( 720 words = 5.5-minute read)
March Newsletter Recap
# 1 – Do What They Can’t Do – help your team to know how to engage you and when not to
# 2 – Challenging – challenge underperforming individuals and teams on behalf of your team
# 3 – Leaders Find Ways to Change Things – use your authentic style to communicate powerfully & create change
Hello Leaders! This month, I would like to offer a simple idea to develop your leadership potential. If you want to improve your leadership effectiveness, this month’s newsletter offers a great idea. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please schedule a time on my calendar.
Point # 1 – Potential vs. Performance
In succession planning, we attempt to assess performance and potential. One of the biggest challenges a leader faces is accurately evaluating both dimensions to determine who could effectively succeed them. For our purposes today, consider how much of your leadership potential you are utilizing.
If you are unaware of your full potential, you may not be investing in yourself sufficiently. Consider a leader who lacks any “profound strengths” (Zenger and Folkman’s terminology; a leadership competency at the 90th percentile). On average, they have an overall leadership effectiveness of 34%.
Everyone can achieve the 90th percentile (and higher) in overall effectiveness. The difference between the 34th and 90th potential is enormous. Getting your job done may be possible at the 34th percentile, but achieving greatness is what you can experience at the 90th percentile.
You might be accomplishing most of your goals and objectives; however, if you don’t have a plan and don’t act on developing your potential, you may never acquire the skills to enhance your overall leadership effectiveness.
Ask yourself: Do I know how much of my potential leadership effectiveness I am utilizing?
Point # 2 – Learning Agility
Not developing your potential usually means you are not utilizing a competency known as “Learning Agility.” Agility is the capacity to be consistently adapting and enables you to take ownership of:
- Knowing yourself and learning from personal successes & failures
- Applying knowledge and insights about yourself in professional situations
- Seeking & accepting feedback from others
- Proactively seeking learning opportunities
Learning agility is critical for a leader because you are always role modeling to others. Demonstrating, even indirectly, how to be the best version of yourself is essential. This competency has a significant impact on your team and the effort they put into developing themselves. If you don’t demonstrate learning agility to your team, it is doubtful that most of them will reach their full potential.
Ask yourself: How proficient am I at learning agility?
Point # 3 – Develop Learning Agility
Those leaders who are determined to improve have a plan and are skilled at executing it. They hold themselves accountable to learn, grow, and change. They possess a self-improvement mindset and strive to continually improve, including seeking constructive feedback. To become great at learning agility, you could do many different things, but here are a few suggestions from the Zenger Folkman library of ideas:
- View successes and mistakes as learning opportunities to be utilized in other situations.
- Identify confidants who will challenge your perspective and help you recognize your areas of strength and areas for improvement.
- Establish a routine of reflecting on your professional performance. Identify patterns that will be helpful to you in the future by keeping a journal of your insights.
- Listen to webinars or podcasts on topics relating to learning agility, such as resilience, adaptive learning, self-awareness, etc.
If you are already good at learning agility and want to become great, consider these suggestions as “strength builders” also from Zenger Folkman:
- Listen and Learn – Agile learners are also skilled listeners. Through listening, you can gain a great deal of insight about yourself.
- Stretch Yourself – Highly effective and agile learners seek situations outside their comfort zone. Push yourself to find learning opportunities with steep learning curves and the potential for failure.
- Project Optimism – Agile learners tend to be generally optimistic. They are skilled at seeing the positive side of failures, and they move on from negative situations quickly.
- Demonstrate Self-Honesty – Agile learners face the facts about themselves. Those who demonstrate honesty about themselves tend to be more agile learners.
Ask yourself: What steps can I take to improve my learning agility?
Want to Go Deeper?
- Boost Your Leadership Agility by Joe Folkman and Jared Harding (webinar)
- Tips for Improving Your Learning Agility – Center for Creative Leadership
- How to Become an Agile Learner by Hellen Tupper & Sarah Ellis – Harvard Business Review