The Leader Habit

Master the Skills You Need to Lead--in Just Minutes a Day

Martin Lanik

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780814439340
• eBook ISBN: 9780814439357
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

In leadership as in life, only practice makes perfect. Habits are powerful, and The Leader Habit offers a simple, original approach to dramatically improving even our weakest areas.

Routines quietly undergird large portions of what we do and how we function. Habit formation can speed success in the workplace as well--even in complex areas like leadership. Leadership training expert and bestselling author Martin Lanik spotlights 22 essential leadership abilities, breaking them down into a series of small, learnable behaviors.

In The Leader Habit, you will find:

• Compelling evidence on how habits shape our lives, and how leadership is simply a series of habits
• Content based on original research that looks at 795 leaders across the globe, identifying 22 essential leadership skills and 79 micro-behaviors that make up those skills
• Simple exercises to turn effective leadership behaviors into ingrained habits, along with clear cues that tell you when to practice each
• A Leader Habit Quiz that assesses 6 personality traits and points to behaviors that you’ll find most rewarding
• Tips for staying motivated, avoiding procrastination, and sustaining progress

The book's simple formula focuses on developing one skill at a time: sell the vision, delegate well, innovate often, empower others, overcome resistance, build strategic relationships, focus on customers, listen actively, negotiate effectively, and more.

Many of us aspire to great leadership by consuming books and training. However, unless you intentionally reinforce the right behaviors, results are fleeting. The Leader Habit builds the "muscle memory" to turn leadership skills into lasting habits.

CHAPTER 1

Leadership Is a Series of Habits

People with strong leadership skills succeed in business and life. Whether you are coaching a junior baseball league, leading a church group, raising a family, building a start-up, managing a team in an established business, or running a multibillion-dollar global company, being an effective leader makes it easier to achieve your goals.

This book is about becoming a better leader by forming better habits, as Laura did. The method is simple: you identify a leadership skill you want to master, such as active listening, then you practice that skill through a short, focused exercise every day until it becomes a habit. I call this the Leader Habit Formula.

The Formula is different from other leadership development programs. Instead of relying on theoretical knowledge and classroom-based learning, which are the standard methods for most leadership training, and for educational and self-improvement programs in general, the Formula is a continuous process that helps you develop leadership skills through deliberate practice. This approach is based on scientific observations about how people most effectively learn new skills and how powerfully habits affect our behavior. The better your leadership habits, the better you will perform as a leader—and the more successful you will be.

But before we can talk about the Formula in detail, we first have to understand what habits really are.

What Is a Habit?

Psychologists define a habit as an automatic behavior. That means that we don’t think about our habits—they seamlessly happen in response to a given cue with little or no conscious effort, and often without us being aware of them.¹ Habits make us more efficient, save us precious mental energy, and allow us to focus on other things—like pondering the meaning of life or fantasizing about our next beach vacation.

People often think of habits as bad behaviors they must struggle to eliminate. For instance, you may wish to quit smoking, drink less, or take the stairs instead of the elevator. But not all habits are bad. In fact, you already hold many positive habits that enhance the quality of your life—you can walk, read this book, drive a car, count money, read a balance sheet, book a flight on the Internet, swim, ski, play a musical instrument; you understand language and can have a conversation with your colleagues and friends, to name just a few common habits.

Some habits you acquired through deliberate practice. You went to school to learn how to read and count, how to understand financial statements, how to manage projects. Through practice, these skills became automatic, and now they are processed in your unconscious mind. Other habits you picked up unintentionally—perhaps your parents insisted on certain daily behaviors, like eating breakfast before leaving the house in the morning. You internalized these behaviors as habits, too. No matter how you acquired your habits, they literally changed your brain.

Your brain consists of billions of cells called neurons. With every new experience, these neurons create new connections with other neurons.² It is through these connections that neurons communicate as they share information in the form of an electric impulse. Two neurons that are connected fire together—the electric impulse that started in one neuron gets carried to its neighbor. Your brain records the new experience as a circuit of particular neurons that fire together in the same pattern. With every repetition of the same experience, that particular neural circuit fires again and again, making it stronger and more easily accessible among all other competing memories and thoughts your brain is storing and processing. The stronger the neural circuit becomes, the more automatically it is retrieved and processed.

It is this automaticity that turns behaviors into habits. Automaticity is the ability to perform a task without having to focus on its every detail, and it develops with practice. You know you have reached automaticity when you can do two tasks in parallel at the same time. Perhaps the best example of automaticity is driving a car. When you first started learning how to drive, you had to focus on every detail of the task—the gas pedal, clutch, brake, steering wheel, rearview mirror, lights, turning signals, and so on. But now that driving has reached automaticity, you don’t consciously think about these details; you just drive effortlessly and you can listen to the radio or carry on a conversation at the same time.

No One Consciously Chooses to Be a Bad Leader

If you paid close attention to Laura’s story, you noticed that, before she changed, Laura wasn’t consciously choosing to be a negative, rude person. She didn’t wake up each morning thinking whom she could pick a fight with, whose idea she could denigrate, or which sarcastic remark she could make. Laura got in the habit of acting this way without any conscious awareness that she was doing it. Once the bad habits set in, she was just reacting to everyday events with her repertoire of negative behaviors without thinking. Automaticity had taken over her interactions.

Laura’s experience is a common one. In fact, I haven’t met a single person in my entire career who was consciously choosing to be a bad leader. When leaders act badly, it’s usually out of a bad habit—something about the situation makes them unconsciously slip into a bad behavior without realizing it.

For example, imagine that you walk into your employee’s office to ask him for something you need. His office door is open but he is in the middle of a conversation with a customer. Your employee is not establishing eye contact, a nonverbal sign letting you know that he wants to finish the conversation before getting to you. Do you rudely interrupt the conversation? Or do you politely wait until your employee and the customer are finished?

Researchers at New York University posed a similar question. More importantly, the researchers wanted to see if they could make people automatically slip into bad habits without being consciously aware they were doing so. Could they get people to act rudely and interrupt the conversation? To test this, the researchers designed a simple experiment. University students came into the laboratory thinking they would complete two short tests of language ability. In the first test, students were given several lists of scrambled words and asked to put each word scramble into a grammatically correct sentence as quickly as they could. An example would be: “pizza—you—like—do,” and the grammatically correct sentence would read: “Do you like pizza?” After students completed the first test, they were told to find the researcher, who would give them instructions for the second test. The researcher would be waiting in another room pretending to have a conversation with a colleague. As soon as the student walked into the second room, the researcher, without making eye contact with the student, secretly started a stopwatch to time precisely how long it would take the student to interrupt the pretend conversation.

Unknown to the students, the first language ability test was a setup to see if they would automatically slip into bad habits. Some students completed a sentence scramble test that contained negative words, like annoying, aggressive, blunt, and rude, which we’ll call the rude group. Other students completed a similar sentence scramble test, but this time the words in the test were positive, like respect, polite, and courteous; we’ll call this the polite group.

Who was more likely to interrupt the researcher—students in the rude group or the polite group?

If you guessed the rude group, you are correct. In fact, 67 percent of students in the rude group interrupted the conversation, as compared to only 16 percent of students in the polite group. Although students in the rude group weren’t aware of it, their brains unconsciously processed the meaning of the negative words in the sentence scramble test, which in turn made them automatically slip into the bad habit of interrupting others.³

A similar discovery was also made by researchers at the University of Southern California. This time the bad habit of interest was speaking loudly in a quiet setting. What would it take for students to slip into the negative habit of being loud in a quiet research laboratory? It turns out that simply seeing a picture of a sports stadium did the trick. For students who frequented sporting events at a stadium, the picture triggered the habitual response of speaking louder.⁴ They didn’t need to be in the presence of typical instigators to raise their voice, such as an argument, or to overcome obstructing sound.

“The Unbearable Automaticity of Being”

The two research studies described above demonstrate just how easy it is for us to slip into bad habits without realizing it. Although interrupting another person and speaking loudly in a quiet place are just two common examples, every aspect of your personal and professional life has the potential to be influenced by automatic, habitual patterns of behavior. From the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep, you carry out the same, consistent routines. And many of your routines are completely automated—you don’t even know you do them, or you might call them something esoteric like intuition or a sixth sense.

Odds are that you follow the same routine every morning in precisely the same order. It probably goes something like this: After the alarm goes off, you start the coffee machine, make your bed, take a shower, brush your teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, get in your car, and drive to work taking the same route. Once you get to work, you take the elevator to the fourth floor, greet the receptionist, walk straight to your office, open your computer, go through new emails, review your schedule, get another cup of coffee, scroll through your social media feeds, read the news, and answer a few emails before heading to your first meeting. You have probably been repeating this routine five days a week for the past ten to twenty years since joining the workforce—and all of it is habit-driven behavior.

I borrowed “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being” from the title of a 1999 article published in American Psychologist. In this eye-opening article, the two psychologists laid out the research evidence that challenged the basic assumption of modern psychology—that people consciously process and analyze information around them and use it to make deliberate decisions and choices about their behavior. The research evidence showed, however, that much of people’s everyday behavior is not a result of their conscious decision-making or deliberate choice.⁵ Your brain unconsciously processes information around you and, in many cases, automaticity takes over and you respond without conscious awareness. In other words, you are a creature of habit.

In fact, nearly half (43 to 47 percent) of your everyday behavior at work and in life is habitual and processed automatically, without your conscious awareness.^{6, 7} The reason for this is the limited capacity of the human brain’s conscious processing power. A person can be aware of (consciously process) only about 110 bits of information per second. Yet even the simplest daily tasks demand a lot of mental power. For example, it takes sixty bits of information per second just to decode speech and understand the meaning of the words on this page.⁸

Even the way you read the words on this page is a result of a well-established habit. You are automatically reading from left to right, top to bottom. You dno’t sonud out idinvduial letrets, but rtaehr you amuotatlicaly exractt meniang from wrods. Notice how easily you read the previous sentence, in which most words were misspelled? That’s because your brain automatically processes each word as a whole. So long as the first and last letters are in the correct place, your brain fills in the rest.

When you reach the last line of this page, your brain will automatically cue up another habit—to turn the page. Do you know how many pages you already turned since picking up this book? Probably not, because you turned them automatically, without conscious awareness. You most likely didn’t think to yourself, “I am o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Laura’s Story
• Part I: How It Works
• Part II: Build Your Leadership Skills
• Part III: Exercises That Develop Your Skills
• Part IV: Encourage New Skills In Others
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index