Tuesday at 2:00pm with Russ

It's Tuesday at 2:00pm! (PST Time: I live and work from Southern California)

Greetings to you!

Each week I send out a short leadership blog that's called "Tuesday at 2:00pm". The purpose of this is simply to provide a brief thought on leadership that you can read and think about in just a few minutes. I send it out every week at 2:00pm (PST) and encourage you to make an appointment with yourself to pause and think about the thing I'm writing about.

Russ...

LEADERSHIP QUOTE:

"A leader is best when people barely knows he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." Lao Tzu


What does this stir up? Either write me HERE or comment at the end of the blog post HERE.

A LITTLE BIT DEEPER:

This month we're going to do a dive into SERVANT LEADERSHIP. You can see past blog posts on leadership and a variety of topics HERE.

Lao Tzu was a Chinese philosopher who was born in 571 B.C.

This thought is an interesting one, because we often promote leadership as being a visible and prominent position, but the idea that "a leader is best when people barely knows he exists" is interesting.

I think the part of this quote that most resonates with me is the closing comment, "we did it ourselves."

One of the challenges of leadership is to help people take ownership and take responsibility, and many times the reason this is difficult is because we have a prominent leader who is constantly taking ALL the ownership and ALL of the responsibility, and we don't allow others to be a part of that.

Leaders have to know when to step back and when to step up. We'll talk about that next week, but in this thought from Tzu, the goal of leadership is to be somewhat invisible.

2 Questions: First, have you ever worked with someone who modeled this kind of leadership? Second, have you ever tried this? What did you see and experience?

DEEPER STILL:

Early in my work experience, I can look back at 2 events I was planning. The first one, because I was in charge, I insisted on doing everything myself. I thought leadership was me taking ownership and doing the work. I viewed this as serving others. I was able to pull off the event but it was just OK. I was exhausted, it wasn't creative, and it was OK. I received a couple of "thank you's" as people walked out the door but I didn't experience a real sense of satisfaction. I was just tired and glad it was over!

The following year, I took a different approach... I built a team, I delegated, I put someone else in charge, I pushed them to make decisions and I allowed them to do the work. The event was GREAT. People were excited, people all worked together to make sure it was successful, and then we celebrated, and the celebration was great because this team of people all celebrated together. It was so much fun that people didn't want to leave, they wanted to stay and while I didn't get much credit for the success, I had this real sense of satisfaction and joy that was so much greater.

There's an article on Inc.com that's entitled: "The 1 Thing Greater Leaders Don't Do" and the article simply talks about why great leaders take the blame and pass on the credit.

This is the servant leadership model.

Think of a time in your leadership where you DIDN'T take the blame & pass on the credit? How did that work out?

 

Things I'm Reading, Listening To and Watching This Week:

Source: www.leadermundial.org