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Kevin Bowser

Leader -|- Follower -|- Guide

I am the husband of a beautiful and wonderful woman. I am the father of two of the greatest kids on the planet. I am a father-in-law to a great young woman. And I am Papa to three very special grandchildren. In my spare time I am an active blogger and writer. And if there is any time left over, I work with small non-profit organizations and churches on the topics of change management, crisis intervention and leadership development.

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Legacy Leadership – Part 2 – Building a Legacy

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Building a Legacy - P2 - 1Building a legacy involves many things. It involves a high degree of introspection. Legacy leaders are constantly asking themselves questions about their activities and interests. Here are just a few questions I want you to consider as we discuss building a legacy.

  • If you knew with absolute certainty that you’d die exactly 24 hours from right now, what would you do?
  • If you knew with absolute certainty that you’d die exactly 10 years from right now, what would you do?
  • Would there be any difference in your activities or the energy in which you went about them?
  • Who are the top five people that you’d want to invest your time in?
  • Do you know what you would want to pass on to them after you’re gone?

Every day, without knowing it, we are passing on to those around us who we are, what we possess and what we learn. But are we really passing along the stuff that matters for now and for eternity?

Building a Legacy - P2 - 2Most of us desire to leave an inheritance of significant value to those around us. Although we don’t always know what that means, what it includes, or how to go about it. We are bombarded in the media to plan for how to pass down our wealth. And we have some authors who are a part of Leadership Voices who can help you with those issues. But when it comes to the intangibles – the kind of stuff money can’t buy – we hear crickets from the media and from pop culture. Pop culture is concerned about the here and the now. In contrast, Legacy Leaders are concerned about those that come behind us.

We tell ourselves that we have lot’s of time. We tell ourselves that it’s OK and we will figure it out later. But the truth is, the average person will fail to pass on what matters the most to the people they care about the most.

Lord, please don’t let that be said of me.

Who comes to your mind first when you think about those you would want to pass down a lasting legacy?

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Why Would Anyone Want To Be Led By You? Or Me?

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Why Be Led By You - 1The year is nearly over. Many leaders and leadership teams are taking their annual step back to do a deep-dive assessment of their organization’s progress against the goals and objectives of their strategic plans. (What? You don’t do that at your organization?  Maybe that is part of what is holding the organization back.)

As part of your end-of-year strategic progress review, consider including another area of assessment — one that will require a different kind of evaluation and be much more introspective in nature. Why not take some time to also consider how you personally are progressing as a leader? After all, an organization’s strategic performance is, in large part, a direct reflection of the effectiveness of the person at the top.

If you want to silence a room of pastors, executives, or any group of leaders try this small trick. Ask them, “Why would anyone want to be led by you?”

Without fail the response will most likely be a sudden, stunned hush. All you will hear are knees knocking and crickets chirping.

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Legacy Leadership – Part 1 – Focus on Legacy Leadership

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Legacy - Part 1 - 6A focus on legacy leadership will drive every decision that you make and every action that you take. So, what is Legacy Leadership?

“The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

2 Timothy 2:2 (NIV)

 Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. — Albert Einstein

It surprises me how many husbands and fathers don’t spend enough time thinking about their legacy – what they will leave behind for the family that they love and the people they serve. I won’t even go into how many husbands and fathers only carry the life insurance supplied by their employer. But they seem to care more about the financial legacy they will leave than the Spiritual one that will be left behind.

Legacy - Part 1 - 1But the harsh reality is that each of us is leaving a legacy whether we realize it or not or whether we want to or not.  The question is whether or not it is a legacy that is positive and has far-reaching implications into the following generations.  And for me, the legacy that I want to leave is a spiritual one.  I want to leave one that is pleasing to God.  And if it is pleasing to God, I am pretty sure I will be OK with it as well.

Webster’s dictionary defines legacy as, “anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor.”

Legacy is not bound by age or time served. Legacy represents your entire body of work at each stage of your life as you establish the foundational building blocks of a family and accumulate the required wisdom to contribute to the success of that family unit. Your legacy grows with each new experience, with each test or trial, and each time you inspire others to see something beyond our current circumstances.

For many, leaving a legacy is associated with the end rather than the beginning of one’s life.

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Leaders Encourage Vigorous Debate

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Vigorous Debate - 1Great leaders know how to focus on the positive, helpful, edifying and uplifting communication while managing the negative, destructive, decisive and demeaning communication in meetings.

Consider this advice from a seasoned old-timer to a young leader who was still early in his leadership career. It happens to be from the New Testament of the Bible.

“But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them.” 

Titus 3:9-10

Have you ever been in a meeting that digressed and evolved into almost a free-for-all? As a contrast, have you ever been in a team meeting where the leader encouraged good debates and successfully squashed useless ones?

Such well-managed teams tend to finish their meetings with good plans and they do it on time. The participants feel productive and actually like getting together because everyone feels like they were a part of something productive.

But, back to my brief Biblical text. The Apostle Paul (the old-timer) exhorted a pastor (young leader) named Titus to refrain from arguing about peripheral subjects that divided his followers.  And I think that advice is relevant to leadership principles today.

There is a branch of modern communication theory that seems to have grown out of the apostle Paul’s philosophy. In 1968, Sir Charles Geoffrey Vickers, an English lawyer, administrator, writer, and pioneering systems scientist introduced the concept of “appreciative systems”, which later became Appreciative Inquiry (AI). It was really further developed nearly 20 years later at Case Western Reserve University’s department of Organizational Behavior. It started there with an article in 1987 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva. They felt that the overuse of “problem solving” as a model often held back analysis and understanding, focusing on problems and limiting discussion of new organizational models. At its core, AI is positive debate that explores what an organization does well and how it can build on its strengths.

Vigorous Debate - 3As leaders it’s sometimes difficult to limit discussion and keep debates from getting out of control.

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Communicating as a Leader

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transactional-comm-modelI recently spent 2 days in meetings with the North American members of my global team.  There were a lot of presentations.  A lot!  One word that came up over and over again was the word: “Communication”. I have heard many presentations in my career on the importance of communication. But, one guy boiled it down very succinctly.  And I loved the sense of urgency that it conveys.

He said it this way:

  1. What do I know?
  2. Who needs to know it?
  3. Have I told them yet?

I thought that was pretty good. Effective communication is one of the key skills that a leader must possess if they are to be successful. So, let’s break it down.

What do I know? – As a leader, I have access to and am privy to things that the rest of the folks on my team do not have access to and are not privy to in their current roles. So, I must recognize that I have a duty to spread that knowledge when and where it is appropriate to do so.

Who needs to know it? – Not everyone needs to know what I know. And in many cases it would be detrimental to the team for them to know what I know. Personnel and salary information are the easy examples. But it goes well beyond those examples. The ones that need to know specific information are those who are somehow engaged in a project and need the information that you possess.

Have I told them yet? – This indicates that there is time sensitivity or an imperative to share the information when they are the right person to receive the information. So, do not delay. Share the information as quickly as you can because they may be waiting on that information in order to determine how best to proceed.

One to many communicationBut, I think that there may be a little more to the process than those three questions. In fact, I would add three more.

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Adaptive Leadership

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Adaptive Leadership - 1So many of the world’s problems, and the issues that organizations, businesses, and people face every day can seem intractable and unsolvable. Leadership consultants Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky discussed a new way to lead the charge to change in their book in 2009 entitled, “Adaptive Leadership”.

Adaptive Leadership calls for moving beyond outdated approaches and embracing new skills and attitudes to guide your organization in the 21st century. Adaptive leadership combines established ways of leading with new skills and new perspectives for dealing with unprecedented challenges.

But, if it were easy, everyone would be adaptive leaders and everyone would be successful.  Before you begin the process of bringing lasting change to an organization you must

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Listening for the Future

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Listening Leaders - 1Great leaders are always “listening for the future” all the while staying grounded in the here and the now.

That sounds impressive and insightful.  But what does it mean?  Simply, it means that our society is evolving into a noisy, chaotic world; characterized by “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity” (This is what “Futurist” Bob Johansen refers to as “VUCA”).

Elements of the VUCA paradigm have existed throughout history, but never to the extent evident in the early 21st century.  Leaders who make decisions without regard to VUCA realities tend to exhibit various “dysfunctional and dangerous” attitudes and reactions, including fear, disdain, procrastination, frustration, anger and denial.  And I am not exactly sure where the anger is strongest.  Is it on the side of those who loath their leaders?  Or is it on the side of the leaders who loath the burden of leadership?

Nevertheless, there are enduring leadership principles that will hold you in good stead during these VUCA times.  Consider the following:

  • To be on time is to be late. – Get there early.  Get there before your team arrives and be ready to greet them as they arrive for the day or for the meeting.
  • Always start on time.  – Don’t punish those who are on time for the sins of those who are late.  And don’t go back over what you have already covered for those who do arrive late.
  • Mental gymnastics.  – Build leadership skills through leadership thoughts.  Read and study other great leaders.
  • Listening Leaders - 2Actively listen.  – But carefully filter what you hear.  Make sure that in the midst of your listening that you are not swayed by an emotional message that takes you away from your core values.
  • Be ready for action.  – We are living in a fast paced world and in the face of uncertainty, preparedness is a great benefit.
  • Practice “urgent patience”. – Know when to press forward and when to ease up on your team.
  • Be a storyteller. – Use compelling stories to inspire hope in your team.
  • Observe synchronicity. – Nothing occurs in a vacuum.  So explain connections and patterns to help others find the reason for your actions.
  • Stay positive.  – It is easy to succumb to the negativity that surrounds us.  We get a steady diet of it on the news and from the media.  Do not dwell on this.  [I could speak at length here about the importance of being in some type of daily devotional reading, but I will save that for another time and place.]
  • Don’t spread yourself too thin.  – You cannot directly lead a multitude.  So, find a small group of leaders to develop and pour yourself into them and make them into great leaders.  Don’t make them clones.  Make them leaders.

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Wit & Wisdom from Midland County, TX

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Gary Painter on Fox News

I love living in Texas.  I usually tell people that I was born in way extreme far east Texas. [better known as Alexandria, Louisiana].  And you get wit & wisdom out of folks in Texas that you don’t seem to find in or around the Capital Beltway.  I know, because I lived in that area for quite a while also.

I don’t often tackle politics in my writing.  And I really am not trying to tackle politics right now. Instead I think there is a leadership lesson to be learned here.  Consider if you will for just a moment Sheriff Gary Painter from Midland County in Texas.  Recently he was interviewed on Fox News about the ISIS threat to the United States.  Consistent with what he has been saying for at least 8 years he made the following statement.  I am providing it below with advance apologies for some of his language as I never want to offend our readers. But here is his quote:

“If they show their ugly head in our area, we’ll send them to hell.
I think the United States needs to get busy and they need to bomb them.
They need to take them out. I would like for them to hit them so hard and so often that every time they hear a propeller on a plane or a jet aircraft engine that they urinate down both legs.”

Contrast that with our President who calls them the “JV squad” and who doesn’t have a plan to deal with them.  And ask yourself for a moment,

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Signs That A Leader Is Succeeding

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Signs That A Leader is Succeeding - 1I recently wrote an article called, “Signs That A Leader Is Failing”.  And I did so with a fair amount of trepidation.  When you consult with other leaders you always wonder what one of them will think when they read one of your articles.  You wonder if they think it is about them.

(Why is there suddenly a Carly Simon song playing in my head)?

Signs A Leader Is Succeeding - 2Well, today, I hope that all of the leaders that I have worked with over the years think this article is about them.

I have written over 160 articles describing, in some way or another, what it takes to be a superior leader in the home, at church, on the job, and in society.  Some researchers and authors claim a superior leader possesses certain traits or abilities innately; others say it is all personality, style and charisma. Still others maintain it is the behaviors or actions that I take — if I do this, then my followers will do thus — that are crucial.  Regardless of the how and why, these are some signs that your followers are following you and that you are succeeding as leader:

The team caught your Vision —  Successful leaders have followers that have a clear understanding of your vision and what it means to them as an individual contributor or follower.  They see it and they own it.  There is no ambiguity.  If you ask them on an elevator to describe the vision of the organization, they can express it with clarity and passion.

The team understands the Mission —  Successful leaders have communicated the mission and the team “gets it”.  They know why the organization exists in the first place and they have a sense of the historical context of the organization.  They can also answer the mission question on an elevator just as effortlessly as they can answer the vision question.

Signs That A Leader Is Succeeding - 4The team has a Goal  —  Successful leaders have followers who understand the goals set for them.  They were probably participants in setting the organizational goals and their individual goals.  They are both excited and challenged by the goals and they are looking forward to stretching to achieve them.

The team is Confident —  Successful leaders have followers who are confident in their leaders and in themselves.  They have been taken through a process

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Five Things You Can Do To Prepare The Young To Lead

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5 Things to Prepare Young Leaders - 2There is much to be learned from those who have served our Country by serving in the military. This is especially true if you look at some of the “specialized” organizations within the military.  I am blessed to have some very dear friends who have served.  One or two have served in some of our military’s most elite units.  Consider the following as it relates to leadership and youth.

“We expect to lead and be led. In the absence of orders I will take charge, lead my teammates, and accomplish the mission. I lead by example in all situations.” — Navy SEAL Creed

Navy SEAL Teams are a relatively flat organization. Everyone goes through the same grueling training, and everyone is trained to lead regardless of age or rank. In the civilian world, emergent leadership is about team members stepping up and taking the initiative to accept more responsibility and to perform work outside of their general roles when called upon. If we, as leaders, encourage and promote this type of drive, our young team members will be ready to rise within the organization, and our organization will be better off for it.

5 Things to Prepare Young Leaders - 1Here are five ways that we can prepare our young people for leadership.  But remember they are, in fact, young:

Give them a platform. Don’t hide your young leaders. Show them to the world. Let them be a feature of your organization.  Encourage them to contribute to the organization’s blog if you have one.  Take them along with you to trade shows and give them an opportunity to represent you in the booth.  And offer them opportunities to collaborate on ways to improve the organization’s systems and offerings.

Manage them, not their output. Get the right people in the right jobs, give them a goal, but don’t micromanage their efforts. It has been my experience that when someone comes to you and says, “I am not trying to micromange, but  . . . “, they are usually micromanaging!  Set goals and boundaries and then back off. Allow them to be innovative and develop systems, processes, and methodologies that will accomplish the goal you set for them and that get the job done. They may and probably will do it differently than you would have done it.  And that is OK.  Doing this will not only result in a more confident team and better retention, but will give your team members a sense of ownership that they wouldn’t get by simply following your orders.

Let them fail.  This one is hard. 

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