How To Become A Better Leader
Originally published on Forbes Business Council - read the original here
Most senior leaders stopped getting better years ago. They didn’t stop caring or run out of ambition. They simply arrived somewhere comfortable, and because they typically don’t make mistakes, they’re a safe pair of hands.
I was thinking about this as I struggled with the Dorian scale on my guitar. I’d better explain: I’m self-taught, and I’ve been playing for more than 50 years. I play in public. Sometimes I even get paid, and sometimes my solo breaks get applause mid-song.
A few weeks ago, I asked an AI tool to listen to recordings of my gigs and tell me how to get better. I expected a few tweaks. Instead, it told me I play like a typical self-taught guitarist: too many notes and all too safe. I focus more on avoiding mistakes than I do on creating memorable leads. There are beautiful notes I know perfectly well that I pass through rather than stop on because it’s a little, I don’t know, non-standard.
In an effort to expand my skills, I signed up with an online guitar program and started practicing properly, 20 minutes most days on a new scale, straight off a tab, note by note, sixths and ninths and all. Then I filmed two 30-second clips and sent them back. The AI preferred the clip that has 40 notes in it over the one with 70, and it told me that in the 40-note clip, I’m playing guitar, while in the 70 note one, I’m making sure nobody doubts that I can play guitar.
Then I had to tell it the awful truth: The 40 notes aren’t a product of judgment. They’re me being not very good. In 30 seconds, I come to a complete halt six times, and my finger keeps substituting the note it already knows for the note the tab actually asks for. I couldn’t play the seven notes in the right order twice in a row.
Me learning sounded, at least initially, like I was getting worse.
Nothing Wrong Or Everything Right
Now let’s put the guitar down.
You’ve led for years, and you’ve led well—nobody could point to failures that you should be held accountable for. You’ve arrived at nothing wrong.
Skill comes from repetition, and you have plenty of both. Learning to lead mostly happens on the job—a process of your intuition, actual behavior and noticing the outcomes that behavior produces. You see that people respond well to your communication, so you communicate more. You see good results come from fast decisions so you become more decisive. It works, which is why you’ve got the job.
But if you want to go from good to great or from nothing wrong to everything right, you’ve got to find a way to practice the equivalent of my sixths and ninths. That takes a new skill, not more of the ones you already have. You have to start learning again. And learning depends on a willingness to look worse than you are for a while.
A well-regarded guitarist plays nothing wrong—perfectly safe but unremarkable. A guitar hero goes further—not only no mistakes, but they deliberately add the little touches and flourishes that make the instrument really sing. The same gap sits between the leader you are and the leader you could be, and crossing it is a lot harder and more uncomfortable than staying where you are.
To change from a safe pair of hands to a difference maker, you have to adopt new behaviors and observe your own performance. That means deliberately and intentionally making that extra effort to impact your people:
1. Let go of solving the problem immediately
Feel the discomfort of taking way longer than necessary to understand what’s really going on before jumping to an action. You might find a nuance that makes an outsized difference for the outcome.
2. Let go of knowing
Consciously recognize your assumptions and hold them up to the light. Be prepared to drop them.
3. Let go of your judgments
Take a look at the people in your team, how you characterize them and how you treat them. What if you were missing something? How would you find out?
4. Coach your direct report rather than fixing their problem
5. Examine your constraints
Take something that has always been a no-go zone. Ask yourself “under what circumstances would we do this?”
6. Delegate something that someone else could do even though you enjoy doing it yourself
Above all else, stop doing other peoples’ work for them. Work on excelling at the things that only you can do, while lifting the level below you.
The Harder Way
You could start these new behaviors right now, but every one of them runs against that lovely feeling of mastery. You have to get comfortable with being less certain of yourself and your skills.
This is not easy. I’m trying to learn to pick with my third finger, and it will simply not obey my brain! I feel like a complete klutz. Making mistakes on lead breaks is not how I want the world to hear me. It’s much easier to drop back into what I’ve already mastered than it is to work on getting better.
That’s the trade. You can have easier, or you can have better. Most leaders take the easier route without ever noticing that they made a choice. And a business rarely outgrows the person leading it, so that unconscious choice sets the ceiling for everybody who works for you. Take the harder route and you might end up playing a whole different tune.