Peter Principle
Every leadership expert that I have read in the last five years understands that the most important asset for any organization is the people who are on your team. If you have not transitioned from the industrial age to the information age in how you are leading your people you will not be able to compete in the new global economy.
Good to Great makes the point about getting the right people on your bus and making sure you get the wrong ones off. There is also a priority on verifying that everyone is in the right seat on the bus.
This is where the Peter Principle can create blind spots within your organization. Just because someone has been a very effective employee in the past does not mean they can continue to be effective in the future.
The natural tendency is when someone does a good job they eventually assume even greater responsibility. They were the best customer service representative you had when your company started and there were less than one hundred accounts.
When the company reaches three hundred accounts then other customer service representatives are brought on board and now your best practices representative just became a manager of other people. After all they deserve the job because they have tenure, expertise and loyalty to organization.
There is only one major problem; they are not gifted or passionate about managing a customer service department that one day will grow to over one hundred employees. These once great team members who are no longer effective have been promoted beyond their capabilities and that is why they are failing.
Never assume that because someone is great in one discipline they can naturally transition to leading others in the same area. If you do not watch this one very carefully you run the risk of a dysfunctional customer service department and tragically loosing a once great employee in the process.
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.
Leaving Legacy
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development
The real question is not will you leave a legacy but what kind will it be? An even more important question is what do you want it to be?
It is amazing how proficient we have become in establishing clear and attainable goals in the business sector. We can break down our plans into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and beyond to ensure that we accomplish what we have determined is important.
I am convinced the reason we do not give the same amount of passion and excellence to our private lives is that we have never taken the time to define what is really important. This lack of prioritization leads to a hope it all works out mentality that would not last for one week in the hit your numbers or else corporate sector.
Most people I have talked with over the years will tell you that in the end the personal part of their life that includes family and friends is really more important to them than the public part. If so, then why this huge disconnect?
It all goes back to understanding Covey’s time matrix in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Almost everything in our public lives fits into the urgent category. They demand that we respond even though many of the things we do every day are not really important at all.
The people we care about the most fit into an important category that is not urgent. Ball games, piano recitals and dates with your spouse will not scream in your face but they are the things that make up your legacy.
Don’t wait for the heart attack or cancer, have the courage to take a major time out and define in very specific terms what really matters so that in the end you will leave this world a better place than you found it.
Dan Greer
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