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Callan…Coffee…Contemplation for the Week of August 31st

Leadership Thoughts

The Leader as Beacon- Part II

One might ask: What if I don’t seek to master myself and move from technical expertise towards the higher ground of emotional intelligence? What’s the harm if I don’t become that beacon of excellence? The answer is simple and stark: You will fail yourself, and you will fail those you lead. As documented by Daniel Goleman’s research on this topic, leaders who failed to navigate the transition to emotional intelligence failed because of self inflicted “fatal flaws.” Like the blind spots on a vehicle moving down a busy highway, fatal flaws prevent leaders from successfully projecting resonant leadership because they destroy the trust and deep bonds necessary for championship performance. Leaders with emotional intelligence nurture things like camaraderie, companionship, mutual affection, and esprit; leaders without emotional intelligence destroy them. And as Goleman also documented, the two primary fatal flaws that ruin such leaders are rigidity (inability to adapt) and poor relations (alienated their teams).

The Leader as Architect- Part I

It’s essential that leaders first focus on mastering themselves and developing their vision; however, we must then shift focus to execution: How do we realize our plan? How do we make it stick? It’s a mistake to focus only on vision and forget the concrete actions needed to materialize end states. When we move to creating execution plans, we are now moving into the realm of management. Here a leader operates somewhat like an architect, creating the blue print and mechanism to build an organization to last. We begin by properly seeing the organization as a “system of systems,” an ecosystem, comprised of three core elements: (1) an ethos (culture, climate, atmosphere), (2) authority (allocation of responsibility), and (3) technical elements (policy and procedures). As an ecosystem, each of these three elements has its own nature but the entire ecosystem must be understood and managed as a whole. The key architectural action is this: Create mechanisms to measure the entire organization, and create mechanisms that endure. People will leave, mechanisms endure.

The Leader as Architect- Part II

Previously, we talked about leaders creating mechanisms to measure the entire organization’s health, vitality, and readiness. Why is that vital? Because teams don’t last; people will move on. Moreover, we never want to build an organization reliant solely on one individual leader. Yes, great leaders make a difference, often profound differences; however, organizations dependent upon a single great leader will likely atrophy and collapse once that leader departs if mechanisms are not built to effectively enable succession, knowledge transfer, organizational resiliency, and the creation of internal talent pools of younger leaders ready to assume the mantle of leadership. Enduring excellence cannot rest solely on the back of a single charismatic leader. To ensure a single leader doesn’t ultimately become a single point of failure, we must create, and then align, mechanisms to sustain our ethos, constantly renew the allocation of authority, and adapt technical policies and procedures to agilely respond to change.

The Leader as Learner- Part I

I often refer to leadership as a master craft, and heroic leaders as a master craftsman. I do this to remind myself that, like all other pursuits of mastery, leadership is a life-long journey in which we never stop honing our craft. Therefore, leaders should never think of themselves as a finished product; we must remain students of leadership, stay fully open to new knowledge, and seek wisdom by availing ourselves to a broad spectrum of experiences. When I reflect on heroic leaders of the past such as Lincoln, Jefferson, T.E. Lawrence, Churchill, and Gandhi to name a few, they all shared these two attributes in common: (1) An unquenchable curiosity, and (2) a bias for learning and understanding. Moreover, their curiosity and passion for learning never waned during their lives. They constantly renewed themselves, renovated their vision, and courageously converted themselves into more wise and effective leaders. When leaders personally model a passion for learning, they in turn create organizations with a similar passion to learn and grow—the true wellspring of enduring excellence.

The Leader as Learner- Part II

To effectively become students of leadership, and to grow as heroic leaders, we must embrace the crucial need to create quiet time and solitude to read, reflect, and discern. Our society often down plays the need for solitude because we erroneously equate busyness with productivity and effectiveness. We think: The busier we are, the more we must be getting done. Wrong! Busyness is a chimera, and being trapped in the chaos of busyness is the antithesis of great leadership. Great leaders, therefore, must discipline themselves to balance “to do” with “to learn.” In doing so, great leaders apportion time and energy to reading, learning, and thinking; they find a place of solitude to disengage from the work-a-day world; and they consider quiet time not only sacred but essential to remaining vital in their lives and in their leadership. Heroic leadership is a marathon, not a sprint; our objective is to be effective across time and to retain a consistent and dependable positive vitality across a broad arc of engagement.

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