Written by Senior Performance Consultant Natalie Macaluso
In elite sport, athletes don’t “fit in” development when their diary calms down. Training is non-negotiable. It’s the job. Yet when we asked a few hundred senior leaders on our recent webinar how often they purposefully work on their own leadership, the clear winner was… “quarterly” – with “I rarely have time” not far behind.
For senior leaders who spend their days championing development for everyone else, that gap really matters. Because when leadership growth is left to chance, unhelpful habits quietly bed in:
- People are promoted for technical excellence and then struggle to let go of that.
- There’s an unspoken assumption that “leadership will be instinctive”
- Technical training wins budget spend while so-called “soft” (human) skills play catch-up
Over time, that can show up in a few negative ways. Leaders can lose confidence, unsure if they’re doing it a “right way”. They may start over-stretching as they try to carry everything themselves. They become a higher risk of burnout at the exact level the organisation can least afford it.
Our recent webinar, Building Purposeful Leadership Habits for Peak Performance, was designed as a reset: 60 minutes to pause, zoom out and design your leadership habits for 2026 with the same rigour an Olympic crew brings to race day.
Below is a short recap we’re sharing to help you hit the ground running for 2026. Feel free to share it with your exec, HR or L&D community – we’re hoping it’s a source of useful guidance to change that trend and help leaders purposefully spend time nurturing their leadership skills.
1. Review your 2025 performance: Success Leaves Clues
In the session, I asked leaders to start not with weaknesses, but by asking,
“what you are you most proud of in 2025?”
Below are some examples from what people were sharing:
- Attracting and keeping incredible talent
- Developing high-performing global teams
- Giving stretch opportunities that unlocked people’s confidence
- Stepping back from the granular detail to truly lead
We encouraged leaders to then dig deeper into their wins:
For many, the ingredients included:
- Making time for 1:1s that go beyond status updates
- Giving clearer, more frequent feedback
- Balancing long and short-term priorities more deliberately
- Living the tone and values they want the team to emulate
The above isn’t just a feel-good exercise. It’s a performance discipline.
In sport, when a race is over, athletes rarely talk about the scoreboard – they talk about how they performed. The race result is history; performance ingredients are data.
That’s your starting point: before you let 2026 bury you in busy-ness, make sure you mine 2025 for the habits that are already working for you.
2. Get Curious About Your Recipe: Performance vs Results
A core principle from Co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis’ Sydney 2000 gold-medal story is that the crew didn’t aim to be the fastest athletes; they aimed to be the fastest learning crew.
Sport accepts a truth business often overlooks:
- If your rate of change is faster than the rate of change in your environment, performance and results improve.
- If your rate of change is slower, they decline.
To influence that, you have to separate:
- Results – revenue, NPS, engagement scores, promotion rates (largely lagging metrics and outside direct control)
- Performance – the specific, observable behaviours and decisions that sit firmly inside your control
In the webinar, we used a simple frame:
→ Results = Performance Ingredients x Consistency
The invitation was to get curious about your recipe.
- What are the 3–5 ingredients that make the biggest difference to your leadership impact?
- Which ones are you underplaying right now?
- If your team wrote the behaviours/ingredients that they see from you, would it match your list
This is where the conversation moves from “generic leadership competencies” to the sharp end of your role – the things that truly make your boat go faster in your context.
3. Take Control of Your 2026 High-Performance Plan
Rather than creating a long wish list, which dilutes focus, we asked leaders to choose two key performance ingredients they’d like to strengthen in 2026 – and then zoom in on just one to start.
From there, I posed a series of coaching questions which I talk through in the below video which you can run individually or with others you lead:
- On a scale of 1–10, where are you today on this ingredient?
- What would moving just one number higher look like in real behaviour?
- Where are the natural opportunities each week to practise it?
- Who can you enlist for support and feedback?
- How will you create space for it, if time is your biggest barrier?
- By when will you review your progress?
Leaders chose things like:
- Actively listening at my ‘level 10/10’, rather than listening while mentally drafting my next point
- Giving specific, stretch-focused feedback, not just “great job” as default
- Challenging upwards more confidently
- Carving out regular reflection time rather than only reacting
The emphasis was on incremental gains – the 1% shifts that compound over a year – not heroic overnight transformation.
As one leader put it in the chat as their commitment that they wanted to aim for:
Sometimes, the measure of success might just be a feeling, and that is fine. The self-check in is the kind of discipline that athletes treat as non-negotiable and the norm.
What’s at stake if you do – and if you don’t
When leaders take their own habits seriously, organisations see three big wins:
- Attracting and retaining talent – people feel seen, heard, stretched and invested in.
- Staying ahead of the competition – especially when your technical advantages can be copied, but your leadership habits can’t.
- Succession planning with confidence – you’re not just filling seats, you’re building capability.
We see it in programmes where participants finish by saying to their CEO, “Thank you for giving me the time and space to work on my leadership – it’s changed how I show up for work.” – and it’s why leadership development is so crucial in the task of looking after the talent you want to retain and nurture.
Your next 15 minutes
If you’re in the C-suite, or a senior HR/ People or L&D leader, here’s a simple way to turn this into action today:
- Pick one leadership ingredient you know will matter most in 2026.
- Score yourself out of 10.
- Define what “+1” looks like in those specific behaviours you identify in your performance recipe.
- Block 15 minutes in the coming weeks to review how often you actually did it.
High performance leadership won’t happen by accident in your organisation. But with clear ingredients, conscious habits and a simple plan, it will happen by design.
And, as we like to ask:
If you’d like to watch the full recording of my session you can do so here:
→ Webinar: Building Purposeful Leadership Habits for Peak Performance with Natalie Macaluso
