The Five Marks of Authentic Leadership

Many people have written on what it means to be a leader. Almost everyone identifies influence as the primary characteristic. By definition, this means that leadership and position are two different things. You can have a title, and a position of power, but this does not mean that you are a leader. Even people without these things can exert influence and thus leadership.

But leadership is more than influence. It certainly includes influence, but it is more. I believe it includes at least five characteristics. I call these the five marks of authentic leadership:

1.Authentic leaders have insight. Sometimes we refer to this as vision, but that usually has exclusive reference to the future. While leaders must have vision, they need more. They need wisdom and discernment. They need to be able to look at complex situations, gain clarity, and determine a course of action. In the Bible, “[The] men of Issachar … understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). This is what I mean by insight.

2.Authentic leaders demonstrate initiative. They go first. They don’t sit on the sidelines. They don’t ask others to do what they are unwilling to do themselves. Instead, they lead by example. Lt. Col. Hal Moore is a great example of this. Famously depicted by Mel Gibson in the movie, We Were Soldiers, Lt. Moore told his troops, before leaving for Vietnam, We are going into battle against a tough and determined enemy. I can’t promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear, before you and before Almighty God: that when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I’ll be the last to step off. And I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together, so help me God.”

3.Authentic leaders exert influence. It’s no coincidence that influence and influenza (the flu) come from the same root word. Real leaders are contagious. People “catch” what they have. People are drawn to their vision and their values. They are able to gather a following and move people to act. To change metaphors, they are like human wave pools, creating a ripple effect wherever they go.

4.Authentic leaders have impact. At the end of the day, leaders make a difference. The world is changed because of their leadership. They are able to create real and lasting change. Unless something has shifted, they aren’t leaders. They are only entertainers. There is a big difference. The measure of leadership cannot be found in the leader; it is found in the impact the leader has on his or her followers.

5.Authentic leaders exercise integrity. Not every leader is benevolent. Adolf Hitler was a leader, as was Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin. They had insight, initiative, influence, and impact. Yet their lives were not integrated with the highest values. Integrity—or the lack thereof—ultimately determines the quality of a person’s impact. In a sense, this is the foundation of authentic leadership.

Leaders must be deliberate and intentional if they are to be successful. These five qualities can guide us as we grow in our ability to lead.

By: Michael Hyatt

Organizational Slippage

My boss recently gave me an article on how organizations end up in a slippage mode. This article was really focused on churches, however, I sense the same thing can apply to most organizations. So, here's the highlights of this article from Gordan McDonald entitled: How A Mighty Church Falls.


McDonald quotes Jim Collins in this article and identifies five stages in the process of organization slippage.

Stage One: Hubris Born of Success

• Hubris is defined as arrogant conceit or as Collins puts it "an excessive pride"
• This is a state of over-confidence in ourselves, our systems, and our successes
• This often makes leaders blind to weaknesses within an organization
• Reality: in this state there is a tendency to understate the problem and overstate your ability to accomplish

Stage Two: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

• It is about getting larger and larger, more and more expansive, even if it costs the organization its soul
• Overreaching stems from a temptation to think that if we're good at what we're doing, we can do anything else just as successfully
• Sometimes this can mean migrating toward "more" and away from "wisdom"

Stage Three: Denial of Risk and Peril

• Leaders and organizations ignore or minimize critical information or refuse to listen to things they do not want to hear
• Collins is concerned for organizations who base their decisions on the basis of inadequate or mismanaged information
  
• The most valuable information came through trusted, wise people who were empowered to systematically engage the community in conversation and with questions designed ahead of time
  

Stage Four: Grasping for Salvation

• Lurching for a "silver bullet"
• Betting big on an unproven product
• Hiring promise-making consultants or seeking a new hero-type leader who can ride in on a white horse and singlehandedly save the day
• A sense of desperation for a breakthrough victory

Stage Five: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

• At what point did it start down the slope of organizational death?
• Who missed the hidden signs?
• Who ignored the core convictions?
• Who misinterpreted the information?

Master Leaders by George Barna

If you are like me you have plenty to read - even some books and articles which you started and have not finished. Having said that, I'm always interested in books which are useful for my personal development or professional development. Have any of you read the book Master Leaders?

George Barna and coauthor Bill Dallas invite you to imagine yourself backstage at a conference featuring thirty world-class leaders. As you join them in the greenroom, you’ll be privy to their provocative conversations on subjects including:

• defining what makes someone a leader


• knowing how to identify, communicate, and get commitment to vision


• touchstones for leading effectively


• what to look for and how to measure performance


• earning and maintaining people’s trust


• developing character traits that honor God, serve people, and empower self


• establishing and retaining the moral authority to lead


• knowing how power is derived and how to use it appropriately
  

These are some interesting leadership topics. This has been recommended as a good leadership read!

The Stop-Doing Discipline

In this recent interview, Campbell Soup CEO Douglas Conant defined his mission in taking the helm eight years ago as being, “to take a bad company and lift its performance to extraordinary by 2011.” His strategy was simple enough: developing or keeping only products that ranked first or second in three major categories. That meant, among other things, selling the Godiva chocolate brand in 2008.

Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great, commented on Conant’s sale of Godiva by saying, “That gets my attention, when someone has the discipline to let go of what doesn’t fit.”
Collins firmly believes in the power of a “stop-doing” discipline, a practice that began taking shape during his early post-Stanford Business School career at Hewlett-Packard. On a return visit to the school early in his career, Jim’s favorite former professor, Rochelle Myers, reproached him for his lack of discipline. An expert in creativity and innovation, she told him his unbridled energy was riding herd over his mental clarity, enabling a busy yet unfocused life.
Her words rang true: At the time, Jim’s life was crowded with the commotion of a fast-tracking career. Her comment made him pull up short and re-examine what he was doing. To help, she did what great teachers do, constructing a lesson in the form of an assignment she called “20-10”: Imagine that you’ve just inherited $20 million free and clear, but you only have ten years to live. What would you do differently—and specifically, what would you stop doing?
The exercise did precisely what it was intended to do: make Jim stop and think about what mattered most to him. It was a turning point for three reasons.

First, he realized he’d been racing down the wrong track, spending enormous energy on the wrong things. In fact, he woke up to the fact that he hated his job. He promptly quit and headed back to Stanford to launch a new career of research, teaching, and writing.

Second, the assignment became a constant reminder of just how important his time is. He now starts each year by choosing what not to do, and each of his to-do lists always includes “stop-doing” items. Collins preaches his practice, impressing upon his audiences that they must have a “stop-doing” list to accompany their to-do lists. As a practical matter, he advises eliminating the bottom twenty percent of your goals... forever.

Third, the strategy helped him identify what factors led the companies he was studying to become “great” while others remained merely “good.” The great companies routinely eliminated activities and pursuits that did not significantly contribute to the following criteria: profit, passion, and perfection. All three criteria had to be met in order for any activity to remain in these great companies’ repertoires.

In this editorial piece Collins said, “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit—to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort—that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life.”

In an economic environment where time, money and attention are fixed or decreasing, where we must achieve maximum effect with minimum means, having a good stop-doing strategy may hold the key. At the very least, it will allow us to make more room for what really matters by eliminating what doesn’t.

When You Want To Call It Quits

All of us have probably had days where we wanted to call it quits. This is usually a quick response when things are not going well. There is great value in persevering as leaders - even when things get difficult. This article by Wayne Cordeiro has a little humor and a lot of truth. I hope you enjoy it as I did.

"My friend Gary enjoyed telling me about the time he ran a quarter-mile relay race. It's basically once around the track—with teammates at each quarter-mile waiting for the baton. The entire race usually ends in less than a minute. That's fast!

The relay Gary told me about was a big track-and-field event in a small town, and the grandstands were overflowing with friends and fans. The weather was chilly and the runners were still wearing their warm-up "sweats." Gary, running anchor, was the last team member to be in the box. When the gun went off, his role was to remove his team's starting block from the track and get to his spot where he would wait for the baton to hit his hand—all within seconds.

Sprinting to the Finish
Bang! The starter's pistol resounded through the stadium, and Gary ran to remove the blocks. Usually he had plenty of time, but the foot pegs fell off the block, leaving him only seconds to grab them and run back to make his start. Gary suddenly remembered that he still had on his sweats. He saw his teammate flying around the corner, so he whipped off his sweatpants as fast as he could and rushed to his position on the track. He made it just in time to feel the slap of the baton hitting his hand and then started sprinting. With his heart pounding, straining toward the finish line, he noticed that it felt colder than it should have. Gary glanced down, only to make a startling discovery: In his haste, he had taken off a lot more than just his sweatpants!

At that moment, Gary said he was caught between two bad options: One choice was to continue and the other was to quit. In a split second, in front of the astonished onlookers, he had to make a decision. As he recalled to me later, "I faced the option to either hightail towards the lockers or make a mad and daring dash to the finish. I chose to cut left to the safe harbor of the lockers."
I rolled with laughter when he told me the story!

Perhaps you, like Gary, have been faced with difficult choices — far more weighty than avoiding embarrassment:
Should I shade the truth to protect a friendship?
Should I remain in this job, when I know the boss is involved in unethical business practices?
Should I blow the whistle about an ineligible player on the team?

Ever feel like you were caught between two bad choices? What do you do when you're ready to call it quits? It's one of the toughest things we face, yet oddly enough it is also one of the most common. We all go through times when we want to chuck in the towel. But does giving up make the situation any better? Not really. Misery may love company, but have you ever noticed that company sure doesn't love misery!

So what do you do when you're stuck between a rock and a hard place and you just want to call it quits? Look at some of the "greats":

• Joseph—a cocky upstart abandoned by his family. He became a slave and was then thrown into jail and forgotten in his cell. He learned humility and was finally promoted to Prime Minister over mighty Egypt.


• Moses—an extreme introvert who stuttered. Not only that he was a murderer — a fugitive on the run in the desert. He led God's people out of Egypt and to the Promised Land.


• Ruth—a foreigner and a widow following a depressed, "down-on-her-luck" mother-in-law. She was also a brand-new believer yet she kept her heart humble and became one of Jesus' ancestors.


• The woman at the well—a divorcee who had slept around and was the talk of the town. She became the first evangelist after meeting "the Man."
  

The Bible's casting call for heroes reads more like a "Least Likely to Succeed" rap sheet. Yet this list of the least likely is the foundation of Hebrews 11—a commemoration of God's most faithful men and women across time—and is most often referred to as "The Hall of Faith."

Don't be surprised—"the last and least" in man's eyes are often "the best and brightest" in God's plans." Be careful not to quit because quitting seems to be the easy response - persevere!

Leadership - a Labor of Love and Respect

In the 1970 essay "The Servant as Leader," Robert Greenleaf wrote, "The servant-leader is servant first... It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead."

The basic tenets of servant leadership call for leaders to:

• Devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members



• Focus on meeting the needs of those they lead



• Facilitate personal growth in all who work with them



• Listen and build a sense of community

Leading as a servant will have a strong impact on you as an individual and your organization. Give it a try and see what happens!!

Wise Words for Leaders

Dr. Leland Eliason is retiring from Bethel Seminary in August. He was asked to share some words of wisdom or advice to those who will continue to lead after him. His words are very profound so I thought I would share them in this blog article.

These are his words to us as leaders:

• Learn to live outside of comfort zones. God is often found in the places we run away from - places we fear most, places we are sure we don't fit into, places that call for humility and more growth.



• Expect God to show up - His ways are not our ways, and His timing is often not ours. But when God shows up, then all the pieces of the puzzle that didn't seem to fit begin to come together.



• Don't quit. Perseverance is so necessary.



• Sometimes the greatest step of obedience is simply to show up.



• Curiosity is one fo the most under-rated qualities for nurturing growth and development. Let your curiousity guide you to ask appropriate questions of those around you. Cultivate a curiousity about Christ - "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3)



• Learn to be joyful. Our leadership is serious. The world's problems are massive. But "the joy of the Lord is our strength." So in the midst of life, nurture joy in your relationship with the great and good God. Look for humor, laugh with abandonment, and cultivate joyfulness.
  

These are great words of wisdom for us as leaders. I hope we all can practice these just as Dr. Eliason did during his faithful years as a leader.