Most of us have asked ourselves “who am I?” at various moments in our lives. I would suggest that more leaders should ask the corollary question. “What kind of a leader am I?” is the leadership identity question – and a useful one.

Useful, but with serious pitfalls, based on how we choose to answer that question.

The Major Pitfall

Too often our leadership identities are formed – whether consciously or not – by our behaviors. What does that look like?

• We take an assessment of some kind which helps us see some behavioral tendencies.
• We notice how we have responded in the past.
• Some combination of those factors leads us to think/say we are “this kind of leader” that could be a label from the style or assessment or a word that you use to describe your approach.

I know this is super common, and yet it is a potential flaw in our thinking.

Why?

Because:

• You are more than your behavior.
• You can change your behavior.
• In a complex world of work, you need to be flexible to change your behavior to meet the needs of the situation.
• Once you have identified yourself as a certain type of leader, it makes it much harder to do that flexing!

The More Effective Approach

So how should we identify our leadership identity?

Based on our values and purpose.

Your values are a far more effective way to define yourself. Why?

• Because our values don’t change – but behaviors can (and often need to)
• Because values are rooted to what we believe, not what we do.

Our purpose defines what we are trying to accomplish and why.

When our purpose and values are aligned, we have the basis we need to then determine our behaviors, rather than defining ourselves by them.

When we build our leadership identity in strict behavioral terms and frames, we make it far harder for ourselves to make or create change for ourselves. When we build identity based on our values and purpose, we build a solid foundational base upon which to continue to adjust our approach – the how we lead to meet the changing needs of our work, workplace, and team.

I’m going to give you the hard truth (and the big key) to professional excellence in the next few hundred words. Even better, it isn’t just the key to professional excellence but excellence in any part of your life. And even if you don’t strive for excellence, but just want to get good at something, the same hard truth is required.

Here's the truth:

If you want to get excellent at something – even good at something – you have to be willing to be bad at it first.

And that is true for everyone.

Even the people who seem to have the magic touch.

If you read any autobiography you will read about people who failed before they succeeded.

Stephen King has written 65 novels and 5 nonfiction books and sold over 400 million copies of those books. And his debut novel Carrie was rejected by 30 publishers.

Comedians practice in small clubs – and get booed a lot – as they hone their craft.

Entrepreneurs have pasts filled with failed companies, projects, and products.

If you want to build professional excellence, the path starts with sucking, not succeeding.

It isn’t easy to fail or fumble when you are doing something for yourself – but it is even harder when you know your mistakes and missteps are at work and in public.

So far, I haven’t told you much you didn’t know, but you needed to be reminded. But knowing isn’t enough. So, let’s translate this to our real working lives…

Building Your Professional Excellence

1. Know what you want to be excellent at. We can’t build professional excellence in everything, at least not all at once. Decide and focus on your skill target.
2. Be prepared to be bad. Remember the point of this article. Grant yourself some grace and be patient.
3. Start small. Pick part of the skill to work on. You don’t have to and can’t get excellent at everything at once. Starting small helps you get past the bad and limits your risk too.
4. Stay the course. Remember, the key is to embrace the bad tries to get to the better (and better) ones. Patience is your secret success tool.
5. Ask for help. You can’t do it alone. Reach out to those who have gotten past being bad. And rely too on people who believe in you. Both of those kinds of people will help you succeed after the suck.

Coaching Others to Professional Excellence

As leaders, we are on the journey to professional excellence ourselves, but we know we have a role in helping others on their path too. Here are some of the things you need to do.

1. Share your belief. Your belief in others matters more than you might realize. Especially if people are scared to try or have lost their confidence when they are especially bad as they are getting started.
2. Provide a safety net. One reason people don’t want to try (and fail) is they feel like a mistake will be career limiting. Give people a safety net so they feel they can keep trying.
3. Be encouraging. Remember what it feels like when you are a beginner and someone encourages you. Be that for others. Often.
4. Promote persistence. Believing and encouraging is important. But people who are struggling to grow also need someone to support them and expect them to be persistent and resilient.

Transforming Professional Excellence to Organizational Excellence

1. Set high expectations. High expectations are important to organizational health. If you hire people you believe can grow and succeed, high expectations are needed to help them get there.
2. Make learning a key piece of your strategy. If you want people to grow and achieve professional excellence, you need to support learning – formal and informal – in every way you can.
3. Promote psychological safety. If you want people to be consistently moving through the learning process at work (including being bad at things for a while), you must create a culture of psychological safety. Here are five places to start.
4. Create organizational patience. We know at a personal level that learning something requires patience. But organizations aren’t always best at patience. If you want to cultivate wide scale professional excellence, people must see patience.

The truth is hard – that to get good at anything we have to be bad at it first.

When we remember that fact and embrace it – for ourselves for others and across our organizations – we have a chance to create far more excellence than we might even imagine. And if you want some more good news…

Since doing this work individually and organizationally is hard, not everyone will try, or stay the course. Which means if you keep swinging, keep trying and keep learning, you will soon surpass most others - because they won’t be willing to do what you will do.

Tension. It’s something we like in the plot of a movie or novel. It’s something that has us bingeing a show we like. But tension in our work and decisions? For most of us, we’d prefer less of it. Preferring is fine, but reality is different – especially at work. As a leader, we need a healthy comfort with tension. You might be wondering what kind of tension I’m talking about…

I’m not suggesting we need to be ok with conflicts that simmer among teammates or groups – the kind that cause discomfort and reduce work effectiveness and efficiency.

I’m referring to the tensions that arise from competing ideas and approaches that exist in a complicated, complex, and uncertain world. In other words, the real world where there are few perfectly right answers and leaders must navigate and flex given the seemingly competing contexts that encounter.

Since that is our world, we need to add comfort with tension to the list of skills and abilities leaders must possess.

Let’s get specific.

• Do we need to think in the short term or long term? Yes – and there is a tension between them – because the better or easier answer to one might not lead to the other.
• Do we need to give positive or negative feedback? Yes – both are important, and both need to be given effectively and in the right situations.
• Do we need to focus on our employees or our customers first? Yes – we need both groups for us to succeed and this tension is very real.
• Do we need to drive results or focus on the process? Yes – without results we won’t succeed – but if the process is broken and it takes a hero’s effort to get results, we have big problems.
• Do we need to go fast or slow down? Again, both are valuable right?
  I could give you many more examples, but I hope these illustrate the point.

Note that all of them are framed as “either/or” questions, but the most effective answer for each is to consider “both/and” rather than “either/or”. When we see the world as both/and, we can more effectively see and feel the tension between the seemingly opposing (but ultimately symbiotic) ideas.

When we think “either/or”, we feel may feel the tension, but once we “pick a side” we ignore (or try to ignore) the complexity of the situation.

When we acknowledge the tension, we can begin developing comfort with it. That gives us the chance to see that, for example, both the short- and long-term matter and that going both fast and slow can serve us.

These are examples of what I call flexors in my new book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. And we can build our comfort with tension when we see the ends (the former black and white choices) as sources of tension we can resolve.

Comfort comes when we know which direction to flex or lean between ends of the spectrum. But it starts by simply acknowledging that the tension exists and that dealing with it matters to our results.

Flexible Leadership. It’s the title of my new book). And it is an idea that might sound good – (we need to be flexible right?), yet we want leaders to be consistent too, right?

So maybe being flexible isn’t such a good idea? Or maybe it’s just more complicated than that…

Since I literally wrote the book on the question, let me unpack it for you briefly.

Consistent or Flexible?

Here’s what I wrote in the first chapter of the book…

Aren’t we losing consistency if we strive for flexibility?

Consistency in some things is desirable, for sure. Here are some important examples:

• Consistency builds trust. When we are consistent in our words and actions, people know what to expect from us.
• Consistency builds credibility. When we are consistent in our ethical standards, we enhance our credibility.
• Consistency supports equity and fairness. When rules and standards are applied consistently, there will likely be less division and more team cohesion.
• Consistency supports stability. When leaders are consistent in times of stress or uncertainty, they help the team feel more secure.

All of these are true.

And . . .

Flexible Leadership isn’t at odds with consistency. Because we don’t need to frame flexibility and consistency as opposites. If they were opposites, then the antonyms of flexibility would be instructive. Let’s look at some of those antonyms.

• Established
• Stable
• Fixed
• Rigid
• Strict
• Hard
• Severe
• Harsh
• Stiff

While the first two seem useful, what about the rest?

Do you want to be a leader (or be led by someone) who you see as rigid, strict, hard, severe, stiff, or harsh?

Not so much. (Neither does your team.)

If you don’t frame consistency and flexibility as opposites, how do you think about them?

You frame them as both valuable and helpful, even though they aren’t the same. When you do that, you move from either/or thinking to both/and thinking.

Both/and thinking supports Flexible Leadership.

Three Reasons Flexible Leadership Matters

Now you see that flexible leadership doesn’t have to be inconsistent with being… consistent. But what are the compelling and practical reasons why you should strive to be a flexible leader?

I’m glad you asked.

Here are three of the most important reasons to consider flexible leadership to be your goal:

• Flexibility helps us navigate uncertainty. If you haven’t noticed, we have plenty of uncertainty surrounding us at work – globally, socially, geo-politically, technologically, economically . . . (do I need to go on?) When we are willing and able to adapt and flex, we can better move with uncertainty, try new things and see what we learn. When we are locked into an approach, we are rolling the dice once and taking the results we get - good or bad.
• Flexibility helps us build confidence. When we only have one way to try something, we put tons of psychological pressure on ourselves. When we realize we have options and can consider different approaches, our confidence grows. And the more approaches we have succeeded with, the more our confidence (and competence) soars.
• Flexibility is required in a changing world. Think about it this way: if the world is changing, and you aren’t, what is the likelihood that the world is changing in the direction of your set, consistent, unchanging style? If you are like me, you don’t like those odds.

Hopefully I’ve made the case for you – the case for the value and importance of flexible leadership. If so, now is the best time to order your copy my book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence, here.

You’ve heard of probable cause. You’ve found root causes for problems. But what is plausible cause and why should we care?

After all, plausible cause isn’t even an entry in my favorite dictionary (Merriam-Webster). Dictionary.com says it means having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable.

Root cause gives us a sense of foundational truth. Probable cause, in a legal sense, is a reasonable ground for supposing that a charge is well-founded (Merriam-Webster). In a non-legal leadership sense, we might say probable cause is the reasonable or likely reason something happens or happened.

In a world where context is clear and cause-and-effect is known (or can be determined), these are useful ideas and tools.

But the world of work isn’t always so clear, and the situations we lead in don’t always lend themselves to clear or immediately probable solutions.

Enter plausible cause analysis, where we aren’t affirming, or finding reasonable certainty, but rather looking for possibilities.

The questions of plausible cause analysis are less firm:

• What might have caused this?
• What could have been the factors that led us here?
• What are the possible things that lead to this result?

Might. Could. Possible.

This is the realm of the real world of work, isn’t it? We don’t have all the answers and might not even be able to get them - but we need to act, respond and decide without those clear or reasonable answers.

Plausible Cause Analysis

As an executive coach, I am often asked my recommendation for what a leader should do in a situation. Typically, the leader has surmised/assumed why someone is doing something and wants to know how they should respond. My approach is to conduct a plausible cause analysis first (whether I tell the person that is what we are doing or not).

I ask why they feel the person did/decided/acted in the way they did. Then I ask if they know that is the reason or intention. After an acknowledgment that they don’t know for sure, I ask questions like:

• Why else might they have done it?
• What are other possible things that could have led to their action?
• What might have been their goal?
• What might or could have been their intention?
• What could have been their positive intention, even if it doesn’t appear that way?

Questions like this will create a list of possible (even if the leader doesn’t necessarily see them as “reasonable” or “what I would have done”) reasons why people performed/decided/acted the way they did. From this plausible cause analysis, I ask the next, and most important question:

Given this range of possible reasons, what are the responses that would address many or most of these possibilities?

From this new perspective, the leader is far more likely to consider a wider range of possible responses and may take a different approach – and have more confidence in it, even if that wasn’t the approach this initially might have taken. This new approach may not be perfect or even work, but an un-examined, or natural response likely has a lower chance of success.

An Example

Let’s do a thought experiment on a situation you have experienced many times – both as the leader and as a person attending a meeting.

You are leading a meeting and ask a question of the group, wanting their input or ideas. After you ask, you get silence and no one responds.

As the pause continues, there are likely a couple of things going through your mind. You are likely thinking…

• Don’t they care?
• Aren’t they listening?
• Why aren’t they responding?

It is the third question that can lead us to plausible cause analysis. Having done this exercise with many groups of leaders, I know there are at least ten plausible reasons why people don’t respond when the leader asks a question. They include (but this isn’t a complete list – and is in no particular order):

• They are thinking about their response
• They have a response but aren’t sure it is what you are looking for
• They don’t want to share because they don’t want to look stupid (to you or the group)
• They don’t want to look like they are just “getting on your good side”
• They didn’t understand the question
• They aren’t sure they trust why you are asking – is it a trick?
• They think you really have already decided, so why say anything
• They don’t want to be “voluntold” to act on their idea
• They don’t want to go first
• They weren’t listening
• They don’t care

If you respond with your natural inclination, which might be to show your frustration, or start giving some ideas “to get things started,” will that address most, many or even some of these plausible causes?

Not as well as you might have hoped.

But once you consider why people might not be responding, you have a variety of things you can do that might address their unstated concerns and improve the chances they will share ideas.

Which was your goal to begin with -- to get their input.

Plausible cause analysis slows us down enough to consider new ideas and options and keep us from our automatic or habitual responses – at least until we see if those responses have a good chance for success.

This is a simple way to begin to become a more flexible leader – one who can adapt to situations large and small to improve your chances of leadership success.

If you want to learn much more about what it means to be a flexible leader and why that even matters, learn more about and order your copy of my book Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence here.

The concept of a playbook in sports originated over 100 years ago in American football. Now, versions of a playbook exist in most sports. My question is, should they be limited to sports? Do you have a leadership playbook, and if not, why not?

I asked ChatGPT: What is the value of a playbook in sports? The answer was enlightening.

A playbook codifies strategies, formations, and responses to different game situations. It allows teams to operate with clarity, consistency, and cohesion. Without a playbook, teams rely solely on instinct, which can lead to disorganization and missed opportunities.

This implies that a playbook is a strategic tool that provides some structure and a framework to improve planning and execution - and provides room for greater flexibility in responses to changing situations.

Sounds like something that would help a leader, doesn’t it?

Now using ChatGPT’s initial answer as a starting point, here’s the value of a leadership playbook.

A leadership playbook outlines strategic responses to different workplace and marketplace situations. Without a playbook, leaders rely solely on instinct, which can lead to ineffective responses and missed opportunities.

Would you like to be able to have a way to act, respond and decide that takes you beyond your instincts and habits? (Hint: the answer is yes, if your habitual response has sometimes led to unintended consequences or less than awesome results).

Habits, instincts and learned responses are wonderful but will not always lead to great results. Having a playbook helps you have a plan to move past doing the automatic natural thing.

My opening question was – do you have a leadership playbook?

Hopefully you recognize the need to have one. Now let’s look at what you want to include.

List Key Situations

Sports playbooks will have plays to address specific game situations. As a leader, you have plenty of these types of situations, including:

• Leading a difficult conversation
• Making decisions
• Solving problems
• Creating tactics and strategies
• Leading meetings
• Managing conflict
• Giving feedback
• Coaching team members
• Introducing and leading change
• Influencing others
• Inspiring your team

These are a few of the situations you may want to include in your playbook.

Identify Your Natural Response

Spend time thinking about what your natural, habitual or learned responses are to each of these situations. Writing them down will help you see opportunities and strengths in your current approaches.

Consider Context

For each of your key situations, there are likely factors that might complicate things or make your next step less clear. What are the factors you might want to consider when considering your situation? Having this list of criteria will help you make sense of the situation more effectively, and allow you to consider flexing your approach, by calling a different “play”.

Have Plans for Flexing

Once you consider your context, how might you flex your approach? Might you need to ask more questions than normal? Slow down or speed up the rate of change? Coach differently? These are just a few examples of what you might want to outline in your playbook, so you can alter your natural response in the fac of shifting conditions.

Keep the Playbook Handy, Brief and Practical

Whether you keep your playbook in a journal or in some electronic format, keep it close by so you can refer to it in real time. And keep it brief so you can consult it quickly. Just as teams change their playbook regularly to deal with new situations and opponents, always consider your playbook as a draft. Be willing to update and revise is as you learn more about the situations you want to improve in.

Leverage it With Others

In sports, the playbook is for the team, not just the coach. Your leadership playbook may be something you want to share with other leaders in your organization. Consider creating organizational leadership playbooks as a part of leadership development processes.

If the idea of a leadership playbook is interesting to you, make sure you get a copy of my upcoming book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. It will help you build out your playbook, specifically helping you think about the context and your flexing plans – giving you a game plan and playbook for leading with greater flexibility, confidence, and success.

If you’d like to explore the creation of these playbooks for the leaders in your organization, reach out to us and let us see how we can help you.