Tag Archives: Goals

Feb 26 2013
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ABC's of Leadership

Leadership is: Zeal pt. 1

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What are the goals of those around you?

“In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.” – Rupert Murdoch

It has been said that others will only be half as excited as we are, when it comes to our passions.

The benefit of our excitement is that we generally have more than enough to go around. The challenge is maximizing on that excitement, and instilling it into others.

In an earlier blog post, Leadership is: Buy-in, I write, “people must be bought into who you are before they are bought into what you are about.” In order to get people bought into who we are, we must be bought into what they are about. In other words, if we want people to help us achieve our goals, we must help them achieve theirs.

Starting points to help others achieve their goals:

1. Know their motivation – We must ask, “what motivates those around us?” Motivations vary, but once we understand what motivates the people around us, we can direct our efforts and incentives to help them win.

2. Know their passions – Henry Ford believed in separating work life from personal life. The problem with this is that the two directly affect each other. When we discover the passions of those around us we can support them emotionally, financially, and/or mentally.

3. Know their strengths – Everyone wants to know what they’re good at, and then be appreciated for what they do. When we know the strengths of those around us, we can help them accomplish more by making sure they are plugged into those ares.

– and finally –

4. Know their goals – It is difficult to help a person get to where they are going, if we don’t know where they want to go!

Once we are bought into helping others achieve their goals, they will be more motivated and excited to help us achieve ours. In part 2 of this leadership letter, we will discuss how to maximize on this motivated excitement.

How else would you help someone achieve their goal(s)?

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Feb 19 2013
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ABC's of Leadership

Leadership is: Selfless

"You have to give up, to go up" - John Maxwell

To be humble to superiors is duty, to equals courtesy, to inferiors nobleness. – Benjamin Franklin

There has been much said recently about Steve Jobs and his style of leadership, love it or hate it, we should all learn what we can from it. In a Harvard Business Review article, Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs, (@WalterIsaacson) writes, “I once asked [Steve Jobs] what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product.”

In a way, Steve Jobs was a servant leader. I won’t go as far as to say that he was the kind of leader that we would all want to follow. In fact I believe that Steve Jobs was a special kind of leader that influenced special kinds of followers. Isaacson writes, “One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. ‘Look at the results,’ he replied. ‘These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.’ Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, ‘And we got some amazing things done.'”

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Feb 06 2013
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ABC's of Leadership

Leadership is: Following

What leads the leader?

“The art of governing consists simply of being honest, exercising common sense, following principle, and doing what is right and just.” – Thomas Jefferson

Leaders must be followers. However, the question begs to be asked, “If they are leading, who or what are they following?”

For most leaders, dreaming the dream and coming up with the vision is the best part. The problem lies in keeping with the dream and the vision once it’s out of the incubator stage.

When I took the Strengths Finder 2.0 “strategy” came up as my main strength. As I read through the action plan for someone with my strength, I came across this suggestion, “Partner with someone with strong Activator talents. With this person’s need for action and your need for anticipation, you can forge a powerful partnership.”

That’s a really awesome way of saying you need to hook up with a doer. This doesn’t hurt my feelings at all, because the reality is I’m not a big fan of the constantly doing. I want to dream, create a vision, start it, and then walk away to dream something else.

The problem with this is that it can really frustrate the doers on my team. If I bounce from dream to dream to dream, my leadership ADD is going to wear my other team members out; they will quit, leave visions incomplete, or produce low quality finished products.

In order to save my team, and for the final product to be as close to the vision as possible, I must have a plan! Once I have that plan, I must follow it!

This all assumes that the plan matches up to my values and my goals. If it doesn’t I need to scrap the dream, vision, and plan. As I mentioned in Leadership is: Exercise, “your actions, not your desires, get you to where you want to be.” I must always be asking, does this get me closer to my goal? Does this match up with my core values? If I’m not constantly checking where I am in relation to these, I am bound to get off track.

Do you find it hard to follow through the plan you’ve made?

Are those around you worn out from your leadership ADD?

Have you taken on too many task at once rather than systematically accomplishing what is needed?

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Feb 05 2013
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ABC's of Leadership

Leadership is: Exercise

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes. – Robert Hutchens 

Most often when leadership is discussed, exercise is not among the qualities associated with it. However, both PHYSICAL and MENTAL exercise are essential to leading well.

Rather than go through what you can do for mental and physical exercise, or what the benefits would be, I’m going to give you four actions that will translate to success with any exercise you take on. You might think this is cheating but with a 350 word limit I call it being creative.

First, you need a goal: What are you’re hoping to achieve? Goals can change as you accomplish them or realize they aren’t right for you at the moment. However, if there is no goal, you will not be able to structure for the right activities.

Secondly, you need a plan! What are you’re going to do? If you’re not sure what you’re going to do your work outs will be less than adequate. It is most likely that you will stop too soon, or waste the time you have to work out trying to think of what you’re going to do next. This is true also for mental exercise.

Thirdly, you need a way to track progress! Goals and plans are great, but we must have a way to track our progress, to make sure we’re on the right path to our goals. Andy Stanley says it this way, “Our actions, not our desires, get us to where we want to be.” (Just for effect, read that last quote again)

Lastly, you need a break! This break isn’t to stop and do nothing. This break is so that you can evaluate what you’ve done, why you’ve done it, and what would be good to do differently. How often you do this is dependent on you and your goals. If you know you tend to get side tracked you will want to stop and evaluate more often to check yourself and renew your sense of purpose.

Just so that you can’t say I didn’t give you any direction for exercises, two great sources to help guide your mental and physical exercise are:

The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry

&

www.womenshealthmag.com or www.menshealth.com (note: not all subject matter suitable for minors)

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