Week 50 Day 7: Assignment: Write Three Moments That Shaped Your Leadership

For each moment, write: what happened (3-5 sentences), what you learned (1-2 sentences), and what behavioral commitment it produced (1 sentence in the form 'Because of this moment, I will always...' or 'Because of this moment, I will never...'). Add all three to your Leadership Operating Manual in a section called 'Formative Moments.'

Here is the detailed process. Step one -- the positive moment. Think about the best leadership you ever experienced -- as a team member, as an observer, or as a leader who got something right. What happened? Be specific about the behavior, not the person's character. Not 'she was an amazing leader' but 'when I made a critical mistake on the production deployment, she pulled me aside privately and said: this is how we learn. Walk me through what happened, and we will figure out how to prevent it together. She never mentioned it to the team, she never used it against me in a review, and she spent 45 minutes helping me build a deployment checklist that the entire team adopted.' What did you learn? 'Leadership is what you do when someone is vulnerable in front of you. She taught me that the moment of failure is a moment of maximum leverage -- you can use it to build trust or to destroy it.' What was the behavioral commitment? 'Because of this moment, I will never address a mistake publicly when it can be addressed privately, and I will always pair the correction with a constructive solution.' Step two -- the negative moment. Think about the worst leadership you experienced. Again, be behavior-specific. What exactly did the person do? What was the impact on you and the team? What did you learn about what leadership should not be? And what behavioral commitment did you make as a result? Step three -- the personal failure. This is the hardest one. Not a failure that happened to you -- a failure that you caused. What did you do or fail to do? What were the consequences for others? What did you learn? And what is the specific behavioral commitment you made? Step four -- review and refine. Read all three moments. Do they tell a coherent story about your leadership values? Do the behavioral commitments from all three moments align with each other and with the principles in your Leadership Operating Manual? If there are contradictions -- one moment taught you to move carefully while another taught you to act quickly -- examine the tension. The contradiction may reveal that you need different behaviors for different contexts, which is itself a leadership insight. Step five -- add to your Leadership Operating Manual. Create a 'Formative Moments' section. Document all three moments with their lessons and behavioral commitments. Over time, you can add more moments as you accumulate new formative experiences. This section becomes the foundation of your leadership identity -- the consciously examined experiences that drive your intentional leadership approach.

The three-moment structure (positive, negative, personal failure) implements what narrative psychologists call 'redemptive narrative construction' (McAdams, 2006) -- the process of building a coherent life narrative that integrates positive experiences (aspirational models), negative experiences (boundary-setting events), and personal failures (growth catalysts) into a unified identity story. Research by McAdams and McLean (2013) found that individuals who constructed coherent narratives from diverse life experiences showed higher levels of psychological well-being, greater ego resilience, and more consistent behavior across situations, because the narrative provided an integrative framework that connected past experiences to present behavior and future aspirations. The behavioral commitment format ('Because of this moment, I will always/never...') implements what Cialdini and Trost (1998) call 'the commitment and consistency principle' -- the psychological tendency to behave consistently with prior explicit commitments. Their research found that written commitments produced significantly higher follow-through rates than verbal commitments, and that commitments framed as identity statements ('this is who I am as a leader') were more durable than commitments framed as behavioral intentions ('this is what I plan to do'). The review-for-contradictions step (Step four) implements what Argyris (1991) calls 'double-loop learning' -- the practice of examining not just whether behavior matches espoused values (single-loop) but whether the espoused values themselves are internally consistent (double-loop). Argyris's research found that most professionals engaged exclusively in single-loop learning (adjusting behavior to match goals) while avoiding double-loop learning (questioning whether the goals themselves were consistent), which produced a pattern he called 'skilled incompetence' -- the ability to achieve stated objectives while systematically avoiding the deeper examination that would reveal contradictions in the objectives themselves.