How to Develop New Leadership Skills and Habits

To prepare to run my first and only 5K, I used a training app. It was one of those couch to 5K kinds of things. It really helped. It had a regular routine. I’d go run a couple days a week, and starting out, I’d run just a little bit and then mostly walk, and then run just a little bit and then mostly walk. And then each day I would run more and more until I built up to the point where I could run a 5K.

But how do you improve as a leader? How do you grow as a leader? How do you develop leadership skills? Leadership skills are very different than training to run a 5K. Now, you need to train to be an effective leader. But unlike running, leadership is a mix of different types of skills. You’ve got hard skills and soft skills. You’ve got tactics and you’ve got relational components. There’s some IQ to it and some EQ to it. So developing as a leader is a little bit different than developing as a runner, or honestly changing many of the habits that we have.

So in today’s episode, I want to share my process to personal leadership development, in hopes that it helps you grow into the leader you want to be.

Welcome to the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast, a show designed to help you lead better to live better.

Okay, my friend. So what does it look like to grow as a leader? Now, first off, again, I want to remind you of one of my favorite leadership axioms, the principle behind the practice. The principle behind the practice simply means don’t just copy something somebody else is doing. Wrestle with it for a bit. Ask, why is it working for them? What’s the truth in it that’s a universal thing that would work for anybody? And how will I contextualize that for me? So don’t copy exactly what I’m doing, but take it not as a theory, it’s practice. Take it as a concept, but contextualize it to you.

Now, this where I’m about to share with you, this isn’t where I started. It’s where I am. I’m not even saying this is where I’m ending. I can say that this is the practice I’ve been doing for a couple of years, which for me is a really long time. But it took years and years for me to kind of land on this system, if you will, on this framework.

So what do I do? Well, the first thing I do is, again, another very popular leadership axiom, I begin with the end in mind. I have a really clear picture in my head of the type of leader I want to be, and I’ve identified the gaps between where I want to be and where I am. And then I have started to figure out, well, what are the areas I need to grow in? What are the habits I need to replace? New things I need to do. And I have come up with a roadmap, if you will.

But it’s such a big jump from where I am to where I want to be that I can’t make it. I can’t jump a ten foot chasm in two five foot leaps. That’s not going to work. So I can’t get there bit by bit, and it’s too big for me to jump on my own. So I have to build a bridge. And a bridge has a lot of pieces and parts to it, and it takes a little bit of time, and I’m okay with that because I want this to be a bridge strong enough to carry me over the gap.

So what do I do? Well, I have these ideas. I know where I want to be, and I’ve just got a list of things, new skills that I want to learn, new ways I want to respond in different situations. And what I do at any given time, I have three of these. I have three of them written down on a note in my Good Notes app, and I use this app every day. I use this specific note every morning.

There are a few components to this note. The very first thing on the note is a list of prayers. Things that I’m praying for, for my team and my company, because I start my workday with that. Then I look at this very next thing. What are the three things that I’m trying to change about me, improve in me as a leader?

And I review these daily. And what I do when I look at these is, one, I use it as a reminder, because sometimes I forget. I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s right, I am working on this. Especially when one of these gets on my list for the first time, I’d be like, oh my gosh, I totally forgot. I said I was going to work on this. So I use it as a reminder.

Then I ask myself with each one, did I have any opportunities in the last twenty four hours to practice this? Where did I have that opportunity? Where did I practice it well? Where did I drop the ball? And I’m just evaluating myself. I’m giving myself an honest evaluation.

Then I look forward over my calendar. Do I have any opportunities coming up to practice this? Do I have any one on ones? Do I have any leadership, team leadership trainings coming up? Do I have an opportunity to create something and share with my team on this? I look ahead for the opportunities that I can identify coming up. But part of leadership is you can’t identify every single scenario, but you can start to get pretty good at it, seeing more and more of these coming up and anticipate them as you grow as a leader.

And then if I know I’ve got something coming up, I think it through. I make a game plan. Now, for some people, they like to write these things out. I’ve tried. That doesn’t work for me. And this is one reason I like having a personal space to work in that’s kind of secluded, just for short chunks of time. Not my whole day, but in the morning. One of the reasons I get up early before my family is for this reason. Not because I love mornings or anything like that, but I like to have this alone time because I’ll role play by myself. I’ll stand up, I’ll pace. I’ll pretend like I’m in the meeting and I’ll just say what I want to say, and I’ll say it more than once.

Now, lately, I’ve also been leveraging AI with this. I’ll explain to AI what I’m going to do, tell it who it is, you know, a team member in this scenario. And over time, my AI has started to learn about my team. And then I’ll say, I want to have this conversation with you, and I want you to respond in a very negative way. And so I’ll then practice what I want to say, and it responds. Then I’ll say, I want you to respond in a way that you anticipate this person would respond. I want you to respond in a positive way. And then I ask it for feedback. How could I have said it better? What did I say that could be misunderstood? Where did I say too much? And this is a good place to get some coaching back and forth.

And then the other thing I’ll do is I’ll talk to my coach. I believe everybody should have a coach. And I believe most people can be coaching others on leadership, even if it’s those people on your team.

So I look for opportunities ahead of time that are coming up, and I start to prepare for them, and I practice. And then, like I said, I evaluate the past, and I just am brutally honest with myself. I do a good job. What worked, what didn’t work, what can I learn from it? And I just do this process of evaluation. It’s about ten, fifteen minutes, you know, two, three minutes, maybe up to five minutes per thing. And some days it’s all focused on one of them. There’s no hard, fast rule for this for me. But this is what I do.

What it starts to do is this starts to lay down over time new neural pathways. You see, our brains are moldable. Okay. There’s a lot of brain based science and research that shows us that we can actually manipulate these pathways. We can change the neural pathways in our brains, and we can start to strengthen new positive response pathways that eventually become stronger and easier and start to be the pathways that our neurons fire down through, versus taking the old habit way.

And so I leverage this. But you have to be intentional. You can’t just want it. This is a situation where you just can’t want it. You can’t put it on autopilot. You have to be intentional, and there’s not always a trigger with this. You know, there’s a lot of books out there and research that talks about setting up new habits. And you have to identify the trigger. And then once you identify the trigger, you can predetermine what you’re going to do after that. Or starting with a cornerstone habit. Some people set up a cornerstone habit of, you know, brushing my teeth. And if I brush my teeth, then I eat better. And then if I eat better, I’m losing weight and feeling better, and then I run, and it’s this cascading effect. And that’s all good and great. And I think for what I’m talking about, all of that stuff still plays true. But you have to figure out how do you contextualize it. Because again, some of this is relational. It’s soft skills. It’s responding in a conversation. It’s practicing bringing up a conversation.

You know, I used to have this really bad habit of when I would bring something up to somebody, I’d say, hey, listen, there’s something I need to talk to you about. I’ve noticed you do this, and I wanted to bring it to your attention because, you know, our core value of this would have you not responding that way. Like, that’s not how we do it here. That’s not the most effective way. That’s not the most efficient. That’s not the way I want you to do it. Whatever it is. Hey, I want to talk about something. I’ve noticed this. This is why I’m bringing it up. This is the change I need to see.

And so many times, it was habit, the team member would say, oh, I’m sorry. And I would say, oh no, no, no, don’t worry, or it’s no problem. And I realized that was kind of a dumb thing to say. If it’s no problem, or it’s something they shouldn’t worry about, then why am I bringing it up? But I don’t like, naturally, I don’t like conflict. I’m conflict averse. I want to avoid conflict. And so I’d try to soften it then. And it took me months and months of reviewing this every day. This is how I wanted to stop. I wanted to stop softening, or over softening, I think is how I said it, my response when giving feedback. I wanted to be clear. I wanted to be direct. I wanted to be kind. I wanted to be specific. All of these things I wanted to be. And I had to start practicing.

And then I had to catch myself. When somebody would say something, I had to predetermine, what am I going to say? So when they say, I’m sorry, what is my response? Oh, it’s okay. Oh, no worry. Don’t worry about it. I had to practice to the point where when I correct, when I bring something up to somebody in feedback, and I say, hey, this is something I’ve noticed, we need to do this different. Oh, I’m sorry, Eric, I see that, I’ll work on that. Or if there’s like, hey, I’m really sorry. I just practiced and practiced to the point where now I say, thank you for apologizing, I appreciate that. Now let’s go ahead and move forward with this. No need to come back to it over and over. And I just, boom, I thank them. They apologized. They felt they needed to, whether I felt they needed to or not, it doesn’t really matter. They felt it. It helps them. And so, hey, thank you for apologizing. And then I just very quickly, let’s go ahead and move forward. And it was in your tone of voice and all that.

So anyway, that’s a completely different podcast episode and topic. But it took me several months to do that, to build this new habit and to have this new response ready to go.

And so then, after several weeks of a daily review and realizing, hey, I’ve accomplished this, I’ve done this for the last three weeks, the last four weeks, whatever it is, like, I’ve done this, at that point I remove it from that list and I bring in a new one. Now, I don’t erase it. I have a list. I’ve been keeping a list for years of all the new habits and practices that I’ve tried to grow. And sometimes, for fun, once or twice a year I read that list and I’m like, oh my gosh, I remember, I can’t believe I used to do that. Oh my goodness. Or I’ll go, wow, you know what, I actually see this in one of my leaders. I want to talk to them about this because I used to do it. And it helps me now find content to develop my team.

So then I take it off of the working list I’m working on. I put it in an archive list. But then I have a someday list. Things that I want to do. And I look at that, and I pull one of them over, and I begin to do this.

So this has been my experience. Now, this isn’t the only. I’ve got one more part to this. I’ll show you this in just a second. But so far what I’ve shared is, I’ve identified where I want to get to as a leader, and the gap that I’ve got to cover, started to identify the things that I need to build a bridge to start to grow in these skills. And then I work on three at a time.

Now, you can work on two, you can work on one, you could work on five. I don’t really care. Me, I have the capacity for three. You may be thinking, man, three? I could work on six of them. Well, you’re better than me. And okay, I applaud you for that. That’s amazing. I’m a three person capacity, I guess. That’s what I can do.

But then the key to it for me is the daily review. You have to continuously be evaluating yourself. Now, again, like I said, one of the ways that I do this is asking a coach to help with something like this. If this is something, let’s say you’re listening to this and you’re like, man, I don’t even kind of know where to begin with that. This is exactly why I offer complimentary coaching calls for people. Twenty five minute calls. It’s a call we’re going to get on. We’re going to identify your biggest leadership hurdle right now, a challenge, and create a plan for you to move past that, to go forward with it. So if that’d be something that you would be interested in as a podcast listener, I’d love to give you a complimentary call. Just go to ericdingler.com/call. Why be stuck? Why try to figure it out on your own? Why continue on the treadmill? Why be wrestling with this anymore? All right. You don’t have to do it alone. I’d love the opportunity. I mean, I’d be totally honored and humbled to have the opportunity to speak with you. Ericdingler.com/call.

All right, so what’s the final part of this for me? I’m working on three things at a time. I do my daily review. And then the last one is, from time to time, I ask my team. I believe in feedback loops. I think these are important. And so, here are just two of the questions I ask my team. From time to time, depending on what I’ve been working on, I might ask one of my team in their one on ones, hey, what have you noticed about me that has been different this year in the way that I work? And I just ask that, and I’m wanting to see, is there a noticeable change? Is there something that they’ve picked up on?

Now, again, this doesn’t work for everything. Most people aren’t going to go, well, you know, I’ve noticed that you used to say no worries, but you don’t say that anymore. So this doesn’t work for everything. But for a season I was trying to change. My knee jerk reaction was always, when somebody brought me a problem, I would say, no such thing as problems, only solutions. And they would share the problem, and I would immediately go, oh, here’s what we should do. And I just solved problems. I love solving problems. You know what? My wife ain’t a big fan of that when I respond that way.

And I’ve also learned that it’s not the most effective way for my team. I’m not helping my team develop when I do that. I’m showing off. I’m being the hero. I feel good, but I’m creating myself as a bottleneck. I’m making myself irreplaceable, and that’s just dumb, because I keep getting pulled back into areas I don’t need to be pulled into.

So I wanted to develop the habit of, when a team member would bring me a problem, I still wanted to be encouraging. Hey, no worries, no such thing as problems, only solutions. What do you think we should do? Give me three options. And so I met with my team. We talked about it, we talked about considering the third option in an all staff meeting. And then I talked to my team one on one. I told them, hey, here’s what I’m going to be doing. And then I had to really work on this. And it was hard. It was really hard for me. But this is the kind of thing where eventually I can say, you know, what have you noticed about me that’s been different this year, the way I worked?

And not too long ago, not too long after accomplishing, developing this new habit of what do you think we should do, or give me three options first, I want to hear your three options first, and then coaching them. After that, not too long after I felt like I really accomplished this, I asked one of my team. I was like, what have you noticed different about me? And he said, well, I don’t know if it’s about you, but I feel like I’ve gained a lot of confidence. And I don’t have to come to you as often with problems. And that was great. That was because I had been developing. I started, instead of solving problems, I started training him how to solve problems.

Another question I might ask is, what’s one way you think I could lead better? I mean, you might as well just ask the question, right? A lot of people think that, oh, that might bring up the fact that I’m not a great leader. Well, you know what? You probably aren’t. Okay, I’m sure you’re a good, I’m teasing. I’m sure you’re a good leader. I’m sure you’re a fine leader. You’re a great leader. But we can all be better. We can all be better.

And for some of us, we don’t want to ask the people we lead. Well, that’s because you’re trying to be a manager and not a leader. Being humble to your team and showing your team, hey, listen, I don’t think I’ve reached perfection, I constantly want to be improving, what do you think I could be doing to work better? This helps them be open to your feedback more. It helps them realize that you aren’t arrogant, that you understand. When you talk to them about areas they can grow in, you’ve modeled for them humility. Plus, these are the people you want to grow.

Because here’s the thing you’ve got to ask yourself as a leader. Are you the leader that the people you want to lead want to follow? Because, let’s say you’re sitting there and you’re like, one day I want to have a business. I hear people telling me this. I’ll be talking to someone, and I’ll be able to honestly, you know, brag a little bit about our lifestyle, I guess is bragging. We’ve done some amazing things, and people start asking questions about our lifestyle and all the traveling we’ve done and the places we’ve been. And I’ll oftentimes bring up the fact that one of our favorite trips was into the Amazon jungle for ten days, totally off grid. And people will say, oh, I wish, I want to get to the point where I could do something like that, where my team can run the business.

Well, that’s great. I think that’s fantastic. That’s a good goal. Now, the world is full of employees. But it’s not full of people that can run your business when you’re gone, the people that you can really trust for that. These are pretty high caliber people, and that’s who you want. But high caliber people don’t work for low caliber leaders. So if you want to attract really quality, top notch people, well, you’ve got to ask yourself, what kind of leader do they want to work for? Will they work for somebody that micromanages? Will they work for somebody that’s sloppy when they’re delegating things? Will they want to work for somebody that just keeps giving them tasks but not ownership? No, people don’t want that. They want to be trusted. They want to be honored. They want to be respected. They want to be challenged to grow. They want to be encouraged to grow. They want to grow. They want to get better, and they want to work for somebody that has the same mindset.

So one way to figure out what you need to work on as a leader is to just ask yourself, am I the leader that the people I want to lead want to follow? If the answer is no, well, now you know you’ve got some work to do.

Now, how do you do that? Well, here again, my personal leadership development plan. I work on three things at a time. I review them daily for about ten, fifteen minutes. Where have I had an opportunity to practice this? What worked? What didn’t? Where did I miss it? Where could I have done this that I didn’t? I honestly give myself a harsh evaluation over the last twenty four hours, or since the last time I did my daily review. Over the weekend, if it’s on Monday, something like that. And then what’s coming up, what’s coming up where I can practice this. And I look at that.

So I’ve got my daily review, and then feedback loop. I ask my team, I ask the people I lead for it, and I have a coach. I have a coach. You should have a coach. Coaches are great. And I’d love to give you, if you’ve never worked with a coach, if you’ve never talked to a coach, give it a try. Ericdingler.com/call, and schedule a complimentary twenty five minute coaching call.

And if you’re like, well, what can be done in twenty five minutes? A lot. And again, as a leader, you need to learn how to accomplish a lot in twenty five minutes, because when you start leading your team, you can’t spend hours every week in one on ones with each person on your team. All right. The key is, and you’ll learn in this call, the key is we very quickly identify the one thing. That’s the next thing. There’s going to be fifty things you want to work on. But there’s a sequence to working on them. There’s one thing that if you worked on this, other things would be getting better. We’re going to quickly identify that, and then figure out what resources you already have and what blocks are in the way, and help you come up with a strategy. We can do that really quickly.

Well, my friend, I’d love for you to let me know how I’m doing here. I want to hear from you. I want to open up a feedback loop, and I want you to do it publicly. I want you to leave me a review, a comment on Spotify. If you don’t like it, if you think this is terrible, let me know. If you think there’s something I could do better, let me know in the comments. It’s okay if you like it. If you got something out of this, please share. You are my marketing strategy for the podcast. We want to have more ears listening to this. We want to be in more AirPods, headphones, speakers. But we’ve got to feed the algorithm. And the way that that happens is reviews, subscribers, and comments. So wherever you are listening to this, please do those. I would be forever grateful.

Well, until next time, I’m going to encourage you to pick one of these things we talked about. Take action on it, to help you lead better to live better.