One of the most important things to keep in mind as you study and work to develop your personal leadership abilities, the ones you’ll use throughout your life, whatever you’re doing and no matter the position, is that they’re neutral.
That’s right, leadership skills and abilities are without prejudice, neither good nor bad—you might say they swing both ways.
According to Warren Bennis, a leader innovates, develops, focuses on people, inspires trust, has a long-range perspective, keeps an eye on the horizon, originates, and is his own person.
Does that sound like someone you’d like to emulate? Because it’s a perfect description of Bernie Madoff.
Leadership actions are a MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) function. In other words, it’s not the actions that are worth emulating, but the MAP.
Notice I said emulating, not copying.
Consider those people you respect, as well as those lower on your list. Even when you disagree with parts of their MAP, you may agree with others, which means you can draw from many sources, but in the end it’s your MAP and that makes it absolutely unique to you.
During this holiday season, think about it. The economic mess with which the world is dealing was created by people with great skills and, to be polite, challenged MAP.
Last week we talked about being an original; now let’s look at something that underlies several of the items on Bennis’ list.
Among the 13 things that leaders do are investigate reality, ask what and why, and challenge the status quo. They may sound different, but the same action underlies each one.
The ability to do all three of these means that you do not make assumptions (the ‘A’ in AMS).
What will you find if you start your investigation from the viewpoint that certain parts have more validity than others?
How can you hear all the input when questioning the premise of an action if you are predisposed to hear one thing (or person) above another?
How can you challenge, let alone upset, what currently is if you blindly accept any of its underlying premises?
Typically, assumptions are buried in your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and require a heightened level of self-awareness to recognize them. With effort, it’s possible to build an automatic MAP monitoring system that sends a warning when assumptions start creeping into your actions. Remember, assumptions are insidious, sneaky and often masquerade as common sense/logical thinking.
For instance, you are assuming if you
evaluate/judge a speaker based on looks, clothes, position, cohorts, even reputation;
request information, but already have your position roughed out; or
consider your ideology inviolate and not open to question.
Ridding yourself of assumptions is difficult; in fact, it’s one of the most difficult skills you’ll ever develop, but you can develop it by staying aware of your own thoughts and being brutally honest with yourself.
Assumptions blind you so you cannot see and deafen you so you cannot hear.
Of course, parents should encourage their children to grow, but this type of thing furthers the myth of what to look for in those who become ‘leaders’, while those without these traits are destined for a lesser role in life.
“…raise your child to be a winner, a leader and a success rather than another member of the dull rat race.”
The ‘leader’ to which the post and follow-up links refer is the person out front with the big pay package, as opposed to plain, hard-working solid citizens—I guess they’re the afore mentioned dull members.
Leadership isn’t a set of skills, it’s how you think and live.
And while it may be your pleasure to see your children excel, it’s your parental leadership responsibility to help them do it.
5 ways for parents to lead
Teach your children to love reading books. Books offer every person a world of hard knowledge and imagination stimulants.
Don’t make things easy for them, especially in school. A poor grade merits neither a rant at the kid or the teacher, rather it requires your effort to understand the difficulty—tough homework isn’t it—and assistance to find ways to improve.
Don’t fight your kids’ battles. People grow by overcoming difficulties, so be supportive and available to help, but don’t do it for them. Obviously, the exception is bullying, which should never be tolerated.
Set age/maturity appropriate boundaries within which decisions are up to them without interference or advice; this gives kids the luxury of making mistakes and learning from them.
Don’t live vicariously through your children. Their hopes, dreams, fears and worries should be of their own making, not foisted on them, whether actively or passively.
By the way, if you follow the links in the post I mentioned you’ll find it’s a sales pitch for a Christian leadership course.
Starting last June a college professor, who goes by CandidProf, has been writing a series of posts based on his first hand experiences with students and administrators.
Recently I was asked why I included them in Leadership Turn; it isn’t an education blog and what exactly did the topic have to do with leadership. To be honest the question floored me.
The only thing I can think of that has more to do with leadership than education is parenting.
Both require serious leadership skills, but beyond that their focus, kids, are leadership’s future.
CP is on hiatus for now, but that doesn’t reduce the need to focus on what could become the greatest leadership void ever faced.
Parents are the first and foremost source of leadership skills, not because they actively teach them, but because ‘monkey see, monkey do’. Unfortunately, as a whole, the job done leaves much to be desired.
Now we’re facing a gift-giving season in the worst economy in decades. You would think this was a great chance to teach children that they can’t have everything; that instant gratification isn’t guaranteed; that they aren’t entitled.
But it’s not happening. In article after article parents, especially moms, say the same thing. That they plan to cut everything—except the kids presents. “I want her to be able to look back and say, ‘Even though they were tough times, my mom was still able to give me stuff.”
Financial experts, such as Michelle Singletary, disagree, “By discussing with them that money is tight, you are admitting that at times you can’t do or get what you want. You are teaching them you can’t spend what you don’t have… Make the choice not to spend if you can’t afford it this year. Love your children like never before, but don’t go shopping out of guilt if you don’t have the cash.”
Even better than the economic lesson, which in itself has great value, you will start your children to understanding that not everything is within their control (or yours); that they aren’t entitled to have their every wish come true; that ‘instant’ isn’t their birthright, ‘gratification’ doesn’t always happen and that they really won’t die if they don’t get <fill in the blank>.
Who’s right? All the sacrificing moms or the minority like Singletary and me?
Or as our soon-to-be ex President called it, “That vision thing.”
Do you get as tired as I do hearing the pundits and media demanding and then dissecting whatever ‘vision’ has been offered up? Many of which make you wonder exactly what the vision author was high on when the vision struck.
Yet vision is supposed to be one the great differences between leaders and the rest of us.
The fifth definition of vision is “a vivid, imaginative conception or anticipation” and I’m willing to bet that you do that often, we all do, but especially those who have specific ideas for the future.
They go by other names—goals, plans, objectives, ambitions, aspirations, purpose, aim—but to achieve them you need to visualize where you want to go and how you’re going to get there.
The first part is your vision, whether you’re Steve Jobs with a vision of the iPod, the child who plays doctor and grows up to be a surgeon, the couple who falls in love and plans a family or the laid-off worker whose purpose is to survive the current mess.
The second part is how to get there. As someone once said, “a goal without a plan is a dream” and dreams rarely come true without the plan.
Whether you’re a manager, student or parent recognize that your goal/plan/objective/ambition/aspiration/purpose/aim is, in reality, your vision and treat it with the respect it deserves.
Write it down;
think it through;
describe it in detail;
determine how to achieve it;
write down the steps;
commit yourself; and
do it.
Visions aren’t carved in stone, they need to breath and live as you do; that means you may need to modify, put on hold, or even scrap your vision—but not at the first bump in the road. Visions are worth fighting for, but rarely worth dying for—even metaphorically.
Think of it this way: Life happens; the world happens; flexibility is part of success—INflexibility often paves the road to ruin.
Long weekends often lead to interesting conversations as happened to me.
A long time reader and I were talking and he asked where I thought leadership belonged. He said he understood and agreed with my premise that claiming leadership was only for a select few and that selecting them when very young was both wrong and wasteful.
What use then were leadership skills? Did I believe that they, too, were worthless twaddle? Did I have anything useful to offer in their place?
I read back on what I’ve written and I realized that things I thought I’d made clear were more like mud.
I decided that he’s right, if I want to tear up and root out leadership myths, then I need to offer something in their stead and discuss what to do in detail.
Leadership, like charity, begins at home; moreover, it begins with the one person with whom you always have, and always will, live—yourself.
It doesn’t matter what you do or where you do it, if you don’t acquire strong leadership skills and apply them to your own actions, then you set yourself up to follow blindly, lacking the knowledge or discretion to choose your leaders wisely and to look after yourself.
I doubt that’s an attractive scenario to you and it certainly isn’t one that I want to encourage.
So some of what we’ll talk about over the next few weeks is how you can apply useful leadership skills to your own situation; more about how your unique MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) impacts them; how and why it’s important to tweak them to fit your MAP.
I invite you to weigh in, agree or disagree and to ask whatever questions will enable you to put it all to use.
On a post over at Managing Leadership, Wally Bock left a great comment that’s germane to my recent posts and to the notion that the idea of ‘leadership’ has been corrupted by the leadership business and the media.
“…people prefer magical thinking to accountability.”
They sure do. That magical thinking is just great for all those who don’t want the responsibility of making their own decisions. It’s wonderful to have a ‘leader’ tell you what to think and how to act. That way, when things get screwed up, it isn’t your fault; it’s the leader’s fault. You get to say, ‘S/he told me to…’ and poof—instant absolution with no strings attached.
“There’s a joke about a professor who says that a certain idea is “fine in practice but may not work in theory. We didn’t have a problem identifying who was the leader before we had leadership theory. Nobody worried about whether that Caesar fellow was a true or real or authentic leader. They just followed him.”
Caesar didn’t worry about it, either. He just did [whatever] and assumed that everyone would follow along. And follow they did, at least until he decided to make his leadership official. At that point their response was direct and very final.
We followers need to do something similar to the leadership movement; not necessarily as final, because it does have its uses.
We need to reform its thinking; recognize that leadership skills are for everyone—not just a select few—and stop it from appointing/anointing those selective few as ‘leaders’.
So, new mantra—everybody is a leader; lead yourself first and don’t worry abut the rest.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions; it’s paved with ”leaders with intentions”—good, bad or indifferent.
I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?
Media co-opted ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ decades ago and increasingly diluted the meaning until it disappeared.
Along with dilution, the media gave those they termed leaders the same treatment that was previously reserved for extraordinary athletes, celebrities and rock stars.
In doing so they created the monstrous, indestructible, uncontrollable ego found in every leader who bought into their hype; and reflected in compensation packages more fit for royalty than for business people.
And in case you haven’t noticed, you can find many of those massive egos in (surprise, surprise) investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and other sectors of financial services. But you knew that.
In fact, ego-mania has percolated throughout all industries, with little consideration for the size of the organization or its mission.
Further, in throwing the leader term around so loosely the media helped enlarge politicians’ already super-sized egos still more and extended the ego franchise to religious heads.
Not only are those egos super-sized, they also seem to be bulletproof.
How many of these ‘leaders’ have actually taken responsibility for what they’ve caused?
Have you seen them apologizing for their share of bringing down the global economy? Did I miss it? Boy, I hope you Tivoed it for posterity.
But the media’s gone pretty silent on the subject; lauding corporate heads seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. But dodos aren’t the only extinct bird, the phoenix is, too. And like the phoenix, media leadership hype will rise again just as soon as we all forget—which, unfortunately, we will and that’s a historically proven fact.
By the way, I’m not the only one; Jim Stroup noticed the silence, too, only from a different perspective.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
One of the most important things to keep in mind as you study and work to develop your personal leadership abilities, the ones you’ll use throughout your life, whatever you’re doing and no matter the position, is that they’re neutral.
Now we’re facing a gift-giving season in the worst economy in decades. You would think this was a great chance to teach children that they can’t have everything; that instant gratification isn’t guaranteed; that they aren’t entitled.
A long time reader and I were talking and he asked where I thought leadership belonged. He said he understood and agreed with my premise that claiming leadership was only for a select few and that selecting them when very young was both wrong and wasteful.
On a post over at 
I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?
