Develop Your Leadership Habits and Reflexes
Every Wednesday, this Transformational Leadership blog features a series on leadership or personal development. This is the fifth and final part of our Leadership Anticipation and Directions series. To get updates on upcoming series, please subscribe to our blog feed.
Do you remember Christopher Columbus? He was the first European who discovered the New world! He was a true blooded pioneer who brought knowledge of the New World to the rest of Europe. But pioneers can’t be rightly called pioneers if other people won’t follow them. Pioneers push frontiers, explore new worlds and ideas and establish new orders.
When the pioneers shall have done their jobs, the managers and the rest of the people will populate whatever colony they have established. We can liken this to managers following the footsteps of the leader.
Managers are mainly maintenance folks. They make sure that the machine is running as efficiently as effectively as possible. They tend to be the “behind-the-scenes” guys while leaders are usually like the driver of a bus or the captain of a ship. Leaders are responsible that the ship is cruising along towards the right direction while managers are concerned in the efficiency, speed, and performance of the ship.
How’s your leadership habits and reflex?
Experienced managers usually have reflexes that help them make quick decisions during crunch times. This reflex is born out of hundreds or thousands of experiences and decisions. They already see a pattern in the issues that confront them so they can have a reflex decision, which can be the best one in the present (short-term) situation.
Compare that with desert drivers who are able to deal with changes in the terrain and in dealing with accidents along the way.
Reflexes make up a person’s leadership habits, which are ingrained attitudes and patterns of behavior in the workplace. If you make similar decisions over a period of time, or you continue doing some actions, favor certain behaviors over the course of time, then you have some deeply embedded habits that you rely on.
When confronted with routine and even unforeseen events in the workplace, you will tend to rely on these habits and reflexes. In an organization built on routine and maintenance mode, that’s fine. You just deal with whatever comes along the same way you dealt with other “surprises” in the past. Your motto in life might be “this, too, shall pass!”
But given the breakneck speed of innovations and technological breakthroughs in the way we handle and process information, such habits and reflexes might no longer suffice!
New terrains require new leadership habits and reflexes.
You can’t expect a city driver to be a good outback driver right away. He will need to understand the terrain, practice, practice and practice until he becomes good at it! Some of the driving reflexes he relied on in the big city will help him in the outback but some will not. He needs to watch out for the stray animal crossing his road, as well as for rocks that may have the power to stop his vehicle.
With the 21st century’s very dynamic workplace and organizational setting, leaders, and even managers, have to continually assess their leadership habits and reflexes and how they can change them if needed.
Changing one’s habits is a difficult act. But not impossible. The willingness to change and adapt is the imperative of 21st century business. The unwillingness to do that will prove to be costly in your personal career and in the organization you belong to!
image credit: KarenWimsy
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Written by Mighty Rasing
April 7th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Posted in Anticipation and Directions
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