10 Leadership Habits of Highly Effective Leaders

"A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential." — Brene Brown.

When someone claims to know how to lead using a specific formula, run. There is no one way to lead or particular formula to follow, but there are certain habits that, if you practice daily, will make you a better leader.

"Leadership is influence — nothing more, nothing less." — John Maxwell

Brene Brown defines leadership in terms of courage. She states that a genuine leader is a person who believes in her people's potential and dares to develop them. John Maxwell agrees with Brene Brown but defines leadership by saying, "Leadership is influence — nothing more, nothing less."

As we see above, it is hard for two experts to agree on one definition of leadership, so this article will not give you a single skill or formula to be a better leader. Instead, it will provide you with something better: ten habits you need to gain influence and the courage to develop your team's potential.

1- Define Your?Vision

"The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion." — Theodore Hesburgh.

Leaders who lack vision lack followers, and leaders who lack followers are not true leaders. Benjamin Hooks made that very clear when he said, "If you think you're leading and turn around to see no one following, you're just taking a walk." that is a powerful statement. So, if you want people to follow you, create a powerful vision.

Southwest Airlines' vision is clear:?"To be the world's most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline."?If you work at Southwest, it is easy to see where the company wants to go. They want to be the most efficient and profitable airline in the world. So, are you in or out?

How to Craft Your?Vision

Andy Stanley often states that you must cast a clear, compelling vision and reinforce your vision through your actions so that people will follow you. To cast a vision, you have to answer two questions:

1. What problem am I trying to solve?
2. What happens if this problem goes unsolved?

A good vision statement is a reference point for every leader's decision. Every decision should be focused on helping you solve the main problem your business is trying to solve.

Habit #1: Craft a compelling vision and communicate it?often.

2- Communicate Clearly

"Good communication is a core leadership function and a key characteristic of a good leader."— Center for Creative Leadership.

Crafting a vision is a leader's most important job, but no one can communicate a vision without communication. According to Harvard Business School Online, "A leader's most powerful tool is communication."

Jack Welch confirmed that by stating, "Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." However, it is not enough to create a vision. You have to be able to communicate it.

When you craft your vision, don't be too clever. Be clear.

How To Communicate Clearly

Kelly Decker and Ben Decker provided leaders a framework to communicate their business vision. The framework contains four steps:

1. Think about your audience: What do they care about? For example, talking to your marketing team differs from talking to your accounting team. Likewise, talking to your customers differs from talking to your stakeholders.
2. Target the message to their needs: How is the vision relevant to them?
3. Communicate your action steps clearly: What would you like them to do next? What needs to be done? When do you want it to be completed?
4. Engage your team emotionally: How will the process benefit them? You should connect your company goals to their personal goals.

Habit #2: Over-communicate your vision, priorities, and?purpose.

3- Build Your?Team

"First Who?… Then What. We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats." — Jim Collins.

Jim Collins believes that choosing the right people on your team is as important as your vision and strategy. You can not bring your vision to life without a good team. Once you have the right people on the bus, leading them becomes easy.

Hire Slow, Fire?Fast

Collins states that there are two principles to building great teams:

1. When in doubt, don't hire — keep looking.
2. When you know you need to make a change in personnel, act right away.

If you want to lead better, don't hire fast. It is better to be shorthanded than to have the wrong person on your team. When you realize that you made a bad hire or have a team member who is not a good culture fit, fire them quickly.

Once you have the right team on the bus, communicate your vision and get out of the way. Steve Jobs stated, "It makes little sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."

Habit #3: Recruit, hire, train, retain, and promote the best?talent.

4- Deliver?Results

"Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It's about impact. Impact involves getting results, influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and you have to inspire teammates and customers". — Robin S Sharma

As a leader, you define your vision and build a team to deliver results. It does not matter if you are leading a non-profit organization, a public company, or a small company. You are hired to get results.

You do not get results by focusing on results. Instead, you get results by doing all the tasks that lead to results. In his book, The Four Disciplines of Execution, Sean Covey pointed out four disciplines to get significant results.

1. Focus on Wildly Important Goals. Instead of focusing on ten goals, choose 1–3 goals that you must accomplish to bring your vision to life. A good question to ask is, "Which one area of our team's performance would you want to improve most to achieve the overall WIG of the organization?
2. The Discipline of Leverage. You should aim to invest most of your team's energy, time, and resources in the activities that drive results and help you accomplish your wildly important goals faster.
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard. There is a reason sports teams keep scoreboards visible. They drive team engagement and inform everyone if they are winning or losing. So your scoreboard should be simple and visible.
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability. The first three disciplines are considered pregame planning. This discipline is about getting results. The fastest way to get results is to hold people accountable for their important goals.

How To Deliver Faster Results Using The FAR?Method:

1. Focus: What are the three goals we need to accomplish this week?
2. Action: What is our action plan?
3. Results: What do we need to correct? What successes do we need to celebrate?

Habit #4: Measure results and engage your team throughout the?process.

5- Document Every?Process

"Knowledge transfer is the process by which experienced employees share or distribute their knowledge, skills, and behaviors to the employees replacing them." — Training Industry.

Leaders fail to document their processes because they feel that it takes too much time. However, documentation saves time and money in the long run.

Jack-in-the-box restaurant documents every operation step: receiving, storage, preparation, cooking, and serving. As a result, a Jack-in-the-box manager can hire and train someone fast because they have documentation that covers every step of their customer journey.

Documentation reduces risk if anyone quits and gives your organization a professional image. Every documentation could be used for the following purposes.

1. Training Tool for the New Hire
2. Create Consistency

How To Document Your Processes Using the IGOE?Method

1. Input: Material, people, or information.
2. Guide: Regulations, rules, and knowledge.
3. Outputs: result, people, products.
4. Enablers: Tools, equipment, and systems.

There are more methods, but IGOE is ideal for the service industry.

Habit #5: Document every process in your business.

6. Run Efficient Meetings

"The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished." — Tim Cook

Basketball players show their talents when they step on the basketball court. Artists can show their abilities when they face a white canvas. Leaders offer their expertise when they lead their meetings efficiently.

Jeff Bezos believes that Amazon's unique twist on meeting structure is the smartest thing Amazon ever did. Bezos has three rules for meetings.

1. Two Pizza Rules. "We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas," Bezos said. "We call that the two-pizza team rules."
2. No PowerPoint. Bezos has eliminated the presentation tool PowerPoint and replaced it with six-page memos.
3. Begin meetings with silence. Bezos starts each meeting by giving team members a half-hour to read the prepared memo before discussing it.

Running efficient meetings has many benefits. They save time, reduce confusion, increase team cohesion, and make it easier for the team to accomplish their goals.

How to Run Effective Meetings

1. Set the agenda.
2. Do not invite more than eight people.
3. Start and end the meeting on time.
4. Get everyone's input.
5. End with an action plan.

Habit #6: Run efficient meetings that focus on getting better results.

7. Create a Sense of?Urgency

"Urgency is a gut-level determination to move and win — to make the right things happen today. Until and unless an organization creates a high enough sense of urgency amongst a large enough group of people, it will flounder. When that sense of urgency exists, even organizations that are facing formidable obstacles can and will produce solid results". — John Kotter

Urgency is the emotional drive that makes great performance a must instead of a choice. Leaders do not have to ask their team to leave a burning building; employees in the crumbling building have a high sense of urgency to do it on their own.

Creating urgency forces your team to act now. As a result, you will reduce procrastination and deliver faster results to your organization. In addition, a sense of urgency inspires your team to act on the most critical tasks in your organization.

John Kotter is an authority on change and creating a sense of urgency in organizations; he studied thousands of companies and concluded that leaders should do four things to accomplish results.

1. Engage all Stakeholders. You must engage your team to get their buy-in to deliver results. Use every tool: emails, meetings, videos, presentations, articles, memos, huddles, retreats, etc.
2. Go Slow To Go Fast. Clarify and overcommunicate the purpose behind every change you seek. The goal is to create a sense of urgency and not go too fast.
3. Remove Barriers. Work with your team to remove obstacles between them and the organization's goals.
4. Communicate the Urgency. When you feel that you communicated the moment's urgency, communicate again.

How To Create a Sense of?Urgency

1. Set weekly goals.
2. Break down weekly goals into smaller tasks.
3. Talk about the quantity needed, the quality required, and the deadlines to be met.
4. Assign accountability partner.
5. Review progress and hold people responsible weekly.

Habit #7: Create a sense of urgency every day.

8. Delegate

"When you delegate tasks, you create followers. When you delegate authority, you create leaders." — Craig Groeschel.

Delegation is difficult but a powerful tool for multiplying one's impact in an organization and enhancing one's team's productivity.

According to Harvard Business School Online, Delegation refers to transferring responsibility for specific tasks from one person to another. Delegation frees your time to focus on higher-value activities and not do less.

As Robert Half stated, "Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too." If you delegate work and do nothing, your team will not respond well to you. When you delegate, explain to your team the purpose of the delegation and your desire to develop them to become better leaders.

Delegation is not the art of doing less. It is the science of accomplishing more.

Use The BEC?Method

I use The BEC method of delegating. It is simple but powerful.

1. Behavior. Decide what to delegate and what behavior is acceptable in your organization. For example, if you need information from a different department, please email them and cc their manager.
2. Expectations. It addresses three things: quality, quantity, and deadlines.
3. Consequences. Explain the consequences of not accomplishing the task and the reward of completing the task within the allotted time. Consequences are about establishing accountability to get things done.

Habit #8: Delegate the right task to the right person.

9. Create Healthy?Culture

"Create the kind of workplace and company culture that will attract great talent. If you hire brilliant people, they will make work feel more like play." — Richard Branson.

Organizational culture is how people behave, act, tolerate, and celebrate. If I walk into any organization, I do not read its mission or vision statement to learn about its culture. Instead, I take my time to observe how people behave.

If leaders tolerate unacceptable behaviors, the intolerable behavior becomes part of the organization's culture. On the other hand, if they celebrate great effort, showing effort becomes part of their culture.

A healthy culture attracts the right people to the organization, delivering great results.?Patrick Lencioni?mentions four disciplines for creating a healthy culture.

1. Build a cohesive leadership team.
2. Create clarity.
3. Over-communicate clarity.
4. Reinforce clarity.

My method of building a healthy culture has four aspects:

1. What Do You Communicate: Value, vision, mission, and strategy.
2. How Do You Behave: Culture caught as much as taught.
3. What Do You Celebrate? Celebrated behaviors are behaviors that tend to be repeated.
4. What You Don't Tolerate: Behaviors that are punished tend to vanish quickly.

Habit #9: Create a healthy culture intentionally.

10- Solve?Problems

"Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership." — Colin Powel

Problem-solving is a big part of what leaders do. Their responsibilities are not limited to planning, controlling, and organizing their teams. They need to be able to solve problems and anticipate them before they occur.

There is one important question that you should answer before solving any problem, "Is this a problem to be solved or a tension to be managed?' Andy Stanley coined this question.

Problems are temporary if you deal with them as soon as you recognize their existence. On the other hand, tension is permanent. It can't be solved and should be managed.

How to Solve Any Problem Using the STIR?Method:

1. Specific Problem: Identify the problem that you want to solve.
2. Target a Solution: Target a solution that you like to implement.
3. Implement the Solution: Implement the solution quickly.
4. Finally, review Your Progress: Review your progress as often as needed.

Habit #10: Solve any problem using the STIR?method.

These ten habits will make you a more effective leader immediately. So, let's review them?quickly.

1. Define Your Vision
2. Communicate Clearly
3. Build Your Team
4. Deliver Results
5. Document Every Process
6. Run Effective Meetings
7. Create a Sense of Urgency
8. Delegate
9. Create Healthy Culture
10. Solve Problems