The Most Common Reason Leaders Fail And 4 Practices To Overcome It

The rapid pace of change in today’s business environment requires that leaders continually evolve their lens, frameworks, and actions to effectively navigate new challenges and opportunities. Research from the?Center for Creative Leadership ?shows that the most frequent cause of career derailment for executives is difficulty adapting to change. Common examples include:

• A new boss with a challenging management style
• Ongoing conflict with key stakeholders
• Repeating that same mistakes
• Transitioning from a technical role to a leadership role
• Needing to accept feedback to make needed changes

Leadership will eventually expose your flaws. Everyone has strengths, weaknesses, biases, and perspectives that serve them well in some situations and do not serve them well in others. When encountering these situations, successful leaders look in the mirror and change how they think and act so their teams and organizations can succeed. If a leader does not develop their capacity to adapt to change, they will never reach their full potential and will be in danger of being demoted or removed from their role.?

4 Leadership Practices For Adapting To Change?

1) A Practice Of Reflection

The American Educational Reformer John Dewey said, "We do not learn from experience….We learn from reflection on experience.” The best way for leaders to adapt, learn, and evolve is to establish an ongoing practice of reflection. Research shows that a regular practice of reflection increases a leader’s capacity to demonstrate good judgment with decision-making, emotional intelligence, social skills, and learning agility.?

The Applied Learning Cycle (see image below) provides a roadmap for how leaders can accelerate their learning agility and professional growth through a practice of reflection.

2) Ask Quality Questions

For leaders to achieve sustained success in a constantly changing environment, they need to develop their ability to leverage other perspectives, understanding, and expertise to solve complex problems. Too often, I witness leaders falling into the seductive trap of needing to be the smartest person in the room. Organizations must have leaders that can leverage multiple types of expertise, perspectives, experience, and insights to solve the ongoing complex challenges teams and organizations must overcome. A leader's success is dependent on their ability to effectively engage others in helping solve challenges, which requires building a strong skill-set in asking quality questions.

The best leaders understand and value that people have different experiences, access to information, values, goals, and perceptions that often lead to new insights, innovations, and conclusions.?

3) Actively Seek Feedback

Leaders are the people who need honest feedback more than anyone else because they are likely to receive only positive messages from those around them. Receiving honest feedback helps leaders address blind spots and evolve their leadership behaviors while setting an example for others.

Since sharing feedback with a leader is risky, a leader must be deliberate about creating a safe environment by actively giving permission and expressing openness and desire to receive feedback about their performance. For a leader to regularly receive honest feedback from stakeholders, they need to minimize potential obstacles while encouraging others by:

• Asking for feedback often
• Being specific about the feedback request
• Creating safe processes for collecting feedback?
• Avoiding defensiveness

Regardless of how effective you are as a leader, you will make mistakes that have negative impacts on others. When leaders ask for feedback, it demonstrates that everyone can improve and role models a growth mindset for continuous development.

4) Establish A Long-Term Orientation

Leaders who do not regulate their negative emotions during difficult situations are disadvantaged in their ability to accurately perceive situations, problem solve, make decisions, manage stress, and collaborate. The late Stephen Covey, who authored the popular book,?7 Habits of Highly Effective People,?wrote, “Look at the word responsibility —'response-ability'— the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive leaders do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling."

Being deliberate about aligning in-the-moment intentions with longer-term goals allows leaders to deliberately choose their best actions versus just reacting out of fear, anger, loss of control, frustration, etc. During challenging transitions, a leader should regularly pause to ensure that their daily intentions align with their best long-term goals for the situation.

Remember that setbacks to old undesired habits are a common occurrence. Give yourself grace when setbacks happen and remember to practice these 4 Leadership Practices For Adapting To Change to continually adapt, learn, and evolve for future success.

*Previously shared by Tony Gambill on Forbes Leadership

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Tony Gambill is the President and Founder of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping executives and managers bring their best leadership self to their most challenging situations. Tony is the author of the book,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life . To read more of Tony's articles follow him on?Forbes .