{"id":1037,"date":"2018-12-19T23:03:23","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T23:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/?p=1037"},"modified":"2025-07-01T17:20:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T17:20:22","slug":"we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do-excellence-then-is-not-an-act-but-a-habit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do-excellence-then-is-not-an-act-but-a-habit\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWe are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In their book, \u201cThe CEO Next Door,\u201d consultants Elena Botelho and Kim Powell talk about \u201cThe 4 behaviors that transform ordinary people into world-class leaders.\u201d\u00a0 They base their findings on studies of over 2600 leaders.\u00a0 While any individual leader may display a wide range of behaviors, Botelho and Powell argue that there are just four that all leaders tend to have in common.\u00a0 However, one of those four behaviors (in our judgement), towers over the other three.\u00a0 To learn what these transformational behaviors are that the authors describe, and to learn what we believe to be the most important of the four, please continue reading below.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><strong>\u201cWe are what we repeatedly do.\u00a0 Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 ~ <em>Aristotle<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In no particular order, here are the four behaviors found in \u201cThe CEO Next Door\u201d that the authors believe all great leaders exhibit.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Decide: Speed Over Precision.<\/strong> Great leaders don\u2019t fire from the hip, and they don\u2019t make decisions recklessly or capriciously, but nor do they allow themselves to get tangled up in \u201canalysis paralysis.\u201d\u00a0 They don\u2019t delay things in hopes of a perfect decision when a good one is already at hand.\u00a0 Steve Gorman, former CEO of Greyhound Lines, said it this way: \u201cA potentially bad decision is better than a lack of direction.\u201d\u00a0 A CEO\u00a0 who delays, delays, and delays making a decision while dithering over the details doesn\u2019t exactly inspire the confidence of his or her organization.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Engage for Impact: Orchestrate Stakeholders to Drive Results.<\/strong> There is little, if anything, a CEO can do to single-handedly drive the company forward.\u00a0 A CEO can set a direction and formulate strategies, but ultimately, those need to be carried out by others.\u00a0 Knowing the truth of that, great leaders are consensus-builders.\u00a0 Not that they try to run a democracy . . . the final decisions are still theirs to make . . . but they do try to get as many stakeholders as possible (employees, customers, vendors, etc.) to understand and support what the CEO is trying to accomplish.\u00a0 A CEO who isolates himself or herself from the rest of the organization and tries to rule by edict is almost certain to fail.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Relentless Reliability: Deliver Consistently. <\/strong>Every CEO must earn the trust of his or her organization.\u00a0 And the best, most direct way to earn that trust is for the CEO to be utterly reliable and to behave in ways that are consistent from one day to the next.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at those two traits a little more closely.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<ul>\n<li>It\u2019s simple.\u00a0 Don\u2019t promise what you can\u2019t deliver, but absolutely deliver what you do promise without fail.\u00a0 Your word is your bond.\u00a0 And this goes for everything both large (i.e., negotiating a new contract with a major customer) and small (i.e., arriving at a meeting on time).\u00a0 When you agree to do something, your people need to forget about it, safe in the absolute knowledge that it\u2019s going to be done, done right, and done on time.\u00a0 And by the way, this is a behavior you\u2019re modeling for the rest of your organization, and over time, you should demand it of everyone else.<\/li>\n<li>Consistency and reliability are two sides of the same coin. Don\u2019t rigorously enforce company rules one day and let them slide the next.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be a mellow fellow in the morning but turn into an ogre by lunchtime.\u00a0 The way you solve problems and make decisions should be fairly predictable by those around you.\u00a0 In short, you should operate by the \u201cDoctrine of No Surprises.\u201d\u00a0 If your people could reasonably say about you, \u201cWe never know what the guy\u2019s going to do from one minute to the next,\u201d you will have a tough time building a firm foundation of trust.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ol start=\"4\">\n<li><strong>Adapt Boldly: Ride the Discomfort of the Unknown. <\/strong>According to H.G. Wells, we need to \u201cadapt or die.\u201d\u00a0 If you don\u2019t believe it, just look at Kodak, Blockbuster, or Borders to name only a few.\u00a0 Change is an inescapable aspect of business today, and the rate of change has been accelerating and continues to accelerate. Technologies are constantly changing as are market conditions and government regulations.\u00a0 Yet our leaders are expected to not just react to these changes, but to anticipate them and spot places where these changes may bring new opportunities.\u00a0 Like it or not, today\u2019s CEO must confront the unknown . . . must continuously face conditions he or she has not faced before and for which there is no real precedent.\u00a0 Under these circumstances, a successful CEO, when confronted with a pile of manure, must have the strength of conviction that there\u2019s a pony in there somewhere.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong>Our choice for the behavior that\u2019s head and shoulders above the others is #3, <strong>Reliability and<\/strong> <strong>Consistency<\/strong>.\u00a0 They are the building blocks of trust without which the other three behaviors will never be able to take root.\u00a0 Consider:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Without trust, people will not follow a leader\u2019s decisions, whether they\u2019re made fast or slow.<\/li>\n<li>Without trust, a leader will be unable to gain the stakeholder support he or she needs to accomplish anything meaningful.<\/li>\n<li>Without trust, a leader\u2019s people will not follow him or her into the unknown, making the leader\u2019s task of adapting to changing conditions almost impossible.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here we have focused only on <em><u>what<\/u><\/em> behaviors \u201cThe CEO Next Door\u201d says a strong leader must have.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t said anything here about <em><u>how<\/u><\/em> to develop those behaviors.\u00a0 So if you think you may be deficient in some of these behaviors but need help developing them, the book will tell you how.\u00a0 Pick up a copy.<\/p>\n<p>Or, if you don\u2019t want to get your leadership training from a book, call me.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be glad to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In their book, \u201cThe CEO Next Door,\u201d consultants Elena Botelho and Kim Powell talk about \u201cThe 4 behaviors that transform ordinary people into world-class leaders.\u201d\u00a0 They base their findings on studies of over 2600 leaders.\u00a0 While any individual leader may display a wide range of behaviors, Botelho and Powell argue that there are just four<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do-excellence-then-is-not-an-act-but-a-habit\/\">Read More\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,26,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1038,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions\/1038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}