Displaying Leadery
So, those that know me know I love coming up with new words. I am OK with making new words that end up getting the dreaded red hash-marked line under them (meaning it is misspelled or doesn’t exist). Today at our February Carolinas 3D Leadership gathering in South Carolina, the group came up with a new word: “Leadery”. I was all over it immediately because of my love for creating new words. Why can’t we create new words, anyway? Who is the new word police? What is the process for creating a new word? Well, I did a little studying.
It turns out any of us can create new words. In fact the term for someone who coins a new word is a neologist. If you say you knew this you are lying! Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, because at least 500 words (including critic, swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works. Experts, however, are not sure whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things he’d picked up elsewhere. I’m guessing with his creative mind he invented them. From what I could find there are about 1,000 new words added to our language each year.
Back to “leadery”. In this case adding the ery to the end of the noun, leader, makes it an adjective. This is pretty cool because I would compare it to bravery. How many times have you heard that someone displayed great bravery? Or, she conducted herself with bravery? Or, the General led his troops with bravery? Probably a lot, right?
Well now we have a term for the act of practicing great leadership: “leadery”. Think about these potential sentences:
- She showed leadery when taking on the principalship of the failing school.
- It took tremendous leadery to do what was right.
- It took a great deal of leadery to change the culture of the organization.
- If we stay focused on self, others, and the wider world we can lead with leadery.
- She instilled leadery in the team.
There’s a good chance that “leadery” won’t become one of the 1,000 new words for 2019, but it has sure been fun to learn about the development of new words. Why not have a word that compliments “lead” or “leading” the way that “bravery” compliments “brave”?
Final question: Can it be said you are displaying leadery?
“Innovation Happens Between The Ears”
I heard a great phrase from a retired U.S. Air Force General today. He said, “Innovation happens between the ears.” This quote was in reference to the story of the young Lieutenant George S. Patton developing a plan for making newly invented tanks into an effective tools for war in World War I in 1917. Tanks had not been effective yet because no one had taken the time, nor had the creative genius to figure out how to use the big, slow, machines that got stuck easily. Thus, innovation is not about the gizmo (in this case a tank); innovation is about how the gizmo is used to change the world.
I believe that the tanks mentioned above were just inventions, or worthless gizmos, until Patton got ahold of them and used them to innovate. In doing a little studying I came across the work of Canadian historian Benoit Godin. Godin attributes the differentiation between inventions/creations and innovation to a 1939 definition offered by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. He defined invention as an act of intellectual creativity undertaken without any thought given to its possible economic import, while innovation happens when individuals figure out how to craft inventions into constructive changes in their organizations, personal lives, or to change the world. This is why some believe, while use of the word innovation is at an all time high, actual innovation is on the decline.
It has taken innovation to take many creations, inventions, and failures into complete successes. There is a very thin line between brilliant innovation and absolute failure, and there are many famous examples. Examples that include: penicillin, slinky, Wheaties, plastic, pacemakers, and my favorite, Post-It Notes. The creation of a weak glue when Spencer Silver of 3M was trying create a super strong glue in 1968 was revolutionary. It took till 1980, however for the first Post-Its to be distributed. It took a little while and another 3M employee, Art Fry, for Spencer’s mistake creation to become an innovation that has certainly changed our world. Let’s face it, Post-It notes are everywhere.
In the context of change, innovation does not happen for innovation’s sake, but to find more effective ways of doing things. How about you? Are you creating gizmos and procedures, or innovating to create social change and break the status quo?
Self-Awareness
The following is an excerpt from The 9 Dimensions of Conscious Success.
Self-Awareness
By David Nielson
Patrick Lencioni wrote in the Foreword of the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0:
Not education. Not experience. Not knowledge or intellectual horsepower. None of these serve as an adequate predictor as to why one person succeedsand another doesn’t. There is something else going on that society doesn’t seem to
account for.
I believe that “something else” is self-awareness.
When the film Animal House was released in 1978, some of my closest friends from college were convinced it was a “documentary” based on their real fraternity experiences. As entertainment, it contains many funny scenes, lines, and some great performances by popular actors of the day. I’ve always thought it was a very funny film and it certainly highlights many elements of college-level humor and bad behavior for that time. That’s clearly part of the “funny factor.” It’s designed to entertain, not to be a model for young people to follow. That said, the film can teach a lesson about the consequences of stumbling through life in a totally carefree, reactive manner (notwithstanding the humorous futures identified for the key characters at the conclusion of the movie, especially Bluto, John Belushi’scharacter).
The characters didn’t seem to demonstrate a very conscious intent with high awareness. The characters were not unconscious (except maybe after the toga party), but they certainly were not totally conscious either. Being clear about the various consequences of their choices was not much of a priority. I have to say I probably operated similarly at times when I was that age.
My simple definition of self-awareness is having the capacity for introspection and knowing at any point in time what is going on with you. It means you can see yourself as separate from others and the environment and can focus on your thoughts, feelings, physical state, and belief systems. This capacity or ability creates the solid foundation for much of life.
As my mentor John Jones used to say, “Awareness precedes meaningful choice.” From an early age, making good choices is a big part of life. It’s near impossible to make great choices with no self-awareness. As someone who has been in the business of helping others with their own development for many years, I can say that it truly is impossible to improve yourself without self-awareness.
About David Nielson
David Nielson brings over four decades of corporate, Fortune 500, and private consulting experience in organizational change management, leadership development, and training. David has helped guide large-scale change initiatives and business strategy driven by ERP, mergers, restructuring, and the need for cultural change. He’s been a featured and frequent speaker at PMI, Project World, Chief Executive Network, Management Resources Association, TEC, IABC, Training Director’s Forum, and the Alliance of Organizational Systems Designers.
David has worked around the world delivering training and consulting Services. In all those years, those countries, those clients; David has observed, learned and collected great experiences and teaching points. David decided to work on a way to “give back.” His latest book, The 9 Dimensions of Conscious Success helps readers identify their definition of purpose professionally and personally to achieve conscious success.
When Leaders Go Bad
This guest post originally appeared on the Giant Leap Consulting Blog.
When Leaders Go Bad
By Bill Treasurer
When you think of the word “leadership,” what comes up?
Most people view leadership as connoting the best of the best, the demonstration of high ideals, and living and acting with high integrity.
But as long as there have been leaders, there have been leaders who compromised their integrity.
In fact, the very first story ever put to the written word, The Epic of Gilgamesh, centers on immoral leadership. Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, brings us the idea of droit de seigneur, or “lord’s right”, which is the right of the leader to exercise jus primae noctis – the king gets to deflower the community’s virgins on their wedding nights. Why? Because he could, that’s why.
It’s the behavioral latitude, the “because I can” freedom, that necessitates the joining of morality to leadership. Just because you can do things that non-leader’s can’t, doesn’t mean you should. But it is also the “because I can” freedom that cause some leaders to lead in a compromised and self-serving way. The unwritten understanding that leaders and followers share is that when you’re the one who set the rules, judge others’ performance, and doles out the rewards, you have more power and freedom than those who don’t get to do these things. Others serve at your pleasure and are accountable to you, not the other way around.
Leadership is massively important, particularly during times of intense challenge and change. But leadership is also massively seductive. Leaders are constantly being told how special they are. Think, for example, of the privileges that leaders are afforded that non-leaders don’t get. Leaders get bigger office spaces, more agenda airtime, better perks, more deference, and fatter salaries. They also get less flak when they show up late for meetings, interrupt people, or skirt around policies or processes that everyone else has to follow. Even the simple fact that there are far fewer leaders than followers illustrates their comparative specialness. The fact that not everyone gets to be a leader suggests that they are born of a different cloth, a cut above the rest of us mere mortals.
Followers, too, as the hands who build the pedestals that leaders sit on, contribute to, and often enable, the embellishment of the specialness of leadership. Every time followers bite their tongues, say “yes” when thinking “no”, mimic their leaders’ style, or capitulate to unethical directives, the specialness of leadership is reinforced. Very often, the more special followers treat leaders, the more leaders start to believe in their own specialness. It feels good to have one’s ego stroked by eager-to-please followers, and, before long, some leaders start surrounding themselves with suck-ups and sycophants just to keep the pampering going.
Given how special leaders are told they are, is it really surprising that some would be seduced into thinking that they are “better” than everyone else, that they deserve more of the spoils, or that they should be free to act with impunity?
Should it really catch our attention that some leaders are more concerned with the privileges that they can get by being a leader, instead of being grateful for the deep privilege it is to make a positive and lasting impact on people’s lives when you’re entrusted with leading them? Is it really shocking that some would succumb to thinking that they are the focal point of leadership and not the people that they’re charged with leading? There really isn’t anything surprising or shocking about it. Hubris is what you get when a leader becomes spoiled.
While all of the real-time costs of hubris are high, perhaps none is as costly as the sheer loss of potential for all the good that could have been done–and all the lives the leader could have positively impacted–had he not become so enamored with his own power. The most damaging impact these “leadership killers” have is on a leader’s potential legacy.
The primary job of a leader is to develop other leaders.
Above all, leadership is a tradition that is carried and passed from generation to generation. A leader’s legacy is built by nurturing and developing the talent and skills of the people who are doing the work on the leader’s behalf during his tenure.
At the core, a leader’s most important job is not to acquire more power, but to help empower others so they, too, can find their leadership and do some good in this world, thus extending the tradition of leadership. The potential to inspire new generations of leaders gets snuffed out when the “leadership killers,” including hubris, are calling all the shots.
THINK ABOUT: How are your actions today going to affect your legacy tomorrow? What will those whom you’ve led in the past will say about you long after you are gone?
About Bill Treasurer:
Bill Treasurer is the founder of Giant Leap Consulting and author of five books on courage and leadership, including the international bestseller, Courage Goes to Work. His latest book The Leadership Killer is co-authored with CAPT John “Coach” Havlik, U.S. Navy SEAL (Retired).
Giant Leap has led over 1,000 leadership programs across the world for clients that include NASA, Saks Fifth Avenue, UBS Bank, and eBay. More at: CourageBuilding.com.
Harvesting Time
I heard someone mention the thought of harvesting time this week. Really, I had never given much thought to the idea of time being something to be harvested. But, really it is something that we need to think about and be very deliberate about how we harvest. Most of the philosophical thought on time is spent thinking about the sowing of the seeds for harvest, but the timing and how we harvest is just as important. In agriculture we must have machines set properly and know the exact time when the crop is right – whether that be ripeness, moisture content, or ground conditions. We should also take this same care in the thought of the harvesting of our time.
“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.” W.E.B Du Bois
I love the quote above. As a civil rights activist and first African American doctoral graduate from Harvard University, W.E.B. Du Bois certainly understood the idea of harvesting as much out of the time we have available today – not for some other time that might be convenient. Even though I do not at all believe the socialist ideals that Du Bois did, particularly related to communism, I do share some of his other ideals. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Du Bois was not afraid to speak his mind regarding what he believed was best for others.” W.E.B. Du Bois represents a great example of how leaders are not always liked by all.
An important lesson to be learned from Du Bois is the fact that he used every moment for accomplishing good. We must consciously decide what we want to spend our time on. Time is our most valuable possession. Our time on Earth is limited. Therefore, we must be productive, harvest our time wisely, and improve the lives of others.
Byron's Babbles 
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