6 Habits Great Leaders Avoid, Part 1

Hey, as we launch into a new year, let's talk about your leadership habits.

Because we know, when it comes to leadership, the potential of your leadership is a reflection of the quality of your habits.

So, to maximize your leadership impact, you don't want to just develop the right habits, you also need to eliminate the wrong habits.

So, in this episode, we're talking about the six habits great leaders avoid.

When it comes to your leadership habits,

remember, the potential of your leadership is a reflection of the quality of your habits.

In other words, if you want to have a bigger impact, develop better habits.

I've taught extensively on habits, one of my favorite subjects, in fact, we have five different episodes on habits, uh, they're on starting the right habits.

Uh, we will link to all of those in the leader guide, but we're going to take a different approach to it today.

To succeed in your leadership, you don't want to just develop the right habits,

but you need to eliminate the wrong ones.

Super important, you don't just bring in what works, but you have to eliminate what doesn't work.

And most people know this and apply this principle like in ordinary life all the time, right?

Like, we know we need to stop eating unhealthy snacks.

Or we know that we need to stop criticizing our spouse.

Don't do that.

Most people know we need to stop bad habits in their personal lives, but many leaders don't know or think about that they need to stop the wrong leadership habits

to have a better leadership impact.

They may not realize, I need to stop misprioritizing my time.

Or I, I always react instead of initiate, so I need to stop reacting and start initiating.

Why does this matter?

Because your habits will shape your results for better or for worse.

If you want to change your leadership, change your habits.

So, today, we're going to start part one of a two-part little mini-series.

And we're talking about six habits great leaders avoid.

Chances are you have one or more of these and we're going to work hard to get rid of them.

We're going to talk about three today and then the first Thursday of next month,

we'll talk about the next three.

Let's name the first three that I'll tease you what's coming up in the future.

Number one, we're talking about today.

The habit of doing too much.

Avoid it, stay away from it.

Most leaders fall victim to it.

Number two, we're going to avoid the habit of avoiding conflict.

Number three, today we're going to talk about the habit of doing what you've always done.

Then, a little tease, we have a bonus episode coming this month with the one,

the only, Simon Sinek, I promise you're going to want to hear that.

It drops in two weeks.

Then the first Thursday of next month, we're going to talk about three more habits

the best leaders avoid.

They avoid the habit of micromanaging, the habit of hiding,

and the habit of hesitation.

Let's talk about the first three.

The good news is, if you do have bad leadership habits, breaking free from these habits is not just possible,

but it's game-changing.

What we're going to do is we're going to try to stop whatever is holding you back

and then we're going to create the right habits to propel you forward.

So, let's start with the first bad habit we're going to avoid.

Number one, we are going to righteously, passionately

avoid number one, the habit of doing too much.

Why?

This is one of the most common bad habits that limit leaders all over the world

with a very good heart and good intentions, leaders, um, end up doing too much.

And where does this come from?

It comes from a very good and positive drive because

as a leader, what I know about you is you are results-driven.

But if you do too much, doing too much will be crippling to your leadership.

I always say it this way.

Doing too much doesn't just steal your energy, it suffocates your productivity.

Let me say it again, doing too much, it doesn't just

rob you of energy, but it suffocates your productivity.

We don't just want to be busy, but we want to be effective.

And what I'm going to tell you sounds counterintuitive, but I promise you it is true in your leadership.

And it's this, take it to the bank.

You don't grow by doing more, you grow by doing more of what matters most.

Think about it.

Let it sink in.

Um, most leaders just want to do more, more, more, busier, busier, busier.

Take on more, conquer more.

And you do not grow more in your impact, in your influence, in your production by just simply doing more.

But you have to really focus on doing more of what matters most.

Uh, there's a good book on productivity.

In fact, we'll give some copies away, I'll tell you how to get them at the end of the episode.

But it's, um, an older book, but a very helpful book called Getting Things Done

by David Allen, if you want to work and growing in your productivity.

That's a book that I recommend.

Uh, but what do you do when you know you're doing too much?

Some of you, this is a really bad habit.

And I'm going to give you four things to do, super important.

You're doing too much, you're worn out, you're almost burned out.

You're kind of sporadic, you're trying to keep all the plates spinning.

What are you going to do?

Four things, you're going to evaluate, eliminate, delegate, and automate.

You're going to evaluate, eliminate, delegate, and automate.

Let's talk about them.

The first thing you're going to do is you're going to look at everything you do.

You're going to evaluate every task, every meeting,

every activity, and then I'm going to encourage you to put all that you do

into one of four tiers.

Uh, there is an episode I want you to listen to if you haven't heard it.

It's episode 79, I call it the four tiers of efficiency.

But you're going to look at every meeting you attend, every task that you do, every kind of decisions that you make, every activity,

every kind of conversation.

You're going to put them into one of four tiers of productivity.

And let me just give you the tiers really, really quickly.

Tier one is what's absolutely mission critical.

There are very, very few things that are tier one in your leadership.

And you need to know exactly what they are.

Tier two is what I call very important and strategic.

It's not mission critical, but it's still pretty important and it is strategic.

Tier three is meaningful but not vital.

And every leader has tons of stuff that is meaningful, you enjoy, it kind of moves the needle a little bit, but it is not vital.

And it can rob you from tier one production.

Tier four is externally initiated and a lower priority.

Let me repeat them, tier one is mission critical.

Tier two is important, um, and strategic.

Tier three is meaningful but not vital.

Tier four is externally initiated, in other words, someone else is saying, hey,

could you do this for me, could you come here, could you run this meeting?

Whatever it is, it's externally initiated and it's a lower priority.

What you're going to do is you're going to evaluate and then eliminate

as many tasks as possible from the lower tiers.

Uh, you don't change the world living in tier three or tier four.

And so you're going to eliminate as many different things you can that are in the lower tiers.

Why, because growing impact starts with subtraction, not addition.

You're not trying to do more, you want to do more of what matters.

And the only way you can do more of what matters is if you do less of what doesn't matter.

And forgive me if that sounds insultingly, uh, simple.

It is simple, but it's so powerful.

Most leaders, and I promise you, you're probably like this, we all are, the most driven leaders end up doing too much.

So, how do you eliminate?

Well, I would say the best way to eliminate is to change the question that you ask yourself.

Uh, an opportunity pops up, something new to do.

Uh, can you speak here, can you start this product, can you, uh, add more

one more thing to your daily list.

Uh, what you're going to typically ask is, can I do this?

Can I accomplish it?

Can I get it done?

Don't ask, can I do this, instead, ask, should I do this?

Game changer.

Over and over and over again.

Someone presents an idea, an opportunity to you.

You're not going to say, um, do I have room on my calendar?

Can I do this?

That's, that is not the best question.

The best question is, should I do this?

And here's a little secret.

If you hesitate, like, hmm, let me think about it, let me, let me look at it.

If you hesitate at all, you should probably say no.

Remember, just because you could do something doesn't mean you should.

You're going to evaluate, you're going to eliminate, you're going to delegate.

You're going to hand stuff off to other trusted leaders.

If you don't delegate, I promise you this is true, your unwillingness to delegate will inevitably become the bottleneck that strangles your team's potential.

If you don't delegate, you get in the way.

Too many leaders have the bad habit of doing too much.

What are you going to do?

You're going to evaluate, eliminate, delegate, and automate.

You're going to look at anything that you can streamline or automate.

Um, we do it over and over and over again in so many different areas here.

Uh, for example, uh, as a pastor of a church, uh, with a podcast,

you might ask, do I read all the emails that come in and do I reply to all of them?

And the answer is like, I used to.

In the early years, a long, long time ago, every single email that came into the church, I read and responded to.

Um, same with the podcast in the early years.

But I do not do that now, instead, I have a team of people that care a lot about you.

And they have a system of how to reply to different subjects and questions and needs.

So,

there are literally dozens of categories with starting points of an automated reply

that has a personal touch.

Why?

Because we care and we want to be efficient and we want to make sure every email that's appropriate gets a response.

Uh, there's another area that a lot of leaders don't realize they can automate and that's decision-making.

Uh, there are a lot of things that are going to come to you that if you put a thoughtful process in place, you can actually automate decision-making.

For example, uh, my office might receive quite a few invitations for me to speak in a given month.

And it could take a lot of time for me to read every one of them, look at where it is, who it is, what it's for, and such.

But what we've done is determined certain thresholds of impact.

If an invitation doesn't hit the target, then we have an automatic no.

I don't even see it.

Uh, you need to be fierce about protecting your time.

Do not let your schedule happen to you.

You plan and protect your time fiercely.

How do you do it?

You're not going to do too much.

You're going to evaluate, eliminate, delegate, and automate.

Why, because to be great at what you do,

you don't let others determine where you spend your time.

In fact, you don't just spend your time, you invest it.

You don't change the world in lower tiers.

You're not living in tier three or tier four.

You're not trying to do more.

You're trying to do more of what matters most.

The best leaders never just do more, they do more of what matters most.

Great leaders, they avoid number one,

the habit of doing too much.

If you're doing too much, this is the best time of the year to change it.

You're going to be very, very intentional about what you do.

The second bad habit that you want to overcome, number two,

is the habit of avoiding conflict.

We know so many leaders,

uh, we avoid conflict.

And we have to understand that conflict is absolutely and completely inevitable in leadership.

And yet, many of us, and I've done this too, we fall into the bad habit of avoiding conflict.

Uh, it might be because we're afraid of it, we don't want to hurt people's feelings.

Uh, we're not comfortable with tension, we desire that everybody's happy.

And we have to remember that avoiding conflict may feel easy in the moment,

but it's always more difficult in the long run.

Why?

Because unresolved problems rarely fix themselves.

If you've got conflict with someone or your team's fighting and you just hope it gets better,

unresolved problems rarely fix themselves.

Why?

If if problems were easy to solve without leaders, then leaders wouldn't be necessary.

So,

how do we learn to handle conflict well as a leader?

Uh, this is way, way, way too important and too complex of a subject for me to

um, handle in a five-minute teaching.

So, I will recommend a good resource, one of the best books I've read on the subject

is called Crucial Conversations.

Uh, we will link to that book in the leader guide as well.

Uh, that's a great book to help you learn how to have really more difficult conversations.

But I am going to give you a real short teaching just to kind of give you a few ideas to get you started.

Um, how do you become better at conflict?

Well, number one, change your mindset about conflict.

Uh, most people try to avoid it.

But you might want to think of conflict like, um, in a marriage.

If you are married, you've probably figured out by now that conflict is inevitable in a marriage.

And the reality is that all couples are going to fight, right?

But the best couples, healthy couples, they fight clean, they fight fair.

Um, the unhealthy couples, they fight dirty.

And so it's not like if you're going to have conflict, but it's how you're going to have conflict in your leadership.

Um, you you want to change your mindset.

Conflict doesn't mean that a relationship is coming to an end.

It's actually often a chance to strengthen the relationship.

In fact, the people that I'm closest to and trust the most are the people that we've worked through the most.

And so I would tell you, don't be afraid of conflict.

Be afraid of unresolved conflict.

Uh, second thing you want to do is you want to see problems early and solve them quickly.

If you have a bad interaction, if someone hurts you, if you might hurt someone, someone offends you,

I would suggest like immediately go to them and say, hey, you know, your relationship's important to me.

And I don't want to let something get between us.

So, I I just kind of want to ask you, what did you mean by that?

What you're doing is you're saying, this could actually be a problem.

And so I'm not going to ignore it.

I'm going to address it quickly.

Or maybe someone's disrespectful in a meeting.

And so you just go to them and say, hey, I want to check and see if you're going through something because, you know, what you said, that's not really like you.

Um, what you're going to do is you're going to see problems early and solve them quickly.

Don't sit on it and hope that, you know, a year from now things are going to get better.

Because unresolved conflict usually doesn't get better by itself.

It was John Maxwell who said this, he said, conflict is like cancer.

Early detection increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.

You want to see problems early and solve them quickly.

Then number three, you want to be willing to hash it out and walk out united.

Uh, you want to be realize that you can, you can get in a real fight and you can argue and and you can work through some things.

And you can come out, uh, much better and stronger and more united on the backside.

Because healthy conflict isn't about winning or losing, it's about growing and learning.

And I, um, one of the things that's most special to me is, uh, we are now 29 years old as a church organization.

And I have, uh, a group of four leaders, three others, uh, Jerry Hurley, Sam Robertson, Bobby Grunewald,

who have served with me for over 25 years, we've served together.

And what do we do?

We, we work through conflict together.

That's what we do.

I mean, our basically our full-time job is we solve problems together.

And there's always challenges and there's often tension, there's fast-moving parts and tons and tons of relationships.

And so anytime something small happens, we just say, hey, we're going to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

And we're not going to let a small offense become a big wedge.

One of the greatest things you can do to have a strong organization is keep tenured, trusted leaders together.

And in order to do that, you have to be able to handle conflict well.

As leaders,

we're going to avoid the bad habit of doing too much.

We're not going to avoid conflict.

And then the third thing we're going to talk about is this, um, we're going to avoid the habit of doing what you've always done.

This is a very common problem and a lot of leaders do the same thing over and over and over again.

Uh, this quote is attributed to Henry Ford, some people debate whether he said it or not.

But, um, I'll attribute it to Henry Ford.

He says, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

I like that.

That quote's powerful, but I would suggest is not always true.

And I'll give you a couple of exceptions.

Exception number one is this.

Sometimes, if you do what you've always done, you'll often get less than what you've always got.

If you do what you've always done, sometimes you don't get the same result.

Why?

Because the world changes.

And what works last year might not work this year.

Markets evolve and technology advances and team dynamics shift.

And so sometimes what used to work doesn't work as well as it used to.

And leaders, sometimes we're slow to notice, we don't tell the truth.

Or we even double down on an old idea and try to do a bad idea better.

I've said this before.

The greatest threat to future success is often past success.

Just because it worked in, uh, the past doesn't mean it's going to continue to bring the same result.

So we're going to be careful to watch for the law of diminishing returns.

What is that?

Sometimes what you did gets you less than it used to get you.

Ford's quote is also not true on the other end.

And I would say here's another exception, and that would be this.

If you do what you've always done, sometimes you'll get more than you've always got.

Sometimes you do the same thing you used to do and all of a sudden it seems to work better.

It's a little bit like investing money.

If you are, uh, consistent investing a little bit money over time, guess what happens?

Money starts to compound and so you put the same in little by little by little, but over time, boom, the results are exponential.

So, you might say, okay, Craig,

new year, I'm in, I don't want to have a bad habit.

So, should I do what I've always done or should I do something different?

And my answer is emphatically, it depends.

It really does depend.

The the main thought is this, you don't want to do what you've done accidentally.

Or you don't want to change what you've done without intention.

What you want to do is you want to be intentional, prayerful, thoughtful,

and you always want to be strategic.

And you want to remember these two thoughts.

Remember this, take it to the bank.

Being static about what you do is dangerous.

And being erratic about what you do is dangerous.

You want to be intentional.

There's some things you don't want to change, some things that you do want to change.

But what you want to do is you want to do it with intentionality.

I'll give you some questions that can be very helpful for you to determine, do we keep doing this?

And we'll put these in the leader guide as well.

Um, here's a few questions.

Ask yourself this.

Is this task, habit, or strategy still aligned with our current goals?

Really important question.

And tell the truth.

Number two.

Uh, are we committed to this strategy because it's effective or just because it's comfortable?

Number three.

Where are we seeing diminishing returns and what should we do about it?

Important question.

Number four.

If someone replaced me in my role, what's the first thing they'd change?

Think about it.

Do not listen to that little section on 1.5 speed, I forbid you to slow it down.

Ask those questions, be honest about your answer.

And be ready to change.

Because eventually, if you're not changing, you're not growing.

Now is the perfect time to change.

New year, eliminating the old bad habits, replacing them with the good habits.

And it's super, super important because you will never, ever change what you're willing to tolerate.

And you won't change what you won't confront.

So, whatever it is, wherever it is.

If you recognize, I actually do have a bad habit, a bad mindset.

I'm doing too much.

I'm too controlling.

I'm, I'm, uh, involved in things that don't really matter.

We're going to call it what it is, we're going to be honest.

And we're going to make some changes.

Now, let me wrap it up with this.

If you haven't rated or reviewed the content and you wouldn't mind doing that, it would mean the world to me.

If you share on social media, I want to tell you, thank you for inviting others to be a part of our community.

If you don't have the leader guide, go to life.church/leadershippodcast.

Get the guide.

Don't forget two weeks from now, we have a bonus episode with Simon Sinek.

Powerful, powerful, incredibly helpful.

Next month, we're going to talk about three more habits, bad habits that the best leaders avoid.

We're going to talk about the habit of micromanaging, the habit of hiding,

and the habit of hesitation.

Uh, if you'd like the possibility of winning a copy of the book Getting Things Done,

uh, I want to give away five copies.

Go to YouTube and, uh, type in the comment section, I want to get things done.

Just type in there, I want to get things done.

And then we'll do a drawing for five of those copies and, um, hopefully you'll be the one to win.

As we're starting a new year, let's just be, uh, real person to person, leader to leader.

Um, we all have bad leadership habits.

The people around us know it, we often don't.

And what I want you to do is just have the courage to look in the mirror

and be honest about what you see that's holding you back.

And I've talked all this time just kind of straight leadership.

I want to shift gears just for a moment.

And if you've listened for a while, you know that, um, I'm also a pastor.

And so as a pastor, I just want to say to you that if there's something that you want to change, you don't have to attempt to change it alone.

That I believe with all my heart that there is a God who loves you.

That he is for you.

And he's given you everything you need to do everything that he's calling you to do.

Whenever you're weak, wherever you're weak, um, his strength is made perfect in your weakness.

And so if you find yourself struggling, you don't have to do it alone.

Maybe as you launch into a new year, you might call on a power so much greater than anything that you have.

Um, we serve a God with whom all things are possible.

And his work in you is possible to change you to become exactly who he wants you to be as a leader.

And then as a person who impacts families and legacies in years to come.

I want you to know that I love you.

So thankful for you.

Thank thank you for trusting me with your time of each month.

I believe in you and I'm going to work really, really hard to bring content that adds value to your leadership.

And I'm going to help you get better.

And this year, you are going to get better.

And that's going to make a big difference because we know that everyone wins when the leader gets better.