Do This to Level Up Your Leadership

Looking for a new approach to expand your leadership influence?

A new year doesn’t mean we automatically leave behind behaviors, habits, and tendencies that didn’t serve us well in 2017, especially when it comes to effective leadership.

According to Roy Baumeister, a leading expert on willpower, people who are most likely to achieve goals make a pre-commitment on how to handle challenges. Meaning, they decide in advance how they will respond to obstacles and take the best possible action. This concept applies to any new year’s resolution, including being a more influential leader.When it comes to your leadership style, choose one of the following options as your pre-commitment in order to positively influence your company culture. Don’t see a behavior that resonates with you? Select one of your own. The goal is to be intentional in how you want to make a significant impact towards organizational health for your company.

Which pre-commitment are you willing to make?

1. Convey a non-anxious presence even when demands, deadlines, and judgements surround you.
2. Improve tolerance for healthy conflict and have difficult conversations.
3. Observe others’ defensive behaviors without absorbing their negativity.
4. No longer rescue nor make excuses for poor employee conduct and performance.
5. Separate yourself from chaos, but remain connected to your leadership team and employees.
6. Be a better listener and understand others’ points of view.
7. Increase employee accountability to help them take responsibility for their actions.
8. Focus on lasting change rather than quick fixes.
9. Promote blameless problem-solving instead of finger-pointing.
10. Allow unmotivated, under-functioning employees to find employment that is a better fit.

Install healthy behaviors

When you make a pre-commitment to how you want to level-up your leadership, you take a proactive stance on your reactions when setbacks occur. Your pre-commitment will become involuntary. When you intentionally install healthy behaviors, you send a powerful message that permeates to the operation of your employees and overall company culture.

Healthy leaders understand that healthy behavior starts with themselves. Leaders must be able to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk in terms of their own behavior before they hold employees accountable for the same behavior.

If you’d like to learn more about behaviors that drive leadership and organizational health, and get support to make your pre-commitment behavior reality, just give us a call or send us an email.

Workplace Conflict Expert Bonnie Artman Fox, MS, LMFT, works with executive leaders and team managers who want to stop divisive behaviors, resolve conflict, and build the team trust needed to create a healthy work culture.  Contact Bonnie to help your employees get along and bring teams together.