Voices of Leaders that Have Lead

When faced with conflicts or indecision, James Allen recommended that

"Circumstances don't make a person, they reveal him."

When faced with outright fear, Andrew Jackson reminds us that

"One man with courage makes a majority."

When taking ourselves way too seriously, Queen Elizabeth suggests

Let us not take ourselves too seriously.
None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

When faced with leadership challenges, be advised by Lao Tzu...

"Go to the people, Learn from them. Live with them.
Start with what they know. Build with what they have.
The best leader when the jo is done, when the task is accomplished,
the people will say we have done it ourselves."

When frustrated in living your dreams, learn from W. B. Yeats to share...

"I have spread my dreams beneath your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Great Leaders Transform Activities into Purposeful Action

“When you engage in systematic, purposeful action,

using and stretching your abilities to the maximum,

you cannot help but feel positive and confident about yourself.”

Brian Tracy

All too often, people engage in work or relationships without consciously evaluating what they want. As a result, there is confusion and missteps on how to move forward in their roles and responsibilities.

The key to productive, effective and even efficient performance is to focus on the purpose. When we align our thoughts, attitudes and behaviors towards achieving goals that are directly related to our purpose, we accomplish amazing results.

Great leaders understand this philosophy and make sure that all the team players fully understand, can articulate and embrace the purpose of their job. Priorities are much easier to establish. Goals become more focused. Synergy is prevalent.

Being a transformational leader takes commitment, openness and accountability. Influencing people to fully engage mind, body and spirit to achieve synchronicity will always optimize potential. It all starts with purposeful leadership.

ACTS to Ensure Relevance

A simple definition of relevance is the "relation to the matter at hand."

"So what," one might say. Well, experience and information is supporting that unless we ensure our relevance to a person, a department, a team, an organization, we can pretty much call it a day and move on.

What does it mean to ensure relevance? It means four steps...

1. Ascertain your current roles, responsibilities and relationships. All too often, we become immersed, no let me rephrase that, we become entrenched in a position or a part that we play so deeply that we lose sight of what is important. Clearly assessing our current functions and tasks can help to establish how we are establishing our relevance to the situations that we find ourselves in. Once this step is done, we can move forward armed with valuable information. Now, we know what we can bring to the game, the job, the partnership.
   
2. Create clarity around what is important. And let's try something novel - a friend in a recent conversation really helped me with this - start with yourself first. This is the time for you to fully understand what you want and need to ensure that your mental and physical energy and are souls are important to the matters at hand. After we appreciate our own wants and needs, then and only then can we start to fully appreciate what is important to others. Now, we can start asking better questions, sharing relevant information, talent and energy.
   
3. Transform through thoughtful action. Setting goals is a way of life. In fact, goals are set all the time most of the time without thought and definitely without any consideration for the planned actions that will help accomplish that goal. Investing thinking time up front can and will save tons of time. We can ensure relevance when we go into an interview, a response to an "request for proposal" (RFP), an evaluation or meeting with at the very least a well-defined plan of action that can positively ensure successful outcomes.
4. Sustain relevance. This last step involves consistent, ongoing, critical evaluation. The quality of what we evaluate is much more important then the quantity of what we are measuring. Sure we may have only made two mistakes, but the mistakes cost thousands of dollars or one or two priceless relationship. On the other hand, perhaps we have 50 clients but each of them only generates $500. Can a business survive on $25,000 or would changing the quality and the service and now the company commands $5000 per client and generates $250,000? Measuring and monitoring tasks, products, services, experiences - you decide what you want to measure, just be sure that it is meaningful.

Ascertaining, creating clarity, transforming and sustaining are approaches that can ensure relevance, that there is a "relationship to the matter or situation at hand" if you choose. The choice is yours.