How many times have you thought about the steep un-learning curve you will have to navigate to take on more responsibility or authority? Read that question one more time if it didn’t catch you off-guard.
Most succession planning, coaching, and development I have seen focuses on the learning curve: new knowledge, skills, and abilities you need to succeed when it comes to what’s next for you. That is important, but it’s only part of the equation.
Consider all the old knowledge, skills, and abilities you will no longer need. These attributes have served you well, but they can turn into obstacles along your leadership journey. You have likely witnessed new supervisors who lean into being excellent individual contributors instead of working through others. Or second-line supervisors who are so busy working in the agency that they leave themselves with no time to work on the agency.
Welcome to the hidden half of leadership development — unlearning habits that no longer serve you in leading effectively.
The hidden half of growing as a leader is disrupting old patterns to make way for new ones. Much of the time, we ignore this half in pursuit of learning everything new we need to master, but the old habits keep coming back, particularly during times of stress and change.
I invite you to invest in this half of your development by acknowledging these well-worn behaviors for their service to your career and retiring them, at least until you need them again. Here are a few practical ways you can get to work on that:
Identify cues and triggers — familiar ways of functioning give us a default mode when we are under stress, but if you can identify your stress triggers, you can see them coming.
Practice pattern disrupters — change your environment, leave the situation and return to it later, create new routines and novelty; there are lots of ways to prevent familiar scripts from taking their predictable course.
Replace the habit; don’t just stop it — leaders often assume that old and unnecessary behaviors will simply fall away as new ones are learned, but this is not the case; work with a coach to identify unconstructive habits and to intentionally replace them with constructive alternatives.
Ask others to hold you accountable — trusted peers, supervisors, and mentors can see you falling into less adaptive patterns and bring them to your attention; be sure to create an environment where they feel welcome and empowered to tell you what they see.
Be compassionate with yourself — remember that these habits helped you get to where you are and they served you well at one point; honor their contribution to your success and your ability to learn and apply them effectively.
Decluttering our physical spaces is often just as rewarding, if not more rewarding, than filling them up with new things. Our professional and leadership identity spaces beckon to be reorganized.
What will you un-learn next?
Ernest currently serves as a Personnel Research Psychologist within the Chief Human Capital Office of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He earned his Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Akron in 2016. Over the last 20 years, he has worked in for-profit, non-profit, and government settings while holding a variety of individual contributor and leadership roles. His areas of expertise and experience include assessment for hire and development, leadership development, employee engagement, performance management, and organizational change and transformation.
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