20 Annoying Habits You Must Break To Be a Better Leader
Submitted by Lori Grant on May 27, 2009 – 11:03 amNo Comment
Picture it: you’ve achieved success in career and/or in life and you got there through your highly effective habits. However, is it possible that these habits could evolve or morph into something else? It’s possible.
After reading Marshall Goldsmith’s book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, I realized that some of my highly effective habits have turned into 20 annoying one, outliving their usefulness.
- Winning Too Much: the need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point. Winning is addictive; after being successful, sometimes, it’s easy to forget that losing can happen.
- Adding Too Much Value: the overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion. I try to hold my tongue, when I feel the urge to add value, but I’m not always successful.
- Passing Judgment: the need to rate others and impose our standards on them. “My standards are proven standards,” is what I’m thinking most of the time, when I listen to others. I try to restrain myself, realizing that people have their own approach and execution methods.
- Making Destructive Comments: the needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty. Only in my personal life. I’ve always had discipline to never do this.
- Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: the overuse of these qualifiers, which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.” I listen, validate what the other person is saying, the offer my perspective, if asked. I’ll only use “however,” when I’m gently trying to get a point across.
- Telling the World How Smart We Are: the need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are. This never crosses my mind. I would be too embarrassed to make any comments or statements to this effect.
- Speaking When Angry: using emotional volatility as a management tool. In business, I quietly take a breathe, making sure I don’t sigh, before I speak on an issue that makes me angry. Cooler heads always prevail, so I aspire to do this in business.
- Negativity: The need to share our negative thoughts, even when we weren’t asked. Again, in business, I’m a different person. I’ll acknowledge negative things, but I try not to feed into them or start the negativity. I used to when I was an unhappy or fearful knowledge worker; however, at the management level I tried to avoid this.
- Withholding Information: the refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
- Failing to Give Proper Recognition: the inability to praise and reward. Never happens to me. I always try to give recognition, when its due or as a management technique to build confidence in direct reports.
- Claiming Credit We Don’t Deserve: the most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success. Never crosses my mind.
- Making Excuses: the need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture, so people excuse us for it. I’m sure, I frame excuses as “reasons” as matters of fact.
- Clinging to the Past: the need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else. A challenging area for me, but I try to keep it to myself.
- Playing Favorites: failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly. An area that I think i was able to keep in check.
- Refusing to Express Regret: the inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others. I always take responsibility, sometimes too often.
- Not Listening: the most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues. If I’m not-listening, then I’m think a couple of steps ahead, which is still not a good habit. I have to remember to be mindful in the present.
- Failing to Express Gratitude: the most basic form of bad manners. No issue here.
- Punishing the Messenger: the misguided need to attack the innocent, who are usually only trying to protect us. No issue here.
- Passing the Buck: the need to blame everyone but ourselves. No issue here.
- An Excessive Need to Be “Me”: exalting our faults as virtues simply because they exemplify who we are. At times, I’m a little much of “me.”
Time to Sit. Think. Reflect.
After I read Goldsmith’s book, Ireflected on ”my habits,” identifying ways of minimize the practice these annoying ones. I also identified any habits that have surfaced in my personal life too, not just my work life. Self-awareness is the key to our career(s) and life. We’re never too young or too old to evolve and improve our effective habits for success. How many do you think you have?
