Resignation
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.
People Skills
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Personnel Development
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.
Pride
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.
The Power of Vision
My home town for all practical purposes is Tuscumbia, Alabama. Our number one and only claim to fame is we are the birthplace of Helen Keller. On CNN web site recently there was a story about researchers who had uncovered this rare photograph of a young Helen Keller with her teacher Anne Sullivan, nearly 120 years after it was taken on Cape Cod.
Helen was born blind and had to overcome many difficult obstacles in her life. In spite of all the hardship she lived and very meaningful and rewarding life that impacted a lot of other people in a very positive way.
Helen was once asked, can you think of anything worse than being born blind? Her immediate answer was, to have sight and yet lack vision for your life. The overwhelming majority of people you know have physical sight but do they clearly see all the things that are really important in life.
What vision do you have for your life? Please tell me it is more than going to work, coming home and watching T.V. and then going to bed. There are so many important things to be done and hurting people that need to be touched.
Can you see them?
Marginless Living
Filed under: Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development
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.