What Actually Makes You a Better Leader

What makes you a better leader? There are plenty of things that can contribute to it, but ultimately one thing matters most.

Here are some of the likely candidates and what you might be thinking about right now:

• Mindset
• Identity
• Skills
• Competencies
• Experience

I've written about all of these, and all are important. But they are all precursors to the main event. They're all inputs to what actually makes you a better leader.

So what actually makes you a better leader?

What you practice.

Your habits.

What you do.

Not what you know, not what you intend, not what you hope, or even what you believe. You are judged by your actions. You are observed through your practices. People watch your feet. People respond, follow and commit based on your actions.

Here is the best leadership development question you can ask yourself today:

What are you practicing?

Better practices, better leader.

Changing Your Practices

Here are four situations that impact your leadership practices.

Consider these situations. How many of them can you relate to? Which of them are your biggest hurdles to becoming a better leader?

• You stopped doing it. These are the things that you used to do, got out of the habit of, or somehow forgot. Whatever the reason, you are now out of the habit and have lost that muscle.
• You got feedback. A person or people has given you feedback on one of your approaches or habits. Maybe you acknowledged it, maybe you didn't. Now might be the time to accept it and apply that feedback.
• You learned but didn't apply. You attended some training, saw a great approach, found it valuable, knew it would work but never applied it. It's sitting in a dusty rusty toolbox, unused and unhelpful.
• You gave up too soon. These are the things you tried once (or twice) but they were too hard, or you were disappointed that you didn't get as good results as you wanted or you became disillusioned with your ability to do those things. None of that means these approaches wouldn't and can't work. It just means you have to go back to work (to practice them until they become your new habit).

Don't look at this list with wistful regret or guilt. 

Instead, look at this list and say to yourself: “up until now.” All leaders have fallen into the trap of one of these situations - most of us have been trapped by all of them. The way we become a better leader is to acknowledge these things, learn from them, and move forward by creating new habits and new practices, based on the lessons they provide.

Organizational Application

Organizations want their leaders to be more effective and yet we too often focus on the wrong things. You can make the ideas in this post more valuable in your organization by doing these three things.

• Make the goal of training events application, not simply knowledge transfer.
• Create an expectation of and accountability for application.
• Teach and reinforce habit-building skills (i.e., practice with your leaders).

Several of our expert guests at last year’s Virtual LeaderCon independently talked about the importance of converting learning into practice, which is an example of how valuable the event was. Want to gain wisdom from world-class thought leaders in real time and interact with them directly? Join us in September for Virtual LeaderCon. Learn more and register for free here.