The Journey to Healthy Leadership Habits

I'm just going to grab a coffee...

Even if you don't drink coffee, I bet you have a routine of getting your favourite drink in a particular location at a certain time. For me, this is a cup of coffee at lunch time in my kitchen.

And you are not alone - we all have our daily routines which feature our unique habits.

But why are habits so important in our lives and how can they affect our ability to reach our leadership potential?

I believe that a lack of self-awareness is holding many of us back from achieving our goals. We can be very motivated to change, but still find it hard to put our thinking into action. To crack the code, we need to discover our habits and explore how they can work against us when we want to change.

To reach our potential, we need to understand how habits work and the use this to our advantage. So let's start with exploring what's behind all this.

Habits in Leadership?!

"What leadership habits?" I hear you say. It's simple - the way you show up at work and interact with colleagues are in fact your habits. We all have them and assume that "this is how I am".

But habits are acquired over time and can be changed, if we choose to work on them. For example, leadership habits can show up in the way we respond to being challenged by a colleague. Some people retreat into themselves, others challenge back straight away and some are curious and want to take perspective.

They are all reasonable habits, but consider for a moment how they might impact ourselves and the people we work with. What stands out is that "we do what we are used to do" without much thought. Read on to find out why.

The Origins of Habits

Let's explore why habits are dominating our lives - they are in fact essential for our survival.

Our brains are designed to learn and repeat actions that have an immediate positive effect: Drinking coffee can give us a buzz. Our brains register this and we want to experience it again in future.

Once we have established a habit, it feels like we can perform it without much effort. Why? Research has shown that when we act out of habit, we bypass the decision-making part of our brains. Our habitual brain takes over and this is optimised to "just get the job done without figuring out whether we actually need it".

The reason might well be that making decisions with our executive brain function is very slow when compared to habitual action. It also uses a lot more brain power. As humans we have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible and therefore our habitual brain function is essential to handle our daily routines for us.

What's odd though is that we still seem to experience all of our actions as if we actively made a decision to do them. Research has found that we tend to rationalise our habits: "I am in control of myself, so I must have made a conscious decision to get my coffee."

This becomes clearer when we consider tasks that we don't do out of habit. Making coffee feels easy, but compare this with doing a tax return. Most of us won't do this often enough to develop a habit. As a result we have to use our executive brain function to think and make decisions more or less throughout the process. We can feel very drained when doing it - making decisions takes a lot of energy!

How to Create New Habits

Habits play a dominant role in our lives. How do we create a new one? It turns out that there are a few elements that need to come together.

In the example above, drinking a cup of coffee can be very rewarding. Just drinking it may give you a positive sensation. Or the simple fact that you going to get coffee with your friends might be a very positive experience. Both are rewarding situations that release dopamine in our brains. This in turn allows new neural pathways to be created and that's key for creating a new habit.

Then we need a trigger - some event that brings the habit into action. In my example I enter my kitchen at lunch time and then the first thing I do is make a coffee. Being in a particular location at a certain time is a very powerful trigger. Many of our habits are connected to a place and/or time. Additionally, one habit can be the trigger for the next: Whilst I make my coffee, I do some squats to kill time. I don't need to think about doing it, it happens automatically.

Finally, repeating the same action regularly is crucial. The first time we do something new, we still need to use our executive brain function to make active decisions and figure out how to interact with our environment to reach our goal. But over time, if we repeat the action, we need to think less and less. Soon, we just do it without needing any conscious decisions.

When Habits Hinder Growth

We've learned that habits form when we get a reward. How can it be possible that not all habits are good for us?

When we go and get our favourite drink we get an immediate reward. But what happens if we keep on drinking coffee more and more often? We may get less and less of a reward and start to feel the side effects of our new habit: Disturbed sleep, unable to concentrate and a feeling of being less and less in-tune with ourselves.

Our brains and habits don't seem to operate with our long-term benefit in mind. As a result, we end up doing things that may actually not be good for us. Over time, more and more other habits get associated with a 'bad habit'. For example we might realise that we should be drinking less coffee, but its become a social event with our friends and our habit of spending time with them is important to us.

Changing our habits is hard. Habits don't automatically update when you want them to change. It takes conscious effort to become aware of our interconnected habits and the underlying needs that make us who we are. But this doesn't mean it's impossible - we can identify habits that aren't serving us anymore and establish new ones that are in-tune with our goals.

Meet Your Leadership Habits

We've looked so far and some of our personal habits. But how does this show in our leadership?

We've learned that we can act unconsciously and automatically when a situational trigger occurs. Here is an example: We attend a meeting at work and someone is challenging our contribution. What do we do? Do we take a deep breath and then figure out how to respond? In most cases we react to this trigger and we do so in a way that we have learned over many years.

For example we may respond by retreating into ourselves because we feel scared. We might try to please the person because they must know better. Or we go on attack and challenge them back because we know best! All of these reactions are automatic habits. We do them without thinking. But are they in-tune with how we want to be as a leader? Probably not.

When we want to grow our leadership, we need to become aware of these automatic reactions. We need to understand why were are doing what we are doing and find a way to help us build the habits that are in service to how we want to be.

Cracking the Code for Healthy Habits

How do we overcome the existing habit and form a new one? We know that this takes conscious effort, that we need to find a trigger for it and that we need to keep repeating our new habit until it sticks.

But there is a powerful additional piece - a hidden layer that we need to explore to crack the code. Our habits have strong allies that ensure that we keep going as we are: These are our needs, desires and existing commitments.

When we want to drop a habit without considering these, we are doomed to fail. Not listening to what we need, desire or have committed to, means that we are not listening to ourselves. We are ignoring what's important to us.

Instead, we need to find a way that makes us aware of what drives our behaviour and then incorporate this into our effort to establish a new habit. This requires curiosity and hard work. But the benefits of reaching your leadership potential is a massive reward. We all can start now on our Journey to Healthy Leadership Habits.

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Meet with me to learn more about my coaching and how this can benefit your personal and professional journey.

Invite me to speak at your organisation about the Journey to Healthy Leadership Habits. Get in touch to discuss details. 

Recommended Reading

• Wendy Wood: Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

• Robert Keagan, Lisa Laskow Lahey: Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization