Tag: On Corporate Life and Leadership

You can’t make other people do or say something that they do not want to do or say. It is hard to get that message across to a child, but I am quite confident that my older one fully grasps the idea. He slips, from time to time, and tries in vain to control his little brother. However, overall, he gets that it’s about influence, not control. I tell him over and over again, you cannot control other people’s behaviors; the best you can hope for is to influence them.

Influence.

I seek only to influence inspiration in others so that they might be free to innovate.

That’s me, right there in a nutshell.

I am, of course, unfathomably profound and clever and talented…and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But, right now, I only seek to influence. If I can do that, then I’m making progress.

Progress is good.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Or so we are told. Plus or minus, of course. Nothing is that precise. But we say that there are 60 seconds in a minute all the same.

There are 604,800 seconds in a week. Recognizing that there are 60 seconds in a minute, that comes out to 10,080 minutes in a week. We sleep through a lot of those. We eat through a lot of those. We coast through a lot of those. If we mash them up together, we can measure the activities in our lives in terms of hours. We say that there are 60 minutes in an hour.

There are 168 hours in a week. We are unconscious through a lot of those, and I mean that in more than just the literal sense. Sleep was covered a few sentences ago, so I am talking about the time we spend putzing around, going through the motions, and not really taking an active role in what is going on around us. Of course, there are plenty of hours filled with purposeful activity, time we spend doing what needs to get done. We spend hours each week accomplishing things we want to, we need to, and we are force to. We do our best to strike a balance.

Or do we?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, and it is one that requires reflection. So, reflect on it. Do you do your best to strike a balance between what you have to do and what you want to do? We are taught from an exceptionally young age that life is filled with things that we won’t want to do. Adults around us convince us that life consists of a lot of filler between moments of actual joy and pleasure. “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend,” that old Loverboy tune, could be the anthem for how we are trained to think about our week. As we get older, they start teaching us about the work week. It’s not just the people we know, either. Our training is reinforced at school, on TV, in the movies…lots of places. We come to learn a traditional view of the work week: 5 days of crap, and 2 days of bliss, in a continual cycle that abruptly ends at death. Woo-hoo. That’s a life worth living.

Marcus Buckingham has a (trademarked…I’ll tread cautiously here) exercise that he calls “The Strong Week Plan.” The essence of the plan is this: make sure every week is spent advancing your life towards your goals. That’s a grossly over-simplified version of it, but that’s the essence of his plan. His book “Go Put Your Strengths to Work” gets into it much more in depth, and reading through the book sort of requires you to actually build your own plan. It’s worth the time and effort. To me, the idea is startling: make every week a week that advances your goals, both career and personal.

A traditional work week is 40 hours, 2400 minutes, or 144,000 seconds. Those seconds represent a significant portion of the time you are awake.

Strive to be conscious for as many as possible. Strive to be present for as many as possible. Strive to give yourself the most that you can for as many as possible.

Each one is borrowed. Each one is precious.

Make ’em all count.

Leadership also begins in the home. It, too, is learned at an early age. I hold my father responsible for teaching me leadership. My father is naturally charismatic. Well, maybe he’d argue that it took years to develop his charisma, but my father is certainly the kind of person who can pull a room together in a way that eludes me to this day. I’m not a kid anymore, by any means, but I can’t hold a candle to my father in that regard. If charisma is one of the keys to leadership, my dad’s the Key Master.

Another of the keys to leadership is integrity. My father had that in spades, too. My older brother told me upon getting my first leadership assignment that there is no greater sin for a leader than lying to your direct reports by pretending that you are someone that you are not. “It takes a long time to build trust, one moment to lose it, and forever to get it back,” he told me. Wise words, no doubt. We both have my father to thank for that sense of integrity. Saying what you meant and acting upon those words…well, my father showed me that this is the true measure of a man.

Norman Schwarzkopf once said, “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.” As children, that’s the leadership that my father modeled. I’m not just talking about leadership at work, either. My father conducted himself in the same way in his personal life. I recognize that I looked at my father through rose-colored glasses as a kid. Like my wife tells me, my boys think I hang the moon and stars each night, just for them. That’s how I saw my dad, too. BUT, I can also attest to the fact that my father led our family in such a way that charisma and character were always present. There’s compassion and confidence and decisiveness, too; my dad always seemed to know just what to do, just what he wanted, and just what all of us needed from him.

So, by simply and genuinely being a strong leader for our family, my father showed me the beginning of a path towards leadership. I learned by watching; I watched him at work, and I watched him at home. Like the path to spiritual enlightenment, the path of leadership is long, too. As a leader of people at work and as a leader in my home, I have traveled far and will travel farther still. As I look towards the horizon, I see a startling light ahead. When the burdens feel too great to bare, I look down at my feet and notice the path has been walked before. When I lose my way, I look to the footsteps of another to guide me: my father, the Font of Leadership.