Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
At our recent The Leadership Challenge® Workshop Facilitator Training, a participant asked the following question during an activity: Would you rather have $20 or a penny that doubles each day for 30 days?
I'd take the penny–the rewards are much greater!
Now what does this have to do with leadership?
Some leadership programs focus on intangible things–your personality, your style, your type. When something is intangible, it's hard to validate and measure (let alone improve at it in a meaningful way).
That’s the power of The Leadership Challenge® program and the 360-degree assessment tool we use in the program, the LPI®: Leadership Practices Inventory®. The LPI measures how frequently you demonstrate leadership behaviors proven to impact leadership effectiveness. No matter your "personality" or "leadership type", anyone can implement the tested and proven behaviors based on 30 years of ongoing research by authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. And the LPI® even provides you with an actionable path to improving the frequency of those behaviors.
The power of frequency is exponential and it's within anyone's control.
What I love most about The Leadership Challenge® is that it focuses on these proven leadership actions (through the LPI®: Leadership Practices Inventory® assessment) with concrete returns.
The frequency of your actions is fundamental to the LPI® and The Leadership Challenge® because simply put, leadership is about practice. Participants come away with the distinct understanding that by practicing leadership behaviors more often, they will improve upon their own leadership impact.
It’s just like the $20 bill versus the penny that doubles each day for 30 days. Doing something well once may pay off in the short term, but for long term impact, the biggest bang for your buck comes with doing a little bit more of each behavior each day.
Especially in the business of leadership, long-term, sustainable impact is what counts. If you're investing in yourself, you must build leadership skills with frequent practice and application. The returns will be significantly greater than an irregular and infrequent effort or having one good "leadership moment" that you don’t put into regular practice.
"You can't get any better at leading, or at anything else for that matter, without practice."
- Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner
