Why ‘baby steps’ is the BEST way to grow as a leader

Personal growth is not a linear journey, if I had to describe it I would say it’s more like a long distance walk, where you need to stop and admire the view, take some rest stops and let’s be honest sometimes fall over or slip down the hill and go backwards a few steps. Along the way, ideally, you're learning new skills to make the walk a bit easier at times but also equip you to walk through tougher terrains and take on bigger challenges.

One concept that you’ll see come up time and time again when referring to how we improve our leadership skills is the concept of “Cumulative Growth” or Continuous Improvement. 

What is cumulative growth?

So, we know growth (in the personal development sense) is when we increase our leadership skills. It’s hard to quantify, but for arguments sake let’s say we improve our skills by 2% each week. Each week you add 2% more to your ‘score’ and at the end of a month, instead of having added 8% on in a big chunk (4 weeks, 2% = 8%), you’ve added 2% each week and ended up with a cumulative growth 8.24% vs. the first week. It’s 0.24% more than if you had just added one big chunk - so it’s not a MASSIVE increase but that’s why James Clear referred to this as ‘The Power Of Tiny Gains’ in his book Atomic Habits.

Let's use that same example but fast forward forward a year. If you were to add 2% FOR each week in the year, but in one chunk at the end of the year you would have grown by 104% (52 weeks, 2% each week). To compare, if we added 2% every week for 52 weeks, at the end of the year you'd have grown by 180.03%. Tiny gains over a long period of time aren't so tiny!

That’s enough maths for today, but it illustrates the point nicely - continuously improving can have a significant impact over the long term.

Stephen Covey in his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective Individuals” refers to this as “Sharpening the Saw”. To interpret his term (which I LOVE, but have always thought it felt a bit out of date), let’s say it’s “Sharpening the Tools” - for example if you were a chef, you’d need to keep your knives sharp and in mint condition to ensure you could do your best work. In that same way, our minds are our tools and we need to keep them sharp by constantly investing into growing them or ‘sharpening’ them. If you left your chef's knives alone, didn’t sharpen them but kept using them everyday - they’d become blunt and less effective over time right? It’s similar to your mind, your skills, your development. If you don’t continue to ‘sharpen’ yourself, by learning new skills, staying up to date with developments in your industry, challenging and growing how you think about things - then it’s easy to become complacent, out of date and less effective in life and work in general. 

Benefits of Cumulative Growth

• You get better at learning. As you add new skills, processes and ways of thinking every week, you improve your skills for learning, so every lesson is absorbed better, easier and means more. 
• You get better every day, and become comfortable with change and trying new ways of doing things, cultivating a growth mindset
• You create opportunities for yourself to do things different and then see the different (and hopefully better) outcomes which only motivates you even more to keep growing and learning.

How to do it

• Commit to learning. Carve out some time each day or week to invest into yourself - whether that’s listening to 15 minutes of a podcast or reading 20 pages of a development book. Doesn’t have to be a huge commitment, the point is to keep it manageable.  
• Take the time to reflect on what you’ve read or listened to - taking the information in and deciding how you think or feel about it. Do you agree with the opinions or approach? When could you see that working for you?
• Be comfortable with experimenting. Trying out new behaviours or approaches can be a bit scary, and it’s hard to break out of the habits of your current behaviours. Instead of thinking about it as ‘change’ - try thinking of it as ‘an experiment’. There’s no wrong or right outcome, just insight.

This is the approach that I’ve taken when creating the curriculum for the Epic Self Leadership Program. I wasn’t interested in the big ground-shaking changes in a short amount of time - I know what it’s like as a leader, it’s jarring to make big sweeping changes overnight. Jarring for yourself but also for your team - imagine overhauling everything at work in one week - it would cause too much upheaval. The ways that I’ve seen leaders really become more effective, happier and more driven is with cumulative growth over time. Small, incremental changes each week, at a manageable pace that facilitates learning, breathing room and time to experiment.

Within the Epic Self Leadership Program, leaders will learn one new skill or approach each week, giving them time to absorb it and test it out if it makes sense to do so.  Over the course of twelve months, the cumulative gain of weekly growth is significant and inspiring - moving from ‘eeeeek’ to Epic. 

Are you looking for someone awesome to help you grow your leadership? 

Hi! I’m Victoria. I’ve got a pretty epic online leadership program - within my Epic Self Leadership course we dive deep into creating your personal value set and provide you with other tools to live and lead in your unique way. 

You’ll be delivered incredible leadership insights and learnings to supercharge your leadership growth, you’ll have 1:1 personalised coaching with me - PLUS you’ll join a group of other interesting leaders to learn and grow with.

My Epic Self Leadership Program helps you understand your role as the leader, and find your unique way to lead so you can become a please-let-me-work-for-you boss and supercharge your team and business performance PLUS you get to create your own network of leaders to grow with while you work with me on your leadership skills.

Apply for the next intake here: Epic Self Leadership Program

Want more?

👉 James Clear, Continuous Improvement

👉 Brighten Project: Atomic Habits by James Clear

TLDR: Grow as a leader by learning and constantly adding to your skillset.