Meditations On Leadership
These are my thoughts on leadership related topics and ideas. It is meant to be a sort of journal for me and if you find it useful than I am happy to have helped.
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." -Parkinson’s Law The basic idea behind Parkinson's Law is that no matter how much time you give work, work will expand to fill up the time. This isn't a law like the Law of Gravity, which is always true, it is more an observation of a trend but it is so frequently observed that it is simpler to expect it than it is hope for a different outcome. In my personal experience and observation I would add to Parkinson's Law by saying that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion and regardless of the amount of time given 80% of the work is done in the last 20% of the time given." Basically, unless there is real passion in the work, people put off today what they can do tomorrow until they run out of time so if you give a generous amount of time for a project to be completed don't expect it to be finished early. Leadership LessonAlways give enough time for a project but don't be overly generous with the time you give because you will never get it back. Also, if you can inspire passion in your people you won't have to worry about Parkinson's Law because once people are inspired they will tackle the work with energy and drive.
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“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” — Albert Einstein Don't focus on what everyone thinks about you. You can never please everyone and you shouldn't try. You should focus on being a good person. By good I mean someone that lives by their values. If you truly believe something in your heart then you will only be happy when you live by that value. If you don't live by that belief you will only find frustration and discontentment. I was in a meeting once and at one point the owner of the company started chewing out one of my coworkers for a silly mistake. My coworker took it in his stride but everyone felt a little awkward and one person said something like "I think what she means to say is that you probably should have..." trying to soften the blow to our coworker. I didn't think much about it then but it bothered me. Then a day or two later I realized that by me not doing anything or saying anything I had not lived in accordance with my values. I don't believe that people should be rude to each other. I especially think that it isn't right when someone of a superior position is rude to a subordinate. That is a value I have. I should have done something or said something. At the very least I should have said that I was uncomfortable with the way it was handled and how things were said. Since that meeting I have tried to be more vocal about uncomfortable situations. I use the discomfort as a signal that something is wrong and I need to say or do something. I try to never be contentious and I try to always come from a place of sincerity and from my own perspective. I can't control other's reactions but I can say that when I do speak up, no matter what else happens, I feel better for doing it. Leadership LessonYour inner voice will tell you when you are going off track. Listen to that voice and align yourself with those inner values. If you do listen then you can feel good about yourself no matter what happens and I would call that being successful.
"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" -Satchel Paige "A “safety net” can easily become a hammock." -Unknown "A long life is not good enough, but a good life is long enough." -Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” -Gandhi “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” -Seth Godin, Tribes “Be not simply good, be good for something.” -Thoreau “If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich." -Tao Te Ching "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." -Parkinson’s Law
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt "The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." -Nelson Mandela Fear is one of the most powerful emotions. It is also the default emotion for the part of our brain that tries to keep us alive. Which for the sake of evolution is a good thing because it has done a good job keeping us alive so far. Unfortunately, it can keep us from doing the things that we want to do and it can also keep us from reaching our potential. So what do you do? Do you silence the fear and push through it? Do you listen to your fear and never try? I don't believe that there is one right answer because every person and every situation is so different but I do believe that you should overcome your fear and make your choices based off what you believe and want rather than what you fear. I know that the fear is there and it is real and it can seem overwhelming and it is one of the most powerful emotions. But in the end that is all that it is. It is only an emotion. It isn't an action or a living thing that can force you to choose something. It is only the way you feel. Bravery, or conquering your fear, doesn't mean that you stop feeling the emotion of fear. You may or you may not stop feeling fear but if your actions are brave then you are brave. When Roosevelt said that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” he is, in my opinion, saying that if you focus on the emotion of fear and let it cripple you then you lose but you only lose if you let fear win by focusing on it. It can't win if you overcome it and do what you fear. Even if the entire time you are afraid, even if after you are done you are still afraid, as long as you keep doing what you should do the fear cannot win. It is only a feeling, an emotion, an internal state of mind. It is real, it can be huge, it is by definition scary, but it is very literally all in your mind. You can overcome fear not by not feeling afraid, but by doing brave things. Leadership lessonIt is ok and perfectly normal to feel fear. It isn't ok or healthy to let that fear control you. Do whatever works for you to overcome your fear and do what you need to do. True leadership requires you to do to overcome your fear even if no one else does.
"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." -W. Edwards Deming The way the problem is framed can sometimes lead you to answer the wrong question. For example, someone comes into your office and says that traffic to your new website is up but sales are down. With that information you might assume that something is wrong with the new website and you might call a meeting to try and solve the problem of the new website. However, the problem might not be the website at all. It might be that the market is getting saturated or that a competitor is running a sale and drawing customers away. It could be a hundred other things but if that problem was framed that the website is the cause of the lack of sales you run the risk of answering the wrong problem. Leadership LessonAsk yourself if you are answering the right question. Ask your team to challenge the assumption behind the problem. Make sure that your energy is focused in the right place. Remember what Einstein said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
"Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It’s not logical; it’s psychological." -Stephen R. Covey Ashby's Law: Variety destroys variety. In order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which are at least as nuanced as the problems you face. This world of ours is increasingly complex. In order to deal with that complexity businesses and organizations have to have a variety of solutions to cope with the problems born from the complexity. The most effective way to deal with those diverse problems is to have a team of people that are equally diverse. The greater the differences in the individual team member's backgrounds the more likely it is that they will disagree. Which is exactly what you want. If you have a group of people that all agree on the same things, why do you have a whole group? You could just take one of them and be more efficient. If you are dealing with complex problems you don't want quick efficient teams. You want teams that will get the right answers. "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -H. L. Mencken When you are dealing with complexity you want a team of people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives because collectively they will have a better 360 degree view of the issue. If moderated well and if a spirit of cooperation can exist in a diverse group the resulting answers to those complex problems will be much more effective. Leadership lessonWhen addressing complex problems make sure you are meeting them with enough variety. The more complex the problems the more varied the opinions should be. Make sure your team is as diverse as it needs to be in order to address the challenges that it faces.
"Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time." -Henry Ford Is there a certain amount of competition that is healthy for business? Yes of course. It can drive innovation and if it isn't the main focus of business it can unite the team in a common purpose. Too often though, competition is unhealthy. There many ways that competition can hurt your business but I am going to talk about two. The first is internal competition. This is the competition that can happen between individual team members or between departments. This is unhealthy for a number of reasons but at the very least your team members aren't helping each other. Why would they help their competition? At the worst they are sabotaging each other and undermining your business' progress. The second is external competition. This is when you are looking at and focusing on your competition. This can sometimes be good but where I have seen it go wrong is when a company focuses so much on the competition that all they are doing is reacting to what the competition has done which means that they are always a step behind and they have lost focus of the customer. Leadership LessonBeware of using competition to motivate. It can be done and it can be done well but you have to be careful that it doesn't devolve into something that hurts your business.
"I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free." -John D. Rockefeller Jr Why do we love great leaders? What stands out in their lives that inspires us? It is the service that they rendered and the sacrifices that they made. You can't be a great leader without sacrifice and service. “Servant leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you; you work for them.” ― Ken Blanchard “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” ― Mahatma Gandhi “We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.” — William Arthur Ward “In a servant leadership culture we learn by choice or example that if we want to be great, we have to serve others respectfully.” ― Vern Dosch “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?'” ― Martin Luther King, Jr. Service and sacrifice are not only a necessary part of good leadership they are literally the recipe for leadership. Without them you can't have leadership. To lead is to serve. To serve is to sacrifice. Leadership LessonIf you want to be a leader you have to serve. If you are serving you are sacrificing. Leadership doesn't happen without service and sacrifice. If you aren't serving and you aren't sacrificing you aren't leading.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” ― Albert Einstein Imagine you are a football coach and you have successfully coached your team to the championship game. You have spent hours and hours perfecting plays and creating a play book that is so good that it just works. The team all knows the plays and you have spent all the time that you needed to watching tapes and preparing for this game. The game begins and everything is going well. You are controlling the game and it looks to be a downhill ride to being the champions. Half-time rolls around and your team is up 14 to 3 and you head off to the locker room to give you team a pep talk. Half-time ends and you head out to the field only to find that while you were talking to your players the officials swapped out the entire football field for a baseball field and you now are expected to play the second half of your championship game following the rules of baseball rather than football. What would you do? Would you keep your playbook and tell your players to go out there and line up? Would you just try to play the game the same way because that is how you have always done it? This is an unlikely story in the world of sports but this is exactly what happens in business. The rules of the "game" are constantly being rewritten and yet so many people want to play by the rules that used to work. Don't just play the way you always have. Make sure you constantly seek to understand the rules of the game and adjust your gameplay to match the game. Leadership lessonThe rules of business are always changing. You must change and adapt to them. Change is constant so you must constantly change.
Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity. -Clay Shirky "You are your story and your story is you. You either live it to the fullest or your world comes falling down like Humpty Dumpty did." -Michael E. Gerber For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -H. L. Mencken Ashby's Law: Variety destroys variety. In order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which are at least as nuanced as the problems you face. "Nothing fails like success." “We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice." -Stephen R. Covey "Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either." -C.S. Lewis
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AuthorJ. LaVarr Roberts Archives
April 2021
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