Making Your Leadership Your Life
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Word count: 794
Summary: Many leaders think that their leadership is something
they do on-the-job and not in their life off-the-job. However,
the author contends that the best leadership should be
applicable both to on-and-off-the-job activities.
Make Your Leadership Your Life And Your Life Your Leadership by
Brent Filson
Companies facing global competition are expecting more from all
employees, more initiative, more innovation and more results.
Critical to meeting these expectations is leadership. The word
"leadership" comes from a old Norse word meaning "to make go."
Leadership is needed in organizations to make things go, to
muster and coordinate direction, ardent commitment and resource
alignment.
Working with thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions
during the past 21 years, I've seen that most leaders deem
leadership as exclusively an on-the-job dynamic. They don't see
it as a life dynamic.
Companies seeking more from their employees must promote
leadership that delivers more, and that leadership can only
deliver more if it is effective both on and off the job.
If you don't make your leadership your life and your life your
leadership, you diminish both your leadership and your life.
The reasons are simple. The best leaders establish a deep,
human, emotional connection with the audience. Why is that
necessary to achieve organizational results? Leadership isn't
about getting people to do what they want to do. If people
simply had to do what they wanted to do, leaders wouldn't be
needed. Instead, leadership is about getting people to do what
they don't want to do and be totally committed to doing it.
These people have a good chance of achieving a lot more results,
achieving those results faster, and achieving "more, faster" on
a continual basis. One may tyrannically order people to get
results, but the effectiveness of such leadership is not as
consistent nor as substantial as having people make the free
choice to get results. And people will make that free choice
mainly in an environment in which deep, human, emotional
relationships are developed.
Look at the leaders in your life. I'm sure you've been at the
receiving end of both the tyrants and those with whom you've had
deeply beneficial relationships with. Weren't you more likely to
go all out for those leaders who promoted an environment in
which those better relationships flourished?
Clearly, that's an environment one should seek to establish in
one's life as well. The relationships you develop as a leader
can be similar to the relationships you should develop in your
life outside your job. In my many seminars on the Leadership
Talk, I have seen people use my processes outside their job,
with their spouses, friends, and children, etc.
There are many values that should be promoted in our lives:
trust, honesty, integrity, coming through on commitments,
fairness, tenacity, tolerance, and more. Let's "trust" as one
example.
I believe we should live a life of trusting others. I call it
"living in trust." Of course, trust can be taken too far, and we
may open ourselves up to be deceived and betrayed. My wife says
I often trust others too much; and certainly I have paid in many
ways over my life for such a propensity. But I believe that even
though we may be deceived if we trust too much; we will
nevertheless suffer more if we don't trust enough.
Living in trust means extending trust without conditions until
that trust is clearly betrayed. And then, depending on the
circumstances, we may continue to extend trust even if it is
betrayed. For when it is betrayed, we may not necessarily be the
poorer for it. We may indeed be the richer; for without trust,
we cannot establish deep relationships.
My view of trust in life can be extended to leadership.
Leadership is about getting continual increases in great
results. To do that, leaders must engender trust in the people
they lead. In fact, great results can't accrue without strong
bonds of trust established between the leader and the people.
I've often said that it is better for a leader to have bought
the Brooklyn Bridge for a nickel rather than to have sold it for
one. People will not be led by you to do extraordinary things
unless they trust you; but they won't trust you unless they know
you are taking the risk to trust them. In fact, many
organizations get into trouble when the people don't trust or
stop trusting their leaders; and when their leaders stop
trusting them.
So, trust operates both in our lives and on our jobs as leaders
and must be cultivated both on and off the job.
There are many other values that should be manifested in both
the life one leads and the leadership one manifests. The point
is that when you make sure the leadership traits you carry out
on the job are the very traits you live by in your life, you
enhance the quality of your leadership and your life.
2006