Category Archive: Personal Leadership

Family Matters

Posted by on January 19, 2009

I have never known a successful leader who did not know how to establish goals, develop plans, execute priorities and finally evaluate success in their career.  The old saying about goals is true, if you cannot measure them, then they really don’t matter.

However, tragically for most people that is exactly what happens to them in their personal lives.  They say this part is ultimately the most important but they never take the time to write down what they want their legacy to be for the people that matter the most.

Because the personal does not get the priority of the professional the family usually ends up with the leftovers.  Leftover time, passion, affection and energy.

I have know people who can make million dollar decisions at work without blinking but by the time they get home they do not have enough emotional energy  to decide if they want hamburgers or soup for dinner.  They have been nice to other people all day, co-workers, suppliers and customers only to come home and be so fried they have to retreat to the T.V. because they have nothing left for spouse or children.

Someone has well said that the person who cannot see the ultimate always becomes a slave to the immediate.  Meaningful relationships with family and bottom line professional results are not mutually exclusive but you must be willing to pay personal leadership price to have both.

 

Categories: Core Values Marriage Pastoral Leadership Personal Leadership Servant Leader Work Life Integration | Comments Off on Family Matters

Character

Posted by on January 15, 2009

Simply put everything you eventually accomplish in life will be based upon you personal leadership DNA.  What you do is based upon who you are.

Someone has well said:  ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.  If you do not believe that then just ask the former governor of New York.

I had to learn the importance of this lesson very early in my career.  I changed jobs four times in five years right out of college because I did not realize that the major problem was not the company I was working for or the supervisor that I had, the problem was me.

All I did was move from company to company and take all of my unresolved character problems with me expecting different results.  I learned the hard way that if you are consistently failing where you are there is no real reason to believe that you will be successful somewhere else.

However, if you learn how to be successful where you are regardless of your circumstances and become an A Player then there is every reason to believe that you can be successful anywhere.

 

 

 

Categories: Core Values Personal Leadership | Comments Off on Character

Resignation

Posted by on January 12, 2009

If you are an A player as defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great you are a character driven leader.  This means that you are willing to set aside any personal agenda for the good of the team and the organization.

It also means that as a leader you are by nature a change agent.  You want to deal with the brutal facts facing your team and find new solutions to old problems.

In some situations the people that you report to are not as open to change.  This is where your character must lead you to deal with this situation in the right way.

The right way is to approach you boss directly and openly share what you are recommending to do and why.  The absolute wrong way is to talk about your superiors to someone else in any negative way that would be disloyal.

If after a long period of respectful dialogue you are not sensing any openness to change within the culture of the organization then your decision is clear.  What you must not do is to try to change your boss, that is not in your job description.

A players realize one fundamental truth about organizational culture.  You will over time help be a part of a team effort that will change it for good or if you stay too long in the wrong culture it will change you.  That is an unacceptable price to pay and that is why it’s time to leave.

 

 

Categories: Pastoral Leadership Personal Leadership Staff Development | Comments Off on Resignation

People Skills

Posted by on December 20, 2008

When you are evaluating any leader’s effectiveness you tend to look at two major categories that summarize everything else.  They are the character that defines the core values of the person and the competency or skill set that they bring to the position.

Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His latest book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a great read for all leaders who want to reach their maximum potential.  He identifies twenty habits that can completely destroy your influence as a leader.

The amazing thing that he confirms for all of us is that the most critical problems related to executive leadership have very little to do with core industry specific competency or even the expected qualities of productive leadership.

The overwhelming majority of smart, disciplined, experienced and passionate leaders are failing in the one major area of basic people skills.  They do not relate well to their superiors, peers, subordinates and sometimes even customers.

They do not listen, make negative comments about people when they are not in the room, and always tend to punish the messenger when bad news is delivered just to list a few.  Almost always these potential fatal flaws are obvious to everyone but the leader who does not even see them as an issue.

An absolute necessity for any effective leader is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed.

 

 

Categories: Career Development Personal Leadership Staff Development | Comments Off on People Skills

Pride

Posted by on December 16, 2008

Pride is a terrible thing.  It causes you to focus only on what is in your personal interest and blinds you to the reality of what you are doing to hurt other people.

The public spectacle that played out in the news concerning Reverend Wright and Barack Obama was been painful to watch. In this tragedy you have two people who once genuinely cared for each other now forced to publicly attack the other person because of what has been said.

Pride also causes you to lose touch with the truth about yourself and what you really believe.  You literally become like the thing you hate but you cannot see it.

The great irony about some of the positions being advocated by the Reverend Wright on the extreme right of black liberation theology is they are really no different than those of other hate speech being advocated by the leaders of the extreme right of white liberation theology.

The only difference between the two groups is literally the color of their skin and if they heard that they would deny it to the death.  What should we all take away from this?

This is not a story just about politics.  It is about every relationship we have in our lives.

When you think the other person is always wrong and you are always right be careful.  The reason you may be able to see their faults is because you are looking at them through the mirror of your own life.

We as Christians are told to always clean up our own issues before we  even begin to criticize someone else.  God does resist the proud but he will give His grace to the humble.

Categories: Personal Leadership Spiritual Growth | Comments Off on Pride

Marginless Living

Posted by on December 2, 2008

In yesterday’s blog I talked about the need to create margin in our lives.  Margin is the space that used to exist in all of our lives between all the physical, emotional and mental pressures of every day and our capacity to respond in a meaningful way to all of the people and circumstances that we must address.

The lack of margin is exactly the opposite when we have too many demands and not enough resources.  For most of us the public parts of our lives centered around our work life demands its percentage first.  I know people who can make million dollar decisions all day long at the office only to be so spent by the end of the day they can’t even decide if they want pizza or hamburgers for dinner.

They put other people first all day whether they are customers or co-workers only to come home with nothing left for a lonely spouse or stressed out children.  We may feel successful at times because of all the public praise that comes with making your numbers but at the end of the day we know something is terribly wrong.

Whatever it takes all of us must find the courage to stake out some core values that are non-negotiable.  This will allow us maybe for the first time in our lives to have the margin we need to live the life we want rather than the one someone else has scripted for us.

You have the capacity to write your own script, so take out your pen and start writing.

Categories: Marriage Pastoral Leadership Personal Leadership Servant Leader Work Life Integration | Comments Off on Marginless Living