Wow what another interesting couple of weeks. Seems like once again everybody has lots to say about what the other guy is doing and not much about what they will do differently.
I am not a huge fan of our current status quo. I recognize that if you gauge it purely by the stock market we are seeing some progress, but I continue see too many things to take a break.
A recent study by Maritz Research indicates that even though the “market” has improved slightly actual employee engagement and trust in management and leadership has gone down rather than up.
I can’t say as an American that I have found the rhetoric around the campaign trail to be particularly enlightening or inspirational either.
I am sure that President Obama’s recent statement that he supports gay marriage will cause some interesting reactions as well. I happen to agree with him. I think there is a difference between support and endorse. I don’t endorse gay marriage, but I honestly don’t see why two consenting adults who are committed to a monogamous relationship and truly care about each other need to be parsed and examined and held up to some others standard of rightness.
Similarly I respect the viewpoint of religious groups and others to refrain from recognizing it and accepting it. I do however see a difference between government and individuals and religious institutions.
I think President Obama’s stand represents a degree of leadership. He has taken a firm position to accept the rights of others as long as it does not abrogate the rights of individuals to abstain from that viewpoint.
Leadership is an elusive and yet simple concept to me. It represents presenting a viewpoint and a catalyst for positive change. It is not exclusionary on its face or below the surface. I have said before I don’t necessarily believe in servant based leadership, but I do embrace service based leadership.
Servant based leadership implies to me serving a group or individual, service based on the other hand services a purpose or ideal.
When I worked for other people I probably wasn’t a very good employee. I evolved in my career where I felt like I worked for an organization or purpose rather than individuals. My loyalty was to the values and principles of the organization rather than an individual or a Board. I tried to evaluate all my actions as to their benefit to the stakeholders.
That doesn’t mean I was deliberately insubordinate. There were occasions where my supervisor and I might disagree on a process or approach and I respected that and executed as they directed. If I continuously found myself in conflict with a values issue it is a different story. I felt that I had a responsibility to voice my concerns up to and including departing the organization.
Loyalty to me expresses itself in terms of execution and the application of my best efforts rather than tenure. When I am in your organization and accepting you compensation I owe you my best work and I need to accept that criticizing the organization or its leadership is not appropriate. If I disagree I need to act as a catalyst for change and if I am unsuccessful I need to leave and find an organization more in alignment with my values.
There is a lot of interplay with my thinking and soft things like clear expectations, communications, etc.
A couple of recent articles explored this very nicely. A recent HBR blog post talked about the relative unimportance of IQ or intellectual intelligence unless it is balanced with emotional intelligence and other factors and even cited research discussing of the four types of intelligence required for highly effective leaders intellectual intelligence might be the least important.
Another article in Forbes discussed how we may have peaked on the gains from continuous improvement as we described and implemented and are seeing diminishing returns because it is too proscriptive and leaves out the people factor. I have long held this viewpoint. I feel like CI in its various forms has led to a global obsession with certification. People display their certifications like a caricature of the South American generals in Marx’s brother’s movies we used to see. Do all those certifications make them better leaders or more effective? I haven’t seen it.
A lot of people are very uncomfortable when people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Howard Schultz and others talk about paying higher taxes and expecting corporate leaders to see a broader constituency than just their shareholders. Overcoming inertia is difficult.
I personally don’t see that truly meaningful change will ever come from one sector of the economy alone whether that be government, business, social services, etc. I think as our Founding Fathers intended there is also a significant role for individuals to play and we need to provide both the tools and the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for people to step up.
When I see the positive outcomes of organizations that have successfully harnessed the economic and intellectual capacity of true employee engagement I see enormous potential to change our definition of success and to build a better model. Unfortunately engagement seems more like Occupy movement and less like the Tea Party- the efforts are fragmented.
The Supreme Court and other institutions aren’t going to fix these issues. Their mandate is academic not execution. They are not accountable for providing meaningful solutions; only apply an academic filter to those proposed by others. Congress seems to be following a similar path. Senator Lugar’s opponent ran his campaign successfully not on a platform of creating meaningful change, but rather applies a partisan litmus test to all legislation and candidates to ensure it conforms to appropriate thinking. Doesn’t sound like leadership to me.
Over 200 years ago a group of citizen leaders got together and took some huge steps to redefine relationships and provide a new model. Even then they added ten amendments that suggested that they recognized that these principles and mandates would need to be evaluated from time to time for context and congruency. Pretty far thinking I would say.
Perhaps there are others out there who are prepared to step up to that challenge today. Are you among them?





