Rhythm is Critical for the Longterm Health of a Leader

Just like you want a visual rhythm to guide you through a layout, we need to establish a cadence of life that guides us through the various seasons.

As we wrap up our series on the design elements of leader, the topic of rhythm will help you apply what you’ve learned and continue to grow.

From line to circle

In the western world, we tend to take a linear worldview. We prefer to represent events chronologically on a timeline from left to right.

However our world has many natural rhythms, such as days, months, seasons, and years. These run in cycles, and much of the world still holds a cyclical rather than linear world view.

The exhortation to “take life one day at a time” reflects a cyclical perspective. The fact that we sleep every night demonstrates how we are made for a cadence or rhythm that runs in a circle.

So how do we take this understanding and apply it to our leadership?

If we and our world were designed to live in rhythm, we should embrace it and allow it to orient our leadership journey.

We can create a rhythm of reflection, evaluation, and growth as a leader with some intentionality.

A rhythm of review

Over ten years ago, after reading Getting Things Done, I began implementing reviews. I would conduct them weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. I was using OmniFocus to organize my work, and it would remind me at the right time to do my review, helping me build the habit.

This rhythm really helped me reflect and make visible what was happening in my life and leadership.

When I conducted the review, I could see my answers from the previous review. I was not only getting a better view of where I was but also where I had been.

My kids can’t perceive how much they grow in a day, week, or even month. But when we mark their height on one post of the bunk bed and they can see progress in something that is otherwise invisible in their daily lives.

Similarly, a rhythm of review helps us as leaders mark our growth over time.

Start small using a weekly review with a few questions. It could be

1. How did I do last week at achieving my goals?
2. What, if anything, was an obstacle?
3. How can I make changes to improve?
4. What are my goals for this next week?

You may notice those questions are essentially the questions of the daily standup in Scrum.

One of the reasons I really embrace the Agile methodology and Scrum framework for organizing people and projects is because it takes advantage of this natural rhythm to make things transparent (reflection), to inspect (evaluation), and to adapt (growth).

I’ve taken a number of these Agile principles or concepts and applied them to both my professional and personal life.

Longer, slower rhythms

You can move beyond the daily and weekly rhythm to a monthly, quarterly or yearly rhythm. These long-term rhythms focus more on alignment with your priorities. Questions I’ve asked for these reviews include:

1. How was my priority of being present with people demonstrated this month?
2. Where could I improve on being fully present with others?
3. How did I grow this past month?
4. What area do I want to grow in this next month?
5. What do I need to stop doing in order to create more space for what’s important?

A cadence of self-reflection is helpful, but as we mentioned in our post on contrast, we have blind spots and need others to see them.

Each year I have a 360, where four to seven people provide feedback on specific areas of my leadership. I also conduct these for those I lead.

If this isn’t a part of your organization’s culture, you can either help start it or run it on your own. Either way, regular feedback from others is critical to our growth as leaders.

Ordering you time

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve tried to create a rhythm to my day, week, and three-week sprint.

To get started, I found it helpful to print out blank daily and weekly calendars. Using a pencil and eraser, I experimented with different options to give my work a more regular rhythm. Some things I’ve tried over the years.

• Theming the days of the week. A day for deep thinking work, a day for team meetings, two days for coaching and mentorship, and a day for growth and development.
• Theming half days. Similar to the first one, but made things a little more flexible.
• Selecting one team or priority that gets higher focus for the week. In seasons that I’ve had a considerable leadership scope, this helped me go deeper than just keeping things moving.

However you do it, look for ways to create momentum and focus while stewarding your energy and attention throughout the day and week to focus on the right things.

Next Steps in Your Leader Design

This wraps up the series on leader design. I hope you found it helpful on your journey of becoming a servant leader.

The leader design short course packages all of this into a 7-day personal guide.

You’ll get daily content, including action steps, resources, and worksheets for you to further develop your design as a leader.