Leadership, Mindfulness
Chances are, January has you thinking about how to be your best self this year. Doing so likely means taking stock of the rote habits in your life that are causing a drag on your energy. Simple enough in theory. Yet, simple is rarely simplistic.
19th century philosopher William James opined that all of our lives are but a mass of habits. Research published in a 2006 study found that about 40% of our daily action is habitual, which is still a good chunk of time spent in mindless behavior. And that was more than 15 years ago. How much more distracted, distant, and drained are we today by our digital lives and full-frontal political polarization?
If habits and distractions require little conscious thought, it may be time to do some self-evaluation. What is not working in your life? Where is there room to do better? How are you unconsciously sabotaging your own success?
Is it possible that you don’t have a definition of success that is truly meaningful? Does success mean dropping weight or having more Instagram-worthy moments? Or, does success mean showing up for people and committing yourself to social connection?
Maybe it means showing up for yourself first. Maybe you do that by switching one bad habit for one good habit. Not because your waistline is growing, but because, in order to show up as your best self this year, you need to get real about the cumulative effects of unhealthy habits.
There are plenty of resources available with tips and tools for how master the habits in your everyday life. But, before you pick up a title like Gretchin Rubin’s Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, try Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. If you want to explore your why on a more existential level, try this TED interview with David Brooks about his book, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.
There’s a reason why you made it to January 2022. Whether or not you’re into making New Year’s resolutions, don’t let bad habits and distractions keep you from showing up as your best self.
Question: What is one good habit that you could switch for one that isn’t serving you?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
It’s been another year marked by uncertainty and disruption. Much like the end of 2020, many of us may feel similarly in that we cannot wait for 2021 to be over. But before we dive into 2022, we took a look back at which of this year’s posts got the most buzz. Some of our most popular posts were book or video lists, whether you were interested in upping your leadership game through watching TED Talks or deepening your understanding of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion through reading a fresh title on the topic. Other popular posts dealt with how to close the inclusion gap and make space for inclusive work environments, whether in-person or virtual.
Regardless of the nature of each post, we tried to find a lesson or two that you could take away in 750 words or less. Something you could apply at work that day, or that might sharpen your skills as a leader.
Here are the top ten posts we shared to serve that purpose:
10. Are Your Employees Ready to Bailout From Burnout?
Last month, I called my go-to window washer to schedule a much-needed cleaning. I usually have this done twice every year, but…well, you know. He was booked solid for the next two weeks, but we managed to get the job scheduled. When he came to my house, I asked if he’d been extra busy with customers like me scheduling make-up window cleaning. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve had more back-to-back jobs in the last two months than I had all of last year.”
I had similar conversations with a landscaping crew, the dental hygienist, and the manager at my local dry cleaners. Everyone is happy to have plenty of work to do, but managing the sudden surge in demand while trying to deal with pandemic fatigue and get through the upcoming holiday season can set us up for a triple dose of mental drain this quarter. [Read more]
9. 7 of our Favorite TED Talks in Honor of Women’s History Month
Since 1987, March has been designated as Women’s History Month. This year, we are sharing some of the top TED Talks given by women leaders from a gamut of backgrounds. These women use humor, vulnerability, and wisdom to claim permission to step into power, validate women’s experiences, and change the world with their stories.
Here’s a look at seven of our favorite TED Talks from remarkable women around the globe.[Read more]
8. Leadership by Lincoln: 15 Steps to Lead in Turbulent Times
It’s been nearly eight months since George Floyd called out for his mother as his life was callously drained away by a white police officer in broad daylight on a Minneapolis street. Mr. Floyd’s death ignited a powder keg in America that spread around the world. Images of his murder, followed by buildings in flames, followed by national guard troops positioned on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial show the worst of what can happen when we lack the kind of leadership that helps us navigate the path between chaos and control.
Before sitting down to write this dispatch, I picked up my copy of Leadership in Turbulent Times, to find inspiration and historical perspective. In the book, author Doris Kearns Goodwin profiles Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. [Read more]
7. Remembering Colin Powell’s 13 Rules of Leadership
Yesterday, America lost a legendary public statesman and former Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
Since his retirement from public office in 2004, Powell spent much of his time sharing his leadership knowledge with the business community. In his 2012 book, It Worked For Me, Powell attributed his success to hard work, straight talk, respect for others, and thoughtful analysis. At the heart of the book are Powell’s “13 Rules” — ideas that he gathered over the years that formed the basis of his leadership principles. [Read more]
6. 5 Fresh Titles to Add to Your DEI Library
No matter who we are or where we come from, our assumptions and beliefs are shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, our race, our gender, religion, culture. Those beliefs help us navigate and make sense of everyday life. But they can also mean that we believe that there is no difference between our perceptions and reality. For leaders, that means we must continuously question our perceptions of reality and value the voices of people who are not like us. Here are five new titles to add to your Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) library. [Read more]
5. 3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Quit Your Job
Since publishing Work On Purpose: How to Connect Who You Are With What You Do in 2014, I have had many opportunities to speak about its principles. The book opens with a story about how something I heard on the radio one morning became a career-changing wake up call. It led me on a journey to connect with my purpose, and find work that truly makes a positive impact in the world. In closing, I challenge others to connect who they are with what they do for a living. Then I take questions. Without fail, this question is always in the top three [Read more]
4. 3 Ways to Help Leaders Reflect and Refuel
During the 3 minutes it will take you to read this post, you’ll probably get an email, a text, a Slack message, a missed call, a social media notification, or some combination of all of the above. Let 30 minutes pass, and you could be swimming in unanswered inbounds. A steady diet of requests for your attention – both electronically and in-person – can leave you overwhelmed and intellectually and emotionally undernourished. You cannot lead effectively when your plate is full, but your cup is empty. [Read more]
3. The Leadership Legacy of MLK Jr. in 12 Powerful Quotes
Last week, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 92. While it is customary to look to our elders for sage advice, King knew that he was walking a path of imminent danger, but that his words could not be silenced by a bullet. Before his assassination at age 39, King reached deep within himself to find messages that would ring as clear and true today as they did during the turbulent times in which he was called to lead.
Here are 12 quotes from 1960 (at age 31) to 1969 (the night before he was killed eight years later) that are part of Dr. King’s enduring legacy. [Read more]
2. Beyond the Basics: 2 Events to Help You Bridge the Inclusion Gap
Gay men are naturally fashionable. Black men are the best athletes. Asians are the model minority.
These are just three examples of positive stereotypes, or subjectively favorable beliefs about certain social groups. And, just as negative stereotypes can be harmfully inaccurate, so too, can positive stereotypes. The trope about Asians being the model minority, for example, largely stems from the idea that Asian Americans have achieved socio-economic mobility through superior education. The problem with this positive stereotype is that it undermines the Asian American and Pacific Islander AAPI community as a monolithic group protected from systemic racism in America. The inconvenient truth, however, is that the AAPI community faces discrimination and persecution while society falsely insists they are protected. [Read more]
1. Highlights from our DEI In Action Panel Discussion
So many superlatives come to mind to describe last week’s event, DEI In Action: A Panel Discussion with Practitioners and Leaders. With nearly 3,000 registrants, it was the largest quarterly DEI panel discussion we’ve hosted. The registrants ranged from some of the most recognizable organizations in the world (like FedEx, NASA, The Nature Conservancy and Nissan) to nonprofits dedicated to positively impacting their communities (like After-School All-Stars, Campus Election Engagement Project, and Leader Dogs for the Blind). Over 125 questions were posted in the Q&A, and the chat log was 45 pages long! The panelists were a Who’s Who of tenured practitioners in the DEI space [Read more]
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Culture, Leadership
The best organizations today understand that culture is their strongest asset and can be the glue to retaining top talent. Whether you nurture it or not, you have a culture. It may be empowering or toxic. Either way, the results are showing up in your bottom line.
Here are the 12 companies we featured in CEE News this year that show how doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive.
1. Tentree, “We’re planting 1 billion trees by 2030.”
Tentree is a lifestyle apparel company that essentially thinks of itself as a forestry program that sells clothes. For every product purchased, the company plants ten trees through thoughtful programs that not only reforest the earth but also help rebuild communities around sustainable local economies. Since its inception in 2012, Tentree has planted over 35 million new trees around the globe. By 2030, the company’s goal is 1 billion. [Read More]
2. Uncle Nearest, “First known African-American master distiller.”
When entrepreneur and author Fawn Weaver saw a 2016 New York Times article about Nathan “Nearest” Green, who while enslaved, taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey, she moved to Tennessee from California to see if she could turn the story into a book or movie. Shortly after arriving, Weaver found that the site of Green’s distillery was for sale. She made an offer and quickly set about to give the godfather of Tennessee whiskey his due. If you’re curious about the quality, you may be interested to learn that Uncle Nearest was the most-awarded American whiskey or bourbon of 2019 and 2020. [Read More]
3. H-E-B, “We’ve grown from a store, to so much more.”
As Texas faced record-low temperatures in February and snow and ice made roads impassable, the state’s electric grid operator lost control of the power supply, leaving millions without access to electricity. As the blackouts extended from hours to days, top state lawmakers called for investigations into the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and Texans demanded accountability for the disaster. But when the power went out on February 16th at a crowded H-E-B in the Austin suburb of Leander, Texas, employees told shoppers that they could walk through the checkout aisles and take their groceries out of the store without paying. [Read More]
4. Articulate, “We make the world’s most popular apps for online training.”
Adam Schwartz started Articulate in 2002 out of his one-bedroom apartment in New York City. He had just enough money to hire two experts – one who lived in Missouri and the other in India. Together, they built the backbone of an online learning product that would revolutionize the training industry. Today, over 112 million learners in 161 countries have taken advantage of career-boosting training from online courses created with Articulate applications. That model of hiring the best and giving them the freedom and trust to thrive is part of Articulate’s secret sauce and culture of empowerment. [Read More]
5. Ringcentral, “Our biggest strength is that we’re not all the same.”
Of the nearly 600,000 immigrants from former Soviet countries who settled in the United States between 1975 and 2003, Vlad Shmunis’ family was among the first. His family left Odessa in 1975 to escape the restrictions of the Iron Curtain. Shmunis’ story is just one example of the impact that the Soviet diaspora to the U.S. had on Silicon Valley and America’s innovation economy writ large. Freeing people to connect and do their best work is the foundation of the inclusive culture at RingCentral, where Shmunis serves as CEO to 6,000+ team members. [Read More]
6. Tuft & Needle, “We believe everyone deserves a good education, a clean community, and a great night’s sleep.”
In 2012, Silicon Valley software engineer JT Marino stumbled across a problem—buying a mattress totally sucked.
Between confusing buzzwords, pushy salespeople, and backwards policies, JT knew there was an opportunity to take an archaic industry and flip it upside down. Enter Daehee Park, his long-time friend and colleague. They launched a simple test site to see if anyone out there would actually be interested in buying a mattress online. Within just 15 minutes, Bingo! They had their first buyer.
After returning the money, they set out to learn everything they could about the industry. Tuft & Needle soon grew from two Silicon Valley software engineers to a team of over 150 people headquartered in Phoenix, AZ. They work each day to deliver a universally comfortable mattress, with no middlemen, and change the way mattresses are sold and delivered. [Read More]
7. Elastic, “Our story begins with a recipe.”
As humans, we are insatiably curious. Prior to the inception of the Internet and the rise of the search engine, we had a limited array of solutions when a question arose. But, as the Internet grew, organizing, sorting, securing and mining vast amounts of data quickly became a challenge.
That’s the problem Elastic Founder and CEO Shay Banon found when he started building a search engine for his wife’s recipes. While she attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu, Banon worked from their flat in London to building a search engine to manage her growing collection. [Read More]
8. Nehemiah Manufacturing Company, “Building brands, creating jobs, changing lives”
Before the pandemic, 38% of manufacturers had trouble finding candidates with the right skills, and today that number is 54%, according to a report by The Workforce Institute at UKG thinktank. Yet, despite this labor crisis, Cincinnati-based Nehemiah Manufacturing has more applicants than it can handle, even as it navigates a pandemic-driven business boon. [Read More]
9. Chili Piper, “Reinventing the meeting lifecycle.”
Alina Vandenberghe traces her entrepreneurship roots to communist and post communist Romania. Both of Alina’s parents were factory workers with limited income. So, instead of relying on them to pay for her textbooks and other school expenses, Alina started a series of ventures at the tender age of nine. [Read More]
10. Stance, “We exist to celebrate human originality.”
When seasoned tech investor Jeff Kearl met with John Wilson for a pitch meeting over breakfast in 2009, Kearl thought Wilson would be talking up a new product in the consumer electronics space. After all, Wilson had previously been an executive of Oakley and was working at Skullcandy on the morning that they sat down. Instead of pitching a cool new consumer device, however, Wilson threw out one of the lowest tech products imaginable – socks. [Read More]
11. ReCharge Payments, “We turn transactions into relationships.”
In 2014, under the name Bootstrap Heros, Oisin O’Connor and his two roommates were determined to solve one of the biggest problems facing Shopify merchants: recurring payments. In October, after many months of takeout and trial and error, ReCharge Payments was launched. By 2015, O’Connor’s team became the preferred partner of Shopify Plus, so they upgraded from their whiteboard-lined apartment to an office in Santa Monica, CA.
Today, the company has grown from a handful of employees to 250+ fully remote team members. Working remotely enables Recharge team members to have more control, gain autonomy, and achieve balance in their lives. The company made Forbes Top 100 for remote jobs by going the extra mile to make team members feel that they’re an integral part of the company’s success regardless of where they’re logging in from. [Read More]
12. NatureSweet Tomatoes, “to transform the lives of its employees while providing consumers with great tasting tomatoes year-round.”
NatureSweet Tomatoes has a vision: to transform the lives of its employees while providing consumers with great tasting tomatoes year-round. It’s a bold ambition for a company in the agricultural industry where employees historically work for low pay, have little stability and rarely see opportunities for growth.
For the company’s 8,000 employees, that vision means working full-time, year-round for a living wage that comfortably supports a family of four with opportunities for bonuses and professional development. This approach helped the company expand its operations from a single small farm in Texas in 1990 to a $2 billion corporation with more than 1000 acres of greenhouses. The company’s commitment to producing flavorful vine grown tomatoes and delivering them to market in its signature clamshell container with a peel-off lid has also helped to create a “snacking tomato” market, which now represents more than one-quarter of all tomatoes sold in the U.S.
Kudos to all 12 of these amazing companies who understand the value of culture as a competitive advantage!
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Book lists, Leadership
To be an effective leader, you need experience, business acumen, and emotional intelligence. You can build these through years of trial-and-error on the job, or you can accelerate your learning and growth through reading. Reading helps shape your views and learn through others’ experiences. This becomes crucial when your work shapes your organization’s culture, and, ultimately, its performance. This holiday season offers an excellent opportunity to build your leadership library.
Whether you’re interested in learning from history, in building new skills to match 21st century challenges, or get inspired by stories of human interest, here are 8 titles to add to pick up this holiday season.
1. High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley
What it’s about: When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.
High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an “us” and a “them”. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.
Why pick it up: You’ll learn that people do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.
2. The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence by Stephen Kurczy
What it’s about: Deep in the Appalachian Mountains lies the last truly quiet town in America. Green Bank, West Virginia, is a place at once futuristic and old-fashioned. It’s home to the Green Bank Observatory, where astronomers search the depths of the universe using the latest technology, while schoolchildren go without WiFi or iPads. With a ban on all devices emanating radio frequencies that might interfere with the observatory’s telescopes, Quiet Zone residents live a life free from constant digital connectivity. But a community that on the surface seems idyllic is a place of contradictions, where the provincial meets the seemingly supernatural and quiet can serve as a cover for something darker.
Why pick it up: The Quiet Zone is a remarkable work of investigative journalism—at once a stirring ode to place, a tautly-wound tale of mystery, and a clarion call to reexamine the role technology plays in our lives.
3. Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World by Vaclav Smil
What it’s about: Vaclav Smil’s mission is to make facts matter and making sense of our world. In Numbers Don’t Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What’s worse for the environment—your car or your phone? How much do the world’s cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy? This is probably the most information Vaclav has ever put in a book, and yet it’s by far the most digestible. Each chapter is just a couple pages long and covers one of the 71 facts mentioned in the title.
Why pick it up: Packed with fascinating information and memorable examples, Numbers Don’t Lie reveals how the US is leading a rising worldwide trend in chicken consumption, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren’t as great as we think (yet). Urgent and essential, with a mix of science, history, and wit—all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics—Numbers Don’t Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true.
4. Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison
What it’s about: From the award-wining journalist, a gripping, suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the corporate dysfunction—the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management—that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation. Drawing from exclusive interviews with current and former employees of Boeing and the FAA; industry executives and analysts; and family members of the victims, Flying Blind reveals how a broken corporate culture paved the way for catastrophe. It shows how in the race to beat the competition and reward top executives, Boeing skimped on testing, pressured employees to meet unrealistic deadlines, and convinced regulators to put planes into service without properly equipping them or their pilots for flight. And it examines how the company, once a treasured American innovator, became obsessed with the bottom line, putting shareholders over customers, employees, and communities.
Why pick it up: By Bloomberg investigative journalist Peter Robison, who covered Boeing as a beat reporter during the company’s fateful merger with McDonnell Douglas in the late ‘90s, this is the story of a business gone wildly off course. At once riveting and disturbing, it shows how the iconic company fell prey to a win-at-all-costs mentality, threatening an industry and endangering countless lives.
5. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikol Hannah-Jones
What it’s about: The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.
Why pick it up: This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.
6. Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks
What it’s about: Hailed as “a brilliant, beautiful book” by the Sunday Times (London), Pastoral Song is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.
Why pick it up: This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.
7. Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone Has Transformed Humanity by Martin Cooper
What it’s about: While at Motorola in the 1970s, wireless communications pioneer Martin Cooper invented the first handheld mobile phone. But the cellphone as we know it today almost didn’t happen. Now, in Cutting the Cord, Cooper takes readers inside the stunning breakthroughs, devastating failures, and political battles in the quest to revolutionize—and control—how people communicate. It’s a dramatic tale involving brilliant engineers, government regulators, lobbyists, police, quartz crystals, and a horse.
Industry skirmishes sparked a political war in Washington to prevent a monopolistic company from dominating telecommunications. The drama culminated in the first-ever public call made on a handheld, portable telephone—by Cooper himself.
Why pick it up: The story of the cell phone has much to teach about innovation, strategy, and management. But the story of wireless communications is far from finished. This book also relates Cooper’s vision of the future. From the way we work and the way children learn to the ways we approach medicine and healthcare, advances in the cellphone will continue to reshape our world for the better.
8. Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old by Steven Petrow
What it’s about: Soon after his 50th birthday, Steven Petrow began assembling a list of “things I won’t do when I get old”—mostly a catalog of all the things he thought his then 70-something-year-old parents were doing wrong. That list, which included “You won’t have to shout at me that I’m deaf,” and “I won’t blame the family dog for my incontinence,” became the basis of this rousing collection of do’s and don’ts, wills and won’ts that is equal parts hilarious, honest, and practical.
The fact is, we don’t want to age the way previous generations did. “Old people” hoard. They bore relatives—and strangers—with tales of their aches and pains. They insist on driving long after they’ve become a danger to others (and themselves). They eat dinner at 4pm. They swear they don’t need a cane or walker (and guess what happens next). They never, ever apologize. But there is another way . . .
Why pick it up: In Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old, Petrow candidly addresses the fears, frustrations, and stereotypes that accompany aging. He offers a blueprint for the new old age, and an understanding that aging and illness are not the same. As he writes, “I meant the list to serve as a pointed reminder—to me—to make different choices when I eventually cross the threshold to ‘old.’”
Question: What books are on your holiday wish list this year?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
Over the past 12 years, I have been honored to explore and debate the essence of power with Dr. Tony Baron. Specifically, how power impacts leadership, how leadership impacts culture, and, ultimately, how culture impacts performance. With a double doctorate in psychology and theology and decades of executive coaching experience with Fortune 100 companies, you can imagine the depth and breadth that Tony adds to the subject.
By: Dr. Tony Baron
Nobody likes to be labeled. And nobody likes to be misunderstood. Given the context of our national dialogue these past few years, this may be a good time to talk about how to respond, instead of react, when we are misunderstood.
I am not talking about times when there is a lack of clarity in communication. I am talking about when others judge you based on misinformation they have received (or conceived) that results in them questioning your character.
The injustice hurts deeply. But, as leaders, our ultimate responsibility is to not to react, but to respond, by modeling the behavior we would like to see in others. It is a true test of how we use power. Will we use our position to force others to bend to our will? Or, will we use our position to practice the discipline of transformative leadership?
Here are four ways that you can practice transformative leadership and respond, rather than react, when others attack your character:
1. Practice the Discipline of Not Having the Last Word
A transformative leader influences others by modeling appropriate behavior not only in positive situations but also in periods of criticism. When people attack your character, they often want to engage you in a verbal volley. Don’t do it. Transformative leaders have the discipline to not have the last word.
2. Practice the Discipline of Humility
An attack on your character may immediately send you into defense mode. If you have power, you may be tempted to use that power to punish the person who is attacking you. However, a transformative leader must refrain from presuming you can silence another person, and refrain from letting others know how wronged you feel. Humility comes from the word “grounded.” A grounded person reflects deeply to see what truth may be in the midst of falsehoods, what path may be used for reconciliation, and what direction you need to follow.
3. Practice the Discipline of Civility
A transformative leader understands that people who attack their character often betray their own fears and anxieties in the process. When people spew words at you in anger, recognize the pain or anxiety behind their words. Pause to reflect before you engage, then practice the discipline of civility. In Reclaiming Civility in the Public Square, civility is defined as “claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs, and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process.”
4. Practice the Discipline of Wisdom
Knowledge is a compilation of things true, maybe true, and definitely not true. Knowledge can lead to pride and a sense of superiority over others. Wisdom, on the other hand, is insight into reality. Reality is the only thing a transformative leader can count on. People of wisdom seek reality – not illusions, innuendos, or ill feelings.
So, to those who feel you have been misunderstood, take courage in the midst of adversity. Seek reconciliation. Practice the discipline of not having the last word, humility, civility, and wisdom.
Question: Have you felt misunderstood recently? Which of these practices might help you respond instead of react?
Dr. Tony Baron is Distinguished Scholar-In-Residence at Center for Executive Excellence and an internationally recognized speaker, writer, corporate consultant, professor and the Former San Diego Director of Azusa Pacific University Graduate School of Theology.
Dr. Baron is the author of six books, including The Art of Servant Leadership and a workbook manual co-written with noted author and business leader Ken Blanchard. Throughout his career, he has worked with hundreds of companies including Ford Motor Company, Coca-Cola Company, Warner Brothers Studios, and Boeing, among many others.
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership, People
On Thanksgiving Day, most of us look forward to enjoying plenty of good food. But, plenty of good conversation? Not on the menu.
With family and friends of all generations and mixed political persuasions coming together for the holiday, avoiding conversational controversy can be tricky. Even once safe topics like the weather can quickly turn into a stormy debate. As much as 64% of Americans report that their mental stress levels rise this time of the year. But conflict mediator Priya Parker suggests that we use gatherings like Thanksgiving to connect meaningfully, take risks, and be changed by our experience.
In her 2019 TED Talk, Parker offers three steps to turning everyday get-togethers into transformative gatherings.
Step 1: Embrace a specific, bold purpose. Instead of focusing on all of the little things — menu, music, seating arrangements — focus instead on the conversation, connections, and purpose that’s bringing everyone together. Take a pause to incorporate meaning beyond the “off the rack” Thanksgiving Day goals. Ask yourself, “what is the purpose of gathering with friends and family today?” or, “who can I learn something new from today?”
Step 2: Cause good controversy. “Human connection,” says Parker, “is threatened as much by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict.” Around the Thanksgiving table, ask people to share stories rather than opinions. Ask for stories about when their opinions changed or their paradigm shifted. Give people a way into each other to share vulnerability and connect on a human level.
Step 3: Create temporary structure using pop-up rules. These are one-time constitutions such as, whoever brings their phone to the dinner table does the dishes. Pop-up rules like this allow us to harmonize our behavior and gather across differences without having to be the same.
“At their best,” Parker suggests, “gatherings allow us to be seen for who we are and to see.” Gatherings flourish when real thought goes into them, when structure is baked in, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try. Read more in Parker’s book, “The Art of Gathering: Create Transformative Meetings, Events and Experiences.”
Question: What tips do you have on how to make your gatherings less routine and more meaningful?
