Success Or Mediocrity: Your Choice - 9 Action Steps for Accelerating Business Success

---

Who cares what others are doing? The only question that matters is, Am I progressing? Become the architect of your future. Because as you know more, you can achieve more. It threatens their security and spotlights their low self-worth. Go for great, no matter what they say. What takes guts is to see the best in people. Your rituals are creating your results. Start to think big picture and see yourself as the business owner you want to become. While you still cannot ignore essential details, as an entrepreneur you need to think beyond the obvious and the small, so that you spot both the opportunities and traps that lie ahead.

As an employee you were part of a larger machine, responsible for undertaking a particular activity. If you did this to the correct standard, then you had done your job. Aim for progress not security. Be willing and ready to embrace change. When you are an employee you become accustomed to the status quo, so when things change uncertainty follows. At its worst, this could even mean that redundancy follows. Measure of a Leader. Kevin Eikenberry maintains a blog on his web site and on the Remarkable Leadership web site. The final part will be posted on Friday.

The Kevin Eikenberry Interview Part 1. Developing a Respectful Mind. Ignition Points How do you lead in a situation where you are not in control? The answer is a qualified no. Thompson defines seven ignition points—functions or tools you can develop and use to create unique value to your organization. The Acid Test of Leadership. The Courage to Initiate Relying on a single person to lead the charge reflects a dysfunctional concept of leadership.

No one person can do everything. No wise leader would. Leadership is a group activity. There is an implied interdependency. Everyone has the capacity for leadership. Often what most people lack is the courage—the courage to initiate. Initiative means moving outside your comfort zone.

It means seeking out opportunities and being willing to act. Nearly everyone can see a need or see where changes need to be made. What is uncommon though, are people who are willing to take the initiative; to do something about it. Leadership is not always seen in the brightest or the most talented, but it is always found in the courageous. The CEO mindset involves taking the time to think about the forces that are shaping the future of both you and your organization.

Managing yourself in this way is important not only to the organization but also to your own personal development. Looking for Leaders Recently someone was lamenting to me the lack of new leaders in their organization. Maybe they were looking for leaders in all the wrong places. We commonly look for what looks like leadership. We look for people who stand out self-promoters. We look for clones people who are just like us.

We look for the smartest person in the room technically competent. We look for people who did a good job for us promote as a reward. All too often I see people being chosen for leadership jobs on the basis of superficial personal traits and characteristics. I just feel in my gut he can do the job. How she ever boiled down all that data onto the PowerPoints is beyond me. She certainly had the committee in the palm of her hand. Such a morale builder and motivator!

We need to look deeper. It seems there are more responsibilities and pressures than ever before. Of course, hardships and stress always accompany accomplishment. Successful people have exceptionally high levels of tenacity and persistence and a general hardiness. Kouzes and Posner find hardiness an important ingredient for leadership success: Increasing your hardiness has a lot to do with your context setting agility. As Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs explain, Context setting agility includes scanning your environment, anticipating important changes, deciding what initiatives to take, scoping each initiative, and determining your desired outcomes.

At the same time, increasing your agility level can increase your capacity for dealing with stress.

Get a free Quote

The thing I had to do was to try to relax. Winston Churchill certainly had it. Focused and On Track. The Study of Leadership In a keynote address in Tokyo, Peter Drucker made the following observation about an aspect of leadership—management: There are management tools and techniques. There are management concepts and principles. There is a common language of management.

And there may be even a universal "discipline" of management. Certainly there is a worldwide generic function which we call management and which serves the same purpose in any and all developed societies. But management is also a culture and a system of values and beliefs. It is also the means through which a given society makes productive its own values and beliefs. Management must, indeed, become the instrument through which cultural diversity can be made to serve the common purposes of mankind.

Success or Mediocrity: Your Choice! 9 Action Steps for Accelerating Business Success – Kindle Book

At the same time, management increasingly is not being practiced within the confines of one national culture, law, or sovereignty but "multinationally. Of course, along the same lines, leadership encompasses far more than the business or political environment we typically confine it to. From being the act of a few, it has become a personal responsibility. The issues we face today require a multidimensional understanding of leadership that is broader than most academic studies would give it.

Many times leaders are promoted because of a strong record of achievement, only to derail later because of their inability to adapt. For example, an individual may be good at demanding high performance from his or her followers, or have strong technical ability. However, those strengths are not sufficient when, for example, big-picture thinking or relationship building are also essential to success. To prepare yourself and others for growing challenges, you need the clarity of thought and flexibility to understand your own weaknesses and develop new talents.

The survey shows that business leaders fail across the board at setting clear objectives, motivating staff and weeding out poor performers. He suggests that you repeatedly practice making judgments of other people and reflect on why you might have missed in some cases.

Did the individual have the potential you saw in them? How good are your judgments compared to others judgments on the same individual? They consistently deliver ambitious results. They continuously demonstrate growth, adaptability, and learning better and faster than their excellently performing peers. They seize the opportunity for challenging, bigger assignments, thereby expanding capability and capacity and improving judgment.

They have the ability to think through the business and take leaps of imagination to grow the business. They are driven to take things to the next level. They come to the point succinctly, are clear thinkers, and have the courage to state a point-of-view even though listeners may react adversely. They ask incisive questions that open minds and incite the imagination. They perceptively judge their own direct reports, have the courage to give them honest feedback so the direct reports grow; they dig into cause and effect if a direct report is failing.

They know the non-negotiable criteria of the job of heir direct reports and match the job with the person; of there is a mismatch they deal with it promptly. What differentiates a connected leader is the way in which they impact and influence those around them and this is largely determined by the way in which they view good leadership. More than even our individual skill-set, how we see the role of leadership greatly determines the impact we have on others and the success we will have as leaders. Our impact is the result of a number of factors. Using the iceberg metaphor, above the waterline for all to see, are skills and knowledge.

On their own, they do not differentiate between average and superior performance…. But it is below the waterline that the real differentiators lie. Performance will differ depending on how people see their role. If doctors believe that their primary role is solving problems, their behavior is likely to be different from that of surgeons who see their roles as healers. Often we see the "smartest person in the room" or " the leader of all leaders" mind-set to thinking about leadership.

With this mentality we won't have the necessary ability to work well with other leaders and developing community. As Jean Lipman-Blumen wrote in Connective Leadership , "leaders cannot just issue orders; instead, they have to join forces, persuade, and negotiate to resolve conflicts.

The Go Point Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Leadership Agility What is leadership agility? Like agile organizations—organizations that anticipate and respond to rapidly changing conditions by leveraging highly effective internal and external relationships—leadership agility is the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions.

Without a framework, leaders often handicap themselves in a number of significant ways. Leaders tend to operate from intuition and experience. While both can serve a leader well, neither is infallible: Leaders tend to become leaders because they are technically competent. Being good at something singles them out for promotion. But what makes people effective at one level can make them ineffective at another. Leaders tend to operate with the skills that were most useful two levels below their current level.

In part because of the way they were chosen for the leadership track, they tend to maintain the mind-set of the level where they last felt real mastery. Few leaders are taught to lead. Because most leaders learn intuitively from experience, that experience is seldom analyzed with any depth, consistency, or systematic feedback. A few leaders have the good fortune of being taught informally by a particularly effective boss or mentor, but such teachers are rare.

Even fewer leaders are taught formally; academic institutions focus on the organization of work more than on the application of leadership. Many corporations offer inhouse programs, but few combine strong teaching with the kind of in-depth coaching that guarantees its application. Leaders tend to stop learning in midlife. By the time people hit their forties, many rely on their previous knowledge and have only a shallow commitment to ongoing self-education and self development. Few leaders lead from a clear sense of purpose.

Even fewer lead from a clear sense of noble purpose. Few leaders know how to pass on what they know. Not having been taught, they have little idea how to help others develop their leadership skills. Bell writes, "To overcome these obstacles, leaders need some guidelines; they need a framework for understanding and exercising great leadership. Leaders stand or fall not so much by their talent or lack of it as by their understanding or misunderstanding of what great leadership is.

He demonstrates how these three dimensions, when properly integrated and applied, will greatly enhance the quality of your leadership. Essentially, it is a blueprint for leadership development. He has created a leadership pyramid founded on basics such as a desire to be in charge, and the corresponding ability, strength, and character that all leaders—especially the great ones—must possess. From there he divides leadership characteristics between analytical reptilian leadership characteristics and those of the nurturing, engaged mammal. While we generally have a tendency to lean one way or the other, we must develop a capacity to deal effectively with both the reptilian economic and performance issues and the mammalian soft or people issues.

Both are vital and most people are, of course a complex mix of the two. We need task-oriented, no-nonsense Reptiles to ensure the work gets done and done well. We need people-oriented, nurturing Mammals to maintain the human community through which work gets done. The authors have put together an online Nature of Your Leadership Self-Assessment that will help you to determine your preference—mammalian or reptilian—and thus the kind of functions you naturally gravitate to.

The scoring is automated. The corresponding web site for the book graphically explains the Leadership Pyramid as well. You can read Chapter 1 online: I wouldn't say anyone is born a leader. There have been some studies that indicate people who have been exposed to psychologically traumatic experiences are better leaders. They've had to overcome trials and tribulations. So they're more inclined to be challenging and look deep within themselves for what they believe in.

Secrets of successful change implementation

Leaders like that learn to be clear about the story they're telling about where they have come from and where they're going. Teaching people to control risk is much easier than teaching people to create it. And it's essential for companies to draw the distinction between leadership and management. It's just wrong to use them interchangeably. Managers tend to react. Leaders tend to seek out opportunities. Managers follow the rules.

Leaders change the rules. Managers seek and follow direction. These are profound differences. Of course you need both. But organizations fail to recognize the difference. Organizations start to fail when they start to produce too many managers and not enough leaders. Or too many leaders of a certain type. The lesson in the corporate world, how can you simulate that [traumatic experience] in the corporate world without destroying people. How can you learn from it without becoming a casualty. This might be called imposing context. This is not just a cursory overview but an understanding of what we really think on issues we would rather not think about.

Like a nighttime traveler attuned to every sound in the forest, the leader must be aware of all possibilities lurking in the shadows. For we can neither challenge not transform what we cannot see. What you believe about human nature influences your leadership style. If you believe people are fundamentally good—good meaning that they're trying to do their best, they're self-motivated, they want to perform—then your fundamental leadership style will be one way.

It will be empowering them, getting obstacles out of the way, and setting high goals while maintaining standards. If you believe people are fundamentally bad—if you believe people are constantly looking to get over and get by and won't do anything unless they're watched—then you'll tend to lead with a very transactional management style that's built primarily around rewards and punishments. Tight supervision, a controlling type of leadership style characterized by a great deal of social distance between leaders and led.

The better we understand ourselves, the more authentic the contribution we can make— shed the image and do the job. The Fred Factor for Kids Too I'd thought I'd pass this along for the Father's Day weekend. Additionally, the absence of a dad from so many homes plays a direct role in a number of social ills. Kids in father-deprived homes are more likely to be abused, poor, prone to drug abuse, prone to poor scholastic achievement, and prone to emotional and behavior problems including suicide and crime. A study if violent criminals in U.

Looking for Leaders Where to find good leaders has always been an issue. In our search we unfortunately find it easiest to gravitate to the role players —. The best leadership examples are found in the home by parents who are involved in their communities. People can do small things, like build a community park in their neighborhood, or big things like run for public office or join community groups. Be a leader in your family.

Their examples profoundly affect the kind of leaders they become. Additionally, leadership needs to be modeled by the parents. It helps if you view all of this in the long-term. The big picture view assists in smoothing out the immature peaks and valleys and helps keep your goals on track. Here are some not comprehensive ideas to think on: Take time to know your child.

Related Topics

For example, an assertive, outgoing personality is a great trait in a leader, but without self-control it can be seen as overly aggressive and controlling. Powered by Movable Type 3. Leading Blog Main Page Leading Matters is about the journey. The stories he tells here are revolve around the ten elements that shaped his journey and how he relied on these traits in pivotal moments. The elements are relevant to any leader at any level. As he observes, the higher up you go the crises just get bigger and come faster. He begins by discussing the foundational elements: He then links them together with courage.

Finally, he shows how collaboration, innovation, intellectual curiosity, storytelling, and creating change that lasts, helped him reach his goals. Here are some of his thoughts on each element extracted from his stories: Arrogance sees only strengths, ignores our weaknesses, and overlooks the strengths of others, therefore leaving us vulnerable to catastrophic mistakes. Authenticity and Trust Authenticity is essential to building trust.

Consider the wisdom popularly attributed to Socrates: So this is part of the practice: If you take a leadership role as a step toward a personal goal of gathering ever-greater titles, awards, and salaries, you will never see true success in that role. Recognize the service of others. As a leader it is easy to get wrapped up in big projects and ambitious initiatives, and, in the process, to forget the smaller, but no less important, individual acts of service taking place all around you.

Much of that service supports and enables the widely celebrated success of others. Empathy Empathy should always be a factor in making decisions and setting goals. Empathy represents a crucial check on action—placing a deep understanding of and concern for the human condition next to data can lead to decisions that support the wellbeing of all.

Empathy usually implies compassion and perhaps charity, but we are looking for more than that: Courage, on the other hand, compels a leader to take that right action. While many people can discern what is right and true, acting on that discernment is more difficult.

Even if risk-taking is against your nature, for the good of your organization, you must find the courage to practice it. Collaboration and Teamwork Most significant endeavors will be accomplished by a team. Certain ground rules circumvented interteam rivalries. First of all, I reminded everyone of our shared goal: Further, to support innovative, cross-disciplinary thinking, I set a second ground rule: To this, I added a third ground rule: This led to my final ground rule: Innovation presents great opportunities for smart entrepreneurs, not the other way around.

Intellectual Curiosity Beyond personal enjoyment, though, this lifelong curiosity has served me well in my career. It has enabled me to engage in meaningful dialog about the world and its future. In challenging moments, great leaders show their true character. Storytelling If you really want to inspire a team to action, best to engage them with a story. Once they become receptive—once they can imagine themselves as part of your vision—you can back your story up with facts and figures.

When you turn that dream into a vivid story, you make it so attractive and so real that people will want to share it with you by joining your team. When it came time to respond to change, these companies moved quickly and efficiently, because every employee already understood the company identity and therefore knew how to respond without direct coaching. In every profession and career, as we climb to higher leadership positions, the role of facts and data decreases.

Legacy means the institution serves people more effectively now than it did when you arrived. The context of leadership has changed, but the fundamentals of leadership have not. It is still working with people. And that has never changed. It is organized around six practices. The six practices are practical and provide a useful guide taking responsibility to lead and improve your effectiveness.

Building a Unifying Vision Organizational success requires a bold and compelling vision that brings people together and inspires them to achieve extraordinary results. The vision needs to be exciting, clear, and simple—and stakeholders should be involved in its creation. Developing a Strategy Implementing a strong, measurable strategy is the key to realizing a vision.

A great strategy is composed of key actionable choices about what to do, and what not to do to create distinctive value. Getting Great People on Board Smart and dedicated people help bring strategies to life. Executing strategies skillfully begins with recruiting, developing, and retaining high-performing talent. People need feedback to grow and incentives to feel recognized. Focusing on Results The experience of achieving short-term results motivates teams to strive for even more.

Setting high expectations and sharpening accountability is necessary for high performance. Sold metrics and reviews can help this process become an organized one.

Innovating for the Future Balancing current performance while investing for tomorrow is a key for enduring success. By keeping an eye on the demands of the future, leaders can continually drive innovations that will reshape the company to keep up with a changing world. Leading Yourself In order for leaders to lead others, they need to know and grow themselves.

Feeling healthy, energized, and balanced also helps leaders do their best work. You shouldn't wait to be anointed a leader. Step up and take the responsibility now.

Leading Matters: John L. Hennessy on the Leadership Journey

Seizing the leadership opportunity and making the leadership difference in fact requires courage and also an ability to look beyond the every day and near-term tasks of basic management. The ground is shifting under your feet. The only way to stay relevant and therefore effective is to invest in building your skills as a leader. As you take on more responsibility, the demands on you as a leader change.

When conditions change, you have to change too. Complexity skills are often what got you in the door. They are about changing how you do what you do. How you approach doing the job having done so. How you think and behave so your people eagerly receive your leadership. Getting the how right is the challenge when it comes to sophistication. Complex challenges are easier to wrap your mind around. You can measure them. Sophistication challenges are not as clear. They can be more painful as they get into more personal aspects of who you are as a person.

But distinguishing between the two challenges is critical. Responding to increased levels of sophistication demands that you do something much harder. You must fundamentally rethink how you spend time, where you focus energy, how you communicate, with whom you develop relationships, and how you look at the big picture to understand when, where, and how to act. As you rise as a leader, sophistication skills take on greater importance. What are the new capabilities on which your leadership success will depend? More importantly, which skills that you value today should you deemphasize—or resist exercising at all?

No matter how good your complexity skills are if you fail to access your sophistication skills by regularly challenging yourself as to what and how you do what you do, you risk stalling as a leader. The authors identify seven inflection points that can trigger a stall in your leadership. You then must craft a narrative that carries your people forward on an inspirational, shared, purpose-based quest—a story that can guide their actions when you are not there to give specific direction at every new turn.

Develop the ability to persuade and influence rather than control. Leading Change Stall When you struggle in your ability to explain and lead change Determine how readily employees and stakeholders receive and embrace your messages about change, and then offer new behaviors and practices for engaging people, so they grasp, welcome, and act on your initiatives. Combine empathetic understanding with discernment, creativity, and determination.

Authority Stall When your authority slips in the eyes of followers Assess your own sources of leadership authority and invest in your own self-development. Focus Stall When you fail to focus your time and energy to have the most impact Anticipate this stall by examining how you allocate your time and energy. What should you be doing and what should you let others do?

Become a leader of leaders, multiplying your own leadership success through the success of others. The authors walk you through each of these stalls to help you overcome or avoid them. Of course, self-awareness is key here—understanding the impact you have on others. Elevate your view and understand where you are and determine where you need to be. They call for a three-part approach: Every stall is an opportunity for growth. Any one of them has the potential to derail even the best of leaders. While they may creep up on us, we can see them coming and apply the proper antidote.

And even though these seven challenges never really go away, we can create some life habits that keep them at bay. Nieuwhof writes from a been-there-done-that Christian perspective about the issues as they manifest themselves in our lives and follows up each one with a chapter on how to combat it. These issues affect everyone and some you'll find hit close to home. The seven challenges are: Cynicism Disappointment and frustration often end in cynicism.

Ask them and they know all about it. It may get us in the door, but character is what determines how far we go. Technology just makes it worse. Eliminate hurry from your life. And this comment could pull any of us up short: For me, the sense that a conversation is going nowhere always carries with it an underpinning of judgment and even arrogance on my part.

Which, of course, should drive me right back to my knees in confession. Irrelevance Irrelevance happens when what you do no longer connects to the culture and the people around you. That gap is a factor of how fast things change relative to you. Change staves off irrelevance.

Get radical about change. Surround yourself with younger people. Seek change to transform you. Burnout Burnout saps the meaning and wonder out of life. Signs of burnout include among other things: Getting out of this state begins by admitting it and then figuring out how to live today so you will thrive tomorrow. What does that look like?

Nieuwhof recommends some concrete steps you can take to bring you back from burnout. Go deep enough and take enough time to recover so that you begin to feel gratitude for the process. Emptiness Ironically, success often makes you feel empty. Humility will win you what pride never will: Other people naturally gravitate toward people who live for a cause beyond themselves. The practical advice found here will benefit anyone on their leadership journey. Editors Ken Blanchard and Renee Broadwell have collected some good essays on the subject. The servant aspect of servant leadership is all about turning the hierarchy upside down and helping everyone throughout the organization develop great relationships, get great results, and, eventually, delight their customers.

Covey says that trust is essential. They serve first and they extend trust first. Leadership is the by-product and positional authority is, at best, an afterthought. They stay humble by turning the organizational chart upside down and serving others. They communicate to their teams the goals and values that form their culture so that everyone stays in focus.

They are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses—through feedback and by following the greatest servant leader of all time [—Jesus]. And they continually strive to do the right thing. It is not based on a series of transactions, but on the promise of being there when someone needs you most. They are setting up a transactional relationship that is likely to promote self-interest.

Just like any relationship in which trust is the basis, it is the combination of a lot of little things that makes all the difference. Now I know better. Our message is always given to an audience of one—the person we are serving. In serving others, our message is our lives.

We must live our message for our message to have life. One person at a time means we will never be too busy to help one person in need. To lead effectively we must understand what is going on inside of us, so that we can lead ourselves. Only when we have developed a consistent habit of doing that can we then better understand and lead others and then collectively our teams and organizations.

In The Mind of the Leader , authors Rasmus Hougaard and Jaqueline Carter of the Potential Project, report that there are three mental qualities that stand out as being foundational for leaders today: Mindfulness, Selflessness, and Compassion. They call it MSC Leadership. All three work together and enrich the others. Mindfulness Mindfulness is about managing your attention and in turn managing your thoughts. Mindfulness enables us to respond to our circumstances instead of reacting.

The two key qualities of mindfulness are focus and awareness. More specifically, a stronger sense of selfless confidence arises, helping you develop the second quality of MSC Leadership: Selflessness combines strong self-confidence with a humble intention to be of service. Selflessness is often thought of as weak by the uninitiated. It is important that selflessness is combined with self-confidence. You become an enabler. You have a strong focus on the well-being of your people and your organization.

Leaders are three times more likely than lower-level employees to interrupt coworkers, multitask during meetings, raise their voices, and say insulting things. We have seen many leaders that think they are above the mores of everyone else. Mindfulness plays a big part in that. In this way, compassion arises as a natural outgrowth of selflessness. Wisdom gives compassion a compass so that choices can be made that are thoughtful and holistic.

• Que justice soit faite (FICTION) (French Edition)
• The Power of Gems Stones : The Power of Gems Stones Meanings
• LEau et le Feu (French Edition)
• Always In Tao Companion Book
• Apocalypse Aroused
• Bleu Cheese Pizza Girl and Other Quirky Tales