Business Book Club: The Self-Evolved Leader

I've set myself a goal to read one self-development book per month. To make sure I truly reflect on what I'm reading I'm going to extract the wisdom from the best business and personal development books and share it with you.

This time, I've been reading The Self-Evolved Leader - Elevate Your Focus and Develop Your People In a World That Refuses To Slow Down by Dave McKeown

The Book

Most leaders I see in my workshops know intellectually the principles of great leadership but when you probe deeper into how they put these into effect, it becomes clear that in the hustle and bustle of day to day working life, they struggle to do the things they know they should do. This is why The Self-Evolved Leader caught my eye. The premise of this book is as follows:

“In a world that only seems to accelerate, becoming a leader who can rise above the business of the day-to-day and motivate, inspire and encourage your team becomes more and more difficult. The Self-Evolved Leader by Dave McKeown is a practical guide to help you elevate your focus, develop your people and get more done”

Could this book offer some insight into how to evolve your leadership style and turn leadership theory into great habits?

What Did I Learn?

The book begins by highlighting some of the problems with the traditional models of leadership. One of the things that resonated with me from the introduction is the description of ‘heroic leadership’. At the time of writing this blog, Covid-19 has meant that most people are home working, many for the first time. I’m hearing leaders tell me how they are being bombarded by emails from team members who are justifying their existence, asking leaders to help them make decisions or describing how work isn’t getting done if they are not there to step in. For many, it is becoming clear how much their teams are relying on them. Most leaders know this creates learned helplessness and disempowers their people but when you are under pressure it just feels so much easier to step in and get the work done yourself.

McKeown explains that the way to break out of this negative cycle (that he calls the Cycle of Mediocrity) is to make the shift from focusing on the urgent to focusing the team towards what is important and by empowering the team to create a culture of shared accountability for results. Thus, moving towards a new cycle, the ‘Cycle of Excellence’.

This requires a shift in mindset and a realisation that:

“Your value comes not from saving the day but from equipping your people to deliver on the day-to-day tactics and grow into the best version of themselves so that you can focus on the medium- and long-term direction of your team” 

‘Heroic Leadership’ may feel quicker and easier in the short term and if we’re very honest it makes us feel important and does wonders for our ego even when we feel stressed, but it hampers both the leader and the team in the long term. McKeown stresses that it is worth taking the time and effort to break this habit. That brings us on to how to do it………

The Five Disciplines

One section of the book that particularly caught my eye is McKeown’s 5 disciplines. The reason is that he distinguishes between skills and disciplines. McKeown explains that because leadership skills are often referred to as ‘soft skills’ they seem intangible and therefore hard to grasp. He suggests that this can cause managers to become lazy in their pursuit of soft skills and that a focus on soft skills can lead to soft leadership.

Disciplines, by contrast, he describes like this:

“Disciplines are hard to master; they require an objective understanding of your relative strengths and weaknesses, and the only way to develop a discipline is through repetition and review. You try something, assess the impact, chart a new course, and try again and again and again, until it’s second nature. Most important, however, disciplines are the only way to lead to ongoing, behavioural change. It’s only when you’ve mastered the discipline that you can take the training wheels off and the behaviour sticks.”

I really like this reframing of leadership skills. I meet many leaders who attend talks, watch inspiring videos and read the latest leadership books, all of which leaves them very well informed, but they rarely translate this new information into meaningful action. It is this art of practising and refining what we do every day that makes the difference to how we lead.

McKeown’s 5 Disciplines are:

Reclaiming your attention: Focusing on what is important and preventing other sources from sapping your ability to stay present and draining your cognitive ability to make high-quality decisions.

Facilitating team Flow: Coming to grips with the numerous inputs to your team from the wider organisation. Quickly prioritising the tasks, putting the most appropriate people to work on it and having them come to you only for updates and feedback, thus creating a smooth ‘flow’ of work through the team. By empowering your team to take responsibility for the tasks you can keep focused on those areas that you can impact in the most powerful way.

Supporting high performance: Supporting high performance rather than managing it. When you try to manage performance, you remove the sense of control your team feel they have and you create learned helplessness. By supporting high performance you encourage your team to assess their challenges themselves, consider their options and decide on the action to take. Your role is to give advice and guidance sparingly and even then, only to help unlock a difficult situation.

Having symbiotic conversations: Assuming positive intent in performance conversations, mapping a path to the desired outcome, and ultimately putting individual team members in the driving seat about what they wish to do next.

Building shared accountability: Moving decision making, direction setting, and accountability away from you as the leader and into the team. Mckeown explains:

“Accountability and ownership cannot be taught; you can only provide the environment for your team to want to take it. Building shared accountability is a natural outflow of setting a clear vision, building an implementation pulse, and mastering the key disciplines” 

What Did I Think?

This book provides a comprehensive guide to developing a leadership style fit for the modern workplace. Overall I found that the book offered very little new insight into how to be a leader. Many of the topics covered have been widely discussed for quite some time. That’s not to say the advice given isn’t valuable, because it is. There isn’t anything in the book that I disagree with or wouldn’t recommend. What this book does that stands out from the many other leadership books I have read is to give a comprehensive ‘how-to guide’ for implementing the topics covered. Most leadership books do a great job of covering the theory but only offer short exercises for putting ideas into practice. The Self-Evolved Leader dedicates the whole 4th section of the book to a week-by-week guide for your first 15 weeks of evolving your leadership style, complete with reflection exercises and templates. For me, this considerably increases the likelihood of the book’s wisdom being translated into action.

If you’re a leader who consumes a lot of books, podcasts and videos on leadership but can’t seem to translate all the good advice into action or if you want to revaluate your leadership style, then I’d recommend this book as a practical guide for how to make positive changes.

What should I read next?

Have you read The Self-Evolved Leader? What did you get from it? What should I read next?

If you have any recommendations let me know below or via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn

Want regular personal development tips and reminders? Sign up for the monthly newsletter and I'll help you to keep focused.