The 5 Disciplines of Leadership Excellence

Excellence is about doing ordinary things, extraordinarily well, consistently. It’s a simple concept that theoretically should be easy enough to put into practice. Too often, however, we let the chaos of the day-to-day stand in our way as enemies in our pursuit of excellence.

Those leaders who can rise above the urgency of the daily grind to focus on delivering excellence repeatedly and over the long run develop a degree of competency in the following five disciplines.

1. Reclaiming your attention.

In a world of constant bombardment, we’ve allowed anyone to interrupt us at any time, in whatever way they wish. The notion of having time to think, to contemplate, to ponder has long since bolted the gate.

Yet, those leaders who are effective in planning for the medium and long term and who focus on developing their people, start from giving themselves the headspace to do so. They wall off their attention and control it rather than allowing it to wander like a lost toddler in a busy mall.

As a simple first step, turn off your email and instant messaging notifications on your phone. Better yet? Delete the apps. Control when you are in communication mode and when you’re not.

2. Facilitating team flow.

It sometimes feels like your day is comprised of lobbing an ever increasing number (and speed) of tennis balls that have been fired at you back over the net. You do this over and over until you survive the day and then you come back in and do it all over again the next day.

Many leaders underutilize their team to help them navigate the number of new projects, priorities, and processes coming their way and keep too much on their plate.

Take a look down your to-do list and ask yourself honestly, “Is there someone on my team who can handle this item, even if they’ll need a bit of hand-holding and support?” When the answer is yes, invest the time in delegating that task out and giving your team the support they need. They’ll grow, and you’ll remove yourself as the bottleneck.

3. Supporting high performance.

Your job as a leader isn’t to know all the answers and make all the tough calls. Sure there are times when you need to do that, but they’re fewer than you think. Your job should be to help your team take ownership of their own challenges and to support them when they make a decision.

The next time someone in your team comes to you with a problem; rather than just blurting out the answer, take a pause and ask them, “What do you think?”

4. Having symbiotic conversations.

Most leaders struggle at having challenging conversations. The reason being that the same fight or flight response that we have when faced with a physically dangerous situation kicks in when we think about a confrontation with our team. And so we either go in too hard or too soft.

Challenging conversations can and should be symbiotic. All parties involved should be able to learn and grow from them. Next time you need to have one, take a deep breath and go in with the mindset that the conversation you’re about to have is truly in the best interest of everyone involved rather than an “I win, you lose” scenario.

5. Building shared accountability.

Individual rock star performers are exciting to watch but detrimental to team success in the long run. When you have one or two high achievers, the rest of the team tends to rely on them to deliver the goods.

Teams that deliver excellence consistently focus instead on shared accountability, on collectively getting closer to their common goals.

At your next team meeting have an open, honest discussion about what you’re trying to achieve as a team and have everyone walk away with a specific action item that they can deliver back to the team this month.