Tag Archives: globalization

Leadership

The New Leadership Is A Sacred Calling

You can greatly improve your job and career performance when you embrace leadership as a sacred calling.

The global marketplace is creating historic changes in human circumstances as broad and deep as those originated by the Industrial Revolution. But one significant change that observers are overlooking involves leadership.

From the outset of the Industrial Revolution, order-giving has been the standard of leadership. The word “order” comes from the Latin root meaning to arrange threads in a woof. In the Industrial Revolution’s early years, workers were “ordered” or ranked like threads in a woof of textile production lines.

But globalization is creating a need for new leadership. Instead of ordering people to go from A to B, the new leadership has people want to go from A to B.

This simple, even simplistic, difference illuminates an enormous leadership opportunity. Clearly, people who “want to” are more competitive than people who are simply responding to orders, given their skills are commensurate. Your arousing want-to in others can be accomplished most effectively when you see your leadership as a sacred activity.

Sacred is commonly defined as being devoted or dedicated to a deity or some religious purpose. But the emergence of the global marketplace has necessitated a new meaning for the sacred. The sacred I speak of is not connected to any principle exclusive to a particular denominational religion. If it were, it could not be applied universally throughout the global market’s interplay of many languages, cultures, and religions. Instead, the sacred aspect of leadership is based on the undeniable fact that all humans everywhere are interconnected through their relationships in profound, practical ways. The sacred flows from the wellsprings of those deep, human relationships.

Paradoxically, this “new” leadership has been manifested since time in memorial. After all, when people needed to accomplish great things, a leader had to first gather them together and speak from the heart. In that gathering, in that speaking, in that sharing something truly sacred was established.

To examine the sacred, we must understand the stuff that leaders’ activities must be made of: results. If you’re not getting results, you won’t be a leader for long. Results come in countless forms and functions. But one thing all results share is they are the outcomes of the relationships people engender to take action.

The word “relationship” comes from a Latin root meaning to “carry back.” To be involved in a human relationships is to both give and get. Such relationships are best realized in leadership when you engage in what I call the Leadership Imperative. The Imperative states: “I will lead others in such a way that we together not only accomplish our needed results but we grow professionally and personally.”

The Leadership Imperative is the rough, organizational equivalent of the Golden Rule that most religions, in one form or another, urge; but don’t confuse it with a guide for conduct exclusively; it’s also a way of getting great organizational results. When people understand that your leadership will improve their lives, their jobs and their careers, you’ll establish a sacred bond with them, and they’ll be more likely to be motivated to accomplish extraordinary things for you.

(An important tool for actualizing the Leadership Imperative is a methodology I’ve been teaching to leaders worldwide for nearly a quarter of a century. See my website for my information on the Leadership Talk.)

In our time, order leadership has held sway in all sectors of business and government. However, order leadership has nothing sacred to offer. Orders are sent, orders carried out or not. Deep, human, “sacred” connections are superfluous, even antithetical, to giving orders. And because order leadership can’t get the consistently great results that the new leadership triggers, the order way of leadership is destined for history’s scrap heap.

Don’t be put off or discouraged if you can’t immediately see the sacred in your leadership today. First, align your words and actions to conform to the Leadership Imperative. When you do, you’ll see the sacred in the very practical necessities of your daily life. It’s been there all along, waiting for you to find it and realize it. You may be in a bureaucracy that at first blush seems to have nothing to do with the sacred. But I submit that no matter what organization you’re in, what job you hold, you’ll get the best results when you work to manifest the sacred in your leadership. In fact, the sacred is the true reality of what you do, where you do it.

When you’re realizing the sacred calling of the Leadership Imperative, everyone you encounter, every challenge you face, is invested with special meaning that can boost results.

The exigencies of the global economy are demanding a change in the standard of leadership. Your understanding and realizing the new leadership but also its sacred dimensions will notably advance your job and career performance.

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 21 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com

For more about the Leadership Talk ==>[http://www.theleadershiptalk.com]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Brent_Filson/1911

 

Leadership

Leadership, Tribal Spiritual Wisdom, And The Leadership Talk

You can boost your leadership skills and hence your career by understanding this one thing that most leaders miss: great leadership incorporates a spiritual dimension.

This spiritual dimension has been a part of leadership since time in memorial; but in today’s global economy, it is undergoing an historic, universal transformation. It’s a transformation that speaks directly to your individual leadership and career challenges.

However, when we talk about the spiritual in leadership, we must, first and foremost, talk about results — the results leaders achieve. Concrete results. Hard, measured results. Plus, we must talk about getting more of them, getting them faster, and getting “more, faster” continually. Otherwise, there is no sense in delving into the spiritual aspect of leadership.

Results are the stuff that leaders are made of. If they’re not getting results, they won’t be leaders for long. Results come in countless forms and functions. But one thing they all share: they are material consequences of actions.

You can’t see spirit, you can’t hear it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, you can’t feel it; however, if you ignore the non-material that the spiritual encompasses, you’ll give short shrift to your leadership.

Just as the root word for spirit comes from Latin “to breathe” so spiritual dimensions of leadership are its very life-breath; for through it, the greatest results are achieved.

Spirit has been applied to many different things in different fields: to stealth bombers, corporations, rock bands, comic book characters, etc. In religion, spirit is the concept of an innate essence of a being. All religions embrace spirit in many ways. But when applied to leadership, spirit is differently manifested than with organized religions. The spiritual aspect of leadership I’m talking about must be exerted universally in the global market place, across cultures, nations, ethnic groups, etc. No religion has a corner on the spirit of leadership.

Fortunately, there is a universal ground for the kind of spirit needed in today’s leadership: the spiritual wisdom of tribal cultures. Anthropologists have come to identify common features in the diversity of tribal cultures around the world. First, they are earth-based. The relationship between the earth and the people is one of mystical interdependence. Second, the powers of nature, the acts of daily life, birth death, nature and the cosmos are all invested with deep meaning through ritual and dance. Third, most tribal cultures view all individual things that make up our universe — rocks, stars, mountains, rivers, people, animals, fish, etc. — as interdependent.

This interdependence is not just a physical dynamic. Yes, we live on the same earth, breath the same air, and are all mortal. But tribal cultures understand it as a spiritual dynamic as well. Unlike the concept of human souls, which are believed to be eternal and preexisting, one’s spirit according to tribal wisdom develops and grows as an integral aspect of a person living interdependently with the community and its environment.

Today, these interdependent features of tribal spiritual wisdom can be applied with dramatic consequences to global leadership. Just as tribe members saw themselves as interdependent with their tribe and their spiritual deities and dictums, so today’s leaders in order to be truly successful on a global stage must see themselves in similar interdependent terms. However, the difference today is that interdependence is not with a tribe but with people the world over and with the world environment. That’s a profound, spiritual leadership lesson, hard but necessary to actualize, from which great leadership results flow.

How do we actualize this spiritual imperative? Enter the Leadership Talk. I have been teaching the Leadership Talk to leaders of all ranks and functions worldwide for nearly a quarter of a century. It works on the premise that great results happen primarily when leaders establish a deep, human, emotional connection with people. When I first began developing and teaching it, I saw it as a powerful results generator. It is that. In fact, the Leadership Talk is the most powerful leadership results generator of all. But I had not really understood why until recently. Now, I see each one of those descriptors, “deep, human, emotional”, which grew organically out of my having to work with leaders challenged to get great results, are fundamentally spiritual in nature. That’s because they are predicated on the spiritual wisdom of interdependence. (You can find out more about the Leadership Talk on my website.) A key reason the Leadership Talk has helped leaders get great, material results for nearly 25 years is its driving methodologies are fundamentally spiritual.

Globalization is forcing broad and deep changes in human relationships as organizations are being challenged to achieve greater results than ever before. When you understand that the best results come from practical processes bolstered with spiritual dynamics connected to tribal wisdom, you’ll have an opportunity to achieve an unmatched competitive advantage in the world marketplace.

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 21 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com For more about the Leadership Talk: [http://www.theleadershiptalk.com]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Brent_Filson/1911