TEAMWORK AND VISION GO HAND IN HAND

Have you ever been a part of a team that doesn’t seem to get anything accomplished? Where the team may work and work, but nothing actually gets done? If so, you’ve probably been on a team that lacked vision. Vision works like a rudder on a ship. Without it, the ship may travel a distance, but not necessarily in the right direction. With it, the ship reaches the destination by the shortest route possible. Vision determines the direction of the team. Champion basketball coach Pat Riley once said, “Teamwork requires that everyone’s efforts flow in a single direction. Feelings of significance happen when a team’s energy takes on a life of its own.” With vision, a team has energy, and team members feel like they’re doing something of value. So if you’re the leader of a team, how do you impart vision to your people? You transfer the vision both emotionally and logically. What is needed to emotionally transfer a vision?

1. Credibility. People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision. Your people need to know that you can be trusted.
2. Passion. Team members will not be excited about a vision that the leader doesn’t care about. They need to see and feel your passion before they embrace it.
3. Relationship. How well do your teammates know you? How well do you know them? People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
4. Timing. For a vision to connect, its timing needs to be right. The right decision at the wrong time is still the wrong decision.
5. Felt need. This is relatively easy, because we all need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Revealing how your vision meets that need can lead to emotional buy-in.

What is needed to logically transfer a vision?

1. A realistic understanding of the situation today. A firm grasp on reality gives your vision a starting point, and makes team members more willing to partner in achieving it.
2. An experienced team. How familiar are team members with the specific problem? The more they’ve dealt with similar situations, the more confident they’ll be in their ability to tackle this challenge. Make it your goal to show them how their previous experience has prepared them.
3. A sound strategy. Do you have a game plan that you can articulate clearly and succinctly? Team members need to know where they’re going before they can fully accept the responsibility for getting there.
4. Acceptance of responsibility by the leader(s). Do you embrace your role in achieving the vision? Are you willing to be held accountable? People need to know that you’ll do your part.
5. Celebration of each victory. A big vision is filled with many small goals. Celebrating victories in those areas helps team members track their progress and find the motivation to continue on the journey.
6. Evaluation of each defeat. When the team misses a goal, it’s important to acknowledge that and communicate how the team can do better moving forward.

Great vision precedes great achievement. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, a leader of troops during World War II, wrote that “every single soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole.” People on your team need to know why they’re fighting. This helps them buy in emotionally and logically, so that they can work together with you to achieve victory.

CHARACTER: WHO WE ARE ON THE INSIDE

I believe it is a normal human desire to be concerned about how we look on the outside. There’s nothing wrong with that. What can get us in trouble is worrying more about how we look on the outside than about how we really are on the inside. Our reputation comes from what others believe about our outside. Our character represents who we are on the inside. And the good news is that if you focus on being better on the inside than the outside, over time you will also become better on the outside. Why do I say that? The Inside Influences the Outside More than twenty-five hundred years ago, the Proverbs writer noted that as we think in our hearts, so we become. That ancient idea has been both echoed by other wisdom writers and confirmed by modern science. Coaches teach the importance of visualization for winning. Psychologists point out the power of self-image on people’s actions. Doctors note the impact of positive attitude and hope on healing. What we believe really matters. We reap what we sow. What we do or neglect to do in the privacy of our daily lives impacts who we are. If you neglect your heart, mind, and soul, it changes who you are on the outside as well as the inside.

 Inside Victories Precede Outside Ones

 If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them. In other words, before you can do, you must be. I have often observed people who seemed to be doing all the right things on the outside, yet they were not experiencing success. When that happens, I usually conclude that something is wrong on the inside and needs to be changed. The right motions outwardly with wrong motives inwardly will not bring lasting progress. Right outward talking with wrong inward thinking will not bring lasting success. Expressions of care on the outside with a heart of hatred or contempt on the inside will not bring lasting peace. Continual growth and lasting success are the result of aligning the inside and the outside of our lives. And getting the inside right must come first—with solid character traits that provide the foundation for growth. 

Our Inside Development Is Totally within Our Control 

We often cannot determine what happens to us, but we can always determine what happens within us. Jim Rohn said,

Character is a quality that embodies many important traits such as integrity, courage, perseverance, confidence, and wisdom. Unlike your fingerprints that you were born with and can’t change, character is something that you create within yourself and must take responsibility for changing.

When we fail to make the right character choices within us, we give away ownership of ourselves. We belong to others—to whatever gains control of us. And that puts us in a bad place. How can you ever reach your potential and become the person you can be if others are making your choices for you? Doug Firebaugh, author and multi-level marketing expert, says, “Winning in life is more than just money…it’s about winning on the inside…and knowing that you have played the game of life with all you had…and then some.” If you want to be successful, you must prioritize building your inside ahead of your outside. Several years ago, teenage millionaire phenomenon Farrah Gray wrote a book called Reallionaire. He coined the term to describe “someone who has discovered that there is more to money than having money. A person who understands that success is not just about being rich in your pocket; you have to be rich on the inside, too.” At a tender age, he recognized that money without a strong character foundation can lead not to success but to ruin. If you have any doubt, just look at the number of famous child actors and young pop stars who have crashed and burned. Their stories are often sad because they focused on the externals of life instead of building internally to give themselves a strong foundation when fame and fortune came. Theirs is a fate we need to work hard to avoid by focusing on improving on the inside more than the outside.

MAKING A SPLASH IN A WAY THAT INSPIRES OTHERS

A boat skimming over the surface of a lake leaves a wake, or trail of waves, behind it. In like manner, people traveling through life leave a legacy; their influence ripples out through their relationships. Or, think of a diver plunging into a swimming pool from a platform high above the water. Regardless of how she lands, the diver will send a spray of water shooting outward as she plunges into the pool. Similarly, no matter how we live our lives, we’re bound to make a splash. No one passes through life unnoticed. How we live our lives is guaranteed to affect others.

Although we’re certain to leave a legacy, it’s up to us whether goodness and love follows in our wake, or whether we leave a trail of heartache and pain through the way we conduct our lives. In consciously choosing to craft an inspiring legacy, we accept personal responsibility for our actions. No one leaves a good legacy without effort; we have to work in order to hand off a worthwhile heritage to our children or to our successors in leadership.

How To Achieve the Legacy You Want to Leave:

1) Know the legacy you want to leave.
What life principles do you want your children to follow? What organizational values do you want the next generation of leaders in your company to embrace? Answering the following three questions will help you understand the legacy you want to leave.

• What are my responsibilities? That is, what obligations do you have and how can you fulfill them in a memorable, extraordinary way?
• What are my abilities?” Where do you excel? What activities do you enjoy greatly and consistently succeed in doing?
• What are my opportunities? How can you leverage your strengths in a way that gives you greater influence with others?

2) Live the legacy you want to leave.
You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die, or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.” People never know your good intentions, and they soon forget your words. What sticks with them is the example you set through your actions.

3) Choose those who can best pass on the legacy you want to leave.
Legacies that matter are connected with people. Our choice of whom we’re going to entrust with our legacy will determine the future success of our business. The ability to develop capable successors is a hallmark of great leaders. Ultimately, if your people cannot win without you, then you haven’t been successful in developing other leaders.

Traits of a Successful Failure

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas A. Edison

Nobody likes to fail. But if we’re honest, we understand that failure is a part of life. There is no success without some amount of failure. Great inventors like Thomas Edison experience a lot of failures on the way to a successful invention. Even the best baseball players strike out much more often than they hit a home run. Anyone pursuing a goal of value will make mistakes and wrong decisions. So the key is to expect failure, to prepare for it, to be ready turn it into a lesson and a stepping stone to success. There is such a thing as a successful failure. These are some of the traits of a successful failure: 1. Optimism. Find the benefit in every bad experience. Thomas Edison redefined the failures in his experiments as “10,000 ways that won’t work.” He expected failure and counted it as one of the costs of finding a way that would work. By finding the benefit in the failure, he was able to keep attempting something great. Optimism is not limited to a few people as a personality trait. Optimism is a choice. And while it doesn’t guarantee immediate positive results, it does result in higher motivation and stronger character. 2. Responsibility. Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility. When we fail at something, it’s easy to blame someone or something else. Perhaps the circumstances or the people that we worked with. But failure is a learning opportunity. If I blame someone else, I’m just cheating myself out of that lesson. Responsibility is more important than reputation. And it tends to lead to reward, which can lead to more responsibility. Your willingness to take responsibility marks you as someone who’s mature and can be trusted to learn from the failure and keep trying. 3. Resilience. Say goodbye to yesterday. The ability to move on from failure is key to continuing to attempt great things. The mind can only focus on so much, so if we’re still too focused on what we did wrong, we can’t give all of our attention to attempting to do things right.

Here are five behaviors of people who haven’t gotten over past difficulties:

• Comparison. Either measuring your failures against those of others, or convincing yourself that your circumstances were harder than theirs.
• Rationalization. Telling yourself and others that you have good reasons for not getting over past hurts and mistakes. Believing that those who encourage you “just don’t understand."
• Isolation. Pulling back and keeping yourself separate from others, either to avoid dealing with the issues, or to continue to feel sorry for yourself.
• Regret. Getting stuck lamenting or trying to fix things that cannot be changed.
• Bitterness. Feeling like a victim and blaming others for negative outcomes.

4. Initiative. Take action and face your fear. When we make mistakes and then consider trying again, we all feel some measure of fear. Facing the unknown, we easily come up with a list of things to worry about. But the act of worrying doesn’t help us at all in accomplishing our goals. As Corrie ten Boom said, “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength. Just believing that failure can be good isn’t enough to help us succeed. We need to act on that belief and take a step forward again in pursuit of our dream. Only then do we learn from our mistakes and make progress.   A successful failure is a failure that we respond to correctly: by finding the good, taking responsibility, moving on, and taking action. How do you respond to failure? Which of the above characteristics would you benefit from adopting? 

The Problem of Pride

When you think of the word pride, does it strike you as positive or negative? There are certainly many positive types of pride. It’s good to “take pride in our work.” We like it when someone tells us, “I’m proud of you.” And nearly everyone wants to live in a neighborhood where people display “pride of ownership.” All of these expressions communicate a positive kind of pride: dignity, respect and honor, traits that we all can embrace.

But pride isn’t always positive. Pride can also mean conceit, arrogance, or superiority. This kind of pride is based on self-centeredness, and it’s destructive.

Selfish pride is especially destructive to relationships. That’s because the opposite of loving others is not hating them but rather being self-centered. The great writer and apologist C.S. Lewis had this to say about pride:

The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise…. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive, is competitive by its very nature, while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good looking, there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.

So how do we solve the problem of pride? I believe there are several steps we can take to counteract our tendency toward self-centeredness.

1. Recognize and Admit Your Pride.
C.S. Lewis said about acknowledging pride: “If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, you are very conceited indeed.” You will not solve a problem that you don’t know exists.

2. Express Your Gratitude.
Henry Ward Beecher said, “A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.” There is something about saying “thank you” that takes our eyes off of ourselves and puts them back on the blessings we’ve received and the people who’ve blessed us.

3. Practice Servanthood.
A person who is truly great is always willing to be little. But pride fights against servanthood, because a proud person demands to be served. Serving others requires us to focus on their needs rather than our own, and this also reminds us of how we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

4. Laugh at Yourself.
There’s an old saying, “Blessed are they that laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be entertained.” Once you begin to look for the humor in your behavior and situation, you find it everywhere. Prideful people take themselves way too seriously. By laughing at yourself, you begin to see how absurd we can all be sometimes.

If your pride pushes you toward performing with excellence, doing your best, and finding joy in the accomplishments of others, it’s probably helping you become a better leader. But if there’s even a hit of competition or self-promotion in it, it’s probably having a negative effect on your relationships. That can hurt both your life and your leadership. If that’s true, do what I try to do: shift my focus onto others and follow the tips above.

Put Others First

Today's blog post is an excerpt from The Maxwell Daily Reader.   

"Put Others First in Your Thinking"

When you meet people, is your first thought about what they'll think of you or how you can make them feel more comfortable? At work, do you try to make your coworkers or employees look good, or are you more concerned about making sure that you receive your share of the credit? When you interact with family members, whose best interests do you have in mind? Your answers show where your heart is. To add value to others, you need to start putting others ahead of yourself in your mind and heart. If you can do it there, you will be able to put them first in your actions.

But how can anyone add value to others if he doesn't know what they care about? Listen to people. Ask them what matters to them. And observe them. If you can discover how people spend their time and money, you'll know what they value.

Once you know what matters to them, do your best to meet their needs with excellence and generosity. Offer your best with no thought toward what you might receive in return. President Calvin Coolidge believed that "no enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others; or failing therein it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist."

(from Failing Forward)

Put others ahead of you in your mind and heart today.

My First Post

Attending the 8th Floor "Getting Started With Blog's" class and creating my first post. This is a new experience for me as a method of creating a professional blog to suffice the requirements for a doctoral level class.

I enjoy reviewing YouTube videos

Leisure time is spent preparing for and competing in Ironman triathlons