Do you smile? I mean really smile. Well that’s probably the wrong question. It’s a question about being happy in your leadership.
If you are then you’ll smile. That’s contagious and the team will notice and it’ll pass around like a virus. I’ve very rarely got bad service or not have a problem solved when I’ve got a smile.
Average age 79.3 and they're all smiling - are you?
Not a fake one, but one that comes because of what’s going on inside.
So smile this Monday for leadership. If you can’t then we’ll keep working on it. Come back here soon!
I’m role-modelling with some new headers on this blog that change when you refresh.
Stephen
ps It’s Mum at her 80th in April with her siblings and spouses.
I try to go the movies a couple of times a week. It’s Sunday, which is a great movie day, so here’s a listing of some of the movies I’ve seen this year (I know there’s more but this is a start) with links to blog entries where I’ve mentioned the particular movie.
Why? I felt like it! And they influence my thinking, and hence my blogs.
I just found this draft blog sitting unfinished. Well, not just unfinished, not started apart from the title. So I wondered, what could it have been about? Any clues? It was drafted on 19 April and looking back at my calendar, I had a farewell lunch and a meeting with Restorative Justice Waitakere to discuss an upcoming governance workshop that I subsequently delivered. It was a Tuesday so I might have gone to the movies so maybe it was to do with that.
Friday afternoon is often a day for catching up on things that have slipped by in the rush of the week, so I’ve been doing some of that today. My team have been very busy getting ready for next week’s Strategic Thinking for Leaders workshop and it’s almost ready. Good feeling.
This week in one of my client meetings, the client said that they were interested in leadership development – the soft stuff, real leadership development for real people. Eureka! Something has changed lately in the language I am hearing from potential clients. Strategy is important, but leaders are wanting authentic leadership development and expressing that in the language. Like I heard this week.
So that’s what the blog’s about. The uncommon language of leadership development. Often expressed as desired but when you dig, it’s management that’s talked about – getting the job done. Leaders need to do both, but focusing on authenticity will be a very special place to start and create followers. The management of getting the job done will likely follow too.
My last meeting of the week this morning was discussing a two-day senior lead-team retreat to be held next month: “So you want to do a half day of strategy at the end don’t you?”. “Actually I don’t now, let’s keep the whole time for real leadership development. We can do the strategy later after we understand ourselves and have a team vision”.
Uncommon language, slightly more common this week. Perfect!
Two new elements, named 114 and 116 joined the periodic table this week. I didn’t see that on the television news, which isn’t surprising as I’m such a rare watcher of television. This evening I was home and watched though, as there was a plane emergency that I’d heard about on the radio while driving. Then there was $1 ski passes, an IT hiccup in the police communications system that didn’t create any problems other than greater use of pen and paper and, before I started drifting off, some redundancies and the OCR announcement today.
The president of the International Criminal Court says he might have evidence of institutionalised rape in Libya i.e. soldiers are being supplied with sexual performance enhancing drugs (I should have just said Viagra, now I have) – but it’s not funny at all, in fact if it’s true is appalling – to facilitate mass rape of women and children. Their own people.
In my observation, somewhere from the centre to the margins of any institution that purports to own morals are things that truly moral people find repugnant. For example, fundamentalists of any description have moral rules about stealing, murder, rape etc which we can all relate to, in fact we don’t need them as “rules” as we’re moral. But go out a little and you’ll likely find that it becomes immoral to, for example, divorce or work on certain days. None of these things are morals, they’re rules. Or is it circular? They might think that they are morals if you view the deemed inappropriate behaviour as immoral. But why do you view it as immoral? Dig a little deeper and you’ll find the rule that sits behind the so-called (and I’d say fake) moral.
Which of course begs the question about how we get morals. And do they change? There’s greater minds than mine alive today who can argue that morals are part of us, and part of us that grows as we evolve and develop greater insights into our own happiness. We’ve been finding new elements on average every two and a half years for the last 250 years. If we looked back 250 years we’d find some pretty strange things called morals. Strange for many of us, but not so strange for some people, still stuck in the rule book.
So does all this matter? Yes. It matters greatly if a government assaults its citizens. It’s an outrage and the work of evil people. Or an organisation spreads lies about the preventative impacts of condoms, to conform to its “rules”. Even as we evolve and grow, parts of our species stagnates, goes backwards, but I hope, will again lurch forward again one day.
A lot of variations in perceptions of right and wrong – morals – have surfaced in this information age. At the same time our understanding of our environment marches on, and new elements are discovered and put on the school science tables.
These elements are special matters in our world. Science quietly advances and challenges our thinking of what we assume is static and settled. No chance. Morals are like science too, which we’ll keep growing and evolving. I hope we will look back and wonder how primitive we were.
Morals are special matters too, that deserve our special attention to ensure we are all happy. That’s the core of what a moral is about. Whether in Tripoli or Takapuna.
Stephen Drain's Leadership Blog 