Two Minutes On Leadership

Posted May 27, 2011 By David Irvine

A participant in one of my recent leadership programs was challenged with preparing a two minute talk to a group of high level leaders from across Canada. She asked me what I think is the most important thing or habit leaders need in order to be successful.

What would your answer be if someone asked you for a two minute summary of your philosophy on leadership?

Here’s my response:

1.      Leadership is the capacity of human beings to shape and create a new future – by inspiring and engaging others.

2.      Leadership is about presence, not position. Great leadership cannot be reduced to technique or title. Great leadership comes from the identity and the integrity of the leader. Leadership is the way you live your life. Your power as a leader comes from being an integrated and real human being. This makes every person a potential leader.

3.      You aren’t a leader until someone says you are. You have to earn the right to be called a leader. While you may get promoted to being a boss, you don’t get promoted to leadership. You have to earn the right to be a leader.

In this high tech world, leadership needs to be about high touch (thanks John Nesbitt). Leadership, in today’s world, is ultimately about connection. Connection to: (1) Your authentic self: your values, your unique talents, your aspirations, your dreams, your passion. Take time for reflection, for clarity about what matters most in your life, to listen to the voice inside of you.  Connection to: (2) Those you serve, your stakeholders: those who depend on you and those to whom you depend. Get out of your office, away from your computers, and make contact with people. Find out what inspires the people you serve, what matters to them, how you can support them. Leadership can probably be summed up with one word: conversation. You can assess the level of impact you are having by the depth and honesty of the conversations you are creating.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

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Society does not want individuals who are alert.

Posted May 17, 2011 By David Irvine

“Society does not want individuals who are alert, keen, revolutionary,” writes J. Krishnamurti, “because such individuals will not fit into the established social patten and they may break it up. This is why society seeks to hold your mind in its pattern, & why your so-called education encourages you to imitate, to follow, to conform.”

This quote doesn’t just relate to our education system. This quote extends to all forms of learning. Be sure you are developing yourself in a way that pushes you to expand beyond your established, conditioned way of thinking.

When is the last time you hung out in situations, environments, and in relationships where you were uncomfortable? When is the last time you exposed yourself to something that broke a particular pattern within you and around you? What does it really mean to learn?

I share Krishnamurti’s words not to be critical, in any way, of our education system, but to remind you that there is another education waiting for you, and that the teacher will be your authentic self, your own voice, your heart.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

Categories: Leadership and Culture
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Passion, Vision, and Persistence: Leadership And A Group Of Committed Mothers

Posted April 11, 2011 By David Irvine

“Although ski jumping was an official event in the very first Olympic Winter Games in 1924, women weren’t granted the right to compete at the highest level in the sport until last Wednesday – 87  years later. The International Olympic Committee’s decision to include women’s ski jumping in the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, might not have come about without the persistence and hard work of four Calgary mothers who fought for their daughters to have an equal footing with men in the sport.” (Calgary Herald, April 10, 2011)

This decade-long fight against tradition is a great leadership story about passion, vision, persistence – and love. It’s also a story of integrity and fighting a principle that, in the words of the mothers, “just wasn’t right.”

The irony of this inspiring story is that all four young women whose mothers’ determination changed years of tradition have since moved on and will likely not be competing themselves. This story reminds me of an old Chinese proverb that says, in essence, “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

Well done ladies. A leaders’ legacy. Many women will be jumping in the shade of your contribution for years to come.

David Irvine, Speaker and Author

Categories: Authentic Leadership and Culture
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Inspire, Illuminate, and Encourage Authenticity In Leaders

Posted March 13, 2011 By David Irvine

As I prepare to launch my business to a new level, I’ve revisited my mission statement. The passion and promise of our business is to build cultures of trust that attract, retain, inspire, and unleash greatness. Its about making this world a better place to work. Personally, through the strength of my authentic presence, I inspire and guide leaders to connect with their authentic selves, thus amplifying their impact on the world. The path to transform cultures is ultimately to inspire, illuminate, and encourage authenticity in leaders. While my focus is on speaking and writing, I have an alliance with some great consultants who support my clients who are committed to implement the ideas that I present in my keynotes and workshops.

Here’s the long form, clarifying for myself, what each component of my mission means:

Inspire is about nourishing and creating learning environments and conversations that awaken the human spirit, connect with and tap into the power of the universal life force, touch the soul, open the heart, and move people to action through significant emotional experiences. I do this through the unique expression of my gifts and my voice – the strength of my identity and integrity as a human being. My work gets to the heart of life and leadership through deeper, more meaningful connections. It is an extension, an expression of my authentic self.

Illuminate is about shining a light on the gifts and the voices – those seeds of possibility – that lie deeply hidden within every one of us as we are besieged by a world that tells us how we “should” be. Illuminating is also about making a conscious contact with a deeper life force that carries, guides, and supports us to live authentically.

Encourage – Has its root in the Latin word cor, which means “heart.” So does the word courage. To have courage means to have heart. To encourage means to give courage, to give others heart, to give of my heart so that others may more fully develop and experience their own courage and heart.

Authenticity is the dedication to living congruently between our inner and outer lives. This ongoing inquiry and commitment leads to amplifying the impact we have on the world through deeper presence.

Leaders are culture makers at all levels of organizations and in all walks of life: people who are committed to find and express their voice in the service of others.

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves. Leaders see the oak tree in the acorn, and create the environment that brings the oak to fruition. Leadership is about presence, not position. Leadership is like the sounding cavity of a violin: It takes in the sound, resonates with it, and gives back depth and fullness to another  voice. My work is built on a simple premise: great leadership cannot be reduced to technique. Great leadership comes from the identity and the integrity of the leader. This involves making deep changes within so as to be capable of transforming others from the depth of our own experience. We lead from the inner strength of who we are.

Greatness is the commitment and capacity to fulfill your natural, authentic potential.


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Where Does Commitment Come From? How To Inspire People

Posted January 23, 2011 By David Irvine

Leadership is about creating cultures that inspire people, build commitment, and harness energy. As I sit on the plane returning from San Francisco this weekend, I reflect on some of the critical factors I have found in creating an engaging culture. Having just finished re-reading James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s book, Encouraging The Heart, I got inspired to write this blog. After you’ve read this blog, I’d love to hear how you inspire others.

Values:

Years of consulting with organizations have taught me that clarity of values is the force that determines an individual’s commitment to an organization. Personal values matter most. To inspire people, you have to get to their core values. Living according to other people’s conditions virtually guarantees that we will not be giving our all.

How many executives go on a retreat, create a corporate values statement, print it on posters, publish it in the annual report, hold training classes to orient people to it, post it beautifully in the headquarters’ lobby, and then wonder why commitment isn’t skyrocketing?

These efforts are a huge waste of time unless there is an equally concerted endeavor to help individuals understand, through dialogue and discovery, their own values and examine the fit between their values and the organizations’. I’m not saying that organizational values are not important, but they are only one side of the commitment equation. Commitment is a matter of fit between the personal and the organizational values.

Personal Vision:

The vision of reaching the top of the mountain gives energy to the climber and makes the experience of climbing worthwhile. With no summit in mind, we are aimlessly wandering through rocks and trees, irritable and discontented. Vision keeps us on track. It helps us prioritize the demands, clarifies what we need to say “no” to, and gives us purposeful action. Vision gives us focus, energy, perspective, power, and significance, especially during moments of discouragement.

Alignment:

Human beings simply don’t put their hearts into something they don’t believe in. Energy, passion, commitment comes when there’s a fit, when there’s alignment between personal and organizational values. Employees are much more likely to be engaged when they know their positional leaders are committed to them. Loyalty begets loyalty. This can only be accomplished with careful and meaningful dialogue. Here are three useful questions to ask employees to help move you toward alignment:

  1. What matters most to you? Where does work fit into the broader context of your life?
  2. How does this organization ensure that you bring your values to work?
  3. What do you need from me as a leader to ensure that there is alignment between your values and ours?
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Service With A Cause: Our Lives Depend On It

Posted January 16, 2011 By David Irvine
My good friend, Ray Robitaille, a senior police officer with the Calgary Police Service, will leave for Afghanistan next month as part of a peace-keeping mission. Ray is leaving his young family behind for eight months to work on the United Nations/European Union mission to help train Afghanistan’s national police force. He is making sacrifices because he stands for something important. I admire him greatly for this, and I know, with his skills and experience, he will make a significant contribution to this cause.
What principles do you stand for? What sacrifices have you made lately for a cause greater than your own self interest?
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Health Care Has Abundant Care

Posted October 31, 2010 By David Irvine

Last week I spent a day facilitating a leadership workshop with an amazing group of 300 health care leaders from Fraser Health, the health region that serves 20 communities in the lower British Columbia mainland, from Burnaby to White Rock to Hope. I experienced the same thing I do with every group of health care leaders I work with: compassion, commitment, and courage in the face of inhuman demands and exorbitant stress in a world of ever-decreasing resources. I believe that the professionals that you meet when you are in need of health care genuinely care. Don’t mistake tiredness for indifference. They care about their work. They care about their profession. And they care about you.

It reminded me to be a little easier on health care providers when in need of health care. Remember: what you give will eventually come back to you. This group of leaders in BC earned every bit of my sincere respect for the work they do and for they way they do it. Give the professionals you come across a chance to earn your respect. And who knows – you may get even better care when you bring care to the system.

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Contribution: Giving Credit vs. Taking Credit

Posted October 25, 2010 By David Irvine

I spent this past weekend being a part of a board retreat in Boston with a wonderful group of leaders. Board members generally don’t get the credit they deserve in an organization – it goes to the front-line people who do the work.  But, that’s not why they’re there. They are there because they want to contribute – to be of service. Service for service sake, while great for soul, is also an exercise in ego reduction. Those who live a life of service understand that if you are to give a little light, you sometimes have to endure a little burning. But in the end, service – without recognition or material reward – provides the best remuneration: self-respect, the result of doing the right thing rather what’s easy, comfortable, or convenient.

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The RCMP: A Culture Of Trust – Getting The Whole Story…

Posted September 26, 2010 By David Irvine

I just came back this week from working with a group of commissioned RCMP officers on the east coast. Some of the finest leaders you’ll find anywhere. While there are certainly areas that need work in the RCMP culture, it is a culture that is far from broken. When these guys put their lives on the line with each other and for the citizens of Canada, there is a level of trust, respect, and camaraderie between them that you won’t find in many organizations. They have rich values: Integrity, Honesty, Professionalism, Compassion, Respect, and Accountability – and work hard to get these values off the wall and into the hearts of their members. The culture of the RCMP is not in Ottawa. That’s only a very small part of the RCMP story. The real culture is in the detachments and the districts across the country. And, like any great organization, there are great commanding officers and bad ones.

Like any organization that is in the public eye, the challenge facing the RCMP is that we live in a “CNN” world, where thirty-second sound bites and headlines create a distortion of the whole picture. This age of technology creates a false impression of reality, where what’s “rare” is perceived as reality, and what’s reality is rare. You don’t know what is going on in Afghanistan by watching a thirty-second news report on the evening news. You learn what’s going on in Afghanistan by spending hours talking with a soldier who came home without his legs, or you spend time people who live and work there, committing their lives to rebuilding a shredded country.

You don’t know what’s going on in the RCMP by watching the sensationalism of a cell-block story in Kamloops or a YouTube video of a tragedy in the Vancouver airport. There is no denying that these events have taken place and the media serves a purpose in holding the organization to account for these catastrophes. There is an element of truth in all news stories. But let’s not forget that these “rarities” are but a small fraction of the reality of the RCMP. If you want to really know what goes on in the RCMP, spend hours on ride-alongs and witness first hand the amazing work these men and women do everyday in this country. Or take the time to visit with staff commanders, corporals, and constables and get their picture of reality, and learn how hard they are working at the detachment level to develop leadership capacity and the development of a culture aligned with their values.

I have nothing but admiration for so many of the leaders I have met in the RCMP. In recent years, I have become associated with some of the men and women who helped organize and run the SwissAir crash recovery, who had to face the aftermath of their colleagues’ deaths in the bloodbath of Mayerthorpe, who organized the security at the Olympics, and who put their lives on the line in daily undercover operations and “routine” policing. We still have a world-class national police force of professionals, many of whom literally give up decades of their lives to make this a safer, more civil society for all of us. Before we pass judgment, let’s be sure we’re viewing the picture from a broad enough lens to give us an accurate representation of reality.

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The First Condition Of Employee Engagement: Engagement

Posted September 19, 2010 By David Irvine

My teenage daughters have been, by far, my best teachers in understanding engagement. When I’ve been traveling for an extended time and disconnected from them, my tendency is to come home and see all the things they aren’t doing to help around the house. When I’m tired and detached from them I’ll notice how they haven’t been keeping their rooms clean enough, their chores haven’t been done adequately, and their responsibilities have been neglected. Then I’ll proceed to lecture them and willfully try to “engage” the “disengaged.” This type of approach, or management by pressure, is what Ken Blanchard used to call “seagull management,” which means you ignore people and then you fly around and crap on them. The obvious result of this line of attack is resistance, disengagement, and power struggles.

What my kids continue to teach me is that if you want engagement, you first of all have to be engaged. Paradoxically, commitment and accountability for results is correlated with the time you spend with your kids when you aren’t expecting anything, when you are just hanging around, listening and hearing their concerns and desires. Before you can engage people you have to be engaged with them. Connection – or reconnection if you have been detached – is a prerequisite to engagement. So often I see executives in their corporate offices sending out employee engagement surveys to people they don’t even know and then wondering why people say they are disengaged. Sole reliance on employee engagement surveys to assess whether your employees are engaged is an indication of disengagement!

For more on this topic, watch for my article in my next newsletter coming out this week.

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