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Get Outside the Circle

Practice New Leadership Behaviors

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, you’ve built an invisible circle around yourself over the years. And subconsciously, you protect and even nurture this circle—it’s called your Comfort Zone. Don’t worry, we all have them, in our personal and professional lives. The Comfort Zone is where all of your favorite beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors flourish. The Comfort Zone is where you feel confident, calm, and self-assured. It is where the person that you (and others) recognize feels comfortable. This is your safe space, where you operate from a familiar style.

But you’ve actually been testing your Comfort Zone, haven’t you? How’s it feel to be stepping outside the circle? As you’ve been stretching and challenging yourself to be a better leader, what are you noticing when you’re outside the Zone? Do words such as unsettled, panicky, tense, uneasy, and uncomfortable come to mind? This is natural, too; as it turns out, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is hard work. It feels strange, and it should; you’re stepping outside your known world—and the unknown is often scary. But I hope you’re also feeling excited, creative, energized, renewed, and open-minded. Because here’s the little secret about Comfort Zones: It’s only when you step outside the Zone that you learn, grow, and develop (see Figure 6). Learning happens best when you’re pushed out of your Comfort Zone. If there’s an overall theme to draw from this book, it’s that you have to feel a little discomfort to produce meaningful and lasting change. You have to expand and push yourself out of your Comfort Zone in order to grow as a leader.

So let’s go back to the beliefs, attitudes, and behavior patterns that you’ve had for years—let’s collectively call them “your way.” You’ve no doubt cultivated and nurtured your way of doing things; it’s become your unique style of thinking, acting, and speaking. You’re not only comfortable with your way of doing things, you may actually believe it’s the only way to operate. You have a comfortable way of starting your day, a habit of eating lunch with the same people, even a certain way of responding to your boss. Am I right? Does this sound familiar? You’re in your Comfort Zone, and if you’re like most people, you’re very happy there.

But what would happen if you stepped outside the circle more often? What opens up if you let in some new thoughts, adopt a new attitude, or start doing things differently? We’ve already explored the value of looking at your thoughts from another angle (Chapter 9) and allowing your attitudes to be altered by other cultural norms (Chapter 21). This chapter explores the idea of experimenting with some new behaviors. Are you ready to start doing some of the same old tasks or routines a little differently? Variety is the spice of life and trying out new leadership behaviors is a great way to expand your repertoire of leadership skills.

Let’s say you’ve always set goals with your direct reports the same way. You give them an assignment or a task to do, tell them when you need it, and tell them (within certain parameters) how you want it done. What if you turn that around, and allow them to select and identify the projects? If that’s not possible, how about allowing them to flesh out the assignment in terms of details and deadlines? The point is to experiment with different ways of assigning and monitoring the work.

How about the way you run your staff meeting? Pretty much the same every week, isn’t it? It may be effective and productive (although if it’s not, you should definitely change it up!), but what can you unlock in terms of creativity and imagination if you conducted the meeting in other ways? Start by sitting in a different chair at the table, or have the meeting last forty-five minutes instead of an hour. Change the venue or the day of the week. If you use a lot of pre-reading, try doing the meeting without any material. If you don’t use pre-reads, send out a deck in advance for people to review. If you normally run the meeting, let a direct report manage the process. If you always go around the room for updates, try addressing just one or two issues as a group, instead. The idea is to try out some new leadership behaviors and see what happens.

Another common “routine” leaders may find themselves in is the way they respond to the boss. Your boss knows your particular buttons and knows how you’re likely to respond to just about any scenario. Are you happy with that level of predictability? What if you did something to alter the relationship? I distinctly remember a boss who had a habit of giving me assignments just as I was getting ready to go home for the day. I dutifully took the work home and had it completed by the next morning, only to watch him leave it on his desk until mid-afternoon or even the next day. One night, as he assigned me something to do, I told him in a calm voice that I would add this to my immediate workload and would have it for him by 2 p.m. the next day. He clearly picked up on my underlying message but didn’t say anything, and I did the work the next morning when I came in. I took a risk and changed the routine, and it worked; I took back control of my evenings.

Here’s another boss story. One of my managers had a habit of calling me out of a meeting if he wanted to talk to me. Essentially, I had to be available at any time to take a call from this guy. For the most part, I was OK with this, especially if it involved an emergency. But it happened once when I was doing a performance appraisal with one of my direct reports, and so I had a very clear discussion with the boss about it afterward. I told him that I wouldn’t take that call again under those circumstances—it had interrupted the flow of a difficult conversation, and I thought it was completely unnecessary and insensitive to the employee. Sure enough, it happened again about a week later, and I told my admin to tell the boss I was unavailable to take his call. After the performance appraisal meeting, I called the boss to check in. He wasn’t happy, but I had stood my ground and altered a small part of our relationship. I’d like to think I gained some respect from the boss that day by standing on principle (especially because it reinforced our official company values). However, I would never have gotten this result if I hadn’t stepped outside my Comfort Zone.

The key lesson of the Comfort Zone is that when you want a different result, you have to do something different. You have to take a chance and try something new, because your Comfort Zone is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, it helps you navigate this crazy world with some familiar routines and patterns and allows you to fit into your present environment. But it doesn’t help you stretch and grow; in fact, it’s specifically designed to prevent you from developing. If you want to change something about your beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, make a conscious trip outside the circle—that’s where you’ll experience the adventure of learning. Search for ways to think, feel, or do things differently. Step out of your Comfort Zone and open yourself to new ways of looking at the world. It may be the biggest leap you’ll take along this path of self-development.

Bootstrap Takeaways

Practice New Leadership Behaviors

1. You don’t have all the answers, and there are many ways to do things. Step out of your Comfort Zone and try some new leadership behaviors.

2. Encourage others to do things their way. Your Comfort Zone may be restricting your ability to empower your employees.

3. Ask others for feedback about your Comfort Zone. If they say you have an opportunity to branch out, practice some new ways of leading the team.