Becoming a Better Leader

Leadership is a developable skill. It is not static and if left ignored it will erode away. It will atrophy. Good leaders are able to see the big picture, model desired behaviors, and challenge others to be the best version of themselves. Great leaders understand that they can continue to improve these skill sets. They understand ability to inspire isn’t an innate skill—it’s one you can cultivate. Just good leaders think they have it all figured out and once that attitude is cultivated their leadership will digress. Great leaders keep learning and great leaders bring others along the way on the journey. Here are key behaviors to focus on to become a better leader.

Reflect on past decisions

Failing to take time to reflect on the outcomes of past decisions is a failure to learn and grow as a leader. Hindsight is never actually 20/20. But it is invaluable in helping you identify the consequences of a decision and whether that choice met its intended successes. Reflection of this sort can be individual based, but should be a regular part of your team’s yearly calendar. Taking time to review the outcomes allows all of you to learn how to better lead. It should not dominate the calendar either. Strike a healthy balance of looking ahead, but the future view will not be as clear for you if you don’t take intentional time to review the past.

Learn Negatively

It could easily be better to phrase this as learning passively. However, this is truly both an active and a passive reality in the life of a leader. If you are reflecting on past decisions don’t just focus on those that went well. Take time to reflect on the bad ones. Take time to review the flops and failures. You will likely learn far more from a negative result than you will a positive. But don’t negate the idea of learning passively through other peoples negative outcomes. If you are a second chair leader at any level who sees one day a move upward to the senior role it is vital to learn through passive negatives. How would you do it different? How would you have chosen to lead through that issue? How would you respond in that situation? Everything is a chance to learn and grow. Don’t waste a chance to improve.

Use Passive Mentors

An active personal mentor is a wonderful guide in your leadership journey. It is just super difficult to find someone who will take actual time to mentor you. But you can learn passively through numerous other leaders, thinkers, and people. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Subscribe to articles, emails, and the like. With the current digital reality of life a myriad of options exist for you to learn and be mentored passively. Readers are leaders. There is really no excuse to not pursue the avenues of learning you have at your finger tips these days.

Focus on one skill at a time

Trying to do everything at once will frustrate and burn you out. Focus on a skill at a time. Knowing yourself is vital to growing as a leader. Your personality, skill sets, abilities and gifts all come with strengths and weaknesses. All of it needs to be developed. Again, a balanced approach is key. Don’t spend all your time trying to minimize the weak areas of your skill set. You just may not be wired in a way to thrive in that ability. Hire someone onto the team that thrives in that area and delegate to that person. Don’t abandon it to that person. Delegate it and trust. Build up the areas of your leadership one skill at a time. Finding yourself to need more empathy? Take six months and focus on how you can build basic empathy into your leadership style. Trying to do it all at once will only lead to failing at all of them.

Choose to value

The Bible challenges us that a leader can have all the charisma, all the oratory skills, all the abilities, all the glitz and glamour but without love it all means nothing. Choose to value the people around you. Care. You will quickly find yourself on a very lonely journey if you don’t value the people around you. Choose to invest time in them. Choose to elevate them. Listen to them. Don’t assume you know better than them.

Never stop learning. Good leaders know things. Great leaders know how much they don’t know things. And do something about not knowing. Cultivate your leadership skills with intentionality. Don’t settle for just being good.