Good habits make great leaders. What a person eventually becomes or achieves is a function of what he does repeatedly. Knowing that good habits are the harbinger of great accomplishments, leaders make deliberate efforts to cultivate and ingrain into their daily schedule, habits that would accelerate their journey to success. This is important because what make a day different from another are the activities therein. If a day is like every other one, it means the activities are similar and the experience would not be different. In situations like that, progress is arrested. Great leaders avoid such situations. Even in cases where schedules are similar from one day to another, they ensure that the activities are different to guard against stagnation.
Here are five of the daily habits that stand leaders out.
They daily reflect on their vision and how close they are to actualizing it
One of the things that mark out great leadership is vision. According to Theodore Hesburgh, former President of the University of Notre Dame, vision is the essence of leadership. Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric, reinforced this when he posited that “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” So without vision, leadership is empty. Vision is the compass that guides an organization into its desired destination. The vision encapsulates the aspiration of the leader for his organization; where he wants to take it and what he wants it to become.
Most leaders start with a great vision; they get into office bubbling with energy about what they want to accomplish and how they hope to get to their desired end. But along the line, the daily pressure of running the office takes their eyes off the goal, they get derailed and eventually shipwreck their leadership.
The undoing of many Nigerian leaders is that they do not stay focused on the vision that brought them into offices. In Nigeria, as soon as an individual gets elected into an office, his preoccupation becomes how to win re-election even when he has yet to justify the confidence reposed in him by the people who elected him. He starts scheming for the second term at the onset of his first term. So, rather than fulfill his campaign promises, his eyes are set on winning another term. As a consequence, he leaves undone what he ought to do and the people are the worse for it.
To avoid this rut, what great leaders do is to spend quality time everyday to reflect on their vision and see how far or close they are to actualizing it. They also take concrete steps and actions on a daily basis to hasten the accomplishment of the vision. For a vision to become realized, it has to be broken into daily activities. For a great leader, everyday takes him closer to the actualization of his vision because he does not allow anything to take his attention off his vision.
Learn something new everyday
Whatever you do is a function of what you know and what you know is dependent on what you have learnt. Nobody can outperform his level of knowledge. It is for this reason that leaders are unrepentantly committed to self improvement. They know that the more they know, the better they get, and the better they get the more productive and successful their organization becomes. So, they pull out all the stops to ensure that their knowledge base is increased on a daily basis. Leaders top up their knowledge base daily because they know that they face different challenges everyday and therefore cannot rest on ancient knowledge to tackle modern challenges. So, for outstanding leaders, knowledge acquisition is an ongoing activity.
According to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, spending one hour daily on reading is a critical ingredient of his success. He says, “Every book teaches me something new or helps me see things differently. Reading fuels a sense of curiosity about the world, which I think helped drive me forward in my career.”
Learning increases capacity, boosts confidence, widens perspective and enhances creativity, all of which are necessary for effective leadership. The more a leader knows the better he is at delivering on his mandate. Therefore, for leaders who are worth the title, daily learning is a way of life.
Make excellence your brand
Leaders know that what stands them out from the crowd is excellence. The world is so filled with average people that it is common to be average. As a matter of fact, it is common to be common. The irony, however, is that even common people don’t like commoners; common people prefer outstanding people to their fellow common people. Everyone is looking for uncommon people to do what they want because they know that whatever they do would be well done. That is why great leaders always leave a mark of excellence on whatever they do.
Excellence is going beyond set standards. It is raising the bar every time, not occasionally. It is shattering records and setting new ones. Great leaders never allow complacency to get hold of them; hence they stretch themselves every time to beat their hitherto hailed accomplishments.
At 86 years of age, Dr Christopher Kolade is in high demand for board appointments but he consistently turns down offers to serve because he already sits on too many boards. He had served as the Director General of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Managing Director of Cadbury Nigeria and Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. In 2012, he was appointed by former President Goodluck Jonathan as Chairman of the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme Board. Currently, he serves as the Pro-Chancellor of the Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos; Chancellor of McPherson University in Ogun State, and sits on the board of many organizations. Why does everybody want Dr Kolade? He has a reputation for delivering excellent services every time. Hence, while younger people are complaining of not being fully engaged, the octogenarian has his cup full.
While expertise and experience are critical components of excellence, they are not the only factors that determine excellent output, if not everyone that combines expertise with experience would excel. One other factor that plays a vital role in achieving excellence is passion. As a matter of fact, passion is superior to either expertise or experience in achieving excellence because it is passion that determines the effectiveness of the two in any given situation. Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group, says his primary consideration for pursuing any line of business is passion; he does not go into anything that he is not passionate about. He attributes his business success to the passion he has for the businesses he runs.
The same principle will work for any leader. Leaders must be passionate about what they do to be excellent at it.
Solve a problem daily
Problem solving is the core of a leader’s calling and this must be done on a daily basis. If a leader was able to solve problems yesterday but is unable to do same today, he loses his relevance. Followers throng leaders who are able to proffer solutions to their challenges and avoid those who cannot.
Most leaders who fail to solve problems approach problematic situations with a wrong mindset. Leaders must be resolute about the fact that every problem has a solution and it is their responsibility to find the solution and fix same. Leaders also find problems difficult to solve because they are unable to raise their thinking. As put by Einstein, a problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created it. So, solving a problem starts with having the right mindset and being creative.
In 2007, Starbucks was recording losses. The chairman, Howard Schultz, narrowed the cause of the trend to the company having lost its way. He realized that it was his responsibility to lead the company back to its winning ways because, according to him, the company was heading south because, “The pursuit of profit became our reason for being, and that’s not the reason that Starbucks is in business. We’re in the business of exceeding the expectations of our customers.”
Schultz knew that it was his primary responsibility to redirect the company, so he took 10,000 managers to New Orleans for a four-day conference as a way of reorienting them about the essence of the company. The 10,000 managers left the conference with “a tidal wave of energy.” A few years later, Starbucks started reporting record profits.
Leaders always find the way out of a labyrinth.
Inspire someone everyday
Organizations with inspired workforce will beat competition hands down. The reason is that an inspired workforce stops at nothing to ensure that organizational goals are accomplished. They go the extra mile and exceed the call of duty in their bid to see that the company excels. But the average workers do not just get fired up, they are fired up by their leaders. It is therefore essential that the leader must find ways of inspiring his workforce on a daily basis.
Employees are particularly inspired when the leader’s interest in them is beyond what they can do for him or the organization. Employees will eat out of the hands of leaders who are interested in their career progression, their families and their general well being. It behooves on leaders to find a way to inspire and motivate at least one person daily. The return on this is beyond what the leader can imagine because the leader ends up building a bank of good will for himself apart from firing up the workers to help him achieve his vision.
Last line
No one is born with any habit; every habit is learned. The import of this is that everyone has control over his choice of habits whether enabling or inhibiting.
and then