Five benefits of habit-stacking leadership development
A lack of time during busy workdays is often reported as a barrier to leadership development.
One way to circumvent this is to habit-stack leadership development by weaving it into existing operating rhythms.
Habit-stacking is a powerful technique for building new habits by leveraging existing ones. Instead of associating leadership development with a specific time or location, pair it with a habit already part of your organisation’s routine.
You can do this by identifying existing business forums leaders regularly participate in and developing leadership capability within them.
An ideal opportunity for this is quarterly or trimester reviews, which typically bring leaders together every 3-4 months to discuss results, adjust strategy, examine the competitive landscape, explore key industry trends, and address matters relating to people, teams, and engagement.
Making room within these reviews to tie these topics back to leadership effectiveness ensures that leadership development isn’t an ‘add-on’ for time-poor leaders but part of ongoing business rhythms and rituals.
Bonus Benefits
Additional benefits of this approach include:
Tying leadership development to your business cycle keeps it on the agenda, creating a known drumbeat to deliver important messages and join the dots between them. This then creates shared expectations and understanding.
It ensures that the leadership development within these forums is highly relevant, targeted, and timely, based on what’s happening in the business, and necessary for strategy implementation and project execution.
These reviews often involve a cross-functional participant mix and bring together a larger cohort of leaders than day-to-day rhythms usually allow. This enables exposure to different perspectives, encourages peer-to-peer learning, and helps leaders to appreciate that many of their challenges are shared.
Networking supports collaboration back on the job, with leaders more comfortable picking up the phone to work through issues after spending time together in person. The trust and connection they build means this isn’t a cold call, and because leaders gain a better understanding of who’s responsible for what, it's easier to work out who to turn to for help.
It’s an excellent opportunity to boost the visibility of leaders who role model your organisation’s values and ways of working by involving them in designing, hosting, and facilitating segments throughout the day. These leaders typically appreciate the learning-by-doing this enables, and it’s a great way to recognise and showcase their contribution to the business.
Try it out
While these are five key reasons I’ve seen to tie leadership development more firmly to your operating rhythms, there are likely many more.
Try it out by identifying an upcoming touchpoint in your organisation’s operating rhythm and building in a leadership development focus.
Experiment with what works, consistently repeating the pairing until the inclusion of leadership development feels natural and automatic, maximising opportunities for behaviour change.