I think we each operate in an envelope of leadership competence.
When we’re calm and composed, we rise to the heights of our competence.
But, when we’re under extreme pressure, we lose our leadership composure and fall to the baseline of our incompetence.
Our envelope exists between these two levels. And it’s different for everyone.
Here’s an example.
A manager is trying to lift a team member’s performance. But they can’t. It’s beyond their capability. They don’t know what to do.
So, they lose patience and typically do one of two things:
- Fight – They get angry at the person
- Flight – They give up and avoid the problem, turning a blind eye to it
Both responses are as ineffective as they are inappropriate.
We all like to judge ourselves at our best, but – to mangle a quote by Roosevelt – “a smooth sea never proved a good sailor”.
It’s how we handle adversity that proves our ability.
It’s how (near or) far we fall to our baseline of incompetence that proves our progress.
To become more effective leaders, we must therefore do three things:
- Develop management and leadership skills. This expands our toolkit of effective responses and pushes the envelope’s upper limit to higher levels.
- Develop mindfulness and self-awareness. This increases our ability to respond to challenging situations – to intentionally choose from our expanding toolkit of effective responses – instead of reacting from our baseline of incompetence.
- Retrain old patterns. By practicing mindful responses to challenging situations, we develop new habits and patterns, which raises our baseline of incompetence. Meaning that – even when we do come under pressure – we will fall back to increasingly effective reactions.
Finally – but perhaps hardest of all for many of us – we must be kind to ourselves when we do go into fight or flight.
We should by all means own and apologise for our mistakes. That’s a cornerstone of integrity.
But we should also forgive ourselves and remember that to stuff up occasionally is to be human.
And, instead of always focussing on the ways in which we’re still not perfectly developed leaders, celebrate the progress we’ve made to come as far as we have.
