Tag Archive for: leadership

Transforming Sorrow Into Service: Effective Leadership In Action

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“Only when we learn to be humble about ourselves, can we begin to respect others.” – Lindsay Leigh Kimmett

Lindsay Leigh Kimmett was an athlete, a leader, and a medical student with enormous potential to do great things in the world. But her life ended when, as a seat-belted passenger, she was tragically killed in a single car rollover in 2008. Lindsay’s parents were consumed with unimaginable sorrow at her untimely passing, “but in an attempt to move forward positively,” they were determined to carry on her legacy. Lindsay’s family and friends created the Lindsay Leigh Kimmett Memorial Foundation in honor of her memory.

To date, more than a million dollars has been invested into our community in Lindsay’s name across an array of initiatives, including Valedictorian Scholarships at all the three Cochrane high schools, The Dr. Lindsay Leigh Kimmett Prize in Emergency Medicine at the University of Calgary Medical School, and Lindsay’s Kids Minor Hockey and Ringette Sponsorships. Since her death, Lindsay’s family has also been very active in supporting Alberta’s distracted driving legislation and asks all to drive responsibly without distractions.

Effective leadership displays the willingness and capacity to turn sorrow and hardship into a gift that benefits others. Those who experience grief and have the courage to work with it and work through it, emerge a better person, enabling leadership qualities like perspective, patience, clarity, and empathy. Through learning to grieve in a healthy way, you open yourself to the capacity required to live in harmony and balance with one another and the earth.

Here are five ways to transform loss into a gift that benefits others:

  1. Make room to grieve – Let life touch you. Stop and allow grief to surface when it is present. Go to funerals. Allow yourself to cry. If you can, be with your pet when they die. Spend time with a dying relative or friend. Community can be built in tragedy. Don’t be afraid to grieve and share your grief with people you care about and who care about you. Allowing yourself to grieve enables you to accept loss as a part of the good life. Grieving is a lonely journey and should not be traveled alone. You may never “get over it,” but you can work through it – by acknowledging honestly what is happening inside you, and allowing your heart to open, both with yourself and with others.
  2. Let go of the anger – Anger is often born out of suffering, especially when someone or something has caused your loss. While it is part of the process of grief, unacknowledged anger or anger that festers inside, turns into the bitter poison of resentment. The antidote to anger? Name it. Claim it. Take responsibility for your reactions to life. Then have the courage to let it go. An indication of strong character is the courage to bear an injustice without a motive of revenge.
  3. Be willing to not know – Sometimes the best you can do is accept what is. Although it is human nature to seek control through answers, sometimes the answers simply aren’t there. Often you have to delete your need to understand. A sign of maturity is the courage to accept the vast and inevitable unknown of the human experience, and the willingness to let go of the need for complete comprehension.
  4. Let grief be your teacher – In the arduous journey of grief, if you pause every so often to open your heart and look within yourself, you will discover that the grief is guiding you to be a better person. While you may not be able to find your gifts in the immediacy of tragedy, keep an open mind to what life’s adversities can eventually teach you. Loss and subsequent grieving can foster, among other things, the ability to be compassionate, to connect more meaningfully with others, and to gain perspective and clarity about what matters most.
  5. Turn sorrow into service – In an effort to move forward constructively, find ways for your loss to fill a need in the world. While establishing a foundation was the Kimmitt’s way to transform grief into positive action, there are many ways you can make the world better through your loss. Being open to what grieving can teach you will amplify your ability to impact others through a stronger leadership presence.

I have deep admiration for what the Kimmett family has done for our community and beyond in light of their tragic loss. Their willingness to turn sorrow into service is authentic leadership in action. May their story inspire you to embrace the inevitable and at times seemingly unjust and often unanswerable tragedies of life as you stumble forward – with courage, conviction, and compassion – on the journey to being a better person and a better leader.

The Roots Of Self Leadership: Living A Good Life

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Last week my wife, Val and I took time to transplant trees and re-pot houseplants. It’s been good for me to slow down and spend some time working with soil, getting my hands dirty and connecting to the land, reminding me of the value farmers bring to our culture. I’ve been learning from Val, our resident plant expert, that a healthy root system is necessary to ensure a robust plant. Through their natural intelligence, plants know this and develop extensive roots before their energy is transferred into growing foliage. You’ll see this in a houseplant that will get root bound in a pot before they flourish above the ground. The root system is first developed in the dirt, thus enabling the plant to support its growth above the surface.

Self Leadership is like that. The source of what is manifested in the world is not seen by the world. Like a plant, whose strength and energy come from its roots, the strength and energy of a leader comes from within. A good life – through a person’s roots – precedes good leadership. Below is a short list of what a good life means to me, and the roots that will sustain and support you to do the work that you are called to do.

  • Clarity – Clarity is about living your life by design rather than by default. Living without clarity is like embarking on a wilderness journey without a compass. Any way will get you there if you don’t know where you are going. Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare and precious achievement. You’ll be told in a hundred ways what is expected of you and what is needed of you to be a success. The real discipline in life comes in saying no to the wrong opportunities.
  • Courage – If you have ever walked through something that frightens you, and you grew through to the other side, you know that courage is inspiring. It inspires you and it inspires those around you. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is facing fear and walking through it. There have always been courageous men and women who have been prepared to die for what they believe in. What do you care enough about to give your life for?
  • Character – If you want to attract others, you must be attractive. Strong character demands that you shift from being the best in the world to being the best for the world, to strive not for what you can get, but what you can give, to endeavor not for what you can have, but for who you can be. A job title, the letters behind your name, the size of your office, or your income are not measures of human worth. No success by the world’s standards will ever be enough to compensate for a lack of strong character.
  • Calling – Calling is a devotion to a cause beyond you. It is inspiring to be around people who have a dedication to a cause they care about. When you feel an internal calling, a deep sense of pursuing what you are meant to be pursuing, you take a step toward completeness in your life. “A musician must make music,” wrote Abraham Maslow, the famed American psychologist, “an artist must paint, a poet must write, if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves.” Whether you are paid or not to express your calling, a good life requires you listen and respond.
  • Contribution – When we come to the end of our days on this earth, we take no material thing with us. It’s not what we have gained for ourselves but the contribution we have made to others that makes life meaningful. It’s not what we get from life that has the greatest most lasting reward. It’s what we give. A good life requires a generous spirit and a giving heart. A life of contribution is a good life.
  • Connection – After three decades of observing and learning from thousands of leaders in hundreds of organizations and in every walk of life, I finally understand what my parents tried to teach me more than forty years ago. In an interdependent world, everything is about relationships. It’s not all about models or strategies or programs or the latest technology. Whether you are CEO building a company, a middle manager leading a division, a supervisor ensuring results on your team, a front-line sales person, a customer-service representative, or a parent attempting to develop capable young people, leadership is all about making contact and building connections. And caring is at the root.
  • Centering – “Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. For me, a good life is built around a spiritual centre that I constantly seek and return to. From this foundation I find security amidst uncertainty, serenity in the middle of success and failure, stability among the fleeting emotions of happiness and sadness. It is this centre that sustains me and provides connection in loss, humility in achievement, perspective in chaos, strength in weakness, and wholeness in fragmentation.

It’s an exciting time to be living in this wondrous world. What concerns me is the possibility that our efforts to continuously improve and advance everything will create a society that is actually less satisfying to live in. Every day we have an opportunity to invent a new world through the choices we make. Not just in a narrow economic sense, but also in a broader human sense: for ourselves and for our children and for our children’s children.

What does a good life mean to you, and how does living in accord with what matters to you make you a better person and a better leader?

How To Build An Aligned Leadership Culture

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We’ve been asked to facilitate a lot of leadership culture alignment initiatives with organizations lately. Here’s a three step process that senior leaders have found to be helpful:

  1. Identify the critical leadership practices required to support and achieve your organization’s strategic goals and objectives. In doing so, your high potential development process will be grounded in helping future leaders be authentic by aligning their career development goals and capability requirements with your organization’s business goals and objectives.
  2. Define what “high potential leaders” means using objective, behavioral terms. This allows the organization to clearly define “high potential” in an objective and observable way that provides a benchmark from which individuals can be assessed and create a meaningful and relevant development plan.
  3. Create and provide a framework your organization can use to communicate this information throughout the organization. This provides a common language and opportunity for your organization to create a “community” in which high potentials, their managers and mentors can support the development, engagement, commitment and retention of key employees in the organization.

Granting Grace – A Key To Building A Good Culture

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What if we could sit down and ask for what we need and want from each other? What if we could talk openly with each other, in the spirit of goodwill and respect, about what would make us happy and loyal in our workplace? What if we could then negotiate what we can do and what we can’t do to meet these needs? What would happen to our workplaces, our communities, and our families if we all practiced being a little more honest and direct with each other in a respectful way?

We can all learn to be more direct with each other, and it takes continual practice, but there’s something more. Farm Credit Canada, one of my clients and an organization that practices good culture, has taught me a very important concept around building strong culture. One of the key principles in their cultural practices and one which they work at relentlessly, is the concept of granting grace in their interactions with each other. They hold each other accountable for creating a safe environment where people can speak up without fear of repercussion.

I spent three days with one of their teams this week, and “grace” was a central part of our conversations. They work hard at talking straight in a responsible manner. They are committed to the success of others and hold each other accountable to not engage in “conspiracies” against people. They strive for patience with themselves and others but also respectfully acknowledge when they operate outside the expectations of grace. They don’t get it perfect, but they get it right.

This kind of commitment lends itself to learning to be open and direct with each other. I love the idea of “granting grace.” What does “granting grace” mean to you? How do you operate with “grace” in your workplace? What effect does “grace” have on engagement, commitment, and productivity?

Good Leadership: How To Motivate People

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I recently returned home after leading a three-day leadership development program with a long-term client and her team of managers who run a successful grocery business. The morning of the first day I arrived an hour early to set up and was eagerly met by the VP of IT who was already had the AV equipment all set up for me. In the process of getting organized, we discovered that I didn’t have the right adapter for his television screen. Enthused and accountable, he sped off across town to get what I needed. He was obviously motivated. Passionate, service minded, and wholehearted are just some of the words to describe this amazing leader.

During the workshop, and referring to the VP who helped me that morning, I asked one of the participants what he felt led to this colleague’s passion for his job. And later that evening I sat with one of the long-term executive team members and got the whole story.

“This manager, who now is on the senior executive team, worked for fifteen years on the floor stocking shelves. While his work was okay, he was unmotivated, unhappy, and pretty miserable to be around. He used up every sick day he had; came in not a minute early and went home not a minute late after his shift; didn’t really talk or interact with anyone; classic disengaged employee. In fact, we were on the verge of firing him because of his attitude when the new General Manager arrived three years ago.”

“So, how did this unhappy employee get from the shop floor to the executive suite in three years?”

“Good leadership,” was the reply. The new GM took the first several months of her tenure to wander around, listen to people, and make a personal connection with everyone on the floor. And she saw potential in this man. She saw something that perhaps he couldn’t even see in himself. She found out he was a leader in the community and started to wonder why we couldn’t bring that capacity out in his work. She thought he had good ideas and asked him if he would be interested in taking on the role of shop steward. She then worked with the union to make this happen.

As it turned out, he thrived in this role. Through some more conversations, it was soon discovered that he played in a band and had unique computer and technical abilities. Informally, he took on the role of the organizational “techie” and, before long, was promoted to VP of IT. The more responsibilities he was given, the more he excelled. And now, he is one of the foremost leaders in a 125 million dollar operation. In the last three years he has never been off work sick. He comes early and stays late, and is one of the most positive people in the company.

Here’s my short take on how motivate people:

  1. Care. Care enough to listen. Care enough to find out what matters to people. Care enough to find out people’s unique abilities, talents, and gifts. If you spend enough time, you will eventually discover that everyone is talented, original, and has something to offer. And everyone wants to make a contribution – if you can find the right niche. If won’t reach everyone, but you reach a lot more if you care.
  2. When you care enough about people you will soon realize that you can’t really “motivate” anyone. What you can do is create a climate where people shine. Motivation is essentially about aligning talent and passion with what the organizational needs.
  3. Never stop believing in people. You never know what people are capable of when you stop controlling them and start unleashing their potential. Good leadership is about seeing in others what they cannot see within themselves.

Employee Engagement and The Power Of Wholeheartedness

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I was in the doctor’s office the other day for my annual physical. The receptionist at the front desk was absorbed in her computer work and did not see me come in.

“I have an appointment to see the doctor.” I said, politely interrupting her.

Without a response, and barely looking up from her computer, she handed me a card with a number on it. Take this to room #17. Put it in the basket outside the door and take a seat.”

No smile. No greeting. No hello. It put me in mind of the many “robotic” employees that I see in many workplaces who exude dissatisfaction in their jobs.

As I sat and waited for the doctor, a series of questions ran through my mind:

  • How would it be to go to work every day and spend so many hours in a state of unhappiness and lack of engagement?
  • Is the detached behavior of such employees an expression of the culture they work in, or are they actually creating the culture?
  • How much is their lack of engagement reflective of the culture, and how much is reflective of their own life? Most people I meet who are disengaged in their work are also disengaged in their personal life.
  • How could I have been more caring toward this kind of employee? It always seems easier to be a critic than to be a solution maker.

Who really suffers when employees aren’t engaged? Not the customer. Five seconds with a miserable employee isn’t going to affect my life too much. Not the organization or their colleagues. When you are around disengaged people, you just tend to disengage from them. If an employee is miserable all day, they are miserable, for the most part, by themself.

I believe the biggest cost to employee disengagement is to the employee. They have to live with themselves. They are they ones who spend thousands of hours at this thing called “a job,” and if they aren’t finding a way to make it a joyful experience, they are the one to ultimately suffer.
If you are waiting for someone to get you engaged in your job, you’ll soon learn that waiting is not a very good strategy. You ultimately have to take responsibility for your own happiness and engagement at work. No one else is going to do it for you.

Certainly a boss and the culture make a difference, and when I work with positional leaders, managers, and supervisors, I tell them so. Bosses have a responsibility to create an environment worth working in. But it isn’t all up to boss. Bosses and employees share the responsibility.

I have five suggestions for living a wholehearted life:

  1. Decide that all blame is a waste of time. Being a wholehearted employee and a wholehearted person starts with a decision. “If it is to be, let it begin with me,” is a good slogan here. If you aren’t wholehearted in what you do, identify the obstacles and work toward overcoming them. Take a good honest look at yourself and ask, “Is it the job that needs changing, or is it my attitude?”
  2. Be a purpose-driven-person. Create an inspiring vision to get yourself out of bed in the morning. Martin Luther King had a prayer to start every day: “Use me God. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself.”
  3. Make a point to create value everywhere you go. Every conversation. Every interaction. Every contact. Create an opportunity to make the life of another person better or the situation improved. Be a problem solver rather than a problem maker. Zig Ziglar once said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
  4. If your job doesn’t inspire you (and even if it does) find something to do when you are home that feeds your soul and helps you come alive. Howard Thurman, the African American author, philosopher, and civil rights leader, said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
  5. Try something new. Break out of the box. Do something uncharacteristic for you. Take up Aikido. Skydive. Sign up for a ballroom dance class. Do something where you are a beginner, and take some risks. There’s nothing more enlivening that getting out of your comfort zone and breaking through some fears. Nothing like an adventure to get your adrenaline going, your energy moving, and your heart open.