12 Keys To Authentic Leadership: You Do Know When It’s Real

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Below are 12 key messages that underlie my fundamental philosophy of leadership. Most of these messages aren’t mine. I’ve borrowed them from many of the great leaders I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years:

  1. Leadership is about inspiring and engaging people to work toward a compelling vision – by seeing the gifts and potential of others more clearly than they see it in themselves and being able to communicate it in their own unique way. Martin Luther King never said, “I  have a strategic plan.”
  2. There are too many consultants and speakers telling organizations how to be leaders. Leadership is contextual. The best an outside consultant can do is help you decide what kind of leadership is needed in your organization to achieve your purpose and help you get there.
  3. 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 in your organization a potential leader.
  4. You don’t get promoted to being a leader. You get promoted to being a boss but you don’t get promoted to being a leader. There’s a big difference between a boss and a leader. Holding a position of leadership is like having a driver’s license. Just because you have one doesn’t make you a good one.
  5. You aren’t a leader until someone decides that you are. You have to earn the right to be a be called a leader, and you aren’t one until you have earned it in the eyes of others. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
  6. As a leader –  whether it’s in the home, your community, or in your organization – you will continuously need to balance supports with demands. You don’t help people by pushing them when they need to be supported, nor do you help them by supporting them when they need to be pushed. You never get this balance perfect, but great leaders work at it – every day.
  7. Great leaders achieve organizational goals. Authentic leaders help you find your voice in the process. Authentic leaders align the interests, values, and goals of the organization with the interests, values, and goals of the employee. This is employee engagement at its finest, and it’s what attracts, retains, and inspires greatness. Authenticity is about finding your voice and inspiring others to find theirs. Authentic leaders earn their credibility by being authentic. You know when it’s real.
  8. Leadership is ultimately about service. Turn your organization chart upside down. Take care of your people so they can take care of the customer. Serving, however, is different than pleasing. Serving is about meeting people’s needs so they can get their job done. Pleasing is about meeting people’s wants. Serving breeds commitment. Pleasing breeds entitlement.
  9. Your best leadership program will be over a cup of coffee. You’ll never be able to lead by sitting at your computer. Make building trust your number one leadership priority and spend a large portion of your time connecting with the people you serve. Find out what matters to others and do all you can to meet their needs. Listen relentlessly.
  10. Leadership isn’t about you. It’s not about how great you are, how noble you are, or how profound you are. Leadership is about others and what you do to give credit to others. If you are going earn the credibility to influence others – long term – you better have a strong enough ego that you can leave it at the door. Credibility comes from giving credit, not taking it. People don’t remember what you said; they remember how you made them feel.
  11. Leadership is largely a matter of love. If you aren’t comfortable with the word love, call it caring, because leadership involves caring about people, not manipulating them. If you don’t care about people or about your work or about why you get out of bed in the morning, you might consider doing yourself and your organization a favor and get out of the position of leadership.
  12. If you want to improve your capacity to lead, put your focus on finding ways to enjoy leading more. While I’ve met a few incompetent leaders who actually enjoy leading, generally speaking, the best leaders I know enjoy what they do. Put your efforts in finding joy in your work as a leader, and you’ll be a better leader.

What is your leadership philosophy? Have you shared it lately with the people you serve and love?

How To Make Sense of Organizational Leadership

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We’ve all seen cases of sending employees to a leadership training program with no understanding of what skills or attitudes they are accountable to come out with. There is no measurement for whether or not the program makes any difference. Indiscriminately bringing in leadership “trainers” or aimlessly sending your leaders to a course because it “sounds interesting,” is the worst mistake you can make when it comes to organizational leadership.

It’s no wonder that organizations cut their leadership training budgets. If you still work in an organization that randomly sends people on leadership courses with no strategy or accountability or ways to measure the R.O.I. for the program, then you are working in an organization whose approach to leadership has reached its shelf life.

Smart – and healthy – organizations counter this mistake with a simple process:

  1. Clarify exactly what you expect from your leaders.
    Leadership expectations come from clarity of your values and clarity of your strategy. Once you are clear about where you are going and the kind of culture you need to get you there, then you can define the kind of leader it takes to make this happen. No one is promoted unless they meet the identified, expected standards.
  2. Rigorously measure – and assess – the leadership gaps.
    Once you are clear about what you expect from your leaders, you need to know where the gaps are. Your leaders need to know where they stand: both from in terms of attitudes and in terms of skills. Where are they meeting their organization’s need for good leadership? Where are they falling short? Your organization needs to know where the gaps are in their leaders. Who is a good leader? Who is not measuring up?
  3. Develop an accountability plan to close the gap.
    Once the gaps are identified (both personally and organizationally), the next step is to hold yourself and your leaders accountable to develop a plan close the gap. There are a myriad ways to close the gap, but how you close the gap depends on what exactly the gap is. Mentoring is a way to close a gap. Coaching is another way. Job sharing or cross-training, where you work in another area in the organization are also alternatives. Specific online training programs can be a very effective way to close the gap. Leadership training is an obvious way to close the gap, but now you have a goal and expected outcomes that you are accountable for in the leadership training. You may identify that many of your leaders have a similar gap in their abulities. This may present an opportunity to bring in an external consultant (or even internal person if you have the resources), to design and deliver a customized program that would fill the collective gap.

In order for leadership programs to produce long-term results they must have both clarity – about the specific skills and attitudes that are needed from the leaders, as well as a strategy to address and fill the gaps. Its so much more enjoyable, enriching, and effective, when you are working with a purpose, rather than merely working with a package.

Security, Identity, and Your Leadership Impact

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Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”- Helen Keller.

The Calgary Stampeders lost the Grey Cup recently, and I woke up the next morning feeling a little less secure. Upon reflection, the correlation is fascinating. I don’t even live in Calgary, and most of the players are Americans. But the Grey Cup for me was not just a game. And the Calgary Stampeders are not just a team. They are part of my identity. They are, I hate to admit, in my blood. I grew up watching my heros: Jerry Keeling, Terry Evanshen, Wayne Harris, John Helton, Don Luzzi, Herm Harrison, Larry Robinson. This crazy team has somehow become part of my DNA.

It makes no rational sense. I’ve never met any of the team members. I didn’t even get to one Stampeder game this season. Logically I can tell you they are just another team, but they actually feel like they are part of who I am. I won’t suffer long from the loss. I’ll get on with my very full day and it all will be forgotten within hours. But just as when they beat BC and my worth was bolstered, I am affected too.

If you ask my wife how long she was affected by the Calgary loss, she’ll tell you she wasn’t affected at all. She was interested in knowing who won, but she had zero attachment to the outcome. She has no identity with this team. Now if something  happened to one of our daughters, that would be a different story. Val’s identity is with her family, not with a football team.

The human experience is such that we all identify with certain things along this journey. Your identity is where you get your worth. Where do you get your source of security? Where do you get restored? As I get older, and hopefully more mature, I identify far less with sports teams and more with things that are much more sustainable and important in the world. But I still identify with external attributes.

In my leadership development programs, I ask people to take a careful inventory of where their identity and worth comes from. Given that many of the leaders in the room are very successful, many of them have their identity in their achievements. They define themselves by the success in their respective roles. Many have their identity in their family, their relationships. Others, if they are honest, have their identity and security in their possessions, their titles, the kind of homes they live in and the cars they drive. Many of us have our identity in the letters behind our name or our capacity to solve problems, fix things, and be smart.

There’s a dark side to this phenomenon of identifying with external roles, relationships, and surface characteristics. Soccer fans can get so attached to their respective teams that they kill each other. Executives who over-identify with their roles die early when they retire or they never retire or change careers. Parents can get depressed when their children leave home, and sometimes to prevent this, their kids never leave home! Bosses can become tyrants. People can go bankrupt. Individuals can get obsessed and become addicts.

The fact is, Helen Keller is right. There is no security in the external world. What she doesn’t tell us is where our security ultimately lies: within. While we can recognize our natural, human attachments to surface characteristics, the goal is to take time to look within and find a deeper core to anchor one’s self image.

As I age, I begin recognizing that all external identification will eventually dissolve. Your team will eventually lose, and even when they win, you will ask, “Now what?”  People we love die. We will eventually retire or at minimum our work will change. That beautiful car we bought will deteriorate. Our bodies will age and our health diminish. And when we begin suffering we have the opportunity to look inside. At this point we begin the spiritual journey.

Leaders who have their worth from within are more secure. They don’t need to prove themselves. They are not driven by their egos. They are more likeable. They are more impactful in their work. And they are better leaders.

What are you doing to let go of your attachments to the external world and find your security and worth from within? What are you doing to make life a “daring adventure?”