Small Actionable Steps to Overcome Common Leadership Challenges

For most people including business leaders and decision-makers, a New Year is a time to reflect on the events that shaped their businesses and organizations. It is also time to make new goals and resolutions that will drive their businesses and organizations forward. When looking back at key moments that defined the past year, decision-makers will identify what worked for them and also areas that need improvement.

Leadership Challenges

While the challenges faced by decision-makers differ from organization to organization, there are common challenges that affect almost all of them. Some of the most common leadership challenges include:

• Ensuring organizational effectiveness 
• Inspiring the team 
• Capacity building
• Navigating change
• Leading the team
• Imposter Syndrome

Small Habits Can Help Surmount Leadership Challenges

When facing challenges, leaders may come up with complex and intricate solutions. However, James Clear, the author of the international bestseller Atomic Habits, advises against the ‘Go Big or Go Home’ approach. Instead of focusing on the goal, he asks people to focus on the system. Let’s look at how adopting small habits can help business leaders overcome common challenges.

Ensuring Effectiveness

Decision-makers often have to worry about time and resources management. To hone effectiveness, leaders set goals and establish timelines to meet these goals. Additional actions may include carrying out organization-wide training to help the team stay on track. Besides being time-consuming, such measures can throw the team into disarray, resulting in undesirable outcomes.  

Leaders should instead focus on encouraging their teams to adopt small habits that allow them to perform their duties without much effort. In his book, James Clear gives an example of how Dave Brailsford turned British Cycling from an average team into world champions. Brailsford employed the marginal gains philosophy, breaking down all the small parts that make up cycling, and improving each part by 1%. Similarly, leaders should seek to make small improvements in the smallest unit rather than pushing for sweeping changes.

Inspiring the Team

As a business owner or leader in an organization, your team looks up to you for inspiration. While this looks easy on paper, the reality is quite different. Many leaders and business owners find it challenging to motivate a group consisting of people with different personalities, backgrounds and needs. The most common approach is to offer the team extrinsic rewards such as a pay rise, bonuses or stock options.

Although these rewards play a crucial role in motivating and inspiring people, sometimes they are not enough to increase productivity and engagement among the team members. Therefore, besides offering extrinsic rewards, you should also consider intrinsic rewards such as members’ overall well-being, fulfillment and learning. Team members who believe their leader cares about their welfare and allows them to tap into their inner resources while performing their duties are happier and more productive.

Capacity Building

One of the roles leaders and business owners take up is that of mentoring and empowering their teams to prepare them for future roles and growth in an ever-changing business world. Preparation methods include developing or strengthening your team’s abilities, skills, instincts, and processes. In most cases, developing your team requires time and other resources, making it a challenging leadership problem.

James Clear urges his readers to use the habit stacking technique to help them adopt new habits. Leaders and business owners should encourage their teams to adopt new habits by building on their existing good habits. For example, if a team member has great people and communication skills, a leader could develop them by encouraging them to take up the role of the group’s spokesperson.

Navigating Change

To ensure their growth and survival, businesses and organizations have to align themselves with their complex and rapidly changing environment. They achieve this through knowledge management, organizational learning, and changing their norms and values. Change may bring out some level of uncertainty among team members, resulting in resistance or a negative attitude.

In his book, James Clear offers four laws that can help you lead change effortlessly.      

4 Laws of Change

1.       Make it obvious – start by changing the environment to match the business and organization you seek to become.

2.       Make it attractive – people are likely to change if it will lead to approval, respect, and praise.

3.       Make it easy – since people are most likely to choose the option that requires the least effort, leaders should put in place policies and processes that make change as easy as possible.

4.       Make it satisfying – people are more likely to adopt change if it is immediately rewarding, even in the smallest way.

Leading the Team

Heavy is the head that wears the crown. No one understands this statement more than business owners and leaders. Being in charge is a tough job and can be overwhelming sometimes. Business owners and leaders facing this challenge should enlist the support of a business and leadership coach. Besides supporting you, a coach can also hold you accountable, ensuring you build on your good habits and eliminate the bad ones.