm” symbol), under stress his behaviors would flip from being self-critical to being defensive. This showed up as outbursts of anger, blaming, frustration and sudden shifts in goals and strategies.
“We struggle to like ourselves and accept that ‘I’m okay the way I am.’”
This graph reveals that his intense developmental efforts—and all the success and recognition they brought—disguised his primary motivation: to overcome a negative self-perception. The more he was esteemed for his self-improvement and rewarded for his success, the more entrenched his false identity became.
Freedom came in realizing he wasn’t who he’d been all his life. He has since become grounded in the truth that his identity is defined by who he is now and who he ultimately wants to be, not who he has been. He’s much more content, comfortable with himself and with others, and rarely has the outbursts that previously were commonplace.
“The more he was esteemed for his self-improvement and rewarded for his success, the more entrenched his false identity became.”
Backward Referencing
We have the tendency to simply accept our self-perception from the past as a permanent reality, whether positive or negative. I call this Backward Referencing: the process of using who we were in our past to define our current identity. Here are three reasons why Backward Referencing your past identity doesn’t work.
1. Who you are and who you want to be is a willful decision, not a prescribed, predetermined or fixed reality. It’s not what your environment has told you. It’s not what other people have said about you. It’s not the roles you’ve played and your performance in those roles. It’s not the emotions you’re harboring (Note: our emotions are important, and we should pay attention to them—but they don’t define us). You are not the experiences you’ve lived through in the past.
YOU decide who you want to be. This is simultaneously the most obvious and yet most elusive of truths about our identity. It is liberating and empowering when you accept it; it is also sobering, as you realize your identity is your responsibility to manage. Once you are aware of this truth, everything becomes simpler.
“YOU decide who you want to be.”
2. It’s impossible to define your identity by avoiding who you don’t want to be. You don’t get humility by trying not to be prideful. You don’t get to peace by trying not to be anxious. You don’t get strength by trying to avoid weakness.
This is true for doing anything in life. Hitting a baseball, for example: You can’t consistently hit a baseball when your approach is to avoid striking out. Neither can you hit a baseball today just because you hit well yesterday. You can’t be who you are uniquely created to be in the present—much less in the future—if your point of reference is who you were in the past.
3. Who you are is a developing reality. In Are You Who You Want to Be, I reveal that modern psychology has recently been utilizing the concept of narrative identity. It’s classified as “narrative” because our self-conception is a story in-process. Dr. Dan P. McAdams, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, defines narrative identity as “a life story—an internalized narrative integration of past, present, and anticipated future which provides lives with a sense of unity and purpose.” In this view, our identity is continuously evolving as we go through life, and each of us is forming our identities as we interact with each other.
“It’s impossible to define your identity by avoiding who you don’t want to be.”
Forward Referencing
When we reframe identity as a present and evolving narrative that we’re writing as we live each day, it becomes readily apparent that Backward Referencing is only useful for gaining perspective and learning wisdom. Most of our effort should be directed toward Forward Referencing: Focusing on the ideal identity of who we want to be. This aspirational perspective moves us quickly into an Inside-Out approach toward discovering and living out our identity. It motivates us toward our unique purpose, toward change and ultimately toward how we can best influence our world for the better and serve others’ interests.
Elements like faith and beliefs powerfully shape our ideal identity. For me, as a person of faith and follower of Jesus, this ideal identity is informed by how the Bible describes us: God’s children, deeply loved and uniquely created to be just who he designed us to be. His intent is that we become like Jesus in character and behavior. If you are not a person of faith, then center on the timeless truths, character qualities and core values to help shape your ideal identity. This ideal identity is the compass we align our lives with.
“Create your future from your future, not your past.”
If you constantly compare yourself to who you’ve been in the past, the best you can possibly hope to be is some rehashed version of who you’ve been in the past.
Looking back is helpful for reflection. But you can’t drive forward by keeping your eyes on the rear-view mirror. Ultimately, you create your future from your future, not your past. Unless, of course, you choose to create your future from your past. But that’s a choice.