The Heart of Leadership

The following copyrighted article by author Robin S. Sharma (www.robinsharma.com) was sent to me recently. I think it offers some great lessons on personal and professional leadership. I have highlighted a sentence in the first paragraph that I thought would be particularly relevant to readers of this blog.

The Heart of Leadership - Reflections on the Rituals of Wise Leaders
© Robin S. Sharma

Leadership is not about the prestige of your title but the quality of your character. Real leadership is not about position, it’s about action. And great leaders spend their days helping those around them manifest their highest human potential while they work towards a vision that adds value to the world at large. (Emphasis added). As I wrote in “Leadership Wisdom from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” – “the greatest privilege of leadership is the chance to elevate lives.”

In the new economy, leadership will be the quality that separates the winners from the “also-rans.” With increasing competition, only those organizations that develop leaders at every level will have the agility and effectiveness to excel in these topsy-turvy times. The organizations that rely on the outdated “top down” model of leadership will not have the speed and nimbleness to go head-to-head against competing companies where everyone understands their duty to show leadership in the way they work and live. In my leadership seminars, I show peak performers how to liberate more of their leadership potential so they see quantum improvements in their professional and personal lives.

Here are 4 of the best lessons:

1. Understand that, at the end of the day, leadership is all about relationships. People will not follow you if they do not trust you. They will not invest in your products or services unless they truly feel you have their best interests in mind and sincerely care about them. Showing leadership in your work means that building high-trust, high-touch relationships is Job #1. To cultivate these bonds, peak performing leaders remember that the little things are the big things when it comes to building client loyalty. They keep their promises, doing what they say they will do when they say they will do it. They are punctual and respectful.

And they are courteous, always remembering to say “please” and “thank you” at every reasonable opportunity. If you simply fill the needs of your clients, they will remain with you until someone who can do it better comes along. If you deeply connect with them on a human level, they just might remain with you for life. As I say in my seminars: “People will not lend you a hand until you first touch their hearts.”

2. Remember that leaders strive for mastery over mediocrity. The quality of your professional and personal life ultimately comes down to the quality of the choices you make every minute of every hour of every day. As human beings, our highest personal endowment is the ability to choose our response to a given event. We can choose to get angry with a difficult client or we can see the circumstance as a gift - as a wonderful opportunity to deepen the relationship by dealing with the complaint in a creative, effective manner so that the client is so delighted he tells the world about you.

You can choose to focus on the increasing competition, regulation and complexity of the marketplace or you can concentrate on the almost limitless possibilities offered by this wired age. One of the most important choices that effective leaders make is to raise their standards. They commit themselves from the core of their beings to being true masters at the work they do. They are hungry to learn from the best. They spend time daily refining their talents and reading from great books. They take time weekly to reflect on the way they are conducting their businesses and course correct so the next week builds on the past one.

3. Stop doing what is easy and focus on doing what is right. Weak performers spend their time doing those things that are easy. They take the path of least resistance and do only what is comfortable and convenient. They never face their fears and make the tough cold call or give the big public presentation. Instead, they lead small lives, preferring to stay within a limited zone of security that never requires them to stretch their capacities. Bold leaders are far different. They have the wisdom to understand that the tougher you are on yourself, the easier life will be on you.

When you have the courage and strength of character to do what your heart tells you is the right thing to do in every instance, rather than doing what is easy, you will raise the quality of your professional and personal life to a whole new level. As the nineteenth-century English writer Thomas Henry Huxley said: “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.” Or as Theodore Roosevelt noted one hundred years ago, the highest form of success “comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”

4. Smart leaders know that the time is now. If you don’t act on life, life has a habit of acting on you. The days slip into weeks, the weeks slip into months and the months slip into years. Then we wake up one day, in the twilight of our lives, and wonder what could have been. As I share in my speeches, on your tombstone, there will be two dates: the date of your birth and the date of your death. You will have had no say in the first date and no choice in the second one. But between these two dates will lay a line representing all that lies between the day you arrived and the day you departed.

Stop putting off living. Now is the time to move to the next level in your career. Now is the time to upgrade your education or learn new skills that will allow you to serve your clients better. Now is the time to enrich your mind and shed the shackles of complacency. Now is the time to go the extra mile for your customers and distinguish yourself in a crowded marketplace. Now is the time to deeply connect with your family and build great friendships. And now is the time to enjoy the journey of life - before it becomes too late.

As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said so eloquently: “It is only when we know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”

Leadership and Legacy

Some individuals become organization leaders by choice; others, by chance. Either way, both types of leaders often wake up one day wondering: "Now that I'm actually in a leadership role, what is it that this organization is really all about? Come to think about it, what is it that I'M really all about? I seem to spend all of my time putting out fires, answering to the organization's owners, riding herd on my managers and staff, and making sure we have enough cash flow to meet payroll. Is that what leadership is all about?"

The answer, of course, is "no." The cause of the problem can be found in two principle areas: (1) the lack of a compelling vision (with a plan for how to get there) that the leader can articulate to his or her followers, and (2) a proper organizational structure that maximizes the ability of the organization to achieve the desired vision. Because there are volumes of business books devoted to organizational development, I will instead address the first of the two ideas identified above.

The degree to which a vision is compelling is directly related to the degree to which the achievement (and pursuit) of that vision resonates with the stakeholders' "will to meaning." The more the organization is able to articulate - to itself and its other stakeholders - a compelling reason for the organization's existence (how the organization is going to make life better for its customers, employees and owners), the greater the likelihood that the organization will set up the means to achieve that vision.

For many organizational leaders, the connection between the organization's purpose and the leader's own "will to meaning" is a very personal thing. Being so personal, many choose to ignore the relationship altogether or gloss over it superficially. This is a mistake. In my experience, effective leaders are those who see and consistently work to understand the inextricable link between their own will to meaning and the work being pursued through the organization.

If you are struggling with this concept, it may be because you find it difficult to start from where you are and build (in your mind) a plan for going forward. Your current situation may make it impossible to think positively or creatively about how to go from "here to there." If that's the case, think in terms of "legacy" and ask yourself: "What do I wish to leave when my work life is over? What are the things that, if I applied my unique gifts and talents, I could bring into this world that currently don't exist and that would be beneficial?"

From there, it's a matter of working backwards: project yourself into the future and create a clear picture of your legacy in place. What did you need to accomplish in order to create that legacy? What were the key benchmarks along the way that allowed you to know that you wree on track? What strategies did you use to achieve each of the intermediate steps? What specific actions did you have to take "way back" when you first got started (today) in order to set off in the right direction? Who was part of the team along the way?

Another way to help you design an organization that will help you deliver on your legacy is to ask and answer 4 key questions (I have to pause here and give credit to my friend Lanny Goodman, an exceptionally gifted business consultant from whom I've borrowed and slightly modified these questions):

1. What legacy do I wish to leave (at work, with my family, my community, my friends, etc.)?
2. How can my business help me achieve that?
3. What would such a business look like?
4. How do we get it to look like that?

For me, the first question above is directly related to the 3 Life Questions identified by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book "On Death and Dying" (sorry to tie in a book with such a morbid title, but it is what it is): (1) Did I give and receive love?, (2) Did I become all that I could be?, and (3) Did I leave the world a little better?

I believe that successful leaders understand - consciously or unconsiously - the connection between these 3 Life Questions and the 4 organizational questions listed above.

Leadership and Meaning

Effective leaders understand that leadership and the "will to meaning" are inextricably linked. A leader is one who can articulate a compelling vision and communicate that vision to his or her followers. To be truly effective, the connection that calls people to follow a leader is one that resonates with the follower's own "will to meaning." The vision affects the follower because, at some deep level, the achievement (and pursuit) of the vision connects the follower with his or her own sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Why does this matter? Because leaders need to accept the challenge that this connection to meaning brings with it. Not all who walk through the door (or who may currently be in the leader's employ) are called to the vision. That doesn't make the follower a bad person; it just means that they are not the right person for this particular organization. Leaders need to identify those for whom the organization's mission is part of something deeper and more profound for the individuals who are a part of it. Without understanding this connection, leaders to often fall into the trap of looking merely for the right "skill set" - the technical attributes that seem to "qualify" someone for a particular position.

Successful leaders are those who are able to articulate a compelling vision and who systematically identify and groom followers for whom the organization's mission is far more than a paycheck.

Strategic Planning: Superior Planning by Engaging People

I came across a quote from Dr. Denis Waitley today. It read: "The central secret of good communication is bringing the other person over to your side by satisfying one of every person's most fundamental emotional needs: Make him or her feel valued. With rare exceptions, people who feel valued – who are allowed to feel important in the sense that they are recognized – answer with openness, cooperation and reciprocated respect."

For organizations that have fallen off track (or perhaps have never gotten on track), I think this statement offers an important clue about how strategic planning needs to unfold. In far too many cases, businesses operate from a belief that strategic planning is the prerogative of management and executives. With this belief in place, they go about taking actions consistent with the belief. They have closed "strategic planning" meetings with the handful of individuals who have fancy titles or they hire consultants to come in and guide them through a planning process. Or worse, they hire consultants to come in, analyze the company, and tell the executives what to do - usually through a nice, glossy report that costs tens of thousands of dollars and which becomes a colorful paperweight). The result: an ineffective plan that costs dozens of people hours and thousands of dollars that does not produce any long-lasting change. (Ah, the BAR Formula© in action: a poor Belief producing the wrong Action and leading to an undesireable Result).

One of the key reasons that these efforts fail to achieve any long-lasting result is that they never connect with the people ultimately responsible for implementing them. Those folks typically are not included in the process or, if they are included, are asked to provide input with no real accountability associated with it (resulting in statements like: "We should....." or "The company really needs to...." rather than "I will...." and "Our team is committed to do [X] by [date]").

As Dr. Waitley points out, one of the most fundamental human needs is the need to feel valued. Organizations spend millions of dollars and most of their efforts focused on satisfying the "needs" of their external customers. All of that is well and good; after all, without customers, the organization would cease to exist. But with relatively few - and notable - exceptions (Southwest Airlines is one of the few publicly traded companies that comes to mind) businesses routinely ignore the need for employees to feel valued. They fail to tap into the basic human desire that each of us has to find meaning in our work. And meaning at work is tied directly to the degree to which each person feels a connection to the organization's purpose.

How can strategic planning make this happen? The concept is easy to grasp but often challenging to implement. In a nutshell, it means engaging your employees in every aspect of the strategic planning process. These are the folks who make it happen for you. They have FAR more to offer than the particular skill for which they receive their paycheck. Indeed, because the "will to meaning" (as Viktor Frankl put it) is so fundamental in every one of us, our employees WANT to contribute more. It's this sense of contribution that enables us to make the connection between what we do (for a living) and who we are (the sum total of our unique gifts and talents).

As Dr. Waitley points out, we human beings desire to feel valued. Tap into THAT basic human need and you will have a strategic plan that won't just sit on the shelf. It will be alive in each of your employees, every day. The results will astound you.