Daily practices for leaders at all levels

The essence of the ‘Leading at Levels’ programme lies in its practices, both ‘in the moment’ and planned.

Leadership comes to life through the ability to notice, use effective language and make small interventions. Attendees are encouraged to experiment with these practices between sessions, focusing on noticing and learning.

Novice leaders need to develop these subtle skills beyond just knowing the theory.

It All Starts with Noticing

Developing antennae to pick up when a team’s energy is flat and get curious as to the cause. Noticing when the ‘share of voice’ in a session is unbalanced and what about the low psychological safety may be hindering people.

Sensing that environmental issues may be causing friction for the team and experimenting with how to make this more visible.

Appreciate when the team has drifted back towards a fixed mindset and how to nudge them back to a more open mindset

Noticing when there is a lack of engagement or motivation or when team members are not owning the challenge or approach

These are key precursors to leadership interventions, requiring the finest of skills and awareness

?‘In the Moment’ Practices

Whilst these practices often do NOT take more time, they do require:

• Cognitive Effort: Interrupt your existing habits or to craft different phrasing.
• Courage: To show vulnerability, use new approaches and risk them not working and accept you do not know what will happen and are learning

These habits often rely on the language used. Gentle prompts can be posted in Slack or Teams to encourage experimentation.

Atomic Leadership Habits

I curated over 50 ‘Atomic Leadership Habits’ that take seconds or minutes, inspired by James Clear’s bestselling ‘Atomic Habits’. Here are a few examples:?

• Principle: Make it safe for growth and contribution
• Experiment: Seek Feedback
• Atomic Habit: Ask ‘What am I missing?’
• Why: Shows vulnerability and invites others to offer their perspective.
• How: Use this question to focus on listening to understand, not just to respond.

?

• Principle: Make it safe for growth and contribution
• Experiment: Vote first, then discuss
• Atomic Habit: Use the 'Fist to Five' response to a question
• Why: Explore the range of views in the team, avoiding binary questions.
• How: Reframe questions to gauge confidence levels and then discuss the outliers.

?

• Principle: Improve engagement, motivation, and ownership
• Experiment: Certify, don’t brief
• Atomic Habit: Certify next steps at the end of the meeting
• Why: Engage people in what they will do, maintaining clarity on outcomes - instilling their ownership of the next step.
• How: Go around the room asking what actions attendees will take as a result of the meeting, if anyone forgets anything you still have the option to remind them

?

• Principle: Improve engagement, motivation, and ownership
• Experiment: Return the problem unsolved
• Atomic Habit: Ask for their ideas before giving your thoughts
• Why: Break habits of dependency and engage them in problem-solving.
• How: Next time someone asks for your suggestions, respond with, “That’s a great question. I have some ideas, however, let's start by hearing your thoughts?”

Other resources

There is no shortage of practical experiments that leaders can run, the value comes from noticing when to use them and aligning them to how you see your role as a leader

I love L. David Marquet 's Leadership Nudges - 1-2 minutes of something to try. Some make me smile in their simple examples... like this one on 'Pass information, not instructions' in a car parking scenario that we all know so well.

This lovely short and practical 'The Psychological Safety Playbook' gives 25 'plays' that can be used to make it safer for people to contribute. By Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman

Not forgetting Tom Geraghty 's wonderful PsychSafety website and newsletter with many useful tools and perspectives

Planned Practices

In addition to ‘in the moment’ practices, there are planned workshops and actions:

• Principle: Focus on the environment, not the people
• Experiment: Make the invisible visible
• Atomic Habit: Run a dependency mapping workshop
• Why: Teams experience friction due to dependencies on other teams and people. This workshop makes those dependencies visible, explore options to mitigate their effects.
• How: Map out key work/knowledge flows with other teams, identify dependencies, and agree on actions to improve them.

Similar workshops, like value-stream-mapping or the ‘sailing boat retrospective’, can help identify other sources of friction.

The effective collection and use of metrics can also increase visibility of trends and challenges, such as too much ‘work in progress’ or error rates

Often it is up to the leader to identify and prioritise the time for this kind of more time-consuming practice.

Learning from the Cohort

The 'leading at all levels' programme typically has 20-100 leaders, which provides numerous opportunities to reflect and learn from each other.

The insights are particularly valuable because they arise from the shared business context

Other posts in this series

This is part of a series of posts where I outline the 'leading at levels' programme that I have been delivering to organisations over the last five years.

I am keen to share and continue to improve the offering, so please contact me if you'd like to be part of that small and creative group of people.

• Introduction ‘leading at all levels’ programme – a necessary re-imagining of Leadership
• Key influences: The key thinkers and ideas which I use in the programme
• Structure of the programme: Outline of the way in which the programme is delivered. How it blends into people’s work lives
• What I have learned so far: A few of the tweaks and changes on the evolutionary journey to the latest iteration of the programme