Credibility The Foundation For Leadership
Filed under: Core Values, Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Servant Leader
There are many leadership qualities that must be present in the leader if people are going to trust them to the point of following. It is very important to be committed, competent and inspiring but without credibility especially today people will see you as a fake and be totally turned off.
The bottom line is regardless of how visionary the message if they cannot believe in the messenger then trust is destroyed. People may show up for work but their heart is not in it and although they seem positive in front of superiors they are constantly critical with their peers in private.
If leaders are to maintain credibility they have to walk the talk and personally practice what they preach. When their actions are inconsistent with their words and they do not follow through on their promises then they are no longer seen as authentic.
When team members work on a project for a long time and produce great results only to see the leader take an inappropriate amount of the credit they feel burned. They want to see leaders who give credit to others and assume personal responsibility when they make mistakes.
If the leader is seen as real when things are not going well people will give them the benefit of the doubt every time. When leaders are hypocritical and things are even going well they will get polite support but in reality they have lost the confidence of their team and sadly don’t even know it.
When To Quit
Filed under: Core Values, Leadership Callling, Personnel Development
As Seth Godin points out we have all heard the expression winners never quit and quitters never win. In real life that is simply not true because knowing when to quit something that is clearly not working is the secret to winning because it gets you one step closer to the one thing that you were meant to do with your life.
Many times we take jobs thinking that we have finally found the answer to what do I want to do with my career? Many months later we realize that what we expected was wrong. We should never quit just because the work is challenging and the people with whom we work are not the best.
However when you have done your best and the day to day responsibilities that you have been assigned are not bringing any challenge or lasting value then you need to find something that you can be passionate about doing. Our work should be something we care about to the point that we look forward to going in every day because what we do really matters.
Sometimes we really like what we do but the team of people we are doing it with are merely takers and not givers. They are out for number one and there is an atmosphere of backbiting , constant stress and negative criticism that drives the culture of the organization. No matter how much you like what you do if you cannot enjoy the journey with the people you are doing it with it is simply not worth it.
Becoming a serial quitter for all the wrong reasons can be a fatal character flaw that will negatively impact your entire life. Quitting for the right reason can be the best thing you have ever done because it can lead you to a brighter future.
Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Personal Development
This is the seventh in a series of ten posts on promises we should be willing to make to the people that matter the most in our lives. A promise goes beyond a mere commitment to do something it carries the clear expectation that we are going to pay the price to do what we said we would do.
The first promise was I will sincerely listen to what you have to say. Really listening to someone without a personal agenda communicates to them that they have value in your life and that you sincerely care.
The second promise was I will always tell you the truth. Without this there can be no basis of trust, just ask Elizabeth Edwards how painful that can be.
The third promise is I will apologize when I am wrong. When someone sincerely and genuinely apologizes we know two things. They are willing to humble themselves and they want to restore their relationship with us because we still matter to them.
The forth promise is I will forgive you when you hurt me. There can be no lasting peace in any relationship without the power of forgiveness. This is even more critical when someone has come to us and sincerely apologized they are asking without saying it will you please forgive me.
The fifth promise is I will live with hope and believe the best. Relationships are messy and there are always going to be times when people do or say things that upset us. It is at that precise moment that we have a critical choice to make about how we process what we are hearing. The bottom line is we will either choose to believe the best about the other person or we will assume the worst.
The sixth promise is I will not manipulate change in you. This deals with our core motivation when we interact with other people. If our goal in sharing with this person is to only tell them what they are doing wrong and why they should be the one to change then we are manipulating.
The seventh promise is I will always love you no matter what. This lets the other person know that our love for them is not based on what they do or how they act but who they are as a person.
It in the truest sense it is unconditional love based on grace given and not performance earned. This gives people the freedom to fail in their relationship with us without the fear of total rejection on our part because of some mistake they have made.
It is impossible to love someone in this way unless you have first received this kind of love yourself. Once you have experience God’s love you have the capacity to pass it own to others. You cannot give to someone else what you have not first received yourself.
Practicing Feedforward
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Personnel Development
Almost every serious organization uses some form of feedback to evaluate the performance of their top leadership team. This usually works best in a 360 type environment where the person receives feedback from superiors, peers and subordinates as well.
The concept of feedforward was developed by Marshall Goldsmith in his best seller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There about how to coach senior executives. He encourages every leader to identify core behaviors that need to change through feedback. Then apologize for your mistake and commit to change that character quality in the future.
The primary way he recommends to accomplish this is through the four disciplines in feedforward:
1. Identify Target Behavior—choose the one behavior that your colleagues have told you about that you consider to be at the top of your list for change. The number one issue among the thousands of people he has worked with is to be a better listener.
2. Enlist Accountability Partners—the key here is to secure a personal commitment from as many people as possible to help you in this particular area. This should include family members as well as various levels of people within the organization where you work. They will all commit to help you focus on this one specific area and help you with ongoing feedback.
3. Solicit Specific Suggestions—ask everyone in your accountability circle for at least two suggestions that might help you achieve a positive change in your selected behavior. The key ground rule here is that there should be no mention of mistakes in the past but every comment is about the future.
4. Practice Active Listening—take appropriate notes if necessary but make sure you are really listening to each and every suggestion to the point that you can put it into practice. Also it is very important regardless of the quality of the input to be sure to graciously thank everyone involved who will take the time and emotional risk of telling you what you really need to hear.
Level Five Leaders
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Servant Leader
In my opinion the best organizational leadership book that has been written is Good to Great by Jim Collins. It proves beyond any doubt some things we have always know about effective leadership but he discovers some key principles that fly in the face of everything we have been taught in the past.
One thing that is really not new but clearly prioritized in his book is the importance of character in the life of any leader. Character ensures that the motives of the leader are always focused on what is best for the people they are leading and not for themselves.
The most significant myth that this book destroys about great leaders is that they all must be very outgoing cheerleader type personalities and that they have to lead with an authoritarian dictatorial style to be effective.
According to Collins, “Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”
This personality type should never be mistaken for laid back soft leaders who don’t have the strength to make the hard calls. As a matter of fact they combine humility with an incredible strong will to make sure the right things are getting done. If they have to they would fire their mother if that is what was necessary for the long term benefit of the organization.
They also give credit to others when things are going well and when they are not they assume personal responsibility. This combination of personal humility and professional will make for the type of leader anyone would want to follow.
Problems With The Boss
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Servant Leader
All of us have worked at some point in time for someone who at worst just could not get it done or at best was personality challenged. We come into our jobs with the hope that we can be a part of the solution and yet there are times when we don’t see the progress we had hoped for.
I changed jobs three times in the first five years out of college because I thought the problem was external. If I could just get with the right company with a great boss then I would be successful. To my shock I realized that the real problems were internal and I was simply carrying all of my personal issues from one company to the next expecting different results.
These are some of the things I have learned over the years about problems with the boss:
1. Check Your Motives—make sure that your real agenda is to do what is best for the organization and not for yourself. When you make it a priority to help make your boss successful then it becomes a win-win for everyone.
2. Keep It Real—when things are not changing at the pace you had hoped you have a choice to make. You can get your feelings hurt and start telling people what they want to hear and emotionally quit or you can have the character to tell the truth with a respectful attitude.
3. Watch Your Tongue—if you allow your concerns to become public in an inappropriate way then you just became part of the problem and not part of the solution. You should never say anything negative about another person to someone else because it will only spread disunity and destroy team moral.
4. Do Your Job—when we get in the negative cycle not only are we causing problems for other people we are not focused on getting our own jobs done with excellence. We must show up every day with a clean heart and high level of commitment to be and do our best.
I can promise you it is not in your job description to change your boss or even your organization for that matter. What is there is a clear set of priorities that need to be done by a person who is mature enough to stay positive when things don’t go their way and passionate enough to never settle for anything less than their personal best every day.
Work-Life Balance
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development
If there has ever been a day when the demands of work and home have been greater I am not aware of it. The sheer pace of life today leaves us emotionally and physically worn out and feeling empty at the end of most days.
Technology keeps us connected all the time and people in the workplace culture almost demand that we stay available 24-7. Our families are all running on the same high speed treadmill that produces stress in every area of our lives.
There are several key principles that must be in place if you want to create margin for the people and priorities that you care about the most:
1. Lead Yourself First—it is impossible to successfully help lead other people at work or in the home if you are not able to accomplish what is most important in your own life. You should set specific goals in the areas of health, personal development and faith with the necessary time allotment to make sure they get done.
2. Prioritize Your Family Next—at the end of your life it will not matter how much professional success you have had if you consistently neglected your role as a spouse and parent. There are no guarantees that time alone will produce a great marriage and character driven children but without it there is a high probability that both areas could fail.
3. Choose Right Career—most organizations are looking for people who will perform and improve their bottom line. However there is a growing awareness that if you want to attract and keep the best people you have to give some deference to work-life balance. The key is you have to be outstanding at what you do and you have to be in a culture that will reward that effort by giving you more time off and not more projects to accomplish.
4. Develop Life Plan—it never ceases to amaze me that some of the most effective leaders in the corporate arena do not practice any of the leadership disciplines that made them successful in their home and personal life. The can lead multi-million dollar projects from start to finish at work but not take more than 30 minutes to plan the annual family vacation.
When you develop a total life plan with goals and strategies for everything personal, private and public you just assumed the C.E.O. leadership role for your whole life. You will never have a more important job.
Lessons From Michael Jackson
Filed under: Core Values, Financial Stewardship, Life Balance, Personal Development
We have all been affected by the sudden death of Michael Jackson in different ways. Some of us feel compassion for the children who are left behind to grow up in the huge shadow of their father. Others are feeling regret for such a waste of a very talented person who lost so much of what really matters during his life.
Most of us will never have to deal with all of the things that Michael did that come with being a famous celebrity who earns millions of dollars in income. However we all have to deal with the life issues that he faced:
1. Resolve Past Hurts—if you do not deal with the pain from when people close to you have failed you when you were growing up then you will surely carry those open wounds into adulthood. The tragedy for all of us is when the core issues that we are dealing with as adults are really problems that surfaced many years ago but were never appropriately resolved.
2. Trust Right People—show me who your friends are and I can tell you a lot about your character. The temptation for all of us is to surround ourselves with people who tell us all that we want to hear but they really don’t care enough to tell us the truth. These people make us feel good for the moment but leave us eventually broken and empty when the fun runs out.
3. Develop Core Values—there is no doubt in my mind that many times Michael wanted to do the right thing and really wanted to help people. When you don’t have a solid foundation to build on you will consistently make very bad decisions that seem extremely inconsistent with whom you want to be as a person.
4. Decide How Much Is Enough—driven people are never satisfied because they are trying to satisfy their deepest needs with things that can never bring real peace and fulfillment in life. If you are not content with what you have now there is no reason to believe you will be in the future regardless of how much you get.
Michael Jackson’s legacy will be a hotly debated subject for years to come. Some only see the bad and others refuse to say anything was wrong at all. Will the people closest to you be debating your legacy when you are gone or will they all agree it was a life well spent.
Corporate Shepherd
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Leading Change, Life Balance, Personal Development, Servant Leader
There are many leaders today that want to move beyond just making a profit to really making a difference. They want to be successful and that’s great but they also want the significance that only comes from adding value to other people.
When leadership is approached from a Christian perspective a new model starts to develop where the leader becomes more of a shepherd to their people than a boss to their employees. They do care about performance and productivity but they also feel responsible for developing alignment around core values and creating the right culture for work-life balance for their people.
They also see life beyond the immediate pressures of planning, project management, staffing, goal setting and execution. The legacy they want to create for their life and organization includes eternal metrics that must be included when talking about the ultimate bottom line.
The clear plan for every Christian is to use your professional life as a platform for ministry because we are all in full time Christian service. Our lives should no longer be seen as segmented into faith, family, friends, recreation and entertainment but become totally integrated into being one life on mission for God. The various roles that we fulfill are no longer competing with each other but complimenting the calling God has for our lives.
In the end there is only one performance review that really matters. The evaluation criteria is simple, How faithful were you with all that I entrusted to your care? Thinking about that moment should overwhelm us with gratitude and give us a renewed sense of passion to hear well done my good and faithful servant.
Love & Respect
There have been a lot of great marriage books written over the last twenty years. The Marriage Builder by Larry Crabb is probably the best based on how our individual needs for security and significance impact our relationship with our spouse.
Love & Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs is extremely good from the standpoint of giving a simple foundational framework for the major role that each partner needs to play in the marriage. Then the book gives lots of practical applications and illustrations on how to live this out in real world.
He writes that the husband should love his wife by:
1. Closeness—she wants you to be close
2. Openness—she wants you to open up to her
3. Understanding—don’t try to fix her; just listen
4. Peacemaking—she wants you to say, “I’m Sorry”
5. Loyalty—she needs to know you’re committed
6. Esteem—she wants you to honor and cherish her
The wife should respect her husband by:
1. Conquest—appreciate his desire to work and achieve
2. Hierarchy—appreciate his desire to protect and provide
3. Authority—appreciate his desire to serve and to lead
4. Insight—appreciate his desire to analyze and counsel
5. Relationship—appreciate his desire for shoulder-to-shoulder friendship
6. Sexuality—appreciate his desire for sexual intimacy
One of the very helpful points that he continues to make throughout the book is just because our needs make us so different that does not make either of us wrong. When we assume the best about our spouse’s motives then we can give them the benefit of the doubt when they fall short of giving us what we want and need.