Tag Archives: Leadership Imperative

Leadership

Hiding Your Leadership: The Jersey Joe Walcott Way of Leading

Former heavyweight champ Jersey Joe Walcott was training for a fight against a boxer who had a ferocious left hook. Asked if he was worried, Jersey Joe replied, “Nope. I’ll take his left hook and put it in his pocket.”

Walcott’s low key, wry, confident attitude matched his boxing style. He hardly looked as if he was fighting at all. It was more like Aikido than boxing, the martial art that controls an attacker by redirecting their energy instead of blocking it.

Jersey Joe didn’t attack. He lured his opponent to him. He shuffled “the Walcott Shuffle.” He created ingenious punching angles. He feinted not only with his hands but with his shoulders. He threw a sneaky right hand counter and a counter-punch left.

In other words, Jersey Joe, to better employ his boxing abilities, hid those abilities. Jersey Joe Walcott provides a lesson in leadership.

To be a better leader, do what most leaders neglect to do, are even ignorant of: hide your leadership.

Why would you want to hide your leadership? After all, isn’t a leader supposed to stand out? When you’re a leader, aren’t you supposed to be the center of attention, telling people to do things?

Yes, that way of being a leader is appropriate if you are viewing leadership in its conventional terms and getting average results.

But if you want to be a leader who gets consistently great results, remember Jersey Joe, if only for this simple, powerful dictum most leaders miss. People are more effective not when they are “ordered to …” but when they “want to …” Having people “want to” through your leadership is the drive shaft of all great results.

Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, wrote 2500 years ago: “As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate … When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!'” In other words, the best leadership is the hidden leadership.

Leadership is about getting results, however one may define those results. If you can’t get results, you won’t be a leader for long. But, clearly, you can’t get results by yourself. You need others to help you do it. The “best” leader is the leader who gets the “best” results through the good offices of other people.

The best results are tied to a concept I’ve been teaching leaders for almost a quarter of a century: When they seek to get results, they should seek to get more results; they should seek to get faster results; and they should seek to get “more, faster” on a continual basis.

(For a discussion of what results really are I refer you to my web site and the articles section.)

If hiding your leadership doesn’t help you get more results, faster results continually then it should be taken no more seriously than the notion that the moon is made of green cheese.

How does hiding your leadership achieve these results? The HOW is in “want to.” But remember this: the people’s motivation is not the choice of the leaders. It’s the choice of the people. Leaders communicate, the people themselves motivate. They make the choice to motivate themselves. When your leadership is exhibited not on stage but behind the scenes guiding them to be motivated to make that choice, you’re creating the super-charged environment conducive to the establishment of more results faster, continually.

What is the best way to hide your leadership? Hide your leadership by realizing the Leader’s Imperative. “I will lead people in such a way that we not only accomplish the needed results but that we together help one another grow personally and professionally.”

This has two parts: results accomplishments and self-improvement. You are never more powerful as a leader as when, in getting results, you are helping others be better than they are – even better than they thought they could be. And when you’re realizing the Imperative, you are advancing yourself in the best way — by advancing them.

Make hiding your leadership a way of life. Test every leadership situation against the Leadership Imperative. Build the Imperative into your strategy, tactics, and have it be a driving factor in your interpersonal relationships.

Two points of caution. First, don’t mistake, or mistakenly communicate, the pejorative side of “hide.” The word can have a negative connotation: i.e., that you have something to hide, or that you are running away from somebody or something, or that you are being secretive or sneaky.

Use the word in its positive sense; you are hiding your leadership to better realize the Leadership Imperative.

Second, hiding your leadership can turn into a failing if you don’t hide it in a robust way. Hiding your leadership does not mean living an easy life for yourself – i.e., detaching yourself physically and emotionally from the people and doing your own thing. Instead, hiding your leadership means living a hard life for other people – i.e., working hard, taking risks, and putting yourself out to promote their welfare.

You will never know how really good you are as a leader unless you are leading people to be better than they think they are. You’ll have a better chance of manifesting your best leadership when you lead the way Jersey Joe Walcott fought – and have the people say, “We did it ourselves!”

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

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

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s most recent books are: THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. http://www.actionleadership.com

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

 

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

A Whack Up ‘Long Side The Head Of Human Resources: The Leadership Imperative

When we perceive the simple center in the seemingly complex, we can change our world in powerful new ways.

Albert Einstein perceived the simple E=MC2 in the complexities of physical reality and changed the history of the 20th century.

Big Daddy Lipscomb, the Baltimore Colts 300 pound all-pro tackle in the 1960s perceived the simple center of what was perceived to be the complex game of football. “I just wade into players,” he said, “until I come to the one with the ball. Him I keep!” — and changed the way the game was played.

Likewise, human resources, despite its complex activities, should have a fundamentally simple mission, yet it is a mission that is being neglected by many HR professionals. I call that mission the Leadership Imperative — helping the organization recruit, retain, and develop good leaders.

Clearly, without good leaders, few organizations can thrive over the long run. What characterizes a good leader? A good leader consistently gets results — in ethical and motivational ways. Because they interact with all business functions and usually provide education and training for those functions, human resource professionals should be focused primarily on recruiting, retaining, and developing leaders that get results. Any other focus is a footnote.

Yet working with human resource leaders in a variety of companies for the past two decades, I find that many of them are stumbling. Caught up in the tempests of downsizing, compliance demands, acquisitions, mergers, and reorganizations, they are engaged in activities that have little to do with their central mission. Ignoring or at least giving short shrift to the Leadership Imperative, they are too often viewed, especially by line leaders, as carrying out sideline endeavors.

Many HR leaders have nobody to blame for this situation but themselves. By neglecting the Imperative, they themselves have chosen to be sideline participants.

Here is a three-step action plan to get the HR function off the sidelines and into the thick of the game.

Recognize. Link. Execute.

Before I elaborate each step, let me define leadership as it ought to be. For your misunderstanding leadership will thwart you in applying the Imperative.

The word “leadership” comes from old Norse word-root meaning “to make go.” Indeed, leadership is about making things go — making people go, making organizations go. But the misunderstanding comes in when leaders fail to understand who actually makes what go. Leaders often believe that they themselves must make things go, that if people must go from point A to point B, let’s say, that they must order them to go. But order leadership founders today in fast-changing, highly competitive markets.

In this environment, a new kind of leadership must be cultivated — leadership that aims not to order others to go from point A to point B — but instead that aims to motivate them to want take the leadership in going from A to B.

That “getting others to lead others” is what leadership today should be about. And it is what we should inculcate in our clients. We must challenge them to lead, lead for results with this principle in mind, and accept nothing else from them but this leadership.

Furthermore, leadership today must be universal. To compete successfully in highly competitive, fast changing markets, organizations must be made up of employees who are all leaders in some way. All of us have leadership challenges thrust upon us many times daily. In the very moment that we are trying to persuade somebody to take action, we are a leader — even if that person we are trying to persuade is our boss. Persuasion is leadership. Furthermore, the most effective way to succeed in any endeavor is to take a leadership position in that endeavor.

The Imperative applies to all employees. Whatever activities you are being challenged to carry out, make the Imperative a lens through which you view those activities. Have your clients recognize that your work on the behalf of their leadership will pay large dividends toward advancing their careers.

Recognize: Recognize that recruiting, retaining, and developing good leaders ranks with earnings growth (or with nonprofit organizations: mission) in terms of being an organizational necessity. So most of your activities must be in some way tied to the Imperative.

For instance: HR executive directors who want to develop courses for enhancing the speaking abilities of their companies’ leaders often blunder in the design phase. Not recognizing the Leadership Imperative, they err by describing them as “presentation courses.” Instead, if they were guided by the Imperative, they would offer courses on “leadership talks.” There is a big difference between presentations and leadership talks.

Presentations communicate information. Presentation courses are a dime a dozen. But leadership talks motivate people to believe in you and follow you. Leaders must speak many times daily — to individuals or groups in a variety of settings. When you provide courses to help them learn practical ways for delivering effective talks, to have them speak better so that they can lead better, you are benefitting their job performance and their careers.

Today, in most organizations, the presentation is the conventional method of communication. But when you make the leadership talk the key method by instituting “talk” courses and monitoring and evaluation systems broadly and deeply within the organization, you will help make your company more effective and efficient.

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