Leadership is about guiding individuals, or groups of individuals, toward a better future. Whether it’s in a for-profit company, a nonprofit organization, the military or the government, this concept of leadership seems relatively straightforward.
However, what sounds like such a simple idea turns out to be rather difficult to implement. As training and development professionals, we can help people turn this concept into reality by supporting them in understanding the mindsets and behaviors that may be quietly holding them back. Based on what I’ve seen working with middle- and senior-level leaders from a variety of backgrounds, industries and geographies, there are six main roadblocks that get in the way of effective leadership and a series of questions we can use to help them remove these roadblocks.
Roadblock 1: They Lack Self-Understanding
A lack of self-understanding is not only a hindrance to effective leadership —it’s a hindrance to living a full life. When leaders don’t understand themselves, they can drift into jobs that don’t suit them, strive for promotions that don’t excite them and fall into careers that don’t fulfill them. They may even become a person they don’t recognize, like or want to be. Understanding ourselves well takes time, emotional energy, and courage because sometimes when people shine a light inside of themselves, they don’t like everything they see. However, as British author C.S. Lewis said, “We can’t go back and change the beginning, but we can start where we are and change the ending.”
Leading others begins with understanding ourselves, which means having a clear sense of our background, influences, values and how our behaviors impact others. To help leaders uncover this knowledge and gain insight into how these factors affect their leadership, we can ask them to reflect on:
- Their backstory: the people, ideas and events that have shaped them as an individual, and how these influences show up in their leadership style
- Their values and the extent to which they are living and leading according to those values
- Their definition of success, in both their personal and professional lives, and whether their actions are leading them closer to the success they seek.
- Their emotions and the extent to which they are aware of their emotions and how those emotions drive their behaviors and effectiveness in building and maintaining relationships.
- What the feedback they’ve received tells them about how others perceive them and how their behaviors impact others.
Roadblock 2: They Don’t Manage Themselves Well
Successful leaders evolve throughout their careers because each new level of their career requires a higher level of skills and new behaviors. To focus on the behaviors they might need to upskill, you can ask them what it will take to evolve from the leader they are now to the leader they want to become — and then coach them as they work to develop these behaviors. Managing themselves involves the ability to replace their current way of reacting to people and situations with a more productive behavior. It means taking responsibility for their actions, including the ability to regulate their behaviors in pursuit of a specific objective (e.g., listening more intently, disagreeing with others more effectively, being more patient, managing emotional outbursts).
Roadblock 3: They Don’t Understand Others
Just as the leaders we’re developing are distinct individuals, so is each of the people who work with and for these leaders. Getting to know others as the individual they are helps leaders get the full benefit of those individuals’ unique set of skills, which makes for more satisfied employees and helps the team perform better. Do the leaders you are working with know the background of each of their team members? What skills they bring to the table? What their goals or interests are? How they like to work? At a minimum, do they understand the ambitions and motivators of those on their team and do the best they can to not demotivate them? These are critical questions to consider.
Roadblock 4: They Don’t Develop Others to Be the Best They Can Be
Leadership is not about having everything your way; it’s about developing the people who work for you so that together we can do bigger things. Just as the leaders we work with are a work-in-progress and needed to develop their skills and behaviors throughout their career, so too are the people who work for them. Part of their job as a leader is to help others grow, which means using developmental feedback and stretch assignments to move people beyond their current capacity, elevating their skills and increasing their abilities. The result is higher performance. How well do the leaders you work with grow the capabilities of their team through challenging assignments, combined with support? How often, and how effectively, do they develop others through feedback?
Roadblock 5: Leaders Often Fall Into the Knowing-Doing Gap
In both managing yourself and leading others, people often know what to do but don’t actually do it. This is the “knowing-doing gap” and most of us, including the leaders you work with, experience it.
For example, most of us know that we should listen to others and be open to new ideas, yet many of us don’t do this consistently. The important thing is assessing whether leaders are putting into practice what they know will improve their leadership effectiveness. In leadership, they don’t get credit for knowing how to lead; they get credit for doing it.
Roadblock 6: They Succumb to Their Fear of Vulnerability
Change, including learning a new behavior, is hard for most people because it pushes them out of their comfort zone. Working on new behaviors can make us feel vulnerable, a feeling that most of us do not enjoy. Our fear of making mistakes, or failing, is often what holds us back from engaging with new behaviors — and what contributes to the knowing-doing gap. Vulnerability can show up in self-understanding as a fear of looking closely at our own behaviors; in self-management as a fear of looking foolish as we learn a new skill; in understanding others as a fear of intimacy or appearing less authoritative; and in managing others as a fear of giving honest feedback to help others become more effective. Many people abandon learning a new behavior because of feeling vulnerable when they make mistakes and instead double down on what made them successful (e.g., intelligence, hard skills, hard work), but this doesn’t bring them to the next level. When learning new skills, they will often be outside our comfort zone, and it’s in this zone of discomfort where their growth begins. Where do the leaders you’re developing succumb to their fear of vulnerability?
Final Thoughts
These roadblocks often prevent talented, hard-working and high-achieving people from growing beyond their current capabilities and advancing in their careers. Better understanding and managing themselves, understanding and developing others, and overcoming their fear of vulnerability and emerging from their knowing-doing gaps, won’t be easy. However, the effort will lead to growth, satisfaction, higher capabilities and better results.
When people understand and manage themselves, it makes them better humans and better leaders. Understanding and developing others builds the overall capacity of the individual, the team, and the organization. So too does going beyond knowing what they should be doing to doing what they know they should be doing.
