Best Quotes From John C. Maxwell's The 5 Levels Of Leadership

Here are some of my favorites quotes from John C. Maxwell's book, The 5 Levels of Leadership -- a book I believe should become a must-read for any workplace/organizational leader:

1. Good leadership isn't about advancing yourself.  It's about advancing your team.
2. Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.
3. Leadership is action, not position.
4. When people feel liked, cared for, included, valued, and trusted, they begin to work together with their leader and each other.
5. If you have integrity with people, you develop trust.  The more trust you develop, the stronger the relationship becomes.  In times of difficulty, relationships are a shelter.  In times of opportunity, they are a launching pad.
6. Good leaders must embrace both care and candor.
7. People buy into the leader, then the vision.
8. Bringing out the best in a person is often a catalyst for bringing out the best in the team.
9. Progress comes only from taking risks and making mistakes.
10. Leaders are measured by the caliber of leaders they develop, not the caliber of their own leadership.

Coherence: The Secret Science Of Brilliant Leadership

Coherence:  The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership is the new book by author Dr. Alan Watkins.

Trained as a medical doctor, Watkins is now an honorary senior lecturer in neuroscience and psychological medicine at Imperial College, London and an affiliate professor of leadership at the European School of Management, London.

• According to Watkins, coherence is the biological state achieved when elite performers experience maximum efficiency and super effectiveness, where body and mind are one.

Coherence provides one of the most unique approaches to showing leaders how to be younger, smarter, healthier and happier -- which gives them the power to make decisions under pressure and achieve sustainable success.

Prepare to spend quality time reading Coherence. It's not light reading.  Kind of feels like a medical text book in parts.  But, it's worth your commitment to it.

I particularly found useful Watkin's discussion on culture, where he wrote:

Culture is the collective attitudes within a group, team or organization, and they manifest in:

• Customs:  traditional practices that may be honored, not necessarily repetitive.
• Rituals:  stylized conceptual totems representing an aspect of culture.
• Symbols:  stylized conceptual totems representing an aspect of culture.
• Dogmas, myths:  unchallenged and unspoken beliefs within a system.
• Metaphors:  stylized stories used to reflect culture.
• Stories:  key bind narrative of culture.

How To Be A Collaborative Leader

Edward M. Marshall's book, Transforming The Way We Work -- The Power Of The Collaborative Workplace, remains relevant today, more than a decade after Marshall wrote it.

Particularly useful is the book's section that teaches readers how to be a collaborative leader.

Marshall says that there are seven different, important roles and responsibilities of collaborative leaders when leading teams, and those leaders should select the appropriate style to meet the team's needs.

The seven roles are:

1. The leader as sponsor -- You provide strategic direction, boundaries and coaching for the team. You also monitor progress and ensure integrity in the team's operating processes.
2. The leader as facilitator -- You ensure that meetings, team dynamics, and interpersonal relationships function effectively. You also ensure internal coordination of activities among team members.
3. The leader as coach -- You provide support and guidance and you serve as a sounding board.
4. The leader as change agent/catalyst -- You hold team members accountable, make the unpopular decisions, energize the group to action and enable breakthroughs where possible.
5. The leader as healer -- You play the role of the mediator and serve as the catalyst to bring people together.
6. The leader as member -- You serve as part of the team, taking full responsibility for the success of the team and actively participate in the team's activities.
7. The leader as manager/administrator -- You serve in a traditional role of tackling the daily administrative responsibilities, processes, and systems essential to managing the boundaries within the larger organization or key stakeholders.

Within any collaborate workplace, leaders will find themselves fulfilling all seven of these roles at different times, and sometimes fulfilling a combination of the seven styles at the same time, while working with work groups and teams.

Four years after Marshall wrote, Transforming The Way We Work, he penned, Building Trust At the Speed Of Change. Marshall won an award for excellence in organization development from the American Society for Training and Development. He holds degrees from Claremont McKenna College, Syracuse University and the University of North Carolina. 

Ask "Why Not?" More Often To Drive Greater Success

Early on in Eli Broad's book, The Art of Being Unresaonable, he reminds us of the power of a child's instinctive asking, "Why not?"  Unfortunately, most adults lose that habit and Broad goes on to explain that it was his continuing to ask "Why not?" throughout his career that brought him success.

"The questions you're willing to ask when others think they have all the answers are doors to discovery," says Broad.

Other words of wisdom from the book, and my favorite takeaways, include:

• Most successful businesses have to begin by bucking conventional wisdom.  Invention and innovation don't happen without it.
• Do your homework no matter how much time it takes.
• Big ideas don't happen in a moment.
• You can't do it all yourself, so ask questions and delegate.
• The trick to delegating is to make sure your employees share your priorities.
• Find the best people to whom you can delegate, and know their strengths and weaknesses.
• Younger employees simply have fewer preconceived ideas of what they can and can't do.  Try to widen their perspective, deepen their sense of accomplishment, and build their capacity.
• No matter how much money your customers have, they still want value.
• The best way to mentor is to challenge people and then to set an example by letting them see you in action.
• When you challenge people to dig deep and do more and better than even they imagined they could, it creates a particular bond.
• Show me a person with an unblemished track record, and I'll show you a person who has dramatically underachieved.

Broad's book, subtitled, Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, is well worth the read.

Broad is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the founder of two Fortune 500 companies -- KB Home and SunAmerica.

Choose To Live A Life That Matters

I recommend that all leaders every so often read the What Will Matter poem by Michael Josephson.

It serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of unselfishly serving and leading with character.

I've highlighted in bold and in color below my favorite parts of the poem:

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.

There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days.

All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.

Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.

It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.

Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.
So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire.

The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.
It won't matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end.

It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.
Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?

What will matter is not what you bought but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught.

What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.

What will matter is not your competence, but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you're gone.

What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you.

What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.

Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident.

It's not a matter of circumstance but of choice.

Choose to live a life that matters.

Parenting With A Story

Growing up in the 1960's sometimes my parents would say to me, "now, don't tell stories," heading off what they anticipated might be an untruthful account of events.  That negative stigma of storytelling stayed with me for quite some time.

Today, as an adult, I now know the immense power of storytelling.  Truthful stories, of course. 

Storytelling is indeed one of the most powerful ways we communicate.  Stories demand attention of listeners.  Stories inspire.  Stories are contagious.

"Stories put the listener in a mental learning mode," explains Paul Smith, author of the bestseller, Lead With A Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives that Captivate, Convince, and Inspire.

Paul is an authority on storytelling and has helped business people around the world to more effectively use storytelling.

Paul Smith

Now, Paul has a new book, Parenting with a Story:  Real-Life Lessons in Character for Parents and Children to Share.   

Based on extensive research into storytelling, Paul demonstrates the power of a great personal story to reach and teach children—by showing the hero struggling and succeeding in a way that’s interesting and meaningful to them, or failing and suffering the consequences. 

Since, as Smith acknowledges, “none of us has had the breadth of life experience to have enough great stories all by ourselves,” he provides 101 compelling real-life stories for telling kids something substantial—about themselves and how they treat others—that they’ll actually listen to and take to heart.

Paul spent a year interviewing people from all over the world, across a wide spectrum of ages, races, and life circumstances, and in an astonishing variety of fields and professions.  

He then pulled from those interviews to present in his book a story collection of real-life stories to reinforce 23 character traits vital for children to grow into responsible, successful, caring adults.

"I asked questions designed to elicit memories of concrete events in their lives where they learned their most valuable lessons—their unexpected moments of clarity," explains Paul.  I asked questions like: 

• Tell me about a time in your life when you learned an important but completely unexpected lesson. 

• What personal stories do you recall hearing as a child that taught you so valuable a lesson you still remember them to this day? 

• What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made and why?

"Most interviews yielded between five and ten unique stories. From that total of perhaps 800, I selected the most compelling 101 to populate the pages of this book," adds Paul.

In the book, you'll find the stories to be uplifting, humorous, heartbreaking, and touching.  They will impart lived wisdom and valuable guidance to children on:    

• Ambition—including the importance of not only setting worthy goals, but also letting go of unhealthy ones.

• Open-mindedness

• Grit—featuring the story of a young gymnast who devoted more than a year of effort, two hundred-plus practice sessions, and well over a thousand attempts to mastering a basic maneuver that takes less than three seconds to perform.

 

• Kindness

Wondering when the best time is to share your stories with your children?  Smith suggests:

• Opportunistically - The best time to share stories like these is opportunistically – that moment when the need for it arises naturally in the course of your parenting. In fact, I’m of the mind that if you have to say, “Sit down and be quiet and listen. I’m going to tell you a story now,” you’re probably doing it wrong.
• Dinnertime is still a great time for stories. If your over-scheduled lives have taken this sacred time from you, reinstate it. It worked for centuries, and it still can. This is when your successes and failures from the day will turn into stories that explain the lessons you learned from them.

• Bedtime – Especially for younger kids, bedtime is always a great time for stories. Most kids would rather hear a true story about something stupid you did as a kid (and the lesson you learned) than hear you read another tired bedtime story from an old book anyway. 

Five Tips For Writing A Company Policy

Keep these five tips in mind when you craft your next company policy:

1. Keep the policy short and simple.
2. Get rid of two old policies for every new policy you implement.
3. Make sure that your organization's policy and procedures are written to serve your employees and customers--not just your organization.
4. Don't write a policy in reaction to a single incident.  The problem may never arise again.
5. Don't write a policy longer than one-page, no matter how large your organization may be.

Thanks to author Bob Nelson for these great tips from his book, 1001 Ways To Energize Employees.