What Does Lasting Leadership Change Look Like Over Time?
Photo credit: Jan Bullish via Unsplash
The old pattern may still be there. Your response doesn’t have to be the same.
Lasting leadership change usually looks like a leader who still feels the old pull under pressure and has practiced a new response long enough to choose it, again and again, over months and years.
Leadership development doesn’t necessarily make our knee-jerk reactions or automatic behaviors disappear. Insight helps us recognize them, while practicing new ways of doing things can gradually make different responses more familiar and easier to access. In a widely cited review, psychologist Mark Bouton found that when a learned response fades, the original learning remains, and new learning grows up alongside it, which helps explain why old reactions can return when circumstances shift.
Over time, something begins to shift, and although the same situations still arise and bring up the same frustration or fear, those feelings no longer have to determine what we do next.
Carol Zizzo, CEO and executive coach at Henley Leadership Group in Seattle, watched this kind of change unfold over many years while working with a leader who came to coaching intensely focused on results and struggled to understand a team that seemed to care so deeply about relationships. What began during a difficult four-day retreat grew into a deep coaching relationship and, ultimately, a more satisfying and successful way of leading.
From Results to Relationship
She was about 28 years old, uber-bright, ambitious, strategic, driven, and brand-new to leadership. She had inherited a team from a beloved leader who had been let go unexpectedly and without explanation, and this was the first offsite with her new team since she arrived several months earlier.
She couldn't have been more different from her predecessor or from the new work culture that she had stepped into. Her new team members were unhappy, didn't like her or get her at all, and were quite vocal about it during our four days together. She braced herself for their feedback, occasionally defended herself professionally, and was completely baffled by their over-indexing on relationships rather than results.
Her region's goals were way behind; the results were down, and she had been mandated to get this team into shape and produce something. In between retreat sessions and over the course of those four days, we had coaching moments, both one-on-one and on the court with the whole team. Around day three, she began moving towards the relationship as the access to trust, and set aside her belief that credibility and trust could only be accessed through results.
That retreat was the beginning of a profound coaching relationship that was to last many years, through several awards for living the values of her company, and to being an exemplary leader. She took her development and need to transform on, like she did everything else, with determination, dedication, and drive.
The shift that came was opening her heart and letting people know her. Over the years, the same frustrations with people not producing would arise, but rather than reprimand or direct, she would mentor and provide very explicit plans for empowerment. She was eventually recruited away by another healthcare company for a higher-level leadership role and today is the CEO of a national healthcare organization.
The change stuck because she did the coaching homework, kept her heart and mind open, and trusted our relationship and the process. She learned the importance of letting people in on what mattered most to her, being open about her challenges, her dreams, and her vision.
— Carol Zizzo
When the Frustration Remains, but the Leadership Changes
Carol’s story gives us another way to think about what lasting leadership change might actually look like. The young leader Carol coached held on to her ambition, and even to her impatience when people weren't producing, since those qualities were part of what had made her successful. What grew was her understanding of how people produce their best work and what she chose to do when those old frustrations arose.
The years Carol spent coaching this leader also remind us that lasting change rarely happens all at once, and that change arriving too quickly may even be met with suspicion. In research published in the Academy of Management Journal, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Francis Flynn and his colleagues examined how people perceive leaders who change their behavior in response to feedback. Flynn first noticed the question while coaching executives who worried that changing overnight might make them seem 'a little bit phony.' Across three studies involving more than 3,000 participants, people saw gradual improvement as more authentic than rapid improvement, especially when the change was a difficult one, because they believe that true change takes time.
Over time, this leader learned that relationships and results could strengthen each other. Building deeper relationships helped her earn trust, and trust made a different kind of leadership possible, one where she could mentor and empower people when they weren't producing while letting them know more about what mattered to her.
This may be one of the clearest ways to recognize lasting leadership growth. The same frustrations and pressures still arise and we still feel them, and yet, with awareness and practice, other choices become increasingly available to us in those moments.
The old way of being may still be there, but it is no longer the only way we know how to lead.
An Inquiry for Leaders
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Author Stephen Covey often used this quote, which he believed captured a central idea in the work of psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl: that we have the capacity to choose how we respond.
As you think about your own leadership:
What do you notice about yourself when you are stressed, short on time, uncertain, or dealing with conflict at work or at home?
When you are frustrated with someone who isn’t producing or meeting your expectations, how do you tend to respond?
What role do relationships play in how you get results?
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Lasting leadership change doesn’t necessarily mean old habits or reactions disappear. It can mean becoming better at recognizing those patterns and choosing how to respond. The good news is that, with awareness and practice, new behaviors can become more familiar and easier to access over time.
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Practice gives leaders opportunities to try different responses and learn from what happens. Insight can help us recognize what is happening, while repeated practice can make other ways of responding increasingly available, including during periods of pressure or uncertainty. Practice is integral to change.
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Some of our tendencies may, and probably will, stick with us for a lifetime. But that doesn’t mean we have to respond in the same old ways. A leader may still get frustrated or impatient without letting those feelings dictate what happens next. This is one of the reasons we find the Enneagram so useful for better understanding ourselves and how we operate.
Ready to Take a Closer Look at How You Lead?
Lasting change begins with seeing more clearly how we respond, especially when we're under pressure. At Henley Leadership Group, we help leaders build that awareness and practice new ways of leading over time, through one-on-one executive coaching and our leadership development programs.
If you're wondering what this could look like for you or your team, we'd welcome a 30-minute conversation.