The Anatomy of a Sustainable Leadership Practice

Most leadership practices don’t fail because they’re poorly chosen, they fail because they aren’t consciously chosen.

Most leaders that I’ve met don’t have practices that they consciously choose, or at least that they’ve told me about. And that’s something, considering I’ve been in leadership nearly half of my career. Those who were mentoring, guiding, and teaching newer, younger, more inexperienced leaders didn’t choose to participate in leadership practices, or weren’t aware of themselves even having practices to be able to pass them down.

Not all leadership practices look the same, as not all leaders look the same. The leadership practices that I’m talking about are the ones meant to shift behavior, change identity, improve performance, and hold steady under pressure — all at once. They’re often designed in moments of clarity that don’t resemble the conditions they’re expected to survive. As I’ve often said, you find out what doesn’t work when things are tough. 

You might have created your leadership practice through an insight. You feel motivated and decide “this is what I’m going to do differently.” And for a while, it works.

Then the pace picks up, the calendar fills, something unexpected always happens and the practice gets skipped once, then twice, and eventually…. disappears. Not in a dramatic way. It just fades out, replaced by whatever feels most urgent in the moment. Usually unnoticed until months later, when you have the epiphany that you haven’t done the practice in a long time.

This happens to experienced leaders all the time.

Not because they lack discipline, or that they don’t care, but because the practice was never designed to sustain the turbulence of real life, and it wasn’t prioritized in your accountability.

This month, I want to slow the conversation down and look at what tends to get skipped entirely: what makes a practice sustainable — not what makes it aspirational, not what looks impressive, but what makes it capable of lasting when things get messy.

A Different Way to Think About “Practice”

When I use the word practice, I’m not talking about a mindset or an intention.

I’m talking about a specific behavior or action, repeated over time. In my opinion, one of the best ways to explain what I mean is by an equation. 

A practice = Specific behavior or action + repeated on a specific frequency + for a specific amount of time + until a certain date + with some structure of accountability for that action. 

A practice is something you can point to and say, That’s what I do. Not That’s what I value. Not That’s what I think I should do. That’s what I do. 

If the behavior isn’t clear, it’s not a practice. If it can’t be repeated, it’s not a practice. If it only works when you’re motivated and things are going well, it won’t last.

This distinction matters because a lot of what gets called “practice” is actually aspiration. And aspirations don’t survive pressure very well.

Practices Fail Quietly, Not All at Once

One of the reasons this topic matters is because failed practices don’t usually announce themselves. Most of the time, there’s no clear moment where you say, I’ve decided to stop doing this, just a gradual erosion.

You miss a day because something came up. Then you miss another because you’re tired.
Then you tell yourself you’ll restart next week. Eventually, the practice becomes something you vaguely remember intending to do.

What’s important here is that most people interpret this as a personal failure. They assume they didn’t want it badly enough, or that they weren’t disciplined, or that they just need a better system.

In reality, what usually failed was the design.

The practice required too much effort relative to the support around it. It relied on remembering, on motivation, on choosing it again and again in competition with everything else which, as it turns out, isn’t sustainable. 

Why Motivation Is a Terrible Foundation

A lot of leadership and habit conversations still lean heavily on motivation, even when they claim not to. Motivation to be committed. Motivated to be intentional and mindful. While those things DO matter, they aren’t a stable foundation to build practices on.

Motivation fluctuates. Energy varies. Emotional bandwidth changes day to day. If a practice only works when you feel aligned, clear, and calm, it’s not going to survive a normal week — let alone a difficult season. And this is exactly where well-intentioned practices quietly break down. 

When you created the practices you assumed that you would remember to do them. You assumed that you would want to do it, and notice when you didn’t. You assumed that it was a priority over all the other noise. 

That’s a mighty tall ask of someone who’s already carrying a full load.

Sustainable practices won’t assume you stay in ideal conditions. They assume that distraction, resistance, and competing demands will be there constantly— and they’re built to function anyway.

The Role of Design (And Why It’s Usually Ignored)

Most practices don’t fail because no design was involved. They fail because the design happened by default.

People don’t usually sit down and intentionally design a practice that’s hard to sustain. Most often we’ll design a practice that gets shaped around ideal conditions — more time, more energy, fewer interruptions — without anyone noticing that those conditions are temporary.

The practice works at first, which reinforces the belief that it’s a good one. But as reality presses in, the design starts to show its flaws. It requires remembering. It depends on motivation. It competes with everything else. And slowly, it stops fitting the life it’s meant to live inside.

The practices that last aren’t necessarily better chosen.
They’re better designed.

When you take constraints seriously — limited time, fluctuating energy, crowded attention, imperfect environments - not as obstacles to overcome, but as conditions to design around, you can create sustainable leadership practices. In my experience, sustainable practices tend to share certain qualities — not because someone followed a formula, but because the design accounted for reality instead of fighting it.

They’re Smaller Than You Think They Should Be

One of the biggest mistakes people make is designing practices that reflect who they want to become, rather than who they are right now. They find a practice that is meaningful, that will improve something in their life. But the practice is so ambitious that it’s slightly too big to be repeated consistently.

Practices that last tend to feel almost underwhelming at first. They don’t create a dramatic sense of progress. They don’t make you feel like you’re “doing enough.”

What they do is survive resistance.

They still happen on bad days, they still happen when you’re busy. We like to refer to this as The Goldilocks Zone. When a practice is intentionally designed to be possible when you’re annoyed, tired, distracted, or just don’t want to.

They Have a Structure to Live in

Practices that float tend to disappear. Practices that are anchored in structure tend to last.

Structuring doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as assigning:

• A specific time of day
• A particular meeting
• A recurring event

What matters is that the practice doesn’t have to compete for attention every time. It has a place.

When a practice has a home, you don’t have to decide whether to do it. You only decide how to engage with it when the moment arrives.

That alone removes a surprising amount of friction.

They Make It Obvious When They Happened

Ambiguity is one of the fastest ways to erode a practice.

If you’re not sure whether you did it “well enough,” or whether it counted, or whether you’ll do it later, you leave room for renegotiation.

Practices that stick tend to have a clear signal:

• It happened or it didn’t
• It’s done or it’s not
• It’s visible in some way

This means you don’t have to worry about tracking or measuring for performance, reducing the internal debate that drains energy over time.

When “done” is clear, follow-through becomes simpler.

They Don’t Ask You to Care Every Time

This one is subtle, but important - practices that rely on meaning in the moment are fragile. There will be days when the practice feels relevant and days when it feels tedious. Sustainable practices don’t require you to feel inspired each time.

They work because they’re repeatable, not because they’re profound. Over time, the meaning often shows up after the repetition, not before. I’ve often found that some of the most impactful transformations that have occurred for me and those I’ve worked with comes from watching how you do the practice, and what your experience of doing the practice is, not the results that it gets in the end.

It’s not the destination that provides transformation, it’s the journey and how you navigate it. 

Why This Matters Specifically for Leadership

Leadership practices are especially vulnerable to collapse because they’re often layered on top of already complex roles. They’re meant to change how decisions are made, how conversations happen, how people are held accountable — all in environments where time is limited and stakes are real.

If a leadership practice adds cognitive load, it will eventually be overridden by urgency. If it requires constant self-monitoring, it will fatigue. If it depends on the leader being “on,” it won’t survive long.

The practices that last are the ones that quietly shape behavior without demanding constant attention. They change the default.

Sustainable Practices Change What’s Normal

A part that often gets overlooked is that when a practice finally sticks, it doesn’t feel like effort anymore. It starts to feel like how things are done. The behavior becomes normal, expected, even boring.

That’s not a failure of the practice. That’s real success. It’s a lasting behavioral change that you created, and implemented. 

Leadership shifts don’t usually arrive with a sense of accomplishment. They arrive with a sense of less friction. Fewer things to manage. Fewer decisions to re-make. Fewer moments of internal debate.

That’s what sustainability actually looks like.

Setting the Context for the Rest of the Month

Over the rest of this month, we’re going to look more closely at how practices are designed — not in abstraction, but in reality.

But before any of that matters, it’s worth pausing with a more basic question: Is the practice you’re trying to build designed for the life you’re actually living?

Not the one you plan for in January, or when things calm down. The real one, with interruptions, pressure, and competing demands. Sustainable leadership change doesn’t come from better intentions, it comes from practices that were designed to last long enough to matter.

Inquiries, Actions, and Practices

If practices stick because of design, not effort, then the work here isn’t to try harder.
It’s to look more honestly at what you’re building — and what you’re building it on.

The following inquiries, actions, and practices are meant to slow that down just enough to make design visible.

Choose at least one IAP to engage with. 

INQUIRIES: To Explore the Design You’re Already Living Inside

These are not questions to answer or resolve.
They’re questions to stay with, ideally in conversation with at least one other person.

There’s no right response. There’s no outcome to land on. The value is in noticing what becomes visible when you stop trying to fix anything.

What does the design of my current practices assume about my time, energy, and attention?

or

Where am I relying on motivation to compensate for a design that doesn’t actually fit my life?

Let these questions unfold slowly. Notice where you feel defensive, dismissive, or relieved.
Those reactions are part of the inquiry. Real discovery tends to happen when there’s no agenda.

ACTIONS: To Surface Where Design Is Failing

Choose one. Don’t improve it yet. Just make it visible.

Make a simple list of every practice or routine you currently have in place.

Not the ones you intend to do, or the ones you wish you were consistent with.
Only the ones that are actually happening.

Include anything that shapes how you work or lead — daily habits, weekly rhythms, standing check-ins, recurring meetings, personal rules you follow without thinking.

Don’t assess, optimize, collate, or make them mean anything, just get them out of your head and onto paper.

Find Where the Practice Breaks First
Notice which practice or routine is the first to go when things get busy or stressful — the one you’re always able to find a reason to skip or miss.

Write the name of that practice down exactly as it exists today.

Leave it on your desk or somewhere you’ll see it for the rest of the week without changing anything about it.

Move a Practice Out of Your Head
Take one practice you mentally track and write it somewhere external — a whiteboard, note, or shared document.
Leave it there unchanged for one week.

PRACTICES: To Experiment With Sustainability

These are not commitments to lock in forever, they are experiments.  Each one is a deliberate behavior designed to test whether a different structure produces a different outcome. You’re not trying to get it right. You’re trying to learn what actually works in your real life.

Choose at least one.

—

For the next four weeks, take one existing practice and intentionally reduce it.

Make it smaller, or simpler but the intent is to make it easier to repeat. 

Run the reduced version consistently and see whether it survives the moments when the original version didn’t.

—

For the next month, set a 10-minute timer twice per week and work only on something you’ve been avoiding.

Stop exactly when the timer ends, regardless of progress. Do not extend the time. This tests whether constrained effort reduces resistance.

Design, Test, Adjust

If there’s one thing to carry forward from this, it’s that sustainable change rarely comes from finding the right practice. It comes from being willing to design, test, and revise practices in response to real conditions. When practices are treated as experiments, failure stops being personal and becomes informative. Some will hold. Some won’t. That’s expected. Over time, what emerges isn’t a perfect system, but a set of practices that actually fit the life you’re living — and that fit is what makes change possible to sustain.

Alex Bednar is an Executive Coach specializing in Leadership Development. Connect with Alex at www.AndreaBednar.com for more insights on conscious leadership and operational excellence.