Do you have a web presence?

One of the fascinating aspects of Blogging is the concept of creating a web presence and correspondingly how to increase readership. Unlike the topic of this blog, leadership development, increasing readership is a relatively foreign subject to me. It is kind of like learning a foreign language. For instance, here in Southern California I have been attempting to learn to speak Spanish. I can speak like a two year old; a few words here and their, wrong tense, wrong emphasis, limited word choice. I love to try and am learning and am excited as I pick up more and more. All the while it is frustrating to not know how to communicate.

How do you increase your web presence? How do you get the word out about a blog that seeks to teach leadership lessons? How do you measure success?

There are many strategies I am aware of. Some of these are social websites, letters and comments to other bloggers, the old favorite friends and family. I am sure there are many other ways and I will continue to explore what they are.

Measuring progress is relatively straight forward. Google. Google analytics allows a blogger to track statistics on visits to a site. You don’t know who visited but you know what they viewed, what city they came from and how they found your site. Fascinating stuff.

I think the ultimate measure is the Google search engine. If you type your name in where is the first reference to you? Unfortunately for me there is a famous hockey player and rock drummer both named Ron Hurst. I am on page three of the google search. Not high enough. I am happy though that if you type in Ron Hurst Leadership, I am the first eight hits on the first page of results! Progress!

Why am I sharing this? Because I found a neat post on leadership, integrity and self awareness that I wanted to comment about. When I first read it I wanted to post a comment on this blog saying I DISAGREE! Then I realized as I wrote my comments that I actually agreed with the author. So Instead of trying to pick a “conversation” I will share my thoughts on this topic here. I have also linked to the post should you want to read the original.

The topic of the blog post I found related to the interconnectedness of integrity, self awareness and leadership capacity. Here is the comment I wrote in response…

I am intrigued by your argument that in a leadership context an unresolved internal conflict will lead to indecision, inconsistency etc. That can certainly be true as decisiveness is a critical leadership attribute. Certainly value conflicts provide a more risky stage where leadership can be potentially destroyed. Value conflicts must be resolved as you state.

You present a logical and sensible progression from value conflict to ineffective leadership. Does this progression though not imply that a leader will be unable to recognize the importance of their decision making ability and its role in the effectiveness of their leadership ability? Leaders regularly make decisions on less than complete information and must defend the logic of their choice. As a leader matures the ability to explain their decisions becomes an important skill in their communication and persuasion arsenal. A “leader” who makes a decision half heartedly and is relatively ambivalent about them is not much of a leader at all. Perhaps it is also the case that a person with unresolved value conflicts will not rise to leadership in the first place…but then that is your argument isn’t it J

http://theselfimprovementblog.com/self-esteem/intellectual-health/integrity-self-awareness-and-leadership/

The post in question was particularly well written by a consultant from England named Andy Smith. I encourage you to go have a read.

Lead well

Ron