2. You sift through new evidence only to back up your existing opinion
Too many leaders, and even organizations, suffer from confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias involves searching through new evidence mainly to find further evidence for your already-formed opinion. For sure, we all do this from time to time. Guilty as a charged.
But for growing leaders, regularly sifting through the evidence should lead to new conclusions, insights and perspectives.
If your insights are wrong, correct them. If there are better perspectives, adopt them.
The implications for your team are deep on this one.
If your eyes aren’t truly open as a leader, you’ll never see the future or seize it.
3. You spend almost all of your time doing what you like
I’m all for finding and working in your sweet spot as a leader. Every leader should discover what they’re best at and spend a good chunk of their time in it. I couldn’t agree more.
But you should spend all of your time in your sweet spot? As in 100 percent?
Maybe, maybe not.
Here’s why. You can grow in your sweet spot, getting better and better at what you do best, which is great.
But being in your sweet spot every day doesn’t always stretch you. In fact, it can start to feel comfortable…too comfortable.
Take that to its logical conclusion and you might discover this: Spending all your time in your sweet spot can turn your sweet spot into a dead spot.
To keep growing, you need to tackle difficult projects, working out new leadership muscles and pushing you to think and grow beyond your current level.
Often tackling something new (even for a few hours a week) can do that.
What’s taking you out of your comfort zone? Chances are that’s where the growth is.
4. Your expertise has started working against you
Most leaders have a quiet desire to become an expert at something. Stick with it long enough and you’ve got a good shot at it.
Expertise, after all, is more than just training. More often than not, it involves a lot of reps.
But being an expert can make you cautious. It can also make you proud. And it can make you conservative.
Having worked so hard to achieve what you’ve achieved, you’re not as open to new ideas as you once were. You simply want to conserve what you’ve built.
Conserving what you’ve built and building nothing new as a result is a short cut to irrelevance.
Great leaders who master a field over a lifetime are always interested in new ideas, new theories and new insights because they know it makes them and their discipline better.
If you want to build an expertise that lasts into the next generation, remember this: The more open you are to fresh perspectives, the more deeply your hard-earned expertise will resonate into the next generation.
