With a considerable degree of familiarity, lists of resolutions have filled newspapers and magazines around the world this January, as every January, urging action or restraint on everything from the best ways to get fit, to the easiest way to rid yourself of an annoying habit.
There has also been a great deal on leadership, which between its reliance on multiple skills and talents, and its potential impact on many different people, is certainly ripe for resolving to attempt to do it better. The strategic, far-reaching viewpoint that chief executives need to take, as well as the measures they need to look at to monitor performance, fits nicely with the act of making a January resolution. There is the ambitious statement of intent – let’s say making an effort to communicate decisions better – and there is a measurable potential result – in this case, whether you did in fact manage to communicate your decisions more effectively and how that played out.
Moreover, there is the simple act of resolving to do things better – an aspirational action that plays well with the idea of a chief executive who is ready to turn attention to themselves, adding to their leadership prowess to be even more impressive in some particular area. Someone making resolutions to improve appears, at least, to be thinking about their own development.
The truth, however, is that resolutions are nearly always a poor substitute for real commitment to improvement. They are, of course, near-inevitably thrown aside within weeks of making them, suffering the same fate as efforts to quit smoking and waking for a daily early morning visit to the gym. Like these others, they often fail because they were too ambitious to begin with, or otherwise, because they were too vague to really put into action.
Here, then, is my suggestion – never make any New Year’s resolutions on leadership. Don’t resolve to remember more employees’ name. Don’t promise to set aside 10 hours a month to personal development. Don’t pledge to resist emails after 9pm.
Not because any of these things aren’t worthy of consideration – they definitely are – but because such things should be part of a much more substantial commitment to improving the quality of your own leadership style and approach.
Resolutions on leadership are generally set for failure because they foresee a definite end point – once you reach a particular marker or goal, you can consider something a success. The problem with that is that leadership development is a process, something that should happen continually throughout a whole leadership career. No business leader, no matter how distinguished, should view themselves as beyond the possibility of further improvement.
So an organisation’s leaders need to drop the vague resolutions and instead show the will to properly develop their talents. First, it requires that they drop any pretension that their position at the top of the company is indicative of them no longer needing to learn. Then it means putting into practice much of the theory they almost certainly have already absorbed from development courses and their work experience to date. Very often, the greatest limiter to developing leadership talents is not a want of information and knowledge, but simply a lack of real personal drive to make changes.
Rather than resolutions, create a detailed plan for your development for the whole year. Consider your strengths; consider your weaknesses; consider the last year and think about situations that could have run differently. Then create a strategy for action that is going to make a tangible difference to the things you will consider in this same exercise a year from now.
Doing so is no less aspirational than a New Year’s resolution, while being considerably more substantial in its probable outcomes. Resolve, then, to be a better leader for life, not just for January.
Ahmad Badr is the chief executive of Abu Dhabi University Knowledge Group.
business@thenational.ae
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