Leadership advice has a habit of accumulating. Read another book. Learn another framework. Build another capability. The assumption is simple: better leaders are built by adding more.
Yet ask experienced leaders what changed them most, and many point to something very different. Not a new skill they acquired, but an old habit they left behind.
Sometimes growth begins not by learning something new, but by letting go of something that no longer serves you. Defending every decision. Assuming the loudest voice has the best idea. Believing long hours equal commitment. Or thinking a leader must always have the answers.
For this week’s Friday Feature, we asked three HR leaders a simple question: What is one habit you consciously gave up that made you a better leader? Their answers are less about leadership theory and more about moments most professionals will recognise. The quiet realisations that reshape how people lead, often without anyone noticing.
When I stopped defending myself
Vinod Rai, Group Head HR, Shahi Exports
Early in his managerial career, every business review felt like an examination. Whenever senior leaders questioned his team’s work, Vinod Rai’s instinct was immediate: explain, justify and defend every decision. What he believed was confidence often came across as resistance to feedback.
Ironically, the turning point came not in the boardroom but at home.
His wife noticed a pattern he hadn’t seen himself.
She pointed out that not every question was an attack. People asking questions were usually trying to understand a situation, not challenge the person responsible for it.
The advice was deceptively simple.
Instead of reacting, Rai began pausing. He listened before responding. Questions stopped feeling like criticism and started becoming opportunities to understand a situation better.
Over time, the change transformed not only his conversations with senior leaders but also the trust he built with colleagues and his own team.
Whether it’s a client challenging a proposal or a manager questioning a presentation, the instinct is familiar. Defend first. Reflect later.
Rai discovered that the pause between those two reactions is often where better leadership begins.
When yesterday’s strengths became today’s blind spots
Ravi Mishra, Head HR, BITS Pilani
For Ravi Mishra, unlearning is rarely about abandoning one specific habit. It’s about recognising when behaviours that once made leaders successful quietly begin holding them back.
Every leadership habit has a backstory. Some are shaped by upbringing. Others by early career experiences. A leader who grew up in a highly hierarchical workplace may find delegation uncomfortable because control once felt like security. Another who built a career during uncertain times may instinctively hold on to information because that approach had worked before.
The challenge is that workplaces evolve much faster than habits do.
Mishra has watched senior managers transform, even after decades in leadership, once they realised their old approaches were no longer connecting with younger teams. In one instance, a colleague casually described a CEO as an “old-timer manager”. The remark was enough to make that leader fundamentally rethink how he engaged with people.
It wasn’t a formal intervention. It wasn’t a leadership programme. It was one honest observation that arrived at exactly the right moment.
As Mishra points out, acquiring knowledge is relatively easy. Reading about a new leadership model takes an afternoon. Rewiring behaviours reinforced over decades takes something far more demanding: honest feedback, self-awareness and the willingness to accept that yesterday’s strengths may not be today’s advantage.
When solving every problem became the problem
Shaleen Manik, CHRO, Transsion India
For years, Shaleen Manik believed good leaders solved problems quickly.
Whenever employees came to him with an issue, he responded with an answer. It felt efficient. Over time, however, he realised he was solving problems faster than people were learning to solve them themselves.
So he changed his approach.
Instead of offering solutions, he began asking questions.
Why is this happening?
What options have you considered?
What do you think will work?
More often than not, people found the answer themselves.
The shift changed more than his own leadership style. It changed the confidence of his teams. People stopped waiting for direction and started trusting their own judgement.
It’s a lesson many managers, and parents for that matter, will recognise. Stepping in is easier. Stepping back demands patience. But it often develops far more capable people.
That wasn’t the only habit Manik let go of. He also stopped measuring commitment by the number of hours people spent at their desks, choosing instead to judge outcomes. And he stopped assuming the loudest voice carried the best idea, making deliberate space for quieter contributors whose perspectives might otherwise have been overlooked.
Leadership grows through subtraction too
The hardest habits to break are usually the invisible ones.
They settle into daily behaviour so gradually that they stop feeling like habits at all. They begin to feel like personality. “That’s just how I work.”
Looking across these stories, one thing stands out. None of these leaders became better because they added another framework or mastered another leadership model. They became better because they let go of something that had quietly outlived its usefulness.
Leadership often feels like a race to acquire more.
More knowledge. More skills. More experience. The harder discipline is knowing what to leave behind. Because the habit that helped you become a leader isn’t always the one that helps you remain one.
What is one habit you gave up that made you a better leader? Share it in the comments