Seth Godin – 7 Questions for (Courageous) Leaders

At Courageous Leaders we often ask leaders to ask themselves some challenging questions. Recently Seth Godin provided a list of 7 (actually 8 including the bonus) challenging questions, that encourage leaders to approach issues differently, be flexible and open, be collaborative and relinquish the need to be right. Read his post here.

These questions interestingly link to the key aspects of the Courageous Leaders Model:

Seth G - Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Connect and Commit - A courageous leader knows that both the facts AND the feelings, our intuitive sense of how to respond and our ability to share our stories are all equally important. By being open to facts, intuition and stories leaders enable connection and commitment throughout the organisation.

Seth G - What do you do with people who disagree with you... do you call them names in order to shut them down?
Courage - Rather than reacting, a courageous leader doesn’t react by trying to put others down, instead they courageously address the issue at hand.

 Seth G - [Bonus: Are you willing to walk away from a project or customer or employee who has values that don't match yours?]
Conviction - Courageous leaders truly own their values and question the behaviour of leaders, employees, customers and suppliers when it does not fit their values. When a partner or sales director brings in large amounts of business and behaves in a bullying or harassing manner to to others, what measures do you take if this is inconsistent to your values?

Seth G - Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?
Confidence – A courageous leaders has an inner confidence and is keen to share credit and recognition. Courageous leaders truly own their values and question the behaviour of leaders, employees, customers and suppliers when it does not fit their values.

Seth G – Are you open to multiple points of view or do you demand compliance and uniformity?
Seth G - How often are you able to change your position?
Change – for any twenty-first century leader, change is simply part of every day life.  Courageous leaders relish the opportunity to take in new information and change their point of view and way ofdoing business.  Note - A courageous leader sees change as an opportunity to develop and hone their leadership skills

Seth G - Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?
Challenge – A courageous leader is open to being challenged by others and discovering new ways to address opportunities and solve problems.

Seth G - If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?
Empowering others – (an outcome with the CL model) A courageous leader is willing to let go, to move aside when someone else has more knowledge, experience or passion for a project, issue or opportunity. Being a facilitator for others to achieve their best is an integral part of courageous leadership.

At Courageous Leaders we link all these qualities to Leadership Mastery, a cornerstone of our Courageous Leaders programs and workshops.

By Mandy Holloway & Fiona Pearman

Finding your Sweetspot

The work of Martin Seligman and his colleague Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi have helped us to create a frame for finding your sweetspot. We acknowledge most of you have invested a significant amount of time developing capability – mostly intellectual skills – and you do not know enough about your personality preferences and character. 

For those who work feeling stressed, guilty or resentful it can so often be because they are operating counter to their personality preferences and character. Such leaders are finding their sweetspot very infrequently because they are defining who they are by their capability.

 

 As leaders decide to spend more time developing greater self mastery they create higher awareness of the personality preferences and character they bring to the way they use their intellectual capability . For those who want even further awareness they also explore ways to develop their emotional capability. When they do this they discover an enlarged sweetspot.
 
The ultimate sweetspot is where your capability is an integral ‘part’ of who you are but it is not what defines you. Your personality preferences and your character define how you interact and behave and you do this in a way that allows you to be at your best at all times. Feelings of guilt, resentment, anxiety are pushed away as you are ‘in the zone’ with how you choose to live with confidence, conviction and courage.

Inspiring Courageous Leaders Book - First copies published and distributed - now come feelings of vulnerability!

Well here is another BLOG on my experience of writing a book and publishing it. We have started to distribute our first 100 copies of the book with another 5,000 copies arriving at the end of May and the feelings of vulnerability are pretty intense:

* what if no one wants to buy the book
* will it help to create the business impetus we had envisaged
* how will people react to the stories and experiences I share
* how will people react to the personal transparency I create
* what if book stores decide they don't what the book on their shelves.

Interesting how overpowering these feelings can become and then how exhilarating they can become when you release yourself from judgement - your own and that of others! What an incredible experience this has been and will continue to be.

Look out for the next BLOG when the books arrive at the end of May.

Avoiding mediocrity with Courage

This short video from Jared Leto got me thinking about how easily we fall into the path of least resistance, forego our dreams and end up living the mediocre life we told ourselves we never would...

 

It takes COURAGE, as Jared says, to follow our dreams, to do what we feel most inspired and compelled to do because we fear that.

We fear failure, we fear embarrassment, in some cases we fear for our livelihood. But don’t we have to do what we believe in?
 Note: for those with sensitive ears, there is some cursing in this video

Fear of Change

So many things inspire us here at Courageous Leaders, and this manifesto, Practically Radical, about leading change and making a difference is right up there.

Leaders, now more than ever, face ever-increasing tension as they strive to absorb information, lead effectively and meet the increasing expectations of all their stakeholders. It’s so easy to just take a traditional route – essentially doing things the same with a little bit of tweaking here and there to stamp their own impression on the process.

So in this era of high competition, to take a new way of viewing what we’re used to seems to be necessary in order to succeed. Apart from it being a difficult thing to do, why else don’t more organisations try to step outside the box?

Fear.

Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of being blamed.

How does a leader harness their fear? How does a leader use it to strengthen their resolve and transform their organisation and their people to great things?

We believe it’s with courage, with trust and with empowerment – from the top level existing leaders, right down to the foundations of emerging leaders. Courage to make decisions around the changes that need to be made, trust that leaders and their teams will continue the journey of change that has been started and empowerment of people – trusting and honouring the intuition of colleagues and peers as they adapt to the changes that have been made.

What do you do to overcome fear of change?

The Control of Anger

While meeting with a newly promoted existing leader we got talking about the changes he wants to make within his leadership team and within the Organisation as a whole. He explained how he has "set the marker" for no more anger within his team.

He passionately explained to me that there is no reason to exhibit such an emotion at work and absolutely no place for using it when asking people to get work done.

This got me thinking - and I acknowledge people will always experience anger at sometime or another - what this existing leader is asking people to do is not to take this emotion "out" on other people.

Having the emotion of anger is not a bad thing – indeed it can be constructive and, in some cases, be indicative of passion. It is how one chooses to use that emotion for their own development and how they choose to control their own reactions by not taking it out on others.

This is courageous and would certainly make for an empowering and constructive work environment. I am looking forward to seeing his progress as he holds people accountable to this expectation.

Can people be expected to manage and lead?

People in their organisational roles are being expected to manage AND lead. Yet in my experience these same people devote so little conscious time to explore how to build this capability - so little time spent reflecting to capture their learning, so little time reading about it and so little time spent talking about it with their colleagues and bosses! How can we expect people to get better at managing and leading when there is so little impetus, enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration around the importance of it. We need more people to have the courage to step up and challenge what is happening in their organisations and challenge the choices they make - to spend time reading about managing and leading instead of the latest tax legislation, the stock market movements, the latest breakthrough in technical research of their specialist field! People need to want to improve the way they manage and lead and actively build their knowledge, skills and desire to become the kind of leader they can be proud of!!!!

Courage to be YOU

In developing the content for my book I was reflecting on some new thinking and would like to share it with you..............I see the constant tension leaders need to manage between financial, brand and people sustainability - the constant push and pull between the short term and the long term; the external and the internal. And this tension permeates every decision leaders make, each behaviour leaders choose and every promise they make to any stakeholder. To harness the creative force that can lie behind this tension takes uncompromising courage from any leader. The Courageous Leaders Model clearly advocates how individuals can redeploy into a position where their courage allows them to harness this tension and unleash something truly creative.
How realistic does this feel. Can courage enable you to manage your way through the ever present tension in your daily lives? Is it sufficient if you have developed your self mastery to an extent that means you are clear on the kind of leader you want to be and now you just need the courage to "be" that leader?