Hang Tight Everyone

Hey everyone

Workin It

A quick note to say that I am working it. It has been a while since I had to coordinate interviews with busy people. This is taking a while. I am certain my persistence will pay off in some valuable insights to share with you. I have four interviews in the works currently. Two with very talented bloggers, another with a professor and the fourth with a well known author. Each of these individuals I respect greatly and am hopeful to start posting the interviews within the week.

I can envision a number of others beyond this but lets stay in the moment.

I am as constant as the northern star...

Did you see Star trek IV? This is my favorite quote from that movie. I suppose Shakespeare and Julius Cesar should also get credit for it. I love the metaphor. Every time I think of the importance of consistency in purpose, I think of this quote. Luckily I do not consider the ill fated gentlemen who uttered it . The quote gets a bad egotistical wrap. Regardless, constancy of purpose is critical to a leader.

Constancy of Purpose

As I dig in and work toward realizing these important interviews, I am reminded of some wisdom around this concept of constancy of purpose.

What's todays Vision?

I once followed a leader in a volunteer capacity who had a new vision every couple of weeks. This used to drive me nuts. Just pick one I often exclaimed in frustration. The people who want to follow you need to know where you want to go. They don't want a new constantly changing vision.

If you think about communication and how remarkably difficult leadership communication is in the first place, you will see the impossibility of this position. They have not even understood the last vision and now you are painting a new one. MAKE UP YOUR MIND! Decide upon a clear direction and immerse yourself in it.

Communicate Communicate Communicate!

Once a leader has a relatively clear sense of purpose, of vision, of process they should communicate it. They should communicate it often, repetitively and in many forms, with pictures, in stories, in metaphors, in simple understandable language. Just when you are getting sick and tired of saying it, they will start hearing and understanding.

Scope Creep

No, not weirdo in need of mouth wash, the inevitable growth of a purpose as peripheral good intentions are added onto the purpose until it is unrecognizable. A leader must stay true to their leadership purpose and learn to respectfully and empathetically say no to those things outside the scope of their purpose.

The Never Ending Story...

All good things must come to an end. Unfortunately many things just die a horrible death of neglect and guilt. The next time you lead a group to achieve a purpose, when you have achieved your desired end, celebrate the achievement and at the same time the funeral of the team that achieved it. Dignified endings are in! It is the only way out of the never ending story...

Well thats it! I am back to investing in the process, you to your own leadership purpose.

See you soon with a great interview...

Lead well

Ron

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