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A Committed Team

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A Committed Team - 1I would like to discuss commitment.

An online dictionary I checked out has no less than seven (7) different definitions for commitment, all the way from …“The act or an instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust….” to “the act of being locked away, or the act of perpetration in a negative manner such as a crime.” As equally interesting are the synonyms they list, such as allegiance, dedication, duty, loyalty, obligation and vow. Now I am sure we have discussed commitment in this forum before but I am going to try a different spin on it. Please be patient. I would like to discuss what is a more important commitment, the leader to the team, or the team to the leader?

A Committed Team - 2The quality of a persons life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
Vince Lombardi

I know this sounds a little strange, everyone would say “Isn’t it inherent that all Leaders are committed to their cause?” I would say, not always. Lets spend a minute discussing commitment and how it pertains to leadership. I would say most people focus only on one side of the leadership equation, what is important to the team. They pose questions to themselves, such as “What’s the minimum I must do to satisfy my commitment?” I propose a committed leader needs to focus more on the other side of the equation, themselves. They need to think about “What can I do to make the most of this opportunity?, How can I leverage my position to make a positive impact?”  After all who are you really committed to? Your followers right? Now many of you know my background is the military, so commitment means something special to me, I was committed to a team, a special team, a team of men who would stop at nothing to “solve a problem”. I propose that commitment means something different to different people, but I also propose nothing great can be accomplished without commitment.

I would argue that being a committed follower may be harder than being a committed leader. I say that because a follower doesn’t always know the whole picture, a follower doesn’t always know the end game. He knows what is required of him or her, and knows the best way to accomplish the goal. I think being a committed follower, or team member, means being whole heartedly engaged in all aspects of the team.

A Committed Team - 3Compare a bacon and egg breakfast to commitment, to be a part of the meal, the chicken is just participating, but the pig, he is committed.
Anonymous

So leaders, be committed to your team, look into your heart and figure out what your team needs. Followers, team mates, be committed to each other and your leader, keep your eyes up and your feet on the ground. Be prepared to carry a team mate, be prepared to support your leader, stay focused on your tasks.

What is your life committed to, I challenge you to ask your wives, husbands, kids and friends, what they think about your commitment.

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Leadership Lessons from Fatherhood

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Leadership Lessons from Fatherhood - 1If you ask many leaders who the greatest influence on their life has been they will often tell you that it has been John Maxwell, Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Ronald Reagan, Gen. Patton, Atilla the Hun, or some other famous or infamous individual. And those are not bad or wrong answers.

If you ask me, I will tell you that it is my two children.

Leadership Lessons from Fatherhood - 2Fatherhood has been an educational journey that no institution of higher learning could provide. Its principles were not learned in a Harvard MBA program. These leadership lessons were learned at the dinner table every night. My children are both grown. And although they may think that I am offering them words of wisdom, I am in fact still enrolled in a life-long learning program and they are instruments of learning.

To be clear, I do not see myself as the great expert on fatherhood. I have made errors in judgment and I have made some erroneous decisions. But, I don’t think I have made too many selfish decisions. But when I did, I hope I was transparent with them and that I sought their forgiveness. And I hope that I was honest in my self-assessment, especially with the weaknesses and faults that I have.

I am clear about a few more things. For another, I have never seen such sacrificial and unconditional love flow from one human to another as I have seen flow from

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Second Chair Leaders

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Second Chair Leaders - 1There has been much that has been said recently in the area of “Leading from the Second Chair”. Although I have not yet read Bonem and Patterson’s book by that name, I have seen a lot of that type of leadership in my own life and in those who I admire greatly.

In fact, from a political perspective, one of the political leaders that I admire the most is Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee.  His was the very first Presidential campaign that I worked on was as a volunteer.  Unfortunately I was a part of his unsuccessful attempt to become President in 1979. I admire Sen. Baker on multiple levels. Others admired him as well. Known in Washington, D.C. as the “Great Conciliator”, Baker is often regarded as one of the most successful senators in terms of brokering compromises, enacting legislation, and maintaining civility across the aisle. A story is sometimes told of a reporter telling a senior Democratic senator that privately, a plurality of his Democratic colleagues would vote for Baker for President of the United States. Unfortunately, not enough Americans apparently shared that sentiment.

Second Chair Leaders - 2But the times during his career that I admired him the most were his days as White House Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan, the man who defeated him early in the primary season and caused him to drop out after the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary.

Baker did not seek re-election in 1984. However, as a testament to Baker’s skill as a negotiator and honest and amiable broker, Reagan tapped him to serve as Chief of Staff during part of Reagan’s second term (1987–1988). Many saw this as a move by Reagan to mend relations with the Senate, which had deteriorated somewhat under the previous chief of staff, Donald Regan. (Baker had complained publicly and privately that Don Regan had become a too-powerful “Prime Minister” inside an increasingly complex imperial presidency.) It is interesting to note that in accepting this appointment, Baker chose to skip another bid for the White House in 1988. Who knows if he would have been successful? I, I for one would have loved to have seen him elected in 1988 over the alternative that year.

Second Chair Leaders - 3So what is the leadership principle that I admire in Sen. Baker? Well, I think it is for these two reasons. One is that he understood the power and responsibility to still lead even though you are not “The” one. He had ambitions to be “The” one. But ambition, skill, and aptitude did not translate into the Oval Office for Sen. Baker. So, he withdrew for the sake of the overall mission of his party and supported the ultimate candidate who went on to become President. He waited patiently for the second term of Ronald Reagan and began to make his own plans for another run for the White House. But “Duty” called and

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Does “Manly Leadership” Have a Softer Side?

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Softer Side - 1Can you lead, be a man and have a softer side?

I not only believe that you can, but I think a leader must have a soft side. I don’t mean a soft side that bends the rules or overlooks things that are wrong, I mean the kind of side that is nurturing, is approachable, and is caring. Maybe the first thing we need to remember about leadership is, although leadership starts at the top with the leader, its never really about the leader.

As the leader you need to be hands on, but your primary objective is to empower others to make decisions and take actions that are aligned with your vision, purpose and strategy. These nuances are the softer side of leadership. These things are what can make or break your leadership, and they are not simple. It takes real effort and commitment to empower people and to continuously reward with praise and acknowledgement.

Softer Side - 2So as Men, sorry ladies, talking to the other guys here, are we capable of being soft, and still being an effective leader? I think professionally it is pretty easy to be “softer”, you know the old saying “You can catch more fly with honey than vinegar”. So I want to focus on our leadership of our families, here for a bit. Being a father of girls I have had to learn a little about leading softly as they respond better to a quiet conversation with Dad then to me yelling.

Softer Side - 3

“Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness, I was taught to be kind to everyone;….But when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me.”
Al Capone.

We also must remember “Soft Manly Leadership” is not weak leadership.

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Shallow Roots

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Shallow Roots - 1As a writer, I cannot choose when inspiration comes to me.  I do not get to decide when a great nugget of truth will stimulate the creative flow.  But, sitting in Church this last Sunday, inspiration came in like a flood.  And, I guess our pastors would be fairly pleased to know that I was “inspired” (or at least I was paying attention) during one of their sermons.

But, I am afraid the inspiration last Sunday took me a little different direction than perhaps they were intending.  Although, as I reflect on it now, maybe not so much . . .

“And other seed fell on the rocky ground, where it did not have much soil,
and it sprang up at once because it did not have any depth of soil.”
Matthew 13:5

For those of you who you who have spent much time at all in church, you will recognize the verse above as coming from the Gospel of Mathew and is a part of the Parable of the Sower and the Seeds.  For purposes of his message last Sunday, one of our pastors chose to emphasize the parable from the perspective of the soil.  I won’t go through his message in detail here.  Instead, if you are interested in the message, you can click on this link and check it out for yourself.

Shallow Roots - 2

Instead, I want to take one of his points and apply it directly to leadership development.  Are you ready for the inspiration?  Here it is:

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When Standing…Falls Short

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When Standaing Falls Short - 2According to a US News and World report dated December 28, 2012 “there will be more than 315 million people in the United States when the calendar flips from 2013 to 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau”.

With numbers like these there are many questions that one must ask.

As a society at large… What have we done wrong that America is experiencing a tragedy of “the breakup of the American family”?

It is reported that, “In every state, the portion of families where children have two parents, rather than one, has dropped significantly over the past decade. Even as the country added 160,000 families with children, the number of two-parent households decreased by 1.2 million. Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers”.

Has it hit yet?

I’ll be honest here, my heart breaks when I learn of the break-up of another family. What happened to the men who now refuse to stand by what they say, what they commit to and to who they have had a part in creating? I’m just reminded this past weekend of how pathetic some men really are. Just another statistic to count. Just another family without a dad. How wrong!

When Standaing Falls Short - 1To be straight… What shiny objects are we chasing? Whose fence are we looking over to see if the grass is just a little greener?

The times in which we find ourselves is quite different than it was 40 years ago but that is no excuse for the way men behave today. I visit my youth quite often because there is much to learn from those days. It is said of those who endured the depression that many didn’t know they were poor, and to that I can relate.

Kids, men, and women, today have by far many more luxuries than either the depression era or those of 40 years ago. But somehow they don’t seem to have enough. Yet somehow they allow those luxuries to come between them and their commitments. Yet somehow they don’t realize that long after moth and rust gathers on those long forgotten treasures…the product of those earlier commitments still exist. Yet somehow those who walk out on their commitments still want to be called dad, or mom. And yes…they are all still statistics.

Where did things go wrong? Who’s responsible?

There is a lot to be learned from the words of Jo Dee Messina.

I want a man that stands beside me
Not in front of or behind me.

Give me two arms that want to hold me, not own me
And I’ll give all the love in my heart

Stand beside me
Be true, don’t tell lies to me

I’m not lookin’ for a fantasy
I want a man who stands beside me
______________________________________________________________________________

Isn’t it time we started standing on our word, and standing up for the commitments we have made?

So…Where do you stand?

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2012/12/28/us-population-2013-more-than-315-million-people
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/25/fathers-disappear-from-households-across-america/#ixzz2uwdfcRUI
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2012/12/28/us-population-2013-more-than-315-million-people
http://www.mp3lyrics.org/j/jo-dee-messina/stand/

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At Home – At Work – In the Mirror

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At Work - At Home - In the Mirror - 2Let’s begin with one of my basic premises: There is unity of life.

What does that mean?

It means that you are one person, not two, and not three or four. You are the same man, both on the job with your colleagues and at home with your wife and your children. You may think that they are different. You may use pop-culture words like “persona” to indicate that you take on different personalities and different habits and behaviors. And, in fact, you may try to live and act differently in those two different arenas. But you cannot live two lives; underneath the mask you are the same person in both spheres of responsible operation. And to argue against my basic premise is to further fortify it prove that it is true. At Work - At Home - In the Mirror - 1

Men who are weak and ineffective as husbands tend to be the same as fathers by trying to split their lives between work and family. In other words, they live as producers at work but become consumers the moment they walk through the front door of the home. On the job they dedicate their powers to serious, responsible activity; but at home they are

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Holding the Helm

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Holding the Helm - 1Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
Publilius Syrus

We are living in difficult days. I am speaking globally. And I am speaking about our nation. And I am speaking about the great state of Texas. And I am speaking about my own little life.

Nobody panic. All is well in my home. I am very blessed. But here is the reality of life as I see it.

Holding the Helm - 2Globally – The Olympic flame was still burning and trouble was brewing on the Crimean Peninsula. The flame is now out and Russian troops are amassing. The world watches and waits.  How many times have we seen that play out in that part of the world in the last 150 years?

For those out there with better than a sub-standard education, does The Charge of the Light Brigade mean anything to you?

Holding the Helm - 4Nationally – Our nation is need of strong leadership. Perhaps more so now than even the days of the birth of our great Nation. The choice then was obvious. Freedom and liberty or tyranny and taxation. But today the choices are not as clear. At least it appears that way.

I think I see a clear delineation. But not everyone does and of those who do see a delineation, not everyone agrees how to address it.  And I am not sure that it is even possible to reach some with a message that we face big challenges and we need big leaders to take us through the challenges that are ahead.

Holding the Helm - 3Texas – Here in Texas we are engaged in a battle to see

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The Convictions of Man

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kinopoisk.ruI have wondered for some time this one penetrating question; What happened to the convictions of man?

I’m sure the period of time in which we find ourselves probably has many of us asking the same question. Let’s consider a few quotes from Saving Private Ryan. Private Jackson says to Captain Miller: “Sir… I have an opinion on this matter.” To which Captain Miller replies: “Well, by all means, share it with the squad.”

Ok squad, to be a man we have to find where that definition comes from. Knowing that God did NOT give us the definition but instead explicitly gave us examples of what it is to be a man of God. Clearly, there are two types of men; a worldly man, and a man who reveres God. We must understand what a man looks like under God’s leadership.

It is important to know that: Responsibility = response + ability.

The Convictions of Man - 2Men have a natural tendency to avoid social responsibility,

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Things You Must Do to Train New Young Leaders

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Training Young Leaders - 2Training the next generation of leaders in your organization may be the most important thing you do as a leader. We can argue what that single most important thing is. But, I think we can all agree that training the next generation is certainly in the top three!

Here are the things that I feel we need to be doing to keep producing new leaders.  This list is not exhaustive.  But I firmly believe that if we take these seven to heart and begin to employ them in our relationships with young leaders then great things will happen.

  1. Play to the Strength of Young Leaders – These young leaders have immediately identifiable talents, skills and abilities. Play to them and allow the young leader to experience success early and often.
  2. Challenge Young Leaders – Yes, they have talents, skills and abilities already. But do not let them rest on those and only play to their strengths. Make them “lean in” to the uncomfortable and try something new or something old that they have never tried before.
  3. Work on a Young Leader’s Character as Much or More than Their Skills – Culture says the result is all that matters. That is false. How we achieve results is also important. Help young leaders develop good work habits early in their career. Character matters. When times of adversity come to your organization, people will follow the leader that they trust even when they don’t know where the leader is taking them.
  4. Training Young Leaders - 1Train Young Leaders to Focus on Others – Young leaders need to know that personal freedom diminishes the higher we rise in an organization. And as leaders we spend a significant amount of time dealing with the wants, needs and desires of others. Get comfortable with this role.

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