The Active Leader: Moving from Ideas to Action

Posted on December 07, 2015 by Ken Abrams, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

With our constant stream of emails, voicemails, meetings, conference calls and so on, it is a minor miracle that any of us can accomplish anything. With our smartphones surgically implanted into our hands, our time is sliced so thinly that we might never have the focused time to develop the big-picture perspective required for an action plan, let alone the time to execute it.

Daily routines, superficial behaviors, poorly prioritized or unfocused tasks leech managers’ capacities— making unproductive busyness perhaps the most critical behavioral problem in business today.

For so many of us—whether CEOs for major corporations, small business owners or solo-entrepreneurs— there is a fundamental disconnection between knowing what should be done and actually doing it. Calling this the “knowing-doing gap,” Stanford University researchers Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton pose the question: “Why does knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fail to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge?”

Is there anyone in business today who hasn’t wondered the same thing? The answer, argue Bruch and Ghoshal, is both simple and profound: willpower. The problem, they say, is not that managers’ time is sliced, but that their intention or “volition” is sliced as well.

Getting things done requires two critical components: energy and focus. And both are at risk in the modern workplace. Building a bias for action in
yourself and your organization requires developing and reinforcing the skills to become a “purposeful” or “volitional” leader. These are people who can consistently achieve their objectives by making an unconditional commitment to their goals and then leveraging the power of that intention to overcome the obstacles in their way, whether their own doubts or the bureaucracies within their organizations.

“Not only does willpower galvanize your mental and emotional energy, it also enables you to make your intention happen against the most powerful odds: distractions, temptations to move in a different direction, self-doubt and negativity,” write Burch and Ghoshal. “Willpower is the force that strengthens your energy and sharpens your focus throughout the action taking process.”

Four key steps that lead to successful action are:
1. Form your intention. Define your goal concretely enough so you can clearly visualize its success.
2. Commit unconditionally to your intention. Consider it an irreversible decision.
3. Protect your intention from forces both within yourself and your organization.
4. Disengage from your intention. Define your “stopping rules,” the point of success—or failure—from which you walk away and take up the next challenge. From commitment comes both the emotional energy and focus that are critical to your success.