Make new leadership habits stick in 2024
Make new leadership habits stick in 2024
What's coming in 2024.
Happy New Year! If you are like me, the start of the new year is a naturally reflective time. But New Year's resolutions tend to fail. They are often unrealistic and long-term, making them difficult to stick at. Instead, by focusing on bite-sized behaviour changes with short-term gains, you can stack them up throughout the year to achieve your desires. This approach works way better than lofty goals and is more fun. In this newsletter, we call those bite-sized chunks - Outcome Habits. Adopting new leadership habits will help you build better products, reach your career goals and reduce stress for this year and those to come. Starting just one easy-to-do habit daily will make a noticeable difference in two weeks.
For many technology and product leaders, the business demands are high, resources are constrained, and time is drained by putting out many fires. This often leads to rushed technology or product strategy and neglecting individuals in the team. Through exposure to hundreds of leaders in my coaching and training practice, I have identified common challenges holding leaders back. Although the obstacles are nuanced and have different root causes, there is a standard solution that will help move things forward - I call this outcome leadership.
Why outcome leadership?
Outcome leadership empowers teams and drives up team performance, so you don’t have to be involved in all the decisions all of the time. It combines the three ingredients to motivate people, explicitly creating purpose, autonomy and mastery. As you embrace outcome leadership, you enjoy helping teams win instead of avoiding disaster and fixing issues. Strong outcome leadership aligns everyone, reducing waste and increasing the opportunity for success. You must embrace unknowns and uncertainty by creating the culture and mindset to deliver customer value while supporting business goals. At its best, outcome leadership helps teams see how they improve people's lives and enables individuals to have a meaningful impact.
You need to put your leadership ‘reps’ in to grow.
As with all skills, leadership requires focused practice if you want to become better at it. The leader you want to be is defined by the habits you practice. Your habitual behaviours are votes for or against the kind of leader you want to be. When I coach technology and product leaders, we explore their desired leadership signature and work together to discover, practice, and tune the preferred habits that will make them the leaders they want to be.
There are many books, blogs, and videos on leadership. The Outcome Habits newsletter is different because it focuses on helping you practice habits to make the behaviours automatic. When the habits are natural and happen without thinking about them, your performance skyrockets and you can move your attention to other growth areas.
Where did these habits come from?
Over the last 4 years, I have worked with hundreds of product and technology leaders in training workshops, group coaching and 1:1 coaching. I have observed common behaviours or habits among the leaders I consider high-performing. I appreciate everyone has a different measuring stick when it comes to performance. When I refer to high performance, I think of outcomes that include driving change, empowering teams, reducing cross-department friction, motivating people, innovating, achieving objectives and enjoying their role with minimal stress.
What is essential is not to treat these habits as some kind of leader “cookie cutter”. You have to adapt them authentically to yourself. Not all of these habits will fit you perfectly, which is okay. While you will enjoy immediate benefits by adopting a new habit, research shows it takes, on average, 66 days to make a habit automatic (closer to 300 days for some people and some habits). Realistically you will not be able to focus on all 10 macro habits, each containing many micro habits at once. Instead, you need to pick and choose what will best serve you in your journey to becoming the leader you want to be.
You might prefer a traditional, more managerial leadership signature, such as one that dictates to people what tasks to do and focuses on how quickly they do it. This is instead of empowering people to achieve their best. If this is your preference, outcome leadership is not for you. But if that is your current style, and you are uncomfortable with it and want to transform yourself into a more modern leadership approach, then this newsletter will help you.
So what are the outcome macro habits?
These outcome habits are focused on being a high-performance product leader or technology leader. They will not capture every leadership angle supporting your success, and I will not explore a morning routine and joining the 5 am club. Instead, I will focus on the critical behaviours to help you be an Outcome Leader. I have grouped high-performing technology and product leaders' behaviours into 10 macro habits listed below in no particular order.
Listening
Giving support
Giving credit
Connecting to purpose
Encouraging learning
Being inclusive
Creating connections
Embracing Challenge
Being transparent
Recognising the wins
Throughout 2024 the Outcome Habits newsletter will explore each macro habit and help you put them into practice to grow as a leader, achieve career goals, reduce stress and build better products.
Coming soon
In upcoming issues of the Outcome Habits newsletter, we will explore in depth:
Starting to connect teams to purpose.
Swap telling for questions.
Special guest interview with Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle, ex-Contentful and ex-Payal.
Listening to empathise.
How to make habits stick.
Special guest interview with Jane Austin, Chief Product Officer at Juniver, ex Moo ex Babylon Health.
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Kick-starting 2024
To help you reflect and consider the kind of leader you want to be, I have cherry-picked some of the questions we ask our special guests and made an anonymous survey for you. Completing the survey will explore your authentic beliefs and start shaping the specifics of your leadership signature.
I will use the results to improve each newsletter issue so it better supports you. The survey is anonymous, so please take it now.
The next issue is an in-depth look at connecting teams to purpose.
Until then,
Dave