Significance
Filed under: Core Values, Life Balance, Personal Development
We all need to ask ourselves what we really want out of life. For many it is success and all the outward benefits and rewards that come from achievement in the corporate culture of our day.
I will never forget an interview that I saw with Tom Brady after he had won his last Super Bowl. After he talked about all the fame and fortune he had achieved, he then made the following statement, “there has to be more to life than this.”
There is and it is called significance which is all about adding value to other people. I have talked with a lot of people near the very end of their lives.
The common denominator for all of these conversations is that when it is all said and done all that really matters is have we made a difference in the lives of other people.
Today if we are not careful we are in danger of reducing all of our important relationships down to a few words on voice mail, or a picture attachment to an email.
Can someone be professionally successful and realize personal significance at the same time? Absolutely.
Everyone who has accomplished both has come to the critical understanding that professional success is only the means to the end of having personal significance through helping other people.
Reaching Your Potential
From a personal standpoint one of the things I love doing is hiking. A hiker is somewhere between a camper and an adventure racer.
One of the great advantages of living in the Atlanta area for ten years is the close proximity to the Appalachian trail in the north Georgia mountains.
My favorite hiking story is about a great one day hike in the Alps. If you start early in the morning you can reach the summit and get back to the car before dark.
About half way up the mountain is this incredibly beautiful rest house where everyone eats a great lunch. The owner of the rest house has noticed an interesting pattern over the years. When everyone reaches the rest house they are all excited about reaching their goal of the summit.
They warm themselves by the fire and about half way through lunch somebody inevitably speaks out what many people are thinking. Ii think I will just stay here while you finish the climb and you can pick me up on the way back down. At that moment everyone must the make decision to stay or go.
For all those who stay the first few hours are incredible. They sit by the fire and tell mountain climbing stories about other great mountain climbers from the past. They may even reminisce about some of their great climbing experiences in the past.
By early afternoon the mood dramatically changes in the room and everyone becomes silent. One by one they make their way over to this huge window in the back of the lodge and they stand there and stare at the summit.
For you see it is at this painful moment that they realize they have settled for second best in their lives.
Someone has well said, “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
Family Matters
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development
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.
Leadership 21st Century
There has been a tremendous amount of change in the area of leadership over the last twenty years. We have moved from an industrial age to an information age to the present idea age.
People in the industrial age were primarily paid for what they did. In the information age they will be primarily paid for what they know and in the idea age how well they think.
Add to this mix the power of technology and the rise of the ever changing and highly competitive global economy and you get the new realities for leaders in the 21st century.
The real tragedy is that most corporate cultures today are still leading and managing from an old positional leadership model rather than a new participative one. Under this model the leaders at the top make all of the decisions and the followers at every level simply carry out their instructions.
These old models are designed around preventing failure rather than ensuring success. The process is trusted and valued more than the people within the organization.
This core belief about leadership results in trying to manage people with a carrot and stick mentality instead of leading them as the most valuable part of your team.
All effective leaders in the 21st century will prioritize hiring great people and then empowering them to make decisions and take risks or they will absolutely fail in this new global economy.
Character
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.
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.