You’re aware of an area you want to improve but haven’t gained traction
You know what you want to get better at. Months later nothing has changed, and you are not certain why.
There is a behaviour, a habit or a skill you know you need to develop. You have thought about it, probably told somebody about it, and perhaps begun once. It keeps slipping off the agenda, and the gap between knowing and doing has been there long enough to be discouraging.
Presenting symptoms
- You have named the same development target in more than one review or conversation.
- You can describe what better would look like but not what the first step is.
- Any week that gets busy is a week in which nothing happens on it.
Possible causes
- The target may be described at a level that has no first action attached to it.
- There may be no protected occasion on which to practise, so it depends on spare capacity that never arrives.
- It may involve doing something uncomfortable in front of other people, so it is deferred rather than refused.
- You may have started before and let it fade, with nothing marking the point at which it stopped.
Nothing, because you are not sure what starting would look like.
Your most useful next step: Convert the target into one action small enough to take in twenty minutes this week, and take it. If you cannot reduce it that far, the target is still a description rather than a plan, and reducing it further is the work.
Lead behaviours
You mean to, and the week takes the time.
Your most useful next step: Attach the practice to something already in the calendar rather than looking for a gap: the fifteen minutes before a meeting you always attend, or the opening of a slot you already hold.
Lead behaviours
You avoid it, because being visibly not yet good at it is uncomfortable.
Your most useful next step: Practise it once somewhere the stakes are low, and tell one person in advance that you are going to. Avoidance survives privacy and rarely survives a witness.
Lead behaviours
You have started before and it faded without anybody noticing.
Your most useful next step: Imagine it is the end of this term and nothing has changed. Write down why. The reasons will be specific and already known to you, and dealing with the first two before you begin again is what makes this attempt different from the last.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
This is the behaviour the whole scenario is about. Deliberate improvement of your own capability is what keeps being postponed, and it is easy to postpone precisely because nobody else is asking for it.
Development that depends on intention fails, and development that becomes a small repeated action succeeds. The target is reached by practice rather than resolve, and the practice has to be built rather than found.
A development target has a long horizon and no deadline, which is the combination that loses to everything else. Attaching it to something that happens this week is what gives it any claim on time at all.
An intention becomes work at the point it is reduced to a step you could actually take. Most stalled development targets are still written at the level of an aspiration, which is why nothing follows from them.
Used specifically rather than generally: imagine a defined future point, the end of this term, with nothing changed, and write down what prevented it. The reasons are usually precise, already known to you, and fixable before you start rather than after you stop.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where the obstacle is discomfort. Being visibly not yet good at something is the price of getting better at it, and a leader who will only practise in private will practise rarely.
Use this where the first approach did not suit you. A development method that works for a colleague may be the wrong one for you, and changing the method is not the same as abandoning the target.
A useful first action
Write the target as one action you could take in the next twenty minutes. If you cannot, that is the diagnosis: it is still a description, and reducing it is the first piece of work.
Suggested approach
- Reduce the target to one action small enough to take in twenty minutes this week, and take it.
- Attach the practice to something already in the calendar, rather than looking for a gap that will not appear.
- If the obstacle is discomfort, practise once where the stakes are low and tell somebody in advance.
- Run a premortem: imagine the end of term with nothing changed, write down why, and deal with the first two reasons.
- Decide what will register if it stops, whether that is a date in the diary or a person who will ask.