What if we treated leaders more like athletes?
Think about it for a moment. We would never expect someone without the appropriate skills, training, and support to compete in a major athletic event and succeed. Olympic athletes, for example, train for years with the support of coaches, nutritionists, physical therapists, and mental health specialists to become leading, elite participants at the top of their game.
And yet, people are asked to become leaders in organizations, institutions, and communities every day, with little training and sometimes no support. We are shocked when they struggle and even fail to be successful in these roles. This is especially true if they were excellent individual contributors and have recently been promoted to oversee a department or team for the first time.
But it isn’t just the would-be leader that suffers. In many cases, internal morale, relationships, productivity, and even the organization’s reputation can suffer. Poor leadership preparation costs organizations dearly, yet development processes are rarely put in place to support and grow leaders, to help them practice the fundamentals long before the stakes are high.
I’ve recently been reading two outstanding books from two of my favorite authors. The first is Brené Brown’s most recent book, Strong Ground: The Lesson of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit. The second is Seth Godin’s 2020 book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. Both intersect around the ideas of process and practice – powerful and yet often undervalued concepts.
Imagine mastering a new activity. It could be something physical, like a new sport, a new art technique, a game, or a language. Regardless of what it is, chances are all the following will apply:
- You aren’t very good at it at first
- You will need to focus on the fundamentals
- You will need to do it fairly often to get better
- You probably have a coach or mentor to help guide you and provide you with feedback if you are seeking mastery
- You will always have room for growth, no matter how good you become
In Strong Ground, Brown explicitly calls out the issue of leadership being viewed as an inherent trait that one either has or doesn’t have. The so-called “executive presence” of individuals is perceived as a key indicator of C-suite success, a quality reinforced mainly by patriarchal workplace norms. If you have read any of Brown’s work, you will probably know that she finds this notion of executive presence to be complete bullsh*t (and yes, I know I can use this word because she has used it many times herself. Just listen to her podcast.)
Instead, Brown argues that for leaders to be truly effective, they must cultivate deep thinking, collaboration, and connection skills. Crucially, these skills do not happen overnight. They require coaching, feedback, open, honest conversations, failing, celebrating wins, and failing again. They require a dedication to personal process to grow and refine them. They require practice.
Similarly, Seth Godin argues that when we adopt a practice and commit to it, showing up generously, fearlessly, and consistently, we will make progress toward whatever it is we are aiming for. Again, the focus isn’t on the destination; it is on the journey, and a courageous journey will likely lead us to many incredible and unexpected destinations.
Practices and processes create room for both creative expression and unpredictable results, just as much as they enable predictable ones. It’s difficult to foresee what the future will bring. Today’s leaders face ambiguous challenges, deep fragmentation, and a pace of change so rapid that each day can look different from the last. To me, this drives home the need for leadership as a practice to become the normative lens through which we cultivate, foster, and build organizational talent.
Back to the list above, I envision a practice-based approach to leadership to look something like this:
- Embracing the fact that leaders are made, not born. Everyone can be a leader, and they don’t need a C-suite role to do it. Horizontal leadership is equally important and valuable.
- Leadership fundamentals can be taught and reinforced in elementary school, high school, college, and on day one of an internship. They can also be taught when an employee has 20 years of experience under their belt. These include listening and critical thinking, generosity, self-awareness, and a learning mindset. You can practice these every day in your home with your family, on your commute, and at the office.
- Cultivate opportunities for everyone in the organization or on your team to grow, expand, and develop their skills, regardless of their role. Not everyone wants to be a manager or have divisional oversight, but that doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from understanding how they can contribute to the organization’s mission.
- Normalize coaching, learning, and feedback. Normalize authentic, humble inquiry. Normalize risk-taking and creative action. Make these routine practices in community spaces.
A final thought – think about developing your own personal practice around leadership, similar to how you might map out a training plan. How can your reps? Who are your coaches? Who do you want to become? Map a path to get there.