Tag Archive for: authenticity

This I Believe

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This past spring, in a year-long leadership program I help facilitate for the Department of Human Services in the State of Oklahoma, one of the participants introduced me to This I Believe, an international organization engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Over 125,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, have been archived on their website: www.thisibelieve.org – which is heard on public radio, chronicled through their books, and featured in weekly podcasts. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow.
Below is a list of my “This I Believe” principles that I hold to be important in navigating my own life and work. These are the underlying beliefs – my Personal Creed – that guide how I live and form a framework for the decisions I make. I found it to be a fascinating and inspiring exercise to reflect on what I believe – and I encourage you, as leaders, to do the same. As you read my list, take some to time to ask, “What would my personal creed be?”
  1. While I can influence and impact others, I believe that the only person I can change is me.
  2. I believe that maturity comes not with age but rather with acceptance of responsibility.
  3. I believe we are not just a product of our upbringing. We are also a product of our perceptions, our beliefs, and our choices.
  4. I believe that your life will change forever the day that you decide, once and for all, that all blame is a waste of time.
  5. I believe in taking the time to clarify, live, and preserve a sense of purpose – a reason for being. When your why gets stronger, the way gets easier.
  6. I believe in the power of a dream. The purpose of having a dream is not necessarily to achieve it, but rather to inspire yourself to become the kind of person it takes to achieve it.
  7. I believe that one of the most encouraging facts of life is that our weakness can become our greatest strength.
  8. I believe that every experience is a potential learning opportunity. Within our wounds lay our greatest gifts and our greatest opportunity for contribution.
  9. I believe in four fundamental laws:
    • The Law of the Echo: Whatever we give will come back to us – ten fold.
    • The Law of Focus: What you focus on is what grows. Focus on the problems and they will grow. Focus on the solutions and they will grow.
    • The Law of Gratitude: A key to a good life is to always make your gratitude bigger than your circumstances.
    • The Law of the Lens: Who we are determines how we see others. We don’t see people as they are; we see people as we are.
  10.  I believe that the best present we can ever give anyone is to be present in the present. Life is lived now.
  11.  I believe that entitlement – believing you deserve something just because you want it  – never leads to happiness.
  12.  I believe that happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a method of travel. You are about as happy as you make up your mind to be.
  13.  I believe that good health is a precious companion. When you have your health you have a thousand wishes, and when you don’t, you have one.
  14.  I believe that the quality of an individual life has nothing to do with how long you live and everything to do with how you live.
  15.  I believe that success is not something you pursue. Success is something you attract – by the person you are becoming.
  16.  Like Scott Peck, I believe in taking the road less travelled – by choosing contribution over consumerism, service over self interest, and character over comfort.
  17.  I believe that leadership – the capacity to influence others toward a shared and worthy goal – cannot be reduced to technique or title. Great leadership comes from the identity and integrity of the leader.
  18.  I believe that caring is everything. Caring makes workplaces worth working in, schools worth learning in, and the world worth living in – now and in the future.
  19.  I believe in a God of my understanding of whom I continue to seek. At the end of my life I hope I can confidently declare that I have done my best to leave this world better than I found it.
  20.  I believe that the ability to positively impact others comes from being an integrated human being. I agree with Gandhi when he said. “A person cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.” Being a good leader means, first and foremost, being a good person.
 
If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.  – Mahatma Gandhi
The outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to reflect their inner beliefs. – James Allen

LEADERSHIP AMIDST THE TYRANNY OF ADMINISTRATIVE MINUTIA

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“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”   – Thomas A. Edison
A good friend and long-time client called me the other day and asked me how I am.
I responded with, “Busy,” which is my default response when I don’t have the where-with-all to be honest. But Vincent isn’t one to let me off the hook and wouldn’t let me get away with a lazy answer. That’s what I value about our friendship. It’s real. There’s an expectation of honesty. He has a low tolerance for superficiality.
So he responded, “Is it a good busy?”
The question made me stop and think. “How do you know if your ‘busy’ is ‘good’ or not?”
He elaborated, “What have you done today that has brought you joy? How is your energy? What drains you? What fulfills you? What tires you? What animates you?”
As an executive director at a university in South Central United States, Vincent started talking about the “administrative minutia” that comes with every leadership responsibility – the paper work, the proposals, the budgets, the demands, the fires you have to put out – the day-to-day grind that will wear you down and wear you out if you aren’t careful.
I came out of that conversation with Vincent with four things you have to attend to every day in order to survive and thrive in the midst of administrative minutia.
1. MAKE TIME TO THINK. You never want to be so busy doing that you don’t have time to think about what you are doing. Peter Drucker, the great management expert said it well: “There is nothing so useless as doing something efficiently that which should not be done at all.” The best leaders I know take time – if not daily, at least on a weekly basis,  – to think about what matters, what’s important, and what needs saying no to. Remember: every time you say yes to something that is unimportant, you so no to something that is important.
2. MAKE TIME TO GET ON THE BENCH. All hockey coaches know that the game is more than performance on the ice. It’s also about good bench management. Players simply can’t go full speed for much longer than about 45 seconds. While you have to stay focused and alert on the bench, you also have to take a good rest while you’re there. Human beings are not meant to go full out without periodic rest. While you don’t want to spend all day on the bench, what do you do every day to get away from the busyness and unplug from it all? What are you doing today to get on the bench? Whether it’s a good rest over the lunch hour or a five minute rest every hour or so, we all need to regularly get on the bench.
3. MAKE TIME FOR JOY. Yes, I know we need to stop complaining about the work we have to do at work. Work is called work for a reason. You don’t come to work to play. You get paid to work at work. And we could all use a little better attitude toward our work and find a little more gratitude and a little more joy in whatever we do. But you also spend a lot of your life at this thing called work, so you want to push aside that pile on your desk and make a little room for something that brings you joy. Joy is the intersection of passion and service to others. Find something you are passionate about and negotiate for ways that intersect your passion with an opportunity to make a difference. At minimum, find something that brings you joy away from work, something that you play at, so when you go to work you can be grateful that it provides opportunities for joy elsewhere.
4. MAKE TIME TO CARE. Caring produces energy. When you intentionally and consciously take the time to care – about the work you are doing, the project you are engaged in, the colleague down the hall who needs a little encouragement, or the difference you are making – notice how it breathes new life into your days. When you s-l-o-w d-o-w-n for even a brief moment to be kind to someone, listen to someone, to be present, and put extra care into the work you are doing, notice how “busyness” can turn into contentment. Mother Teresa said that, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” It’s simple caring that makes our workplace worth working in and our lives worth living.
These strategies don’t replace hard work, effort, or results. But when integrated into a busy life you come home at the end of the day a little more satisfied, a little more fulfilled, a little more focused on what’s important, and a little less depleted. We’re all busy, but is your busy a “good” busy?

The Inner Path of Leadership

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Michelangelo was asked once how he carved and created such magnificence and beauty from a slab of cold marble: He reportedly replied, “I didn’t do anything.  God put Pieta and David in the marble, they were already there.  I only had to carve away the parts that kept you from seeing them.”

For the past three and a half years, since walking with my brother through his cancer journey and his passing in February, I have taken much time to stop and reflect about my life and the purpose of my work. I have been setting aside time to refine my focus, clarify my personal mission and vision, and re-examine my calling and my commitments. Death, as painful as it is, can be strangely and amazingly healing, as it magnifies what truly matters in your life.
As I slowly emerge from this experience, two renewed agreements to myself and others arise: First, I am resolved to be more present in the present moment. Life is lived now. Not tomorrow or yesterday. We simply never know when our time is up. Facing death squarely and honestly helps us fully see what is around us now. Paradoxically, the realization that the life we have today won’t last forever enables us to appreciate and experience it more deeply. It is the impermanence of life that makes it possible to realize it’s incredibly precious value.
Second, I have never been more committed to guiding leaders in all walks of life to their authentic self and realizing the integral value of caring in leadership and life. This is the work I feel most called to do. There is an old Gnostic tradition that believes we don’t invent things, we just remember. That’s what the authentic journey is – remembering who we are meant to be and bringing that to life.
At Thomas More College in Kentucky, there stands a magnificent sculpture of a man sculpting himself, illustrating the amazing capacity to create yourself. The effigy is of a man hunched over his knees with a chisel in hand, carving his own body. Below his knees is a square block of bronze. As you look at his face, which is firmly concentrating on his sculpting, you see that he is blindfolded, creating himself by looking inward. The core of leadership, it turns out, requires reaching within ourselves and bringing the full spectrum of ourselves to our life and our work.
The Greeks understood the internal work that is necessary to sculpt ourselves. The eyes of their statues have no iris. They were chiseled looking inward, focusing on the back of their eyes. This illustrates the essence of leadership as a journey from within, a kind of consciousness that is creating a world out of what is inside of you.
The ending of a relationship, a betrayal, trauma, death, facing an addiction, living an unfulfilled dream, or simply expressing ourselves artistically – are all opportunities for the chisel to penetrate the hardened stone of the walls that surround us and protect us from living the life we are meant to live. Like the work of a great sculptor, the work of the authentic journey is not neat or linear and it can be messy. Far too many people in our culture decide it’s just not worth the journey and fall asleep, living lives, described by Henry David Thoreau, of “quiet desperation.” At some point in our lives, however, the desperation can no longer be quieted, and our authentic presence must come forth in the service of the world. This is the core of leadership.
I have had many experiences that were painful and often traumatic at the time, but were actually necessary and profound teaching moments providing a passage to a deeper connection to my authentic self. At the time they seemed to be random occurrences that I coped with the best way I could and I didn’t know that they were leading me to my destiny. Below the surface of my “traumas,” there was the power of a great sculptor, calling and preparing me to connect with a deeper essence that addressed the fundamental questions, “What is it, in my heart, in my soul, that I must do and be? Who am I, really?”
When National Hockey League player Theo Fleury announced publicly that his former junior hockey coach had sexually abused him, it helped release him from the internal trauma he had been suffering. Over the years, that trauma had driven him to drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity. He’d managed to hold the secret inside himself throughout his impressive sixteen-year NHL career, but it was steadily destroying him. Through a concerted and courageous desire to look inside and heal himself, Theo is now helping to heal others. By speaking out and becoming an advocate for sexual abuse victims, he has brought healing and recovery to thousands of hurt and struggling individuals who have experienced similar traumas in their lives. Looking within and then having the courage to bring what you find to serve others is not just good for the soul. It’s good for the world. This is the work of authentic leadership.
This fall I am planning to launch a public Leadership Presence Program – perhaps a year-long development opportunity – for discovering and strengthening your authentic leadership. Stay tuned, and let me know if you are interested in learning more.

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is in reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.” – Margaret Young, American singer and comedian

The Tyranny Of The Urgency: Why Too Many Priorities Means Nothing Is A Priority

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Earlier this month I was on a United Airlines flight from Calgary to Oklahoma City via Houston. It was on the morning of Calgary’s first snowstorm of the year and we were sitting on the tarmac for several minutes before passengers started to get restless, anxious, and impatient. You could feel the tension in the cabin.That’s when the captain came on the intercom and demonstrated some good leadership.

“I want to apologize for the delay, folks,” he said. “You can see the snow on the wings, and we are waiting in line for the de-icers to do their work. Unfortunately, they are a bit backlogged with the demands this morning. There are three or four planes ahead of us, so it appears it will take about ½ hour before we will be ready.

We also are having some difficulty with our computer system communicating with air-traffic control, so we have to reboot the system. That will take about an additional ½ hour.

What I want you to know from the flight deck is that we have only one priority: your safety. And I am promising you that we will not take off until we know this aircraft is 100% safe to do so. You can count on us for this. What I ask is that you have patience with us in this process that will enable us to make this a safe flight for all us.”

All the frustration that was surfacing amidst the passengers seemed to subside with this direct and honest message from the captain. In less than a minute, impatience was transformed into support. We shifted from being irritated with the airline to being sympathetic to the captain and committed to helping him make it safe for us. The tension in the cabin was dissolved in a few short moments with the clear and calm message sent by the leader at the front of the aircraft.

This is what leaders do when they are clear about their priority and are honest with those they serve…

The word priority didn’t always mean what it does today.

In his best-selling book, Essentialism (a great read by the way), Greg McKeown explains the surprising history of the word and how its’ meaning has shifted over time.

“The word priority,” writes McKeown, “came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.

Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple ‘first’ things.

People and companies routinely try to do just that. One leader told me of this experience in a company that talked of “Pri-1, Pri-2, Pri-3, Pri-4, and Pri-5.” This gave the impression of many things being the priority but actually meant nothing was.”

The captain on UA Flight 1599 knew what his priority was in the context of his job. A clear focus leads to clear leadership. This priority is transferred to his entire team. While the flight attendants serve us drinks and are expected to be pleasant and supportive to the passengers, and help us make connections to our next flight, the bottom line is that I got to Oklahoma and back safely. And even if our baggage got delayed or passengers missed connections and people were inconvenienced, our safe arrival to our destinations was all that really matters.

So what is all that really matters in your world? If I were to wander around your organization and ask your people, “What is you #1 priority right now?” what answers would I get? Are people clear about what is the only thing that is important? What have you done to identify and clarify this?

Let’s gain some liberty from the slavery of the tyranny of too many priorities. Let’s get focused on what matters most and get people enrolled in that effort. Just because somebody wants something from us doesn’t make it a priority.

Seven Steps To Holding An Employee Accountable

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“Everyone on a team knows who is and who is not performing and they are looking to you as the leader to see what you are going to do about it.” – Collin Powell, former US Secretary of State

Last week, in a two-day culture and leadership development workshop with a group of executives, one of the leaders made a fascinating statement: “I’ve been a positional leader for almost thirty years, and I’ve never learned an actual process for holding people accountable.”

I find this fascinating. We talk about “holding people accountable” all the time. We all know we need to be doing it, and we all think we know what we talking about. But do we? Far too often, tasks are assigned to employees in a haphazard way, hoping that the worker will ‘figure it out’ and deliver an adequate, even superior, performance. If this is your accountability process, you will soon realize that ‘hope’ is a better strategy for frustration than it is for results.

I have observed three reasons why managers don’t hold people accountable:

  • They aren’t clear about how to do it. There isn’t a clear accountability process in place.
  • They don’t want to be the bad guy. A recent Harvard study showed that many managers, hoping to get promoted, refrain from holding their people accountable because they want to get good performance feedback and stay in line for promotion.
  • It’s too hard. Let’s face it. It’s tough holding people accountable. It takes courage. Leaders must be prepared to put in the time and to have the tough conversations.

Seven Steps To Holding People Accountable

  1. Build Trust – Accountability without trust is compliance. Make the connection. Be trustworthy. Keep your promises. Be accountable. Make the connection.
  2. Discover the Reason – Accountability without a vision – without purpose and passion – is drudgery. If someone lacks accountability in their work, it usually means that haven’t found a reason to be accountable. They don’t have a why. Before you talk about results, if at all possible, help your employees discover a fit – between what they are passionate about what is expected of them. Even if you find out that their primary passion lies outside of work, at least you are supporting them. Fit people; don’t fix people.
  3. Clarify – Ambiguity breeds mediocrity. People need to be clear about what is expected and how success is defined. Clarify expectations, including what kind of attitude is required and what results are promised. People also need a clear line of sight between how their contribution makes a direct impact on the success of the organization.
  4. Get an Agreement – I define accountability as: The ability to be counted on. Accountable people never make a promise they can’t keep. But we need to get better at making promises. A request is not an agreement. If you want to hold someone accountable, you must get their full 100% agreement. Before you make an agreement, be sure the willingness, the resources, and the capabilities are in place. If you don’t get an agreement to a required request, then go to Step 6.
  5. Support Requirements – To be committed, engaged, and ultimately accountable, people need to feel that they can talk openly about the support they require to achieve their accountabilities. What support is needed? Your employee’s negotiated support requirements will be your accountability to them. The support requirements of your employees will be their accountabilities to you.
  6. Consequences – With no consequences there will be no accountabilities. Always start with positive consequences (motivators). Motivators are the internal or external results of delivering on your accountabilities. Motivators are meant to inspire you to achieve your accountabilities. If these don’t get the job done, then go to negative consequences.
  7. Follow up – Follow up means a clear understanding of a plan for follow-through, including how often we need to meet and with whom, to ensure that you hold yourself and each other accountable for honoring the promises you have made to each other. If you end up getting to negative consequences, then follow up means you must now be accountable to follow through on the consequences that were put forward to your employee.

If accountability remains a challenge for you or for your organization, I’d like to hear from you. Perhaps I can be of some assistance. http://www.irvinestone.ca/contact

AUTHENTICITY ISN’T ABOUT BEING PERFECT- IT’S ABOUT BEING HUMAN Three Ways To Authentic Leadership

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I learned from Jerry Weinberg, author of The Secrets Of Consulting, that if you want to stay single you should look for the perfect mate. So, I would postulate that trying to be perfectly authentic will actually make you inauthentic. Earning the trust and credibility that comes from authenticity isn’t about trying to be perfect. Instead, it’s about honesty. Let me illustrate with an example:

While working with an executive on how to be a more authentic in his leadership, he told me about a meeting where he had to deliver some tough news about his team’s performance. “I was honest with them, but I could see them pulling away and withdrawing. I knew that my honesty was disrespectful, and I was losing credibility. But I also knew that if I held back my frustration with their performance would increase and I wouldn’t be doing my job as a leader. How can you be more authentic in this kind of scenario?”

Being authentic is an entirely human journey, full of paradoxes, uncertainty and tension. It doesn’t mean getting it all perfect, working from a script, or having a formula. Instead, being authentic means accepting the paradox along with the tension. Authenticity requires both honesty and respect, and a willingness to wrestle with these sometimes opposing forces. If you are completely honest and call someone stupid, you would be totally disrespectful. On the other hand, you can be so respectful and polite that you are dishonest.

Struggling with this paradox between honesty and respect is an indication of authenticity. It means you are honest enough with yourself to step back and get some self-awareness. You don’t have to tell people you are wrestling with this kind of paradox because your humility will show through. Be assured that disrespectful, demeaning leaders with no emotional intelligence do not consciously wrestle with these kinds of paradoxes. The fact that you are grappling with them and seeking ways to better lead and communicate is an indicator of authenticity. Authenticity is about being human. It’s not about being perfect.

Here are three ways to be a more authentic leader:

  1. Be open for feedback. When the 75 members of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness. Seeking self-awareness is an indicator of authenticity. Certainly a 360 degree feedback tool is valuable, but asking directly for feedback is also important. “What do you want me to stop, start, continue doing in our relationship?” “On a scale of 1-10 how would you rate the quality of our relationship in the past year?” “What would take it up a notch?” These are helpful ways to get feedback. You don’t have to agree or disagree with what people tell you. You simply say thank you and take one or two areas that you will commit to improve. You can also get feedback from yourself, by taking time for self-reflection. Ask yourself how you can improve. Take an honest inventory every so often. Inauthentic people have no interest in getting to know themselves better.
  2. Realize the value of caring. In the ten years that Doug Conant served as CEO of the Campbell Soup Company, he turned the languishing business around by putting the focus back on the people who worked there. Over the course of his time at Campbell Soup, Conant was said to have written 30,000 handwritten thank you notes to his employees, amounting to about ten notes a week. “I let them know that I am personally paying attention and celebrating their accomplishments,” Conant said in an HBR podcast. After working in the leadership development field for more than thirty years, I have learned that good leadership is fundamentally about making contact, building personal connections, and helping people to grow and flourish. It’s fundamentally about caring. Good leadership means you go the extra mile to care about your organization. You care about the people you serve. And you care about the work you do and the contribution you make.
  1. Work with a guide. There’s an old Sufi saying that says, “The eye can’t see itself.” Just as a mirror reflects our face back to us, mentors, coaches, trusted advisors, therapists, confidants show us that which is so close to us we can’t see it. If you are serious about uncovering your authentic leadership, find a guide to help you through unfamiliar territory. Ask for help. While authenticity is a lonely journey, it can’t be done alone. The important thing is that others who have some experience with what you are facing can offer a supportive, accepting, accountable space to heal and learn. Guides help you step back and get some perspective. They support you, challenge you, and help ask questions like, “What’s going on here?” “What are you up against?” “What can be learned?” “What are your options?”