How To Build Better Leaders Using 4 Simple Practices

Lots of people are reluctant to step into a leadership role because they think they don’t have the necessary attributes. They imagine a great leader as someone who is extroverted, or charismatic, or an expert in their field. However, research shows great leaders don’t share any particular set of personal attributes. This fact may be counterintuitive, but it’s true. Some great leaders are introverted, or socially awkward, or even lack specific expertise. They don’t have all the answers. So what makes them great?

The research indicates great leaders follow practices that accomplish two things:

1. Give their teams clear goals
    
2. Build a team culture where individual efforts are amplified and people can overcome obstacles together

This is good news if you want to train leaders. You can start with ordinary people who are willing to learn, teach them best practices, and enjoy the success that follows. If that sounds too simple, I should clarify that it’s not easy. The practices are simple, but they require patience, perseverance, and thoughtful work. Want to know what that work looks like? Read on!

The Progress Cycle

Effective leadership practices can be summarized in a four step process we at Niche Academy call the Progress Cycle. The steps are:

1. Set Goals
2. Identify Barriers
3. Change Behavior
4. Evaluate Results

Set Goals

Effective leadership always begins with setting clear goals. This step helps each team member understand what they’re working towards. They can act independently instead of requiring constant direction—understanding their big-picture direction and the near-term measurable targets that indicate progress.

Identify Barriers

When leaders are clear about what they want to do, it becomes easier to identify obstacles they need to overcome. Thoughtful analysis usually shows one primary bottleneck. This is the thing that needs to be attacked first. 

Change Behavior

Leaders usually don’t know exactly what will overcome the bottleneck, but they can make educated guesses and begin to experiment with new tactics and strategies. The smartest first experiments are going to be quick and inexpensive.

Evaluate Results

Experiments should provide measurable results that let teams know whether they are on the right track. This requirement is key, because reality is usually more complex and nuanced than expected. The sooner teams can find the flaws in their solution, the faster they can move forward.

A Case Study: Effective Leadership Through The Progress Cycle

Here’s a real world example of The Progress Cycle in action: 

TinySpeck was a software company with a talented team. They had big goals for the development of a multi-player online game they called Glitch. Their primary barrier was identifying a target market where they could attract a critical mass of players. After multiple experiments with different approaches, it became clear that they were not on the right track to reach their goals and the Glitch project could not justify the funding necessary to move forward. 

While TinySpeck was building Glitch, however, they created an internal tool that streamlined internal communication, document sharing, and project updates. It was a messaging tool with rooms and channels as well as one-on-one messaging. They loved it so much internally, that they believed it might have broader business applications. They set new goals to market a workplace communication app they called Slack. This was a relatively inexpensive experiment, because they already had a product that worked based on years of internal use.

The bottleneck in this new space was attracting users who were used to email communication. They began experimenting with a freemium marketing model and targeted their marketing efforts to tech companies and startups. Adoption was slow at first, but they kept experimenting and iterating their goals based on results. Eventually, they broke through. Slack is now a primary communication tool used by organizations all around the world.

Key Concepts

Let’s review key concepts from The Progress Cycle:

• Leaders usually don’t know up front how to overcome obstacles. They have to experiment.
  
  
• Every behavior change is an experiment.
  
  
• Leaders have to be honest and objective about results. They need metrics.
  
  
• The more efficiently teams can cycle through experiments, the shorter their path to success will be.

Why Culture Matters

This brings us to one final reality check: most teams have to experiment for a long time before they break through their barriers. After breaking through one barrier, other barriers emerge and the process repeats. Only a healthy team culture can sustain experiments over the long term. 

The habits of healthy teams are well documented in research, but surprisingly rare in practice. Many leaders have trouble applying best practices consistently. Here’s where consistency is needed most for long-term success—leaders need to learn how to:

• Set goals that include big-picture compass points and near-term measurable objectives.
  
  
• Create a speak-up culture and feedback loops where front-line information, good or bad, is never hidden from leadership.
  
  
• Encourage healthy debate and resolve unhealthy conflicts.
  
  
• Guide effective conversations that provide a foundation for trust-based relationships. Trust includes helping team members experience belonging and recognition.
  
  
• Set clear expectations and hold themselves and their teams accountable.

Niche Academy’s Leadership Development Program

Niche Academy’s Leadership Development program reflects the best available leadership research and lived experience—our customers’ and our own efforts to create a successful SaaS company over the last 10 years. We chose to create a cohort-based experience because we’ve learned so much from peers along the way. And we optimized for a 12 week program based on our customers’ need to balance in-depth instruction with competing time constraints. The primary instruction is self-paced and online to accommodate diverse work schedules. We’ve benefited from working with many great coaches over the years. So the program also includes multiple levels of coaching, including group sessions, mastermind sessions, team-specific coaching, one-on-one feedback, and accountability partners.

The first 5 weeks focus on goal-setting including training on:

• Setting Priorities
  
  
• Understanding Goal Frameworks
  
  
• Getting alignment between personal goals and team goals
  
  
• Balancing aspirational goals and achievable goals
  
  
• Setting both qualitative and quantitative goals

By the end of this section, leaders will understand and actually work on defining their big picture directional goals as well as how to measure near-term progress.

The next seven weeks focus on team culture including training on:

• Encouraging a Speak-up Culture
  
  
• Resolving Conflicts
  
  
• Creating Performance Improvement Plans
  
  
• Building Employee Career Paths
  
  
• Guiding Effective Conversations
  
  
• Creating Feedback Loops
  
  
• Establishing Explicit Expectations

The essence of the program is to practice and apply concepts with help from highly qualified coaches. After the 12 weeks end, leaders retain reference and review access to the program material for a full year. If you’d like to learn more, schedule a consultation for your team.