For Managers to Be Successful in 2025 They Must Focus on Developing These 5 Habits

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The past 5 years have put managers, both old and new, through a constant cycle of change, leaving many leaders burnt out and feeling overwhelmed. Managers may be struggling to pinpoint the habits they need to lead to personal and professional success. By understanding and addressing these opportunities for growth, managers can develop the skills and mindset needed to inspire and motivate their teams. In this article, we'll explore the top five leadership habits that leaders often struggle with and provide practical tips for improvement.

Leadership Habit 1: Learn to Delegate Like a Pro

This behavior has multiple variants and they all revolve around the idea of building a more skilled team through coaching. In many organizations, managers don’t coach and if they do, they don’t coach enough. This finding is tragic and frustrating at the same time.

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The tragedy stems from the fact that managers have been operating at high level of burnout for years. This task-focused grind mentality prevents them from coaching their teams, which ironically is the best remedy for this problem. This is the vicious cycle of perpetual DIY: “We just got new project, my team cannot handle this, I have to do it myself, I don’t have time to teach them, my team will never learn”. At one point or another, every manager can relate to this statement.

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Why do managers do this? Commonly this behavior has put them into a leadership position to begin with. They were very good at what they did, they outperformed their peers, but they never had to teach and distribute their skills. In most cases they have never been asked to delegate, only to perform.

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How do we break through the vicious cycle of perpetual DIY?

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Here are three suggestions that can help managers to start delegating:

1. Shadowing: When you take on your next project, let 1-2 employees shadow you. Let them document every step and review the documentation with them, revise if necessary. Let these employees take on the next similar project, and meet with them frequently in the beginning. 
2. Create a small task team. If you cannot carve out time to instruct your team, ask one or two employees to outline their best approach. Review this outline, enrich and fine-tune it. Then ask them to try it out in the wild.
3. If you are truly overworked, it may be time to sacrifice your work outcomes for the benefit of training your team – temporarily. You only have to do this once to yield an immediate relief to your workload. Being perpetually overworked and overwhelmed is not sustainable. Now is the right time to drop old habits and build delegation skills.

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Leadership Habit 2: Become a Master of Team Accountability

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Talking to your team about poor performance is probably the last thing on any manager's to-do list. No conversation is more awkward, uncomfortable, and unrewarding for both parties. And yet, no conversation is more important. Our research shows that holding your team accountable is the single most important factor in retaining high performers. High performers don't like being on a team where their extra efforts aren't recognized.

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Why are these conversations so hard? Most of us don’t feel comfortable bringing up low performance. Most people, and that includes managers, don’t like criticizing others. Every time we do that we put the relationship to the test. Even worse, if the conversation becomes confrontational, things get even more uncomfortable and difficult to navigate - especially for an inexperienced manager.

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Rhabit Chief Science Officer, Alexander Schwall says: In our experience, holding teams accountable begins with setting clear expectations. Expectations that are defined and articulated ahead of time. Any conversation about performance is made easier if performance expectations have been set. 

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The bad news, setting expectations takes a lot of time. It requires planning and looking ahead. The good news, when this is done collaboratively, allowing the employee to influence what expectations are set, this can be a motivating process.

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With these expectations in place, holding your team accountable is much easier. The conversation is not about whether or not expectations were met (this should be obvious). It is about what can be done better or what was done well. These problem-solving conversations can be had without deteriorating the relationship with your team.

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Leadership Habit 3: Be Willing To Fail

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When we try new approaches and apply them to our day to day we're actually experimenting. We experiment every time the outcomes are not known in advance. Without it, we are doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again and never try anything new. In an ever-changing environment trying new things is key to staying competitive.

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Why are managers reluctant or even afraid to experiment in their roles?

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We believe managers feel pressured to hold up a facade of competence and independence while having to be the smartest person in the room. When subscribing to this mindset, experimenting may appear as not knowing the best solution. It may seem like admitting that we don’t know what to do to solve a problem. In addition, experiments may fail which is seen as weakness in the mind of an untrained leader. Leaders are taught, through observation, that failure is the worst possible outcome, when in reality the unwillingness to experiment can lead to tragic levels of professional stagnation.

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From our conversations with our clients' employees, we know that managers who try things out and run small and meaningful experiments come across as entirely different. They are seen for their willingness to take calculated risks, create cutting-edge solutions (that don’t have precedent), and can learn from their mistakes. If these experiments are run with input from capable employees there may be some extra credit in it for being a collaborative boss. That willingness to fail becomes a positive quality, inspiring others to take risks, which results in innovation.

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Experiments don’t have to be all-or-nothing bets. They can be small and focused tests of an idea. Try things out for a limited time, use free software trials, focus on small groups of clients to test something. We know some of our clients are very motivated to run little experiments with us.

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Leadership Habit 4: Encourage Bottom Up Feedback

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Feedback is hard, in and out of the workplace. Managers struggle with asking their peers and direct reports for feedback, and giving them the space for honest, objective feedback about their performance. In the minds of many managers, asking for feedback is equal to admitting fault or acknowledging weakness. Some managers may thing, "If I have to ask you for feedback I am implicitly admitting that I am not capable of figuring out what I am doing wrong myself? If I am asking a direct report, others might even start to wonder if that employee should have my job to begin with?".

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However, this is not the impression a manager leaves with their team when they ask for feedback. Asking for feedback on how to improve does not reveal a weakness. It shows strength and signals that we are curious about how to improve.

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When asking for feedback, a manager demonstrates the following:

First, I am humble enough to know I don’t know everything, and humility is a quality that makes me relatable to others. 

Second, I value their opinion and expertise. I admit that I cannot know everything and I acknowledge my team members as an expert.

Third, getting things right is bigger than me. I don’t need to protect my ego. Improving the way we do things is more critical than presenting myself as an infallible, omniscient leader.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, I model for my team that improvement is of the highest value and that no one should shy away from asking for feedback.

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Perhaps we are trained and incentivized to always appear competent, knowledgeable, and independent. Maybe that is how we got our management jobs in the first place, right? However, we highly recommend that you try this. Ask your team, "What can I do differently to improve", and see what happens. We guarantee this will lead to a positive outcome for you and your team.

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Number 5: Inspire Through Feedback and Recognition

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In the Swabian region in Germany, an area known for its productivity, Cuckoo clocks, and a general no-nonsense way of life, the following saying exists: "Nothing said is praise enough". In other words, if you are not criticized, think of it as praise. Seemingly many American managers agree; our data shows that managers have a hard time giving constructive feedback and motivating employees with praise.

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Why is this so hard? We cannot be sure but we assume that many managers assume that praise will cause their employees to lean back. An entirely pessimistic view of human motivation may underlie this philosophy: Humans only work hard to evade getting yelled at and avoid other forms of punishment. They are not driven by a desire to make things they can be proud of. Any form of praise will make them kick back and call it in.

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Nothing could be further from the truth. We want to be seen and recognized for our hard work, our ideas, our effort. Praising your employees will make them go the extra mile and fill their emotional bucket. This does not mean that low performance should not be called out (more about that later). 

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Try it out: in your next team meeting, publicly praise specific team members for things they have done right, for example staying late, coming in early or having a particularly good idea. And then observe, if this will lead them to “kick back”. Don’t be a Swabian, praise loudly and publicly.

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Conclusion

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By addressing these five common leadership habits, you can take a significant step towards becoming a more effective and inspiring leader. Remember, leadership is a journey, not a destination. Continuously strive to learn, grow, and adapt to the ever-changing demands of your role. With dedication and perseverance, you can build a successful and fulfilling career as a leader.

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Developing these leadership habits is easy with the right feedback and development tools. Rhabit Reflect creates psychologically safe opportunities to receive feedback to help managers quickly grow skills and become more effective leaders. You can try a preview of Rhabit's feedback platform for free, learn more here.