Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 9 - Proactive & Responsive
In structure we find our freedom to be creative and get into flow.
Our ninth Leadership Behavior is Proactive & Responsive and it builds nicely upon the previous leadership which is Smartly Anticipates. It differs though in that it centers around habits, cadences and getting yourself into a good state of flow, so that you impact those around you to do the same. When you work around someone that has this dialed in, you feel inspired and sometimes I think, “wow, I want to be like that!”. Here’s the slide from our internal deck:
In today’s world, we’re asynchronous more than ever. Folks are remote and new patterns, like the ones captured in Atlassian’s Loop Framework are starting to emerge. But for me, the core concepts for this have been around for a long time.
For me, I was inspired to master this by a talk I attended as part of the EO Alchemy conference in Los Angeles in 2011 by Warren Rustand. That initial talk can be viewed here and the subsequent workshop was extremely impactful. (Warren’s book is in the list of references below).
The Proactive & Responsive Rocketeer Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:
Understands the power and impact of habits and continually builds new positive habits in all aspects of life
Redesigns personal and company systems for continual improvement
Has positive drive and energy
Able to respond and seize opportunities
Master of cadence and repeatability
Effective at asynchronous productivity
For me, the journey started with gaining control of my calendar, and building a habit that we call the #SundaySpecial, which I learned from my journey becoming a triathlete at Purple Patch Fitness. They have a template for their Sunday Special on their website. The idea is simple, spend 30-60 minutes on the weekend planning out the next week in detail, and for me I do a rough glance ahead at the 2-3 weeks in front of that.
During this time, I’m questioning “where am I?” in terms of physical location and optimizing commutes, meetings (aggressively removing the ones that aren’t useful) and being proactive to get the ball rolling.
Many folks do this on Monday mornings, but by that time the starting gun has already fired - we want to hit the ground running.
For me, I can get most of my days work done before lunch, and I aim to do that, leaving the afternoon to think and untangle some of the biggest challenges.
Once you learn the meta-habit of building habits and stacking them and placing them in a cadence, the flow can build from there.
At any time when something unexpected comes up, just jump back to a planning session and get the bigger picture done. This elevation for me is like getting into a virtual helicopter 🚁 and viewing the traffic around me vs being stuck in the middle of it!
Also think about where you are when you plan and when you do your detailed work. For me, I find that I need to be in isolation to do that, with some music, some coffee ☕️ and usually a big block of Cadbury Fruit & Nut chocolate! 🍫
I’ll do a follow up post with more details about my calendar setup and such.
Anti-Behavior: Reactive and Pressured
The Anti-Behavior for this Leadership Behavior is: Reactive and Pressured.
The energy you put out is absorbed by your team, and the tension/pressure that is created by being unorganized isn’t great to be around.
Our Inspiration
We leveraged the core of this Leadership Behavior from Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams along with it’s anti-behavior. And then we adapted it for our culture and The series of books and research by these authors and the underlying Leadership Circle framework is used heavily at our company and linking these together made so much sense. In that body of work it distinguishes between leaders being in the state of high creativity or high reactivity. The anti-behavior logically has a canceling effect on the creative side.
The sub-points were inspired by our Rocketeer managers along with the Leadership Circle. I’ll write more in a future post how we use this leadership framework in our company across the globe in a scalable way.
Some great resources for this Leadership Behavior include*:
Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Mastering Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
Scaling Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
Principles - Ray Dalio
First Things First - Stephen Covey
The Leader Within Us: Mindset, Principles, and Tools for a Life By Design - Warren Rustand
Why do we have Leadership Behaviors? Isn’t this what Core Values are supposed to do? See my previous post below on ‘When are Core Values not enough?”, but in short Leadership Behaviors give you explicit coachable items to work with your team to help them get better. Telling someone they have fallen on a behavior is much easier to correct and improve, whereas telling someone that they have failed against values is akin to telling them that they’ve been banished from the tribe.
In my opinion, companies need to define these behaviors if they are truly invested in growing their employees to reach their potential. We outline this in our Rocketeer Promise.
When are Core Values not enough?
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FEB 9
*I have some amazon affiliate codes on book links, I may make billions from these and quit my job.
**Over time these posts will be updated with more links, tweaks and changes as we learn more. Nothing is ever final at ServiceRocket, and we don’t like “unveiling” things.