Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Personal Development
We all struggle with the commitments we make either to ourselves about eating a healthier diet or to someone else about something we said we would do and simply forgot. When we want to take our commitment to the next level we start making promises.
A promise is defined as a declaration that something will or will not be done and there is assurance given and an expectation created. Promises should be reserved for the top priorities and the people we care about the most.
One promise we should all be willing to make to the people that matter is that I will carefully listen to what you have to say. As Stephen Covey said in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People we should first seek to understand the other person before we ask to be understood.
Our motives are no longer to show how smart we are, win the argument or avoid pain. We sincerely want to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling to the point we acknowledge their value as a person.
Listening involves time and a willingness to be patient until we have embraced all that the other person wanted to share. Think of at least one person in your life today that you really care about and make a promise that I will lay down my agenda for the benefit of someone else.
Are you listening?
I Incorporated
Filed under: Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Personal Development
Many of us have some type of leadership responsibility at work. We are involved in setting goals, identifying priorities, problem solving and even casting vision. Over the years we develop a skill set that enables us to do all of these things and more.
There is a lot of culture shift taking place in the corporate world from the old days of working with one company your entire career to now almost viewing yourself as a free agent always looking for best situation.
There are many good aspects to this new reality and some that are not. This shift in expectations should never excuse us from coming to work every day and performing with excellence regardless of how long we stay in one place.
The important truth for all of us to realize is that we are The Leader and The C.E.O. of our own life. We have a responsibility to lead ourselves before we can effectively add value to other people.
We need to take this same skill set that has served us well at work and start applying the same disciplines at home.
What are the priorities and goals that you have for your life that are based on your core values?
Are they written down and do you evaluate your progress just like you would on any project at work?
Do you have a vision for where you want your personal life to be in one, two, and even five years down the road?
Someone has well said, you will be the same person five years from now that you are today except for two things, the books you read and the people you know. That is great advice for any new C.E.O. including you.
Walk The Talk
Ultimately everything we do outwardly is driven by all of our inner attitudes about what is important and what is not. If our actions are not what they should be we must first change what we believe to be true before we can see bad habits broken and new good ones take their place.
I think the most important attitude you must draw from everyday is gratitude. The media is almost totally focused on all that we are losing in this down cycle. The pain is real and there are significant problems that must be solved. However, almost all of us still have plenty to eat, a nice place to sleep and friends and family that care about us. Think about what is really important today and be grateful.
The second important thing to me is hope. As we deal with the reality of lost jobs and endless bad news we must have a picture of a better day ahead. Hope fuels a positive attitude about life when the majority of people are negative. We may not be able to change the global economy or Wall Street but we can change ourselves.
Finally we must be people who are committed. Your passion about life is what will move you beyond the pain of the present. The promises we make and keep to ourselves and the people we care about the most is the sum total of who you really are as a person. If what say you believe is not moving you to act everyday then you really did not believe it after all.
Remember the old saying, what you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.
Parenting Expectations
It is incredibly important that we all have realistic expectations as parents for our children. We should want them to develop character, succeed academically, respect authority and grow in their faith.
However, the reality is they are going to fail in every one of these areas and many more on their journey towards becoming successful adults. When they do fail, we as parents must care enough to take the time to correct them for the mistakes and then encourage them to restore their confidence. They will need to learn to deal with the consequences of bad decisions and on the other hand not break their spirit so they give up on life.
Many times this process fails because we as parents have placed our own personal expectations on top of the ones we already have for our children. We are vicariously living our lives through them instead of for them.
If we are honest with ourselves we would admit that when we overreact because they fail it is partially because we have failed as well. Our own emotional needs to be successful parents have been added to the relationship to the point that our expectations for them are now totally unrealistic.
Constantly check your motives and make sure this is primarily about what is best for them and not about me. Growing up today is hard enough without them having to take on the extra burden of making us feel good about ourselves. That is our responsibility.
Personal Crisis
Filed under: Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development
When negative things are happening in your life and you feel like you are in a deep hole and cannot see how to get out there are three key personal leadership disciplines that will help you get your positive momentum back.
The first is perspective. When things are not going well today it is very important to put the present in the context of the long look that includes both the past and the future. All of life both the good and the bad tend to run in cycles. You cannot choose many times the circumstances about what happens to you but it is your responsibility to choose how you respond to them.
Adversity in life will either make you a better person or a bitter one and that choice is within your control. The key thing about your past is you must learn from it but never live in it. Failure never has to be final unless we let it.
The same is true about the future. You can choose to watch the news 3 hours a day and live with fear, worry and doubt or you can be grateful for what you have and face the future with hope and a positive attitude.
The second personal leadership discipline in dealing with change is priorities. The one incredibly good thing about a down cycle is that it always forces us to separate what is important in life from what is not.
We must start by not asking the question what have I lost but what do I still have? I would encourage you to write down everything that is still in your life that is important and when you see it all you will be amazed by how blessed you really are.
Someone has well said the tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon but we wait so long to begin it. Regardless of your age or stage of life this dramatic period of change we are all going through is the perfect time for you to decide how you want to spend the rest of your life. If you need some help get a life coach to walk through this process with you.
The third discipline to deal with change is to be proactive. When some people face dramatic change they choose to live in denial as if this is not really happening to me. On the other extreme others know the change is real to the point of becoming emotionally depressed about their new state of life.
I must assume personal responsibility to change myself first and start leading myself by making good daily decisions before my life can begin to turn around in different direction. The only way to do that is to do what you can with what you have right where you are and do it today with all your heart.
Segmentation
Filed under: Family Ministry, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development
The natural tendency of every Christian is to divide their lives into multiple pieces. We have our personal, family, career, church, friends and civic roles.
With this mindset comes the danger of segmentation between the secular and the sacred parts of our lives. We go to church on Sunday and check off that faith box for the week and then we move on to the rest of our lives.
I am convinced that the scriptures teach that in God’s mind this artificial division was never intended. The Holy Spirit wants to give leadership to everything we do so that we live sacred lives in a secular world.
Our Heavenly Father is just as concerned about how you respond to your family at home and how you react to other people at work as He is about two hours on one day of the week. The Christian life is intended to be a relationship and a partnership with God as He impacts other people through every aspect of our lives.
The calling that God has placed on all of us as believers is not primarily about going to church but being the church. When we reach this point of spiritual integration it all becomes about Him and them and no longer about me.
Don’t Shoot The Messenger
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personnel Development, Servant Leader
Every leader likes to hear good news. We all want to be positive people who inspire others through our can do attitude. If we are not careful though we will surround ourselves with team members who will start to tell us what we want to hear and not what we need to know.
When you create a culture within your organization where the truth can be told you must not make the mistake of reacting every time you hear bad news or something negative. If you do, you are shutting yourself off from critical information that you must know and you have created an environment where your best people will eventually leave.
Jack Welch calls the lack of candor the biggest dirty secret in business. Avoiding conflict and hoping things will get better is the formula for failure especially in the realities of the new economy.
I am not talking about chronic negative whining people who never really want to solve the problem. They should not be tolerated within any organization because they are a cancer to your creativity and morale.
So the next time that person walks into your office who you know is drop dead loyal and they need to talk about a problem that must be addressed be grateful and listen they have got your back.
Just Don’t Do It
Filed under: Goal Setting, Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Personal Development, Physical Fitness
Just Do It is a phrase that has come to represent the cultural mentality of an entire generation of Americans. The sheer discipline that is represented in those three words has pushed many of us to do things that otherwise we would have walked away from and left undone.
In my life the major point of application is in the area of physical fitness. When it is cold and dark outside most of us do not want to jump out of bed and go for a nice run when the temperature is in the twenties and the wind is blowing. In some small but very effective way, thinking about Just Do It can make the difference between turning over and getting up.
An even bigger problem for most of us is the daily discipline of learning how to say No. Everyday all of us will have more to do than we can possibly get done. It happens at work, at home, with friends and hobbies.
The real secret to success in life is in knowing on a daily basis what to say No to and walk away. The real tragedy of life is when we look back and realize even though we have been incredibly busy we have done so many things that were really not important at all.
I don’t know about you but the Just Do It mentality has pushed me beyond my limits too many times. I do not want to waste my time, energy, passion and relationships on things that do not add value to others.
I encourage you to just pick one thing a day for a week that you can say No to so that you can have the time to find your bigger Yes.
Living In The Moment
Many of us will lose some of the greatest blessings in life because we are not able to enjoy the life we already have today. Someone has well said that,” the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment.”
Two mortal enemies that tend to rob us of the potential for today are the failures and pain from our past or the worries and fears about what may happen in the future. Mark Twain once said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
We tend to live under the false illusion that one day I am going to get my priorities in order and then I will be able to do what I want and need to do. Happiness is always in the future tense because we never take the time to decide what is really important and what is not.
Every day we must say no to something because we live in a highly stressful world that demands more of us than we can possibly accomplish. The only way to consistently say no to the wrong things is to first know what you should be saying yes to on a daily basis.
One of the major yes things should be I want to live everyday with a grateful spirit and a peaceful mind so that I can really see what is good about my life. Then I can concentrate on getting the things done today that are important and before today is done I can make sure to enjoy the moment.
Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis
Filed under: Crisis Management, Leadership Callling, Leading Change
The Wall Street Journal – February 24, 2009
Bill George
In order to understand the real reasons for the crisis, everyone on the leadership team must be willing to tell the whole truth. As J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said at a panel I chaired at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January, “It’s not sufficient to have one person on your team who is a truth teller. Everyone on the team must be candid in sharing the entire truth, no matter how painful it is.” How can we solve problems if we don’t acknowledge their existence?
Lesson #2: “No matter how bad things are, they will get worse.” Faced with bad news, many leaders cannot believe that things could really be so grim. Consequently, they try to convince the bearers of bad news that things aren’t so bad, and swift action can make problems go away.
This causes leaders to undershoot the mark in terms of corrective actions. As a consequence, they wind up taking a series of steps, none of which is powerful enough to correct the downward spiral. It is far better for leaders to anticipate the worst and get out in front of it. If they restructure their cost base for the worst case, they can get their organization healthy for the turnaround when it comes and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
Lesson #3: “Build a mountain of cash, and get to the highest hill.” In good times leaders worry more about earnings per share and revenue growth than they do about their balance sheets. In a crisis, cash is king. Forget about EPS and all those stock market measures. The question is, “Does your organization have sufficient cash to survive the most dire circumstances?”
Goldman Sachs, where I serve on the board of directors, anticipated the difficult times and built up its cash reserves. When the markets got really bad, Goldman had adequate cash reserves to weather the storm.
Lesson #4: “Get the world off your shoulders.” In a crisis, many leaders act like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. They go into isolation, and think they can solve the problem themselves. In reality, leaders must have the help of all their people to devise solutions and to implement them. This means bringing people into their confidence, asking them for help and ideas, and gaining their commitment to painful corrective actions.
Lesson #5: “Before asking others to sacrifice, first volunteer yourself.” If there are sacrifices to be made – and there will be – then the leaders should step up and make the greatest sacrifices themselves. Crises are the real tests of leaders’ True North. Everyone is watching to see what the leaders do. Will they stay true to their values? Will they bow to external pressures, or confront the crisis in a straight-forward manner? Will they be seduced by short-term rewards, or will they make near-term sacrifices in order to fix the long-term situation?
Lesson #6: “Never waste a good crisis.” This piece of advice comes from Benjamin Netanyahu, the next prime minister of Israel, at the panel I chaired in Davos.
When things are going well, people resist major changes or try to get by with minor adaptations. A crisis provides the leader with the platform to get things done that were required anyway and offers the sense of urgency to accelerate their implementation.
Lesson #7: “Be aggressive in the marketplace.” This may sound counter-intuitive, but a crisis offers the best opportunity to change the game in your favor, with new products or services to gain market share. Many people look at a crisis as something to get through, until they can go back to business as usual. But “business as usual” never returns because markets are irrevocably changed. Why not create the changes that move the market in your favor, instead of waiting and reacting to the changes as they take place?
The Bottom Line:
In a crisis we learn who the real leaders are, and whether they have the wherewithal to stay on course of their True North.
About the Author
Bill George, author of “True North,” is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. He is also the former CEO of Medtronic and serves on the boards of directors of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs and Novartis.
Dan Greer
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