How a three minutes morning ritual made me a better leader

How do you get better at something?
How do you reach mastery ?

Study and practice. Lots of it.
That’s the rule, and it’s a fine rule. You should follow it.

Do that, and one day the right mix of judgement, intuition and habits becomes second nature. Your left and right brain are both engaged and you naturally pull off those inspired acts of executive leadership, directorship, coaching, mentoring and more that so much you read about in books and admired others doing. Success.

Well, except that all that did not quite work for me, or at least all that was not enough. This post is about what I did next about it.

When study and practice are not enough

I lead engineering teams. It’s more than just work of course.

Shortly after I started doing it (about ten years ago) I realized two significant truths. The first was that I loved the job and I wanted to be really good at it. The second was that I sucked at it.

So I did like advised. I read and studied a lot, worked with mentors, looked up to role models, scrutinized my own failures and extract whatever lesson I could.

Did it help ? Of course it helped.
Was it indispensable? Absolutely.
Was it enough ? Nope.

Nothing here matters if you don’t lay your foundations. Read and learn as much as you can. If you want to follow and peek at my reads you can follow me on Goodreads.

What’s the deal

Plain and simple, sometimes developing new habits is hard. Very hard. Our conscious self knows the theory, the practical implication, why it’s important. All of that.

And yet, end of day Friday comes and we admit to ourselves: this week we were awesome at planning, delegation and stakeholder management again, all the while we were meh at giving feedback, listening actively and keeping our focus, again. Or anything like that.
So frustrating!

To be fair, we got our heads up all the way back in the 90s.

But why is it that the case ?

In my experience, for the many of us who have not yet trained our instinct to follow the path on sight, the answer is as simple as it’s unexciting: we forget.

We don’t forget at a deeper level (we surely remember it when we re-asses ourselves a few days later), but in the moment we loose sight of what we know to be necessary and due. Faced daily with the challenge of observing and reacting to an unfolding, often unplanned, sometimes unexpected reality in real time, our good-habits-lacking instinct takes over, not balanced by active left-brain rationality and resolve, able to steer us to choose what’s right instead of what feels right.

And we fall to the dark side, again.

A three minutes ritual to the rescue

Pretty bad uh. How do we get out of it ?

Well, I came up with my own little tool, a personal leadership morning ritual of sorts, which over time has worked pretty well for me.

I recommend you to give it a try. It works in 3 steps:

1. List down the behaviors you want to have. Keep short and tight. Keep specific. This list is always personal and yours, contextual to what you do. Can’t be universal (if you are curious, I share my own just below). Moreover, it needs to stress on behaviors you know you are more prone to fail with and the ones you absolutely and positively don’t want to compromise.
2. Pin the list somewhere visible. Chose a spot (physical or virtual) that you will hardly be able to ignore or skip at the beginning of each day.
3. Take about three minutes every morning to go trough the list. With attention. You can drink your cup while you do it, but give it your full focus. Some days it will feel totally redundant. You still do it.

Here it is. You do this consistently, every day for 3 months and it’s likely you will recognize yourself more and more capable not only of recognizing the path, but to take it as well.

I recommend a little physical board. Not bad to stretch yourself in front of it in the morning with your coffee. This is mine.

My morning leadership ritual

Well, we got so far, why not sharing right ?

This is my current leadership morning ritual. Enjoy!

I hope you found this post interesting. Feel free to connect to me (links above) for any feedback, questions or suggestion. Take care.

1. Connect on a personal and emotional level.
2. Act with respect and compassion.
3. Seek for ways to help others.
4. Tell the truth and don’t cover up.
5. Keep open to the opposite and conflicting.
6. Pay full attention and don’t get distracted.
7. Keep positive and convey optimism.
8. Don’t act impatient or frustrated.
9. Plan the day and make room for what is important.
10. Regularly (re)-align on strategic objectives.
11. Act as the the ultimate owner.
12. Delegate to the lowest competent level.
13. Be rigorous, not rigid.
14. Give feedback often.
15. Appreciate and praise others.
16. Keep my people informed.
17. Stick to what I planned to learn.
18. Admit and post-mortem failures.
19. Act with confidence.
20. Know what to say before start speaking.
21. Speak loud and crisp.
22. Keep eye contact.