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Develop Your Leadership Potential

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Alex Chediak has an excellent article over at Boundless on developing your leadership potential.

His three points are:

  1. A leader must strive for excellence
  2. A leaders must think clearly
  3. A leader must combine humility with boldness and realism with optimism

Here’s an excerpt from his first point:

Remember that God’s timetable may be different from yours, and be faithful with what He’s given you right now, while also striving to be a wise steward of your current growth opportunities. The Bible says that whatever your hand finds to do, you should do with all our might (Ecclesiastes 9:10). And that in everything you do, “work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Colossians 3:23–24). That means that in serving your “human masters” (your bosses or professors) you are actually serving Jesus Christ. So do it with excellence, as best you can.

Paul gives us an example of godly striving — an ambition to accomplish much for Christ. He made plans to go to Rome and then Spain and to continue his church planting among the unreached (Romans 15:20–24). He spoke of being zealous for good works (Titus 2:14) and said this zeal should mark us all. In the Parable of the Talents, the mere preservation of one’s talent brought scorn and reproof. The Master, it turns out, expected an increase, a return on investment (Matthew 25:14–30). To whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48).

So go ahead and aspire to achieve great things for God’s glory. Don’t equate humility with mediocrity. There’s a subtle, yet significant difference between seeking to make a name for yourself and seeking to make a name for Christ. When we’re obedient, diligent and fruitful stewards of the gifts and opportunities God gives us, we honor God. Titus 2:10 talks about our lives adorning the gospel message — making it look beautiful in the eyes of others. Christians are called to excellence in all that they do. Excellence is both attractive to others and inherently valuable. Therefore, those who excel are often placed in positions of authority or influence (so they can motivate others to excel).

Read the whole thing.

Low-Trust Cultures vs. High-Trust Cultures

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Stephen Covey outlines the differences very well in First Things First, which is one of the most helpful books on productivity around. He compares high trust and low trust organizations in the areas of supervision, evaluation, span of control, motivation, and structure and systems. Here are some highlights.

Supervision

In a low-trust culture, supervision is associated with words like control, monitor, hover over, and check up. In a high-trust culture, people supervise themselves according to the agreement. The criteria are clear, the consequences are set. There’s common understanding of what’s expected. A manager, leader, or parent becomes a source of help — a facilitator, helper, cheerleader, adviser, counselor, and coach — someone to remove the oil spills and get out of the way.

Evaluation

In a low-trust culture, you’re into forced ranking, external performance evaluation, and judgment. In a high-trust culture, the judgment goes into the performance agreement before the fact instead of after the fact. People judge themselves. Their evaluation is not just a function of measurement, but also of discernment. “The numbers are looking good, but I feel a concern about this particular area…” People are much more aware of the issues that affect their performance and success. [Note: The “discernment” here should not devolve into subjectivity. It needs to be anchored objectively in the mission and values of the organization.]

Span of Control

In a low-trust culture, the span of control is small. It takes time and energy to hover over, to check up. You can only control so many people. In a high-trust culture, you don’t need to hover over and check up. You aren’t trying to control but to release. Instead of one to eight or ten, you have one to fifty, one to a hundred, one to two hundred.

Motivation

In a low-trust culture, you’re into “the great jackass theory of motivation” — the carrot, out in front, the stick behind. In a high-trust culture, people are internally motivated. They’re fueled by the fire within. They’re driven by a sense of passion about fulfilling a shared vision that’s also a co-mission, a synergy between their own mission and the mission of the family or organization.

Structure and Systems

A low-trust culture is filled with bureaucracy, excessive rules and regulations, restrictive, closed systems. In the fear of some “loose cannon,” people set up procedures that everyone has to accommodate. The level of initiative is low — basically “do what you’re told.” Structures are pyramidal, hierarchical. Information systems are short-term. The quarterly bottom line tends to drive the mentality in the culture. In a high-trust culture, structures and systems are aligned to create empowerment, to liberate people’s energy and creativity toward agreed-upon purposes within the guidelines of shared values. There’s less bureaucracy, fewer rules and regulations, more involvement.

It isn’t my point in posting this — my point is to encourage you to keep building a high-trust rather than low-trust culture in your organization because it is intrinsically right and better for people — but Covey next makes a connection to personal time management. And his connection is this: high trust cultures save a lot of time, because you don’t have to spend so much time controlling, monitoring, checking up, supervising, coming up with hokey motivational programs, creating (and enforcing) pointless rules, and sorting out the communication problems that result from low-trust environments.

He concludes:

We spend an incredibly inordinate amount of time dealing with symptoms of low trust, but learning how to deal with the symptoms faster is not going to make a qualitative difference.

“First things first together” is a function of empowerment. It’s the ultimate way of moving the fulcrum over from the “one to one” ratio to a “one unit of effort to one thousand units of results” ratio. There’s no time management technique that can even begin to approach the results. And that’s why empowerment is at the heart of Quadrant II [that is, true personal effectiveness and effectiveness within organizations].

Google and Amazon on The Importance of Taking the Long-Term View

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It is noteworthy that two of the companies that have made the greatest impact over the last ten years, and continue to do so, have explicitly rejected the common approach of focusing on the short-term over the long-term.

They have both done this in spite of the fact that, when becoming public companies, the pressure from Wall Street is precisely to focus on the short-term. Many companies give in to this, and thus fail to become great. Google and Amazon stated from the start that they would resist this temptation and continue to think long-term, in spite of the pressure. This is a good lesson that is applicable to all areas of life, and is essential to effectiveness: take the long-term view, even when it is challenging.

Here’s what Google had to say in its founding IPO letter:

Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near term financial returns are not obvious. For example, we make our services as widely available as we can by supporting over 90 languages and by providing most services for free. Advertising is our principal source of revenue, and the ads we provide are relevant and useful rather than intrusive and annoying. We strive to provide users with great commercial information.

We are proud of the products we have built, and we hope that those we create in the future will have an even greater positive impact on the world.

As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to “make their quarter.” In Warren Buffett’s words, “We won’t ‘smooth’ quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you.”

If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.

And here’s what Jeff Bezos had to say in Amazon’s 1997 founding IPO letter (to get to it, just scroll down beneath the 2010 letter):

It’s All About the Long Term

We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise.
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies.

Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy…

Among the many lessons from these, here’s one of the key ones: The path to effectiveness is often unconventional. The conventional approach is often the easy, risk-free, uninspiring path of low impact. It often seems safer, but actually isn’t. Organizations that make a difference are those that, in the words of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, “stand for a truly distinctive set of ideas about where [their] industry should be going.”

Is Your Organization Structured for Growth or Control?

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This is well said by Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Church. This is first of all good advice for churches, but these principles apply not just to churches, but also any type of organization:

Every church must eventually decide whether it is going to be structured for control or structured for growth. This is one of the most crucial decisions your church will ever face. . . . .

Once a church grows beyond about 500 people, no single person or board can know everything that’s going on in the church. I haven’t known everything that happens at Saddleback for years. I don’t need to know it all!

You might ask, “Then how do you control it?” My answer is: “I don’t. It’s not my job to control the church. It’s my job to lead it.”

There is a very big difference between leading and controlling. Our pastors and staff are responsible to keep the church doctrinally sound and headed in the right direction, but the day-to-day decisions are made by the people actually doing the ministries of the church.

10 Things Google Has Found to be True

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A good summary of Google’s philosophy from it’s website, which encapsulates some helpful principles in general for understanding the changes that have been brought about by the internet (and which many companies still haven’t caught up with):

  1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
  2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
  3. Fast is better than slow.
  4. Democracy on the web works.
  5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
  6. You can make money without doing evil.
  7. There’s always more information out there.
  8. The need for information crosses all borders.
  9. You can be serious without a suit.
  10. Great just isn’t good enough.

Focus on Contribution, Not Your Authority

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Drucker:

The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward his goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility. . . .

The person who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the one who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

(From The Effective Executive)

Great Leaders Build People, Not Just Results

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Henry Cloud, from his foreword to Bill Hybel’s very helpful book Axiom: Powerful Leadership Proverbs:

A leader is also responsible for the experience of his or her followers. If your leadership is sound, not only are you hitting the numbers, but you are also lifting the people to experience more health, more growth, more success, and an upswing in fulfillment as a result of being on the journey with you.

Great leaders cultivate an environment where instead of people getting injured, discouraged, and burned out, they are equipped to become what they never thought they could be and achieve things they never thought they could achieve. Great leaders grow not just results, but people too.