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During my experience in business, I have met or worked for many executives who are strong and recognized leaders, and dealt with others who have similar positions and titles, but are unable to lead effectively. The differences always seemed more mental and emotional, rather than skill or experience-based, but I’ve never been comfortable coaching peers on how to build the required mental strength.
I recently found some good guidance in a new book, “The Mentally Strong Leader,” by Scott Mautz. Scott is a popular speaker and leadership trainer, with a successful track record leading several multi-billion-dollar businesses. He narrows his focus to mental “muscles” for stronger leadership based on six key habits and the tools to build them for the rest of us in the real world.
I’m convinced these same leadership principles are applicable to all of us, as entrepreneurs or business professionals, in our efforts to increase impact and productivity at work. Thus, I will paraphrase here his six required habits, with my own insights added, for your own career evolution and leadership aspirations:
1. Fortitude – self-determination to persevere. Demonstrate the courage to wade through tension, reframe setbacks, plan for adversity, and refuse to engage in victim mentality. You must manage your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to thrive under pressure and perform in a crisis. This requires a mindset that you can solve any problem.
2. Confidence – to steer you through insecurity. This helps you push past fear of failure, manage self-doubt, and embrace relevant criticism. The result is that you exude executive presence and increase others’ confidence in your leadership. It also optimizes your open-mindedness to honor everyone’s input and allow you to converge to solutions.
3. Boldness – empowering thoughts and beliefs. Developing boldness pays huge dividends as it fuels your fearlessness to push the team, and yourself, harder, further, and faster past uncertainty and into embracing change. It also promotes bigger thinking, emboldens smart risks, pushes aside limiting thoughts, and paves the way to growth.
4. Messaging – providing strong cues to employees. Growing in this area helps you fuel motivation, energy and employee trust by actions consistent with your values, reinforcing your character, proactively fueling positivity, and showing that everyone is heard. You must be an active listener and avoid losing your temper or using demotivating language.
5. Decision-making – show conviction to be decisive. You need to develop a data-based, analytical approach to making decisions which demonstrates your willingness to make tough, even unpopular calls on a timely basis. Be sensitive to all your biases and bad habits, which can negatively affect the quality and timeliness of your decisions.
6. Goal-focus - discipline to set and achieve goals. Use this focus on goals to set and communicate a thorough set of expectations to all constituents. Keep your focus on what you can control, and how to hold yourself and others accountable for milestones along the way. Avoid perfectionism and be willing to adjust goals as needed for success.
As you see, none of these recommend acting tough or pretending to be someone you are not. They are all about you managing and regulating your own real attitudes, thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs to help you and your organization achieve something exceptional from normal business challenges that we all deal with every day.
In summary, I agree with Mautz that a strong leader pushes their team (and themselves) to produce exceptional results by continually challenging their own habits, and doing so in a way that makes everyone feel something special. We certainly need more of that in this age of global business change and competition.
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